Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  • Former U.S. Defense Secretary Warns of Nuclear War, Nuclear Terror

    Although peace activists know it well, the average American is “blissfully unaware” that the likelihood of a nuclear attack inside U.S. borders has markedly increased for two reasons: serious deterioration in relations between American officials and their Russian counterparts and potential development by terrorists of improvised nuclear technology.

    William Perry
    Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Perry.

    That was the warning delivered in November by William Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense, who told attendees in Chicago at the annual Clock Symposium sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that intensified public information campaigns will be essential to enlighten a citizenry that’s become complacent and ignorant about the rising threat of catastrophe.

    “Our first steps today must be education and activism,” said Perry, who led the Defense Department under President Bill Clinton between February 1994 and January 1997. Perry, 88, is now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, where he also is a senior fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute.

    The political relationship between the U.S. and Russia, nearly 24 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has become just as hostile as it was during the Cold War, Perry told an audience of mostly scientists and students at the University of Chicago.

    “How in the world could this have happened?” Perry asked, recalling that in the period following the fall of the USSR, American and Russian officials were amicable enough to jointly dismantle about 8,000 nuclear weapons, hold many diplomatic meetings and even engage in joint peacekeeping exercises.

    To some extent, Perry blamed today’s Russian government leaders for producing soured relations. Russia has violated Ukrainian boundaries and embarked on a new, major build-up of its ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) forces, nuclear submarines, and nuclear-capable bombers, he said, even as the U.S. is engaged in major, long-term modernization of its own nuclear technology.

    Russian leaders, in addition, have made reckless statements regarding their government’s ability to use nuclear weapons as a tool of power, Perry said. Government-backed Russian news agency chief Dmitry Kiselyov, he recalled, said in 2014 that his nation “could turn the U.S. into radioactive ash.”

    The statement was broadcast on TV, with Kiselyov situated in front of a photo of a mushroom cloud; it was a response to cautions from the Obama Administration that the Russians mustn’t try to annex Crimea.

    Later in 2014, Perry said, President Vladimir Putin boasted that his country was “one of the most powerful nuclear nations” and should not be interfered with militarily. He indicated that Russia could rely on tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance threats to its interests in Eastern Europe.

    Perry also criticized Russia’s apparent rejection of a no-first-use policy governing strategic use of nuclear weapons. The Russian military more than 20 years ago said it might use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack that posed an existential threat to the country, negating a longstanding no-first-use doctrine espoused by Soviet leaders. More recent remarks by Russian leaders, though, have seemingly reconfirmed that officials no longer believe no-first-use has value for Russia today amid strained relations between Washington and the Kremlin. [It should also be noted that the U.S. government has never espoused a no-first-use doctrine.]

    But it’s not only Russian officials who are liable for the current deep freeze in relations with the U.S., Perry said. American policy since the end of the Cold War has not always produced trust, he suggested, starting with what he called “premature expansion” by NATO in the period after the demise of the Soviet Union. East Germany joined NATO in 1990 after Germany was reunified, and three former Warsaw Pact nations, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO in 1997. They did so in 1999. Since 2004, nine other Eastern European countries have joined NATO.

    “Part of the problem we’ve brought on ourselves,” Perry said.

    Furthermore, Perry was critical of the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, which forced that treaty to be terminated. Because it wished to pursue a National Missile Defense program, the George W. Bush Administration declared it would no longer participate in the treaty, which had banned signatories from building systems to intercept and destroy nuclear weapons delivered to targets via ballistic missiles. Russian leaders say they fear and oppose U.S. ABM programs and plans.

    Many in the Russian government now believe that American leaders are seeking to foment counter-revolution against Russian interests around the world, as well as supporting factions in Russia that oppose Putin, Perry said. These fears, together with a dismal Russian economy that seems to have little chance for recovery in the near future, have engendered “ultra-nationalism” in Putin’s actions and speech that conceivably could lead to war between the U.S. and Russia — and even a nuclear exchange in a worst-case scenario, he said.

    “The danger is that he [Putin] may overplay his hand and blunder into a war, and a war nobody wants,” he said.

    The United States and Russia must try to reopen “serious dialogue” to find peaceful diplomatic solutions and address nuclear issues, Perry said. At the very least, American and Russian scientists need to have unofficial discussions about how to reduce existential threats to the world’s future — a practice that was much more common in past decades, he said.

