nuclear-news

The transformation of anti-nuclear movements into coalitions of change requires a shift from street protest to engagement with politics and policy.

A nuclear catastrophe could destroy us anytime. Because we have learned to live with nuclear weapons for 68 years, we have become desensitized to the gravity and immediacy of the threat.

The tyranny of complacency could yet exact a fearful price if we sleepwalk our way into a nuclear Armageddon. It really is long past time to lift the shroud of the mushroom cloud from the international body politic………..

Against nuclear-armed rivals, they cannot be used for defense. The mutual vulnerability of such rivals to second-strike retaliatory capability is so robust for the foreseeable future that any escalation through the nuclear threshold really would amount to mutual national suicide. Their only purpose and role is mutual deterrence.

However, here too national security strategists face a fundamental and unresolvable paradox. In order to deter a conventional attack by a more powerful nuclear adversary, each nuclear-armed state must convince its stronger opponent of the ability and will to use nuclear weapons if attacked.

But if the attack does occur, escalating to nuclear weapons will worsen the scale of military devastation even for the side initiating nuclear strikes.

Because the stronger party believes this, the existence of nuclear weapons may add an extra element or two of caution, but does not guarantee complete and indefinite immunity for the weaker party…….Almost half a century after the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed, the world is still perched precariously on the edge of the nuclear precipice.

As long as anyone has nuclear weapons, others will want them; as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will be used again some day by design, accident, miscalculation or rogue launch; any nuclear exchange anywhere would have catastrophic consequences for the whole world.

We need authoritative road maps to walk us back from the nuclear cliff to the relative safety of a less heavily nuclearized, and eventually a denuclearized, world. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/08/18/commentary/global-threat-of-nuclear-deterrence/#.UhJ2P9Jwo6I