Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclar proliferation

  • The Dawning Age of Nuclear Zero

    This article was originally published on Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

    It is never clear to us why and how certain critical events reach a tipping point — that is how they fundamentally depart from the status quo. In the case of six decades of nuclear armament, that may be particularly true. But an argument can be made that we are at or near such a tipping point, a tipping point away from expanding nuclear arsenals and toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
    Two events in the United States bolster this argument. One was a proposal put forward by four moderate-to-conservative leaders — former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Defense Secretary William Perry — a year ago urging not just a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, but their elimination as a class. This was seen by many at the time, particularly those familiar with the support these figures had given to new strategic weapons systems in the past, as a shift of historic importance.
    More recently, an international organization of public and private figures — once again including a number of Americans and others who had never been identified with disarmament causes in the past — called Global Zero announced its intention to press nuclear-armed nations to reduce, and then eliminate, their arsenals.
    The political landscape clearly is shifting in meaningful ways.
    The reasons for this shift are many and, in the case of particular individuals, probably unknowable. These may include matters of personal legacy, how one’s public career and values are viewed by history. They may include pragmatic considerations, that the longer existing nuclear powers maintain large stockpiles of warheads and delivery systems (missiles), the more likely it will be that less stable or even unstable nations, such as Iran and North Korea, develop their own capabilities. They may include military considerations: only doomsday scenarios include the use of nuclear weapons as a viable option. They may include the new reality of the changing nature of conflict and the transformation of war, that nation-state wars are declining sharply in probability and unconventional conflict involving stateless nations against whom nuclear weapons represent no deterrent are increasing.
    The reasons for the tipping point in opinion may ultimately get down to that most basic of human motives: the desire to leave a safer world for one’s children and future generations now overrides the often casual discussion of the political power once thought to be derived from weapons of ultimate mass destruction.
    Now faced with frightening economic consequences of unregulated market collapse and the prospects of a very long international economic recovery, a new Obama administration in Washington could well be looking at initiatives that bring increased security at little or no cost, or indeed that produce cost savings. Nuclear zero, elimination of nuclear arsenals, must be at the top of this list. It may be argued that the president must fix the economy first before anything else gains attention. This false argument assumes intelligent people can do only one thing, even one complex thing, at a time or that some talented economic people cannot carry out their project while other talented diplomatic people carry out quite another.
    Reasons and motives are incidental to opportunity. And now the opportunity exists, an opportunity not known for more than 60 years, to rid the world of its greatest menace. Eliminating all nuclear weapons will not be easy. It will require skilled and patient multinational diplomacy. It will require breakthroughs in verification. It will require a tolerable sacrifice of national sovereignty. It will most of all require an enormous amount of international purpose and good will. But it can be done. The principal requirement is political will and visionary political leadership. And it must be done. If not now, when?

     

    Gary Hart is a former US Senator from Colorado.

  • Cold War Comeback? The nuclear threat from within

    Originally Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

    With mounting casualties in Iraq and other news of the war dominating headlines, it’s no wonder that President Bush’s drive for a revolutionary breed of new nuclear weapons has gone largely unnoticed. Since Bush first came to office and presented the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, it has been clear that this White House has a dramatically different view of nuclear weapons compared with previous administrations.

    The Nuclear Posture Review actively sought to find new uses for nuclear weapons, emphasized pre-emptive military action and shortened the timeline to restart nuclear tests in Nevada. The Bush administration has been actively pursuing new nuclear weapons that are explicitly for use on the battlefield. These tactical weapons — the powerful “bunker buster” Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and “mini-nukes” less than 5 kilotons — turn the notion of strategic deterrence on its head and create a world in which nuclear weapons are seen as legitimate offensive alternatives.

    Neither of these weapons was asked for by the Pentagon. They were not driven by a real threat. They will not make the United States any safer. Instead, the administration’s actions are having the opposite effect by erasing the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons. Russia has already indicated that it will develop new “tactical” weapons in response, and no one doubts our enemies will follow suit.

    This is a major departure from where we were as a country only a few years ago and deserves serious debate. Do we want a world in which the United States is spurring a new global arms race with our own development of a new generation of nuclear weapons? Or do we want a world in which the United States, confident in the proven deterrence of our existing nuclear stockpile and the success of our conventional forces in every conflict since the Cold War, is able to lead the world in preventing the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons?

    At the same time the administration is hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it is paving the way to test nuclear weapons in Nevada and reigniting America’s nuclear weapons industry. This is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

    What is perhaps most troubling is that the intense desire for these new weapons is fueled by ideology rather than a national security need. A recently leaked classified report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board recommended pursuing new nuclear weapons, writing that the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator “has been requested, but much more needs to be done,” in spite of the fact that the Department of Defense has “neither clear requirements nor persuasive rationale for changing the nuclear stockpile.”

    In fact, the administration’s two main arguments — that new nuclear weapons are needed so American scientists can think and excel and that the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator is needed to defeat terrorists — don’t stand up to scrutiny. The utility of bunker-busting nuclear weapons is highly questionable. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons cannot destroy every bunker, as there is virtually no limit to how deep enemies can tunnel. They will never surgically destroy targets, offer no guarantee of destroying chemical and biological agents without releasing them into the atmosphere and hinder our ability to gain valuable reconnaissance in the bunkers by making them radioactive. Moreover, even a 1-kiloton nuclear bomb — many times smaller than the warheads under consideration for a bunker-buster — would kill tens of thousands of civilians if detonated in an urban area.

    These are not theories in a vacuum. Congress recently repealed the decades-old law forbidding research and development of nuclear weapons smaller than 5 kilotons and soon will provide millions of dollars for researching nuclear bunker-busters. Simply put, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, America is back in the business of developing new nuclear weapons.

    A handful of my congressional colleagues and I tried to counteract the push for new nuclear weapons, but we were defeated by near-unanimous Republican support for the administration. I am gravely concerned that our minor successes in requiring the administration to provide a long-term plan for our nuclear weapons stockpile pales in comparison to what is to come on this perilous path.

    We should learn from history. Nearly half a century ago, President Eisenhower rejected the counsel of advisers who wanted a new variety of nuclear weapons they said would allow the United States to fight a winnable nuclear war. Eisenhower responded, “You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” As we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, our conventional weapons can do the job. There is no military, scientific or strategic reason to go nuclear at this time — and every reason not to.

    Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, sits on the House Armed Services Committee and is a leader on nonproliferation.