Arms control is essential to prevent the total devastation of nuclear war

Amid a historic low in US-Russian relations, now more than ever Moscow and Washington should reaffirm their commitment to reducing nuclear arsenals and place limits on strategic defense missiles

By The Guardian Editorial,  https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2024/12/31/2003829391

November next year is to mark 40 years since then-US president Ronald Reagan and then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The statement was striking — not least because their militaries were pouring billions into preparing for an unwinnable conflict.

A year later, at Reykjavik, the two came tantalizingly close to eliminating nuclear weapons entirely. That historic chance slipped away over Reagan’s insistence on his unproven “Star Wars” missile defense system. The moment passed, but its lesson endures: Disarmament demands courage — and compromise.

The summit proved a turning point in the cold war. Arms control brought down the number of nuclear weapons held by the two countries from 60,000 to about 11,000 today. The most recent New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), signed in 2010, capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each.

In retrospect, that was a false dawn in nuclear diplomacy. Since then-US president George W. Bush withdrew the US from the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Moscow in 2002, the risk of a return to an all-out arms race has grown.

On Jan. 20, US president-elect Donald Trump would once again hold the keys to a planet-ending arsenal. Trump’s capricious personality sheds new light on an old question: How much of the terrible responsibility to inflict large-scale nuclear destruction should be invested in a single person?

He has called the transfer of authority “a very sobering moment” and “very, very scary.” Reassuring words — except he has also reportedly said that “if we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?”

Presidential sole authority rightly ensures civilian control over nuclear weapons, but why concentrate such power in just one civilian’s hands?

Without bold action, New START, the last safeguard of nuclear arms moderation, is to expire in February 2026. Trump admires strongmen such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has recklessly threatened nuclear strikes and hinted at restarting tests during the Ukraine war. It would be a catastrophic mistake if the pair decided not to exercise self-restraint.

It would mean that for the first time in more than 50 years, the US and Russia — holders of 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — could begin an unconstrained arms race. That dismal decision would send a message to other states, notably China, further encouraging their buildup of nuclear stockpiles.

Deterrence is not the only way to think about nuclear weapons. For decades, a conflict involving them has been a byword for Armageddon. The fearful legacy of “the bomb” can be felt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the testing grounds still contaminated by nuclear fallout decades later.

Such sentiment led to then-US president Barack Obama in 2009 advocating a hopeful vision of a nuclear-free world. His speech inspired a coalition of activists, diplomats and developing nations determined to force a global reckoning. Their resistance to the conventional wisdom that nuclear disarmament is unrealistic bore fruit with the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, adopted by 122 countries at the UN in 2017.

Its message: The only way to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again is to do away with them entirely.

The treaty, championed by the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was a triumph over superpower diplomacy that had long hindered reviews of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Nuclear-armed states are skeptical, if not scornful, but their resistance does not diminish the importance of the 2017 UN vote.

It represents not only a moral and legal challenge to the “status quo,” but a reminder that much of the world does not accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. That sentiment was amplified this year when Nihon Hidankyo, Japan’s atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors group, won the Nobel peace prize for efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.

Eight decades after its first test, the nuclear bomb remains — its purpose long obsolete, its danger ever present. Built to defeat Hitler, dropped to end Japan’s imperial ambitions and multiplied to outlast the cold war, nuclear weapons have outlived every rationale for their existence. Arsenals have shrunk, but not enough.

The world’s stockpile remains dangerously large, and efforts to reduce it further appear stalled amid a geopolitical backdrop of nuclear proliferation, a multipolar and ideologically diverse UN and the US desire for global preeminence.

It is little wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight — the closest ever to apocalypse.

In 2019, Gorbachev warned, with good reason, that nuclear deterrence keeps the world “in constant jeopardy.” It is obvious that as long as these weapons exist, the risk of nuclear war cannot be erased. The question is no longer why the bomb remains, but whether humanity can survive it for another 80 years.

This month, UN members voted 144-3 to establish an independent scientific panel on the effects of nuclear war. Shamefully, the UK was among the naysayers.