    The alternative will be a new nuclear arms race, which Perry said the U.S. and Russia stand at the brink of already, and also a risk that the two powers may once again turn to nuclear tests.

    “We have to stop drifting to a nuclear arms race and testing,” he said.

    Even more probable and alarming than a major war between nuclear-armed nations, Perry said, is the prospect of a terrorist organization such as ISIS obtaining nuclear materials. He said that these materials conceivably are “within reach” of these organizations, considering the amount of unprotected fissile material in the world. A so-called “crude” bomb constructed by terrorists, though unsophisticated by modern standards, would probably still have the destructive power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, he said.

    Perry showed a brief video that depicted what might occur if such a weapon were to be detonated by terrorists on the ground in Washington, D.C. The new video will eventually be used to show high school and college students, in a very dramatic way, the stark reality of the effects of a nuclear explosion on government functioning and everyday life. It was commissioned by the William J. Perry Project, an educational initiative he founded in 2012 in connection with the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.

    In the movie, which Perry narrated live from the lectern, a “rogue group” of citizens from an unnamed nuclear nation manages to  improvise a single, compact uranium bomb and transport it in a crate by airplane — under the guise of agricultural equipment — to a Dallas airport. The box is then shipped to a warehouse in Washington, D.C. and driven in a van by a terrorist down Pennsylvania Avenue. Midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, the bomb is exploded.

    About 80,000 people die instantly.

    The dead include the president, vice president, speaker of the house, secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and 320 members of Congress. The president pro tempore of the Senate is later sworn in as the new commander in chief in a hospital.

    In the scenario, terrorists declare in a radio message that they will set off five more nuclear bombs — one every week — in unspecified cities, until various political demands are met. Panic seizes the nation and people try to evacuate cities.

    Meanwhile, Wall Street trading is halted. The U.S. economy plunges. Widespread rioting occurs in urban areas. Martial law is declared there, and National Guardsmen move in and start shooting looters. The video depicts civil liberties effectively being ended, as the military sets up “concentration camps” to hold those who are feared to be dangerous.

    “This is my nuclear nightmare, essentially,” Perry said after presenting the video, which had evoked tears from some audience members while it was being played.

    The Clock Symposium is held annually by the Bulletin to discuss grave threats to the survival of the planet, and in recent years speakers have focused both on nuclear weapons and global warming. The metaphorical clock is used by the organization as a symbol to be adjusted every year to depict the relative danger to humanity, with midnight representing doomsday.

    The Doomsday Clock now stands at 3 minutes to midnight. The minute hand was set two minutes closer to midnight at the beginning of 2015; it had stood at 5 minutes to midnight in 2014. The Bulletin said the change reflected unabated global climate change together with efforts by several nations to both modernize and enlarge their nuclear arsenals. The farthest the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, when the U.S. and USSR signed the START Treaty; the minute hand was set to 17 minutes to midnight.

    The next position of the clock hands is expected to be announced in January.

    Perry told symposium attendees that he felt a U.S.-Russian nuclear war that would cause the end of civilization is now “very unlikely still, though possible.” But he said that if the Doomsday Clock were adjusted based solely on the basis of the danger of nuclear terrorism, he would set it to 1 to 2 minutes to midnight.

    Also at the Bulletin’s symposium, Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and co-chair of the 2010 International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, warned that the world’s biggest peril is that any nation with nuclear weapons might see one or more of them launched due to error or accident, causing a regional nuclear war. “It really is only a matter of time before weapons are used,” he said.

    That such a calamity has not happened already, he said, is “a matter of sheer, dumb luck.”

    Evans, who is now chancellor of the Australian National University, said abolition of nuclear weapons wherever they exist must remain the long-term goal of world leaders, even if the goal appears very elusive now.

    “The main game in all of this…is not peaceful uses, or nuclear security, or nonproliferation, but outright nuclear disarmament–the complete elimination from the face of the Earth of the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented,” he said. “The basic argument first articulated by the Canberra Commission in 1996 remains compelling: So long as any country has nuclear weapons, others will want them; so long as any country has nuclear weapons, they are bound one day to be used, by accident if not by design; and any such use will be catastrophic for life on this planet as we know it.”

