The Nuclear Peril

It is impossible to assess the extent to which the various treaties and conventions have reduced the risk of nuclear war, but both sides have partially adhered to the arms control regimes to avoid the menace of annihilation. However, President Bush has already demonstrated his belief that international laws are optional when U.S. interests are at stake. He has also clearly exhibited his contempt for some of the most important arms control treaties whose purpose has been to protect human civilization from the scourge of nuclear war. 

During the Cold War, the U.S. and USSR signed the AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) treaty, which prohibited the development and deployment of defensive systems, with the exception that each country was allowed one location, presumably to protect their capital city.  The principle of the ABM Treaty has been to avoid the inevitable increase in the nuclear arsenals on both sides in an attempt to overcome the other side’s defensive system. 

On June 13, 2002 “Dr. Strangebush” officially withdrew from the ABM Treaty declaring that it impeded the ability of the United States to defend itself from an InterContinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) attack. U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty was in preparation for developing and deploying a Nuclear Missile Defense (NMD). The U.S. government planned to convey to the Chinese that they would not object to China expanding its arsenal as a counterweight to a U.S. missile defense system if China would not object to the U.S. NMD. 

Without the ABM Treaty and with the U.S. intention of ignoring the Outer Space Treaty (OST), there is no obstacle to the weaponization of space. The weaponization of space will only provoke other nuclear powers to devise a nuclear strategy to overcome a U.S. defensive system and avoid being at the mercy of the American arsenal. Therefore, abandoning the ABM Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty will lead to a further buildup of nuclear warheads. 

A further danger in rescinding the ABM Treaty and deploying weapons in space is the threat posed to Russian spacedbased early warning systems. With U.S. weapons in space, the Russians will be fearful of the vulnerability of their spacedbased monitoring systems resulting in a more nervous trigger finger. The withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and Outer Space Treaty moves the clock to six minutes to midnight. 

The lynchpin of the arms treaties regime to guard against nuclear war has been the NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits nonnuclear signatory states from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for the five official nuclear powers committing to a reduction in their arsenals. It prohibits nuclear states from transferring nuclear components, devices, and technology to nonnuclear states. Although the United States has not withdrawn from the NPT, it has violated it in significant ways. 

In 2000 the NPT Review Conference committed to an “unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” Although a majority of member states at the 2005 NPT conference were seeking an agreement to completely dismantle all nuclear weapons based on the 2000 conference, the U.S. obstructed any progress towards that goal by impeding development of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and 13 other steps to achieve nuclear disarmament. According to David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “Current U.S. nuclear policy comes down on the side of an indefinite commitment to nuclear weapons.” 

A nother deterrent to the development of new weapons and ensuring the reliability of old ones is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all testing of nuclear weapons in order to prevent further developments in weapons technology and specifically the miniaturization of warheads. The miniaturization of weapons would widen the scope of possible usage of nuclear devices to include, for example, the destruction of underground facilities such as the nuclear reactors in Iran. To test these new weapons, the United States and France have developed a sophisticated computer system that allows either country to redesign weapons without an actual physical test. 

Although it doesn’t violate the letter of the CTBT, the decision by Congress to launch the Reliable Warhead Replacement program violates its spirit. By developing more sophisticated and miniaturized nuclear warheads, the U.S. is precipitating further development of nuclear technologies by both nuclear and nonnuclear states. Violating the spirit of the CTBT and developing new weapons moves the clock to four minutes to midnight. 

With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had no justification for expanding and upgrading its nuclear arsenal, yet every year the government has spent billions of dollars enhancing its nuclear capability. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists , “As of January 2006, the U.S. stockpile contains almost 10,000 nuclear warheads…. The Defense Department is upgrading its nuclear strike plans to reflect new presidential guidance and a transition of war planning from the topheavy Single Integrated Operational Plan of the Cold War to a family of smaller and more flexible strike plans designed to defeat today’s adversaries.” Bush’s nuclear policy reflects a severely distorted and inaccurate perspective of the global nuclear configuration where only Russia, which is no longer an enemy, even remotely approaches the strength of the U.S. arsenal. It would be suicide for any nation to launch even the feeblest of nuclear attacks against the United States. 

The threat of a nuclear accident is possibly the greatest threat to catastrophe. The complexity and number of mechanical, electronic and chemical components in a nuclear arsenal creates the potential for human error. There have been a frightenly large number of near misses, many of which could have moved the doomsday clock to zero. Consider the following accidents (as reported in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , 2006): 

• February 1958 at Greenham Common airbase, England, a U.S. Air Force B47 jettisoned two 1,700gallon wingtip fuel tanks just missing a parked B47 armed with nuclear weapons 
• February 1958 near Savannah, Georgia, a B47 armed with a nuclear weapon collided with an F86 fighter plane and jettisoned its bomb just before making a landing 
• January 16, 1961 an F100 armed with a thermonuclear weapon caught fire scorching the nuclear weapon before it was extinguished 
• January 1968 the Defense Department announced that between 1958 and 1968, there had been 13 major aircraft accidents involving nuclear weapons 
• In 1973 a Sandia Laboratories report stated that between 1950 and 1968 there had been a total of 1,250 nuclear weapons accidents of varying severity, including cases where the bombs’ conventional high explosives had been detonated 
• November 1977 in West Germany, a U.S. Army CH47 helicopter carrying nuclear weapons crashed after takeoff 
• Since 1988, 96 U.S. nuclear warhead accidents have been reported 

With 27,000 warheads deployed in so many countries, it is virtually inevitable that human or nonhuman error will eventually be responsible for a nuclear accident. Any nuclear accident would be a catastrophe of major proportions, but an accident that triggers a nuclear exchange could precipitate nuclear winter and would sentence life on earth to a very painful death. The possibility of nuclear accidents moves the doomsday clock to two minutes to midnight. 

The tragic commentary of an arms buildup, and the nuclear arms buildup in particular, is that leaders in most nations and institutions lack the ability to transcend the historical tendency to resolve disputes by force to a higher plane where negotiations, cooperation, and compromise replace force as the means to settle differences. 

It is ironic that Albert Einstein, the person who discovered the theory that led to nuclear weapons, warned that, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.”