Imagination has already outpaced fact. In her book Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson describes how humanity could end in 72 minutes after a North Korean “bolt from the blue” attack sparks a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. She writes of thousands of warheads raining down on the US, Europe, Russia and parts of Asia, obliterating cities, incinerating human life and leaving billions stripped of life, light and hope. Streets turn molten, winds flatten the land and those who endure suffer wounds so terrible that they no longer look — or act — human.

Jacobson’s point is that this apocalyptic vision is the logical conclusion of the world’s current nuclear doctrines. Those that do emerge into the desolation discover what the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned of decades ago: “The survivors will envy the dead.”

The devastation is total, offering a future that no one could bear to live through.

Amid historic lows in US-Russian relations, one truth remains: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Leaders in Moscow and Washington should reaffirm this in the run-up to negotiating significant arsenal reductions as well as real limits on strategic missile defenses. Such a statement, simple but profound, would remind the world that Trump and Putin recognize their shared responsibility to prevent global catastrophe.

That will not be easy: rising nationalism, geopolitical rivalry and mutual mistrust between the countries — especially over Ukraine — loom large over disarmament efforts. Try they must. However bitter their disagreements, Washington and Moscow owe it to humanity to talk about — and act on — avoiding the unthinkable.

January 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

New Mexico’s Nuclear-Weapons Boom

Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal.

Los Alamos is growing at a pace not seen since J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. 

New Yorker, By Abe Streep, December 27, 2024

“…….  Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which is once again rapidly expanding to supply the nation with nuclear weapons.

Los Alamos was built in secret during the Second World War—J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the lab there as part of the Manhattan Project. The town hovers high above the Española valley, on a handsome mesa called the Pajarito Plateau. Originally, the only way to access the enclave was through two gates. Today, it accepts visitors but remains a company town, housing many of the lab’s scientists and high-level staffers. The community has a population of about thirteen thousand, and boasts one of the nation’s densest concentrations of millionaires. In New Mexico, such wealth is rare. Española, which sits on the Rio Grande and is a twenty-five-minute drive away, has a median household income of fifty thousand dollars, a poverty rate approaching twenty per cent, and an entrenched fentanyl crisis.

…………………………………………………………………………………… In recent years, Los Alamos has been essential to a sweeping 1.7-trillion-dollar update of the country’s nuclear arsenal,……. The U.S. government has nearly five thousand nuclear warheads, close to two thousand of which are deployed inside submarines, bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also has thousands of plutonium pits—the fissionable cores of those warheads—in storage. But the plutonium in the stockpile is aging. Despite statements from groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which argue that the arsenal remains sufficiently deadly to serve as deterrence, the government insists that it needs new warheads.

The nuclear-weapons overhaul involves facilities spread out across the United States. Its projects include fabricating new missiles, installing thousands of miles of fibre-optic transmission lines, building new computer centers at Air Force bases, and refurbishing the underground chambers where missileers control weapons. But Los Alamos is the only lab that is capable of actually producing the plutonium pits.

…………………………….. workers move radioactive materials into secure containers. Salaries range from sixty-six thousand dollars to nearly twice that amount………

New Mexico’s state budget is just above ten billion dollars. The federal government spends about as much money on just two laboratories: Sandia, in Albuquerque, which designs weapon components such as detonators, and Los Alamos. Kirtland Air Force Base, which stores nuclear weapons, has a budget of nearly two billion dollars. An underground nuclear-waste repository in New Mexico’s southern desert also receives federal funding; after a fire and an unrelated radiological release at the facility, ten years ago, the Department of Energy spent nearly five hundred million dollars on an update to its safety infrastructure. “It’s gone from being a company town to being a company state,” Zia Mian, the co-director of a program on science and global security at Princeton, said.

…………………….in many states, weapons production meant jobs. When Obama was working to secure congressional support for a nuclear-coöperation agreement with Moscow, Republican senators asked, in return, that he sign off on modernizing the country’s arsenal. He agreed.