    The key role of experts such as nuclear scientists in today’s world is to refute arguments about nuclear deterrence that are once again being used to justify proliferation and modernization, even though such deterrence theories make little practical sense anymore, Evans said.

    “It is not just a moral argument–as important as the reborn humanitarian movement now is–that has to be mounted against nuclear weapons,” he said. “Nor a financial argument, though the extraordinary opportunity cost of nuclear programs–in terms of other desirable expenditure foregone–might appeal to some hardheads. What policy makers need to be persuaded about are the rational, strategic arguments against nuclear weapons: that in fact they are at best of minimal, and at worst of zero, utility in maintaining stable peace.”

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    Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.

  • Leading Nuclear and Climate Scientists: Act in Second Term to Avoid Cataclysms

    Is the world any closer to destroying itself now than it was a year ago? According to the nuclear and world-climate experts who advise the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the answer is a complicated yes and no. But the complexity didn’t deter the organization from sending President Barack Obama a letter that’s critical of the progress his Administration is making on preventing global catastrophe.

    Last year, the scientists wrote to Obama, “was a year in which the problems of the world pressed forward, but too many of its citizens stood back. In the U.S. elections the focus was ‘the economy, stupid,’ with barely a word about the severe long-term trends that threaten the population’s well-being to a far greater extent: climate change, the continuing menace of nuclear oblivion, and the vulnerabilities of the world’s energy sources.”

    Each year, the Chicago-based Bulletin convenes a forum of scientists to help decide whether to adjust the hand of the Doomsday Clock, a warning symbol that has appeared on the cover of the magazine, and now its Web site, since 1947. At the beginning of 2012, the Bulletin announced it would move the clock’s hand from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight – a warning that, all risks taken together, civilization was inching steadily closer to annihilation. Risks now considered are nuclear war, global warming, the threat of nuclear power plant mishaps, and potential emerging threats such as bioterrorism.

    The annual “Doomsday Clock Symposium” was held in late November, and the decision of the organization’s Science and Security Board to keep the clock’s hand at 5 minutes to midnight, at least for another year, was announced in January. The reasoning behind the decision not to change the clock, despite the progressive worsening of certain global risks, was outlined in an open letter from the Bulletin to President Obama. It was the first time that the decision regarding the clock took the form of a letter to a U.S. president. The communication to the president largely was an appeal for bolder, more decisive action rather than congratulations for what he already may have achieved.

    While the Bulletin did praise Obama for his continued support of New START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the nuclear arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia that became effective in February 2011, the group’s leaders were critical of “unrealized opportunities” to make even more serious cuts in nuclear stockpiles. The Bulletin also said the U.S. should make more progress to take its nuclear weapons off high-alert status, and to stop the spread of fissile materials that can be used by terrorists or hostile nations to make weapons of mass destruction.

    The Bulletin is calling on the U.S. to cut nuclear stockpiles beyond the terms of New START so that each side has fewer than 1,000 deployed strategic warheads. Under the treaty, the U.S. and Russia are permitted to have a total of 1,550 warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The organization also is calling for quantities of non-deployed strategic warheads to be “significantly reduced,” and for tactical nuclear warheads to be completely put out of commission.

    Tactical nuclear weapons, which generally are less powerful and are considered “battlefield” weapons, are not covered by New START. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. in 2011 was thought to have about 500 tactical nuclear warheads deployed in Europe, as well about 700 to 800 more tactical nuclear warheads in storage. It was estimated by the Federation of the Atomic Scientists that Russia had as many as 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads deployed and more than 3,000 in storage or retired in 2010.

    In addition, the Bulletin wants the Obama administration to seriously question if all three legs of the nation’s nuclear “Triad” – ICBMs, bomber jets, and nuclear submarines – are necessary to national defense, arguing that maintaining redundant systems is “an expensive legacy of a bygone era.” The administration should “fundamentally restructure” the Triad as a way of making more extreme reductions in the nation’s deployed nuclear warheads, the Bulletin told Obama. This process should include cuts in the number of warheads on submarines and bombers as a signal to the world that the U.S. is interested in peace, the magazine said.

    The letter to Obama did not address international concerns that Iran is moving closer to achieving nuclear weapons capability. At the symposium in November in Washington, however, John Polanyi, chemistry professor at the University of Toronto, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1986, and a leading arms control advocate, said proliferation of nuclear weapons to more countries, including Iran, “surely adds to the risk of nuclear war.”

