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July 2006

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The Nuclear Peril

By David Model
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July 2006
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T he Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set its doomsday clock to seven minutes before midnight on February 27, 2002. Despite the growing precipitous nuclear crisis since, the clock remains unchanged. The doomsday clock represents the global level of nuclear danger and has been as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953 when the “United States and Soviet Union tested thermonuclear devices within 9 months of one another” and as far away as 17 minutes in December 1990 when it was redesigned to reflect democratic movements in Eastern Europe signaling the end of the Cold War. Nuclear armageddon still hangs over civilization. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is overly optimistic in leaving the clock at seven minutes to midnight, given the Bush administration’s wanton disregard and reckless withdrawal from important nuclear arms treaties, which manage the risk of nuclear war; the proliferation of nuclear weapons and fissionable material; and the irrational blueprint for the increase and miniaturization of nuclear warheads. The purpose of building smaller but still very powerful warheads is to expand the scope of their usage to any war or pseudo war waged by the U.S. In addition, the United States is embarking on a program to weaponize space that will only provoke potential competitors such as China to add to their own arsenals. The Bush energy policy of transferring dependence on oil to nuclear power poses a number of risks, including a nuclear power plant breakdown, disposal of nuclear waste, and the creation of additional targets for terrorists. One of the least understood perils of nuclear proliferation is the high probability of a nuclear accident as reflected in the number of accidents that have occurred to date but have not yet resulted in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Primarily because of the actions of the Bush administration, the doomsday clock should be at two minutes to midnight. 


The Clock is Ticking 

I t could be argued that during the Cold War when both the U.S. and USSR were scrambling to build bigger and more powerful nuclear warheads and more accurate delivery systems, the risk was greater than today. During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States possessed an absurd overkill capacity, which spawned the bizarre and demented concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) whereby no side would launch a first strike for fear of massive retaliation. The primary chink in the armor of MAD was an effort by the United States to build a first strike capability, that forced both sides to accelerate the decisionmaking process about whether to push the nuclear button. The new system was largely automated and was referred to as launchonwarning. The argument that the world is safer today than during the Cold War is meretricious because both the U.S. and Russia still have an overkill capacity and continue to be on a launchonwarning basis with the additional risk of an aging Russian system that is in a state of dangerous disrepair.

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.” 

Bush unmasked his hypocrisy about his commitment to the NPT regime when he struck a deal with India, in which the U.S. would transfer nuclear fuel, technology, and parts to India in exchange for India spending billions of dollars on U.S. defense industries. The hypocrisy began with the fact that India is not a member of the NPT and therefore is outside of the inspection and control regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In negotiating the treaty, the U.S. ignored virtually every single proliferation constraint, thereby allowing India to process weapons grade material at eight of their reactors without the required IAEA inspections. By transferring nuclear fuel, the U.S. is in violation of Article I of the NPT, which states, “Each nuclearweapons State Party to the treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclearweapons or other nuclear explosive devices” and Article VI, which states, “Each of the parties to the treaty undertakes to pursuit negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race.” Violations of the NPT move the clock to five minutes to midnight. 


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. 

On the other hand, there are 27,000 nuclear warheads distributed among the official and nonofficial nuclear powers, all of which can be launched within half an hour.  The U.S. arsenal, the total worldwide inventory of nuclear warheads, and the new nuclear weapons strategy moves the doomsday clock to three minutes to midnight. 

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.”  

David Model has been a professor of political science, economics, and sociology for 31 years at Seneca College, King Campus, in Toronto. He has published three books: Lying For Empire: How To Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face (Common Courage Press), People Before Profits: Reversing the Corporate Agenda ( Captus Press), and Corporate Rule: Understanding and Challenging the New World Order (Black Rose Books). 
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