……………………………………………………………………The lab is supposed to be building the capacity to produce thirty war-ready plutonium pits per year. So far, it has created just one, even as the budget has tripled. …………………….The treaty that Obama signed with Russia in 2010 expires next year, and it is not expected to be renewed. Last June, in an address recorded for the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned of the creeping threat of nuclear war. “Humanity is on a knife’s edge,” he said. In 2023, Russia de-ratified a landmark nuclear-testing-ban treaty, and in November, following Ukraine’s use of long-range American missiles, Vladimir Putin lowered his country’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal and taunted Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. His Administration also signalled interest in reviving America’s defunct underground weapons-testing program.  In preparation for his second term, he has adopted Ronald Reagan’s old motto—“Peace through strength.” But his military aims have been difficult to pin down, and the views of his presumptive cabinet are scattershot. Sharon Weiner, a professor of foreign policy and global security at American University, said that Trump’s nominees appear “willing to violate norms and rules that have been in place for a long time.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., as fears about China reach a fever pitch, a sense of alarm is seeping into discussions about nuclear policy. During a recent panel, Robert Peters, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who once worked as a lead strategist for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, discussed the slow progress at Los Alamos with frustration. “Let’s waive the environmental regulations, blow up the mountain, pave it over, build a highway that you need to get there, fire everyone who’s not building warheads,” Peters said. Increasingly, politicians have advocated boosting the number of nuclear weapons—not just updating the existing ones. “The U.S. is embarking on a pair of arms races,” Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said. “You hear from both Democrats and Republicans that expansion is inevitable.”

In Los Alamos, it is widely acknowledged that, during the Manhattan Project, environmental concerns were not a priority. Nuclear waste was simply dumped in the ground.

This past August, a retired chemistry professor from Northern Arizona University named Michael Ketterer, who has studied nuclear sites around the West, announced that he had found what he called “the most extreme plutonium-contamination scenario” he has seen in an area close to Los Alamos. (The Department of Energy and the laboratory maintain that the radiation levels at the site are safe.) Worker-safety issues have also been a problem. 

the recent pressure to produce appears to align with a culture of haste. One of the oversight agencies that inspects the lab has published reports that reveal a concerning number of safety breaches………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/new-mexicos-nuclear-weapons-boom

December 31, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Guardian view on arms control: essential to prevent the total devastation of nuclear war

Guardian 27th Dec 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/27/the-guardian-view-on-arms-control-essential-to-prevent-the-total-devastation-of-nuclear-war

Next November marks 40 years since the US president Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. The statement was striking – not least because their militaries were pouring billions into preparing for an unwinnable conflict.

A year later, at Reykjavik, the two came tantalisingly close to eliminating nuclear weapons entirely. That historic chance slipped away over Reagan’s insistence on his unproven “Star Wars” missile defence system. The moment passed, but its lesson endures: disarmament demands courage – and compromise.

The summit proved a turning point in the cold war. Arms control brought down the number of nuclear weapons held by the two countries from 60,000 to roughly 11,000 today. The most recent new strategic arms reduction treaty (New Start), signed in 2010, capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each. In retrospect, that was a false dawn in nuclear diplomacy. Since George W Bush withdrew the US from the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Moscow in 2002, the risk of a return to an all-out arms race has grown.

On 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will once again hold the keys to a planet-ending arsenal. Mr Trump’s capricious personality sheds new light on an old question: how much of the terrible responsibility to inflict large-scale nuclear destruction should be invested in a single person? He has called the transfer of authority “a very sobering moment” and “very, very scary”. Reassuring words – until one remembers that he also reportedly wondered: “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?” Presidential sole authority rightly ensures civilian control over nuclear weapons. But why concentrate such power in just one civilian’s hands?

Close to apocalypse

Without bold action, New Start, the last safeguard of nuclear arms moderation, will expire in February 2026. Mr Trump admires strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has recklessly threatened nuclear strikes and hinted at restarting tests during the Ukraine war. But it would be a catastrophic mistake if the pair decided not to exercise self-restraint. It would mean that for the first time in more than 50 years, the US and Russia – holders of 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons – could begin an unconstrained arms race. That dismal decision would send a message to other states, notably China, further encouraging their buildup of nuclear stockpiles.

