Tag: US nuclear program
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Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced the firing of two top Air Force officials for failure to adequately secure the nation’s nuclear weapons, citing a report that found a “problem…not effectively addressed for over a decade.” The individuals fired were the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But why stop there?
The firing of these two men suggests that the problem is the adequate safeguarding of nuclear weapons and materials in the US arsenal. That is a serious problem, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if we could assure the security of all US nuclear weapons, we would not have dealt with the larger problem of assuring the security of US citizens from nuclear weapons. It is not only our own nuclear weapons we must worry about, but those of all other nuclear weapon states as well.
What most Americans don’t realize is that nuclear weapons do not and cannot protect us. They are not a defensive shield. All we can do with nuclear weapons is threaten their use against a country that would attack us and then hope that our threat is adequately communicated and believed, and that the leadership on the other side behaves rationally. In other words, deterrence (threat of retaliation) is a theory about how people may behave, and not a means of defense. We are staking the future of our country and the world on deterrence working under all circumstances. Whoever came up with this concept should be fired immediately.
In fact, some of the strongest proponents of deterrence during the Cold War are now calling for US leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world, precisely because they have concerns about the capacity of deterrence to provide for US security. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined with former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn in pressing for a new approach to US nuclear policy. They wrote in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”
Working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons will require far more than firing two air force officials. In the current administration, it would require firing the president. He has failed to pursue US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons; kept US nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status; sought to develop new nuclear weapons; failed to support US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue missile defenses (or, more accurately, missile offenses); and has blocked proposals by Russia and China to ban the weaponization of space. The one nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia that the president achieved, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), does not go as low in the number of weapons as the Russians proposed, has no provisions for verification, requires no dismantling of weapons taken off deployed status, and ends on December 31, 2012.
Both major party presidential candidates have said in general terms that they support the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. McCain stated that he shares Ronald Reagan’s dream “to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” However, he characterizes that dream as “a distant and difficult goal.”
Barack Obama has stated, “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”
Both candidates are short on details of how they intend to move forward. It is the responsibility of the American people to assure that the next president they elect have a solid plan for getting from where we are now to a world free of nuclear weapons and that he be ready to begin the process on his first day in office. It is certain that without determined US leadership a nuclear weapons-free world will remain a distant goal and the security of the American people will continue to be endangered by the threat of nuclear war, by design or accident, and by nuclear terrorism; and further, that our current arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons will provide us with no protection.
David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Foundation’s Appeal to the Next President can be signed at www.wagingpeace.org/appeal.
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“Our Goal is Perfection”
On August 30, 2007, six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded onto the wings of a B-52 aircraft and flown from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. It was a major error in the handling of nuclear weapons, leading to various investigations and the replacement of the commander of Minot Air Force Base. The new commander, Colonel Joel Westa, commented, “Our goal in this line of work is not to make errors. Our goal is perfection. It’s one of those missions where the tolerance is very low for error. In fact, it is zero.”
Colonel Westa sounds like a well-meaning fellow, but perhaps someone should explain to him that humans are prone to errors, not only of judgment but of memory and inadvertence. For example, on the same day that Colonel Westa was professing that there is zero tolerance for error, February 12, 2008, the US Secretary of Defense, surely not purposefully, slipped on ice outside his home and broke his humerus, the bone connecting the shoulder to the elbow. Accidents occur.
Even Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb, recognized, “Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof even in a foolproof system.” With 26,000 nuclear weapons still in the world and 3,500 of these weapons still on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments, and with policies of launch on warning in effect in the US, Russia and other nuclear-armed states, there is unfortunately fertile ground for proving Teller right about the fool proving greater than the proof.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who had his finger on the nuclear button for many years and who called in the mid-1980s for the abolition of nuclear weapons, offered sage advice when he stated “that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.”
Perfection is not possible, but it is possible to abolish nuclear weapons. Our choices are to play Russian Roulette with the human future, seeking an impossible standard of perfection for all possessors of nuclear weapons, or to recognize the wisdom in Gorbachev’s words and eliminate the overwhelming danger posed by these weapons by eliminating the weapons themselves.
David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
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No More Nukes
The Bush administration succeeded last week in advancing one of its most radical, dangerous and underdebated policy ideas. Shrugging off objections from a handful of Democrats, both the House and the Senate approved legislative language removing a decade-old ban on research into a new class of “low-yield” nuclear weapons and authorizing $15 million for the study of another category of “robust” warheads designed for underground targets. The administration insists it wants only to pursue research on the new nukes. But even this research will, at a minimum, multiply the incentives for rogue states and rival powers to build nuclear arsenals of their own — a trend that President Bush has rightly defined as the most serious danger of the new century. At worst, the administration will succeed in making nuclear war easier and more tempting, both for the United States and for other powers — an outcome at odds with any reasonable understanding of national security or morality.
The protestations that only research is at stake appear questionable when placed against the nuclear weapons doctrine drawn up by the administration, largely at the behest of a circle of civilian advisers in the Pentagon and White House who for years have been advocating the development of new nuclear weapons. An administration plan disclosed last year called for a three-year process of developing the new arms; another measure approved by Congress last week, to lower the time needed to prepare for new nuclear testing from three years to 18 months, hints at the larger agenda. The new generation of nuclear strategists envisions using “low-yield” weapons — with an explosive force up to one-third that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — to attack stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons held by rogue states. The “robust nuclear earth penetrator,” with destructive power at least 70 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, would be intended to reach bunkers buried far underground — like those where North Korea is thought to be producing and storing weapons materials.
Many scientists believe that earth-penetrating nuclear weapons will never be feasible. Current technology limits earth penetration to about 50 feet; a low-yield weapon exploded at that depth would do no harm to a deep bunker while wreaking enormous damage by spewing tons of radioactive rock and soil. A “robust” weapon powerful enough to destroy a bunker 1,000 feet underground, in turn, would kill at least as many people and cause as much damage as a conventional nuke. The administration’s doctrine nonetheless allows for the possibility of using such weapons not only in response to a nuclear attack on the United States but also preemptively against a state thought to be stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Any such preemptive attack ought to be unthinkable — the harm it would cause this country, and the world, would be catastrophic.
At the moment, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed for use only in a situation where the survival of the nation or its closest allies is at stake. That scenario died with the end of the Cold War — but it ought to remain the threshold. The rapid progress of conventional weapons technology offers sufficient means for tackling the problem of deep bunkers and rogue arsenals. By pursuing other options, realistically or not, the Bush administration is feeding the budgets of nuclear weapons labs and the dreams of misguided strategists at the expense of the far more urgent nonproliferation agenda it adopted after 9/11. Congress should return to the issue as the appropriations process proceeds; this is a project that ought to be stopped before it causes real harm.