The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today talking about the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The two necessary facts to understand from the article are “Every U.S. warhead is more than 20 years old,” and “Britain, France, Russia and China are all updating their nuclear forces.” Right now, our capabilities are slowly diminishing, and we’re doing nothing to ensure that those of other nations follow the same trend. As I see it, the U.S. has two choices, either update our nuclear weapons or revive efforts to make them taboo.
On June 14, 1946 the United States representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Baruch, declared, “Science has torn from nature a secret so vast in its potentialities that our minds cower from the terror it creates. Yet terror is not enough to inhibit the use of the atomic bomb. The terror created by weapons has never stopped man from employing them.” In today’s world, these weapons would most likely be employed precisely because of the terror they create. Baruch went on to offer giving up ownership of all atomic weapons to a United Nations body. Unfortunately, in 1946, American hegemony was half a century away, and the Soviet Union didn’t trust the generous terms of the offer. Perhaps we should try and use our current preeminence to revisit that noble goal.
North Korea, Iran, and bad intelligence about Iraq all seem to indicate that the current non-proliferation regime needs some new life. Nuclear Pakistan today announced, “We are not at War” with nuclear India; usually it’s pretty obvious when countries aren’t at war, and declarations to the contrary are worrisome. A quick Google News Search shows 3, 716 news stories in the past month when searching for “terrorists nuclear weapons.” As a likely target of these terrorists, non-proliferation is clearly in our national interest.
What about the other states? The Hegemonist does worry that the post-9/11 world has forgotten timeless geopolitical concerns while learning counter-terrorism, and maintains a keen, American distrust of tyranny. On the other hand, Russia is at least as endangered by rogue nuclear weapons as we are, and together we make up 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenal. Despite the end of the bi-polar world, few countries remain that could resist a combined diplomatic effort by America, Russia, and the current non-proliferation regime. Even if we gave up the bomb, we’d still have all of our knowledge. In 2006, the Christian Science Monitor reported that in Japan, “the time lag between a decision to go nuclear and the actual creation of a bomb would probably be measured in months, not years.” The U.S. would certainly retain similar means should the international climate sour. I’m no expert, but I imagine that our conventional capabilities alone are currently enough to prevent another nation from attempting to attack us directly. On the other hand, we would decrease the liklihood that terrorists acquire nuclear weapons, gain international prestige, and save quite a bit of money and manpower that could better be used elsewhere.
The other option is to modernize and continue our nuclear deterrent. Is it likely that the U.S. would resort to destroying whole cities of civilians with nuclear weapons in the present? Clearly policy makers don’t think our system does much to deter any likely nuclear aggressors in the current environment, but something is better than nothing, right? Well, maybe there are times when nothing is better than something.