Deterrence is not the only way to think about nuclear weapons. For decades, a conflict involving them has been a byword for Armageddon. The fearful legacy of “the bomb” can be felt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the testing grounds still contaminated by nuclear fallout decades later. Such sentiment led to Barack Obama, in 2009, advocating a hopeful vision of a nuclear-free world. His speech inspired a coalition of activists, diplomats and developing nations determined to force a global reckoning. Their resistance to the conventional wisdom that nuclear disarmament is unrealistic bore fruit with the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, adopted by 122 countries at the UN in 2017. Its message: the only way to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again is to do away with them entirely.

The treaty, championed by the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was a triumph over superpower diplomacy that had long hindered reviews of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Nuclear-armed states are sceptical, if not scornful. But their resistance does not diminish the importance of the 2017 UN vote. It represents not only a moral and legal challenge to the status quo but a reminder that much of the world doesn’t accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. This sentiment was amplified this year when Nihon Hidankyo, Japan’s atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors group, won the Nobel peace prize for efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.

Eight decades after its first test, the nuclear bomb remains – its purpose long obsolete, its danger ever present. Built to defeat Hitler, dropped to end Japan’s imperial ambitions and multiplied to outlast the cold war, nuclear weapons have outlived every rationale for their existence. Arsenals have shrunk, but not enough. The world’s stockpile remains dangerously large, and efforts to reduce it further appear stalled. This against a geopolitical backdrop of nuclear proliferation, a multipolar and ideologically diverse UN, and the American desire for global pre-eminence. Little wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest ever to apocalypse.

A shared responsibility

In 2019, Gorbachev warned, with good reason, that nuclear deterrence keeps the world “in constant jeopardy”. It is obvious that as long as these weapons exist, the risk of nuclear war cannot be erased. The question is no longer why the bomb remains, but whether humanity can survive it for another 80 years.

This December, UN members voted 144-3 to establish an independent scientific panel on the effects of nuclear war. Shamefully, Britain was among the naysayers. Imagination has already outpaced fact. In her book Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson describes how humanity could end in 72 minutes after a North Korean “bolt from the blue” attack sparks a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. She writes of thousands of warheads raining down on America, Europe, Russia and parts of Asia, obliterating cities, incinerating human life and leaving billions stripped of life, light and hope. Streets turn molten, winds flatten the land and those who endure suffer wounds so terrible that they no longer look – or act – human.

Ms Jacobson’s point is that this apocalyptic vision is the logical conclusion of the world’s current nuclear doctrines. Those that do emerge into the desolation discover what the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned decades ago: “The survivors will envy the dead.” The devastation is total, offering a future that no one could bear to live through.

The Guardian view on arms control: essential to prevent the total devastation of nuclear war

Editorial

Over the holidays, this column will explore next year’s urgent issues. Today we look at why an unqualified belief in nuclear deterrence can’t keep us safeSat 28 Dec 2024 04.30 AEDTShare

Next November marks 40 years since the US president Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. The statement was striking – not least because their militaries were pouring billions into preparing for an unwinnable conflict.

A year later, at Reykjavik, the two came tantalisingly close to eliminating nuclear weapons entirely. That historic chance slipped away over Reagan’s insistence on his unproven “Star Wars” missile defence system. The moment passed, but its lesson endures: disarmament demands courage – and compromise.

The summit proved a turning point in the cold war. Arms control brought down the number of nuclear weapons held by the two countries from 60,000 to roughly 11,000 today. The most recent new strategic arms reduction treaty (New Start), signed in 2010, capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each. In retrospect, that was a false dawn in nuclear diplomacy. Since George W Bush withdrew the US from the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Moscow in 2002, the risk of a return to an all-out arms race has grown.