    Nonetheless, Polanyi told fellow scientists that Obama’s recent assurances that the U.S. will do whatever’s necessary to prevent Iran from gaining such weapons do not add to the cause of peace, and that preemptive strikes to prevent other countries from gaining nuclear weapons are based on the philosophy that “might makes right” or “the law of the jungle.” Polanyi noted that the U.S. refrained from taking military action to prevent nations such as the Soviet Union, India, Pakistan or North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons.

    Polanyi added that the notion that all nuclear nations might someday peacefully agree to international control over their weapons stockpiles may seem hard to imagine, but is “not preposterous.” There is no “divine right of nations to behave as they please,” he said, noting that in 1945 the original member states of the United Nations agreed to the UN Charter’s specification that nations are prohibited from attacking other UN member states – a recognition that war must only be declared for purposes of self-defense.  Thus, there is precedent that national leaders may be willing to give up power to ensure international peace and security, Polanyi said.

    On the issue of preventing fissile materials from falling into hostile hands, the Bulletin called for the U.S. to “rejuvenate and expand” international efforts to get control of both civilian and military stores of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The organization warned that approximately 2,000 tons of fissile materials are not yet safeguarded, and that theoretically such an amount could be incorporated into “several hundred thousand” nuclear bombs.

    The U.S. needs to put all missile materials not currently in warheads under the control of international monitoring and, in cooperation with other nuclear nations, declare a moratorium on making more fissile materials for weapons until a permanent Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty is signed, the Bulletin told Obama.

    The cut-off treaty is a proposal to ban worldwide any more production of materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons and related devices. Although in the early 1990s the UN General Assembly voted that such a treaty should be negotiated internationally, the agreement has failed to become reality as various nations have disagreed on verification and other terms.

    The organization also addressed the dangers of climate change, reminding Obama that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the continental U.S.  While praising the U.S. government for spurring some progress in promoting alternative energy sources, those advances have been “dwarfed” by unchecked expansion in fossil fuel production, such as coal, tar sands, oil shale, and shale gas, the Bulletin said.

    Obama must pursue the expansion of natural gas resource development, tempered by careful regulation to prevent methane leakage, water pollution, and other harmful environmental side effects, the letter said.

    The president in general needs to “confidently face those who irresponsibly argue that climate change science is not relevant” and instead listen attentively to knowledgeable experts who are charged with making recommendations to the government about climate change, it said.

    Daniel Kammen, professor of public policy and nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, told symposium attendees that China and the U.S. lead the world in greenhouse gas pollution, with China releasing the most pollutants overall but the U.S. leading by far in per capita pollution. In 2007, China emitted nearly 7,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, while the U.S. emitted almost 6,000 million metric tons. When figured per capita, however, the U.S.  was responsible for about 23 tons of carbon dioxide per person, as opposed to just 5 tons per person for China (2005 figures).

    China has declared a goal of reaching 11.4 percent of its national energy consumption from non-fossil fuels by 2017, through increasing use of such alternative fuel sources as wind turbines, various types of solar energy, and hydroelectric power. Kammen said it’s unclear if that goal can be reached.

    The Doomsday Clock has been adjusted 20 times since 1947 to reflect increasing or decreasing perceived dangers to world peace, and, more recently, climatic stability. It was initially set at 7 minutes to midnight in 1947, and reached its closest position to “doomsday” in 1953, when the Bulletin set it at 2 minutes to midnight to convey alarm and dread over the explosion of the first thermonuclear device by the U.S. in 1952, followed in suit by the Soviets with a test of an H-bomb several months later.  The farthest the clock’s hand has been moved away from midnight was in 1991, after the Cold War ended, arms limitations agreements were reached between the U.S. and Russia, and each nation removed most missiles and bombers from high alert.

    The clock was moved from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight in January 2012 because, the Bulletin said, “the potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts in the Middle East, Northeast Asia and South Asia are alarming; safer nuclear reactor designs need to be developed and built, and more stringent oversight, training, and attention are needed to prevent future disasters; [and] the pace of technological solutions to address climate change may not be adequate to meet the hardships that large-scale disruption of the climate portends.”

    Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.