The new movie “The Peacemaker” is a great piece of entertainment. It’s also a critically important reminder that the threat of nuclear war is still with us.
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a tendency to act as though the enormous nuclear arsenals built up to wage that war vanished with the Berlin Wall. They haven’t. In fact, some 40,000 nuclear warheads remain in the world, and while the danger of a deliberate nuclear attack has declined since 1989, the dangers of accidental war and nuclear terrorism have increased dramatically.
More than 5,000 of the nuclear warheads remain perched on strategic missiles still maintained at hair-trigger alert and aimed at the major cities of Russia, America, Europe and China. A computer or human error could accidentally send one or more of these missiles on the way and trigger a full-scale nuclear war.
This nearly happened on Jan. 