On 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will once again hold the keys to a planet-ending arsenal. Mr Trump’s capricious personality sheds new light on an old question: how much of the terrible responsibility to inflict large-scale nuclear destruction should be invested in a single person? He has called the transfer of authority “a very sobering moment” and “very, very scary”. Reassuring words – until one remembers that he also reportedly wondered: “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?” Presidential sole authority rightly ensures civilian control over nuclear weapons. But why concentrate such power in just one civilian’s hands?

Close to apocalypse

Without bold action, New Start, the last safeguard of nuclear arms moderation, will expire in February 2026. Mr Trump admires strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has recklessly threatened nuclear strikes and hinted at restarting tests during the Ukraine war. But it would be a catastrophic mistake if the pair decided not to exercise self-restraint. It would mean that for the first time in more than 50 years, the US and Russia – holders of 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons – could begin an unconstrained arms race. That dismal decision would send a message to other states, notably China, further encouraging their buildup of nuclear stockpiles.

Deterrence is not the only way to think about nuclear weapons. For decades, a conflict involving them has been a byword for Armageddon. The fearful legacy of “the bomb” can be felt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the testing grounds still contaminated by nuclear fallout decades later. Such sentiment led to Barack Obama, in 2009, advocating a hopeful vision of a nuclear-free world. His speech inspired a coalition of activists, diplomats and developing nations determined to force a global reckoning. Their resistance to the conventional wisdom that nuclear disarmament is unrealistic bore fruit with the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, adopted by 122 countries at the UN in 2017. Its message: the only way to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again is to do away with them entirely.

The treaty, championed by the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was a triumph over superpower diplomacy that had long hindered reviews of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Nuclear-armed states are sceptical, if not scornful. But their resistance does not diminish the importance of the 2017 UN vote. It represents not only a moral and legal challenge to the status quo but a reminder that much of the world doesn’t accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. This sentiment was amplified this year when Nihon Hidankyo, Japan’s atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors group, won the Nobel peace prize for efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.

Eight decades after its first test, the nuclear bomb remains – its purpose long obsolete, its danger ever present. Built to defeat Hitler, dropped to end Japan’s imperial ambitions and multiplied to outlast the cold war, nuclear weapons have outlived every rationale for their existence. Arsenals have shrunk, but not enough. The world’s stockpile remains dangerously large, and efforts to reduce it further appear stalled. This against a geopolitical backdrop of nuclear proliferation, a multipolar and ideologically diverse UN, and the American desire for global pre-eminence. Little wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest ever to apocalypse.

A shared responsibility

In 2019, Gorbachev warned, with good reason, that nuclear deterrence keeps the world “in constant jeopardy”. It is obvious that as long as these weapons exist, the risk of nuclear war cannot be erased. The question is no longer why the bomb remains, but whether humanity can survive it for another 80 years.

This December, UN members voted 144-3 to establish an independent scientific panel on the effects of nuclear war. Shamefully, Britain was among the naysayers. Imagination has already outpaced fact. In her book Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson describes how humanity could end in 72 minutes after a North Korean “bolt from the blue” attack sparks a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. She writes of thousands of warheads raining down on America, Europe, Russia and parts of Asia, obliterating cities, incinerating human life and leaving billions stripped of life, light and hope. Streets turn molten, winds flatten the land and those who endure suffer wounds so terrible that they no longer look – or act – human.

Ms Jacobson’s point is that this apocalyptic vision is the logical conclusion of the world’s current nuclear doctrines. Those that do emerge into the desolation discover what the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned decades ago: “The survivors will envy the dead.” The devastation is total, offering a future that no one could bear to live through.

Amid historic lows in US-Russian relations, one truth remains: a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Leaders in Moscow and Washington should reaffirm this in the run-up to negotiating significant arsenal reductions as well as real limits on strategic missile defences. Such a statement, simple but profound, would remind the world that Mr Trump and Mr Putin recognise their shared responsibility to prevent global catastrophe. This will not be easy: rising nationalism, geopolitical rivalry and mutual mistrust between the countries – especially over Ukraine – loom large over disarmament efforts. But try they must. However bitter their disagreements, Washington and Moscow owe it to humanity to talk about – and act on – avoiding the unthinkable.

December 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment