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It is a common belief that the end of the Cold War ended the danger of all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, despite the emerging threat of nuclear confrontation in South Asia. The specter of thousands of nuclear warheads destroying civilization and leaving a huge trail of death from widespread fallout seems to have been replaced by a belief that a new era has begun, where children need no more scurry under their desks in fearful rehearsals of orderly behavior in the face of approaching Armageddon. Political leaders have reinforced this notion. They point to the major reductions in nuclear arsenals and the "detargeting" of cities and military installations by the United States, Russia, and China as proof that all is well.
 The rocket motor stage of a Pershing II missile is destroyed at the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant in Karnack, TX, September 8, 1988. This was the first of more than 200 that were destroyed as a result of the 1987 INF Treaty. US ARMY/US AIR FORCE (COURTESY NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL)
While it is true that the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union have reduced some risks, others have actually increased. This article will examine nuclear dangers as they relate to the United States and Russia. Other articles will address the situation in South Asia. (See articles, "India," "Pakistan," and "Timeline of Nuclear Weapons Development in South Asia" in this issue.) The problems in both areas and in the potential scenarios that may cause them to intersect make clear the urgent need for enduring nuclear disarmament - proposals for which are also discussed in this newsletter (see "IEER's Disarmament Plan."). A number of factors have contributed to a considerable rise in the danger of accidental nuclear war. Russia and the United States are reducing their nuclear arsenals, but the global count still amounts to about 36,000 warheads, all but about 1,500 of which belong to the United States and Russia.1 (See table, "The Nuclear Numbers.") Thus, despite arms reductions, the total explosive power of the world's nuclear weapons is still hundreds of thousands of times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It is more than enough to cause total devastation. The production of nuclear materials in military programs has slowed greatly, but the global stockpile of commercial plutonium, which can also be used to make nuclear weapons, is growing so fast that it will exceed total military stocks in the next two to three years.2 The risk of black markets in fissile materials of both military and commercial origin is now far greater than it was during the Cold War, making proliferation problems far more complex and immediate. The most dramatic illustration of the heightened risks is provided by the incident of January 25, 1995, when Russian nuclear forces were put on alert and "President Boris Yeltsin was brought his black nuclear command suitcase."3 The proximate cause of the false alert was a US-Norwegian research rocket fired from an island off Norway's northwestern coast, which adjoins Russia's northern Arctic coastline. According to a former CIA official, Peter Pry, the four-stage rocket "resembled a U.S. submarine-launched, multiple-stage ballistic missile."4 The immediate causes of the event appear to be:
There were underlying problems that may have contributed to the the crisis, but the role of each is difficult to estimate. These include low and uncertain pay, low morale, poor working and living conditions most likely facing Russian radar crews, lack of funds to maintain infrastructure and deterioration of US-Russian relations. We should note, however, that despite the reduction of radar surveillance due to the break-up of the Soviet Union, the launch was detected by Russian radar. The US tendency to treat Russia simply as the defeated party in the Cold War may have contributed to the fact that an appropriately high-level warning was not given to the Russian government about the unusual launch. It was, so far as we know from public information, the closest the world has come to all-out nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis. But in contrast to that crisis, when decisions about global life and death were being deliberated in the United States and the Soviet Union in councils of government over a period of days, the 1995 crisis developed over minutes, unknown to all but a few Russian military and civilian leaders. The possibility of destruction on a global scale now hinges, more than ever, on factors such as the proper functioning of aging equipment in Russia that can no longer be well-maintained, and the coherence of nuclear command structure in times of economic distress and of low military morale and budgets. De-targeting will not help. Missiles launched in case of such a misunderstanding would be reprogrammed to hit US targets. Even accidentally launched missiles that have been de-targeted may revert to their old target coordinates when launched. As was the case during the Cold War, nuclear war can also be initiated by accidents in the United States or other nuclear weapons states. There have been many false nuclear alarms in US nuclear history.5 The threat of nuclear war today is aggravated by the fact that Russia is more reliant on its nuclear forces for its military strength than during the Cold War. Since the the decline in its conventional military strength, Russia has adopted a first-use posture similar to the one that NATO has had and continues to have. A state of high alert, especially during times of crisis, is an important corollary of a policy of first-use of nuclear weapons. And the dangers of heightened alert in present-day Russia are grave, as the 1995 incident described above demonstrates. Today, as during the Cold War, the only serious threat of utter physical devastation to the United States is from a large-scale nuclear attack upon it by design or by accident. The collapse of the Soviet Union has eliminated the essential antagonism that brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe by design, leaving accidents and mistakes as the major triggers of all-out war. Nuclear terrorism is also a severe danger. The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City was a grim reminder that great devastation can also occur through terrorist attacks. The failure to bring all nuclear-weapons-usable materials into secure, accountable, and verifiable storage has created a heightened risk that such attacks may become nuclear. Once substantial quantities of these materials are diverted, it will be extremely difficult or impossible to bring them back into control. As with the danger of accidental nuclear war, the solution lies in prevention. Expanding Programs for Unusable Weapons The many crises and wars of the past half a century, such as those in Korea, Viet Nam and Afghanistan, have shown that nuclear weapons are essentially unusable in war. That is even more so today, for a variety of political, military, environmental, and legal reasons. Moreover, terrorism cannot be credibly or effectively dealt with by the use of nuclear weapons. For instance, they are of no use whatsoever in dealing with incidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the attacks upon US troops in Saudi Arabia or on its embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Despite the dangers and the lack of utility of nuclear weapons, all five nuclear weapons states that are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China) have been modernizing their nuclear arsenals. For example, China is developing long-range submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The United States has a $4.5 billion per year program largely to ensure maintenance of weapons design and testing capability, weapons production capacity, and weapons modification capacity. The five nuclear weapons states have now been joined by India, which conducted five nuclear weapons tests in May 1998, (including one thermonuclear explosion6), and Pakistan, which announced that it conducted six nuclear tests later in that same month.7 The five plus India have declared programs for laboratory testing and computer simulations of nuclear explosions. All of them have used the primary rationale that "deterrence" is the basis of their nuclear weapon programs.
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Not Just a Good Idea -- It's a Legally-Binding Constitutional Obligation Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. -Signed by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and 59 other countries on July 1, 1968. Entered into force in 1970. Indefinitely extended in 1995. Currently signed by 185 countries, including China and France, but not India, Pakistan or Israel.
There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control. (emphases added)
-Unanimous ruling, July 8, 1996
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land... -Excerpt from Article VI of the US Constitution, signed September 17, 1787
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Deterrence
Nuclear deterrence has been described and defended in a number of different ways. Two of the most common arguments are that:
We will discuss each briefly.
Deterrence of conventional attack: The claim that nuclear weapons have kept the world at peace is very narrow and misleading at best and false at worst, arising largely from Eurocentrism. A more realistic claim for the US-Soviet nuclear confrontation during the Cold War would be that it induced a fear in these two countries and across the European political-military divide of yet another war on the soil of Europe. Nuclear weapons therefore contributed to the cynical export of war to the Third World. (There have been, to be sure, causes of war and violence unrelated to the Cold War during this period, as for instance the conflicts over Kashmir in South Asia, or those in northern Ireland.) The proxy wars of the Cold War, often carried out via favored local regimes and dictators, have directly caused the deaths of millions of people, created millions of refugees, and resulted in impoverishment, economic devastation, and disease for millions more, greatly increasing the death toll. Further, as the campaign against land-mines has shown, the ill-effects of these wars are still killing large numbers of people and preventing many more from pursuing normal lives. Nuclear weapons have contributed to untold misery in the world, largely outside Europe, among people caught up in the US-Soviet ideological competition in circumstances they could not hope to control. But the people of the countries where these arsenals were built were not exempt from the harm that was inflicted. They were on the frontlines in Korea, Viet Nam and Afghanistan. And both countries inflicted enormous health and environmental damage on their own people as well as on the rest of the world in the process of building and testing their nuclear arsenals. The number of weapons required to generate the level of fear required for this export of war will remain open to debate. However, the fact that nuclear arsenals were built to a level where total destruction of everything of value to both sides was possible speaks to the stark irrationality of the process. Deterrence of attack by nuclear threats was carried to extremes during the Cold War. US policy was formulated in NSC-68, the 1950 National Security Council memorandum that spelled out the containment policy thought necessary to win the Cold War. It was premised on the idea that the Soviets would ruthlessly attack US interests and undermine them, counting on hesitations and delays in the US response, and that the US had to threaten global annihilation to prevent Soviet success:
The risk that we may thereby be prevented or too long delayed in taking all needful measures to maintain the integrity and vitality of our system is great....For example, it is clear that our present weakness would prevent us from offering effective resistance at any of several vital pressure points. The only deterrent we can present to the Kremlin is the evidence we give that we may make any of the critical points which we cannot hold the occasion for a global war of annihilation.8 The readiness for deliberate global annihilation came closest to actualization in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis.
Deterrence of a first-strike nuclear attack: In practice, the US-Soviet "deterrence" process since the 1950s was to build large numbers of ever more sophisticated nuclear weapons in reaction to one another's weapons systems, and thereby to increase the number of targets that the weapons were supposed to destroy. The huge numbers of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable materials that resulted are now at the root of the grave dangers we face after the Cold War. Further, whether a second strike can actually be carried out has been and remains an open question, given the large number of US and Russian nuclear weapons that are targeted on each other and on command and control systems.10 This uncertainty has led to a hair trigger posture on both sides, known variously as "launch-on-warning" or a "use-it-or-lose-it" policy. This means that a decision to launch a retaliatory attack must be made within a few minutes of detection of a first strike. There have been many false alarms - the worst, so far as we know, is the 1995 Russian incident discussed above. Hence, even second strike-deterrence has become an unstable policy practically indistinguishable from a first strike posture. The doctrine of deterrence has, moreover, been the main engine of nuclear proliferation. The process started with Manhattan Project during World War II. It was started because of the fear that Nazi Germany might acquire nuclear weapons. The crash Soviet program to build nuclear weapons was a response to the Manhattan Project, which included the use of nuclear weapons on Japan.11 China built nuclear weapons in response to the US program and later to its conflict with the Soviets. The connections between deterrence and proliferation are summarized in the box below.
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Only the British nuclear arsenal is largely explained as an artifact of a fading empire determined not to pass the baton to the U.S. without a place at the bargaining table. The French determination to have nuclear weapons was at least partially out of their desire to remain independent of US power. Their desire for a large influence in a Europe in which the U.S.-Soviet confrontation would otherwise always be decisive was also a big factor. 2
1. Arjun Makhijani, "Japan: 'Always' the Target?", The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1995.
2. Chapters 6 through 11 in Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherin Yih, eds., Nuclear Wastelands, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), contain brief histories of the development of nuclear weapons in the declared and undeclared nuclear weapons states.
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In sum, the doctrine of deterrence provides the main rationale for the possession of nuclear weapons. It was central to the creation for the first time in history of the possibility of total destruction. It is therefore not only an irrational idea that has been at the core of proliferation, it is also an immoral one, as the Catholic bishops conference of the United States (among others) has recently pointed out. (See excerpts in the box on page 22.) It is therefore essential that nuclear weapons states abandon this doctrine as part of their obligations to achieve and maintain complete nuclear disarmament.
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Institute for Energy and Environmental Research