Wednesday, 06.25.08
Fallout Holidays
Photo by Flickr User Tony Peters Under a Creative Commons License
How to Get a Nuclear Bomb
December 2006
William Langewiesche travels the world looking for weaknesses in the non-proliferation regime.
Rad Storm Rising
December 1990
The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.
Satellite images can convey only so much. If you want to see the destruction for yourself -- the Department of Energy runs tours -- you are in the good company of defense reporters Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger. Their book combines travelogue, history, and science reporting, and offers a splendid introduction to the array of nuclear facilities around the world. A married couple, they visit the Nevada Test Site in person, drop in at nuclear labs around the U.S. and in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Iran, and get as close as they can to the secret bunkers and bases to which war-planners intended to retreat if actual nuclear war broke out. At the Greenbrier, a fancy resort in West Virginia, Hodge and Weinberger tour a 112,000-square foot facility built to house Congress during nuclear war. The authors point out that these facilities, like many others, have always existed in vain, since the Soviets could deliver nuclear warheads so fast that most of our elected officials would be burnt alive or irradiated long before they could reach the safety of Appalachia.
At most of the sites, there's not much left to see. The nuclear facilities turn out to be decrepit and decaying, in spirit if not in function. Now that the danger of mutually assured destruction looks more remote -- even as the danger of dirty bombs and loose-nukes increases -- the scientists and soldiers who man our arsenals seem to have absorbed dangerous levels of existential angst. (One says that the military personnel who work with the weapons felt "emasculated" by the post-Cold War peace dividend, which included having their launch-keys taken away.) What role could thermonuclear weapons have in an age of asymmetric threats? The only state actor that would conceivably want to lob a nuke at the U.S. is North Korea, and they've barely managed to produce a bomb that works at all, much less a missile that can deliver it. And although they authors do describe surprisingly small tactical weapons -- including a backpack-bomb that the U.S. trained its soldiers to use in suicide missions -- they concentrate overwhelmingly on the weapons of mass death that would be useless against most modern threats.
The authors say they are neither pro- nor anti-nuke, but it's clear from their account that they're skeptical of the nuclear arsenal. It is, at least, heartening to remember just how much less frightening the world is today, now that nuclear-annihilation is exceedingly unlikely. The government once treated as classified the number of toilet-paper rolls used by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, lest the Soviets figure out the population of scientists who worked there. That level of secrecy would seem paranoid or even crazy if practiced today, and for that we should be grateful.
In their own wordsWired sits down with the authors of A Nuclear Family Vacation. |
Macabre road tripBronwen Dickey celebrates the book's timing and hopes that its many lessons will not be lost on the next administration. |
Paradigm shiftWashington Quarterly explains that the need for cooperative security and arms control has only increased since the end of the Cold War. |
Off limitsForeign Policy lists the top ten travel destinations where Americans are less than welcome. |
Dispatches from nuclear test sitesNathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger provide vignettes about the sites they visited in their book. |
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For someone who seems to know his stuff on WMDs, you do know that Pakistan (along with India) already has nuclear weapons, right?
From what I read, China has only a handful of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the US, which seems more like a defensive deterrent to us doing something irrational. I know Americans aren't used to being viewed sacrilegiously in this way, but Bush's policy of preventive war would create suspicion in any rational nation.
It's tragic that the world is not far along toward nuclear disarmament as it should be if the US and Russia were leading by example. Sadly, our decision to design and field new, improved nuclear weapons is a major factor standing in the way.
If we all agree that these weapons should never be used, that MAD is and was mad, then we should be disassembling our arsenals and certainly not designing new types.
Nuclear proliferation is dangerous and increasing.
Pakistan developed nukes in contravention of US policy and was slapped on the wrist, Israel has 150 or so and we do nothing, even though we have the leverage. India and Pakistan went to the brink a couple of times, but stopped in outbursts of rationality.
Let's hope that president Obama will reinvigorate the nuclear disarmament process halted by the Bush troglodytes. Now that communism is dead in any major country, conditions are ripe for an interconnected world prospering and trading. Whatever bumps we may experience with our new trading partners, they're nothing compared to the dangers of a nuclear war.
Even more than poison gas and biological weapons, nuclear weapons are fundamentally unusable. It's like the human race pointing a gun at it head and threatening "If you attack me, you're next."
Nuts, expensive, unnecessary and, NUTS!
The "big weapons" still have deterrent capability.
China has not democratized as we had hoped giving them the ability to eat our lunch in trade with their low labor costs - they aren't exactly hot on war at the moment, but they are intensely nationalisic and rapidly modernizing their military and strategic nuclear capacity.
Richard Nixon justified unilaterally abandoning massive chemical warfare and boilogical warfare WMD by noting that "nuclear weapons were more than enough, and also enough to deter anyone thinking of attacking America or its forces overseas with nerve gas or germs".
Nixon's logic still holds. It also helps make people in nations where non-state actors dream of getting not just nukes - but mass death germ or chemical agents, their brother's keeper. It should be well-understood that if AQ gets Pakistani nuke capacity and uses it, it will be the Paks that experience thermonuclear retaliation on "innocent people" that tolerated the radicals existence. Same holds with a country like Sudan suddenly going "anthrax-happy", dusting places in not just Darfur, but the West. The likely response would be Kartoum and all major military sites in Sudan become craters.
It is something that bears repeating now and then. Geneva is breached and goes right out the window if WMD are used on America - we would retaliate not with ACLU lawyers fighting prosecutors over wording on the warrants to arrest a few "culprits" - we would respond by roasting civilians. In an adequate enough number to show that the threats our deterrence rests on real consequences - so don't act like the nation we just "did a Cathage" on.
Posted by chris ford | June 25, 2008 10:43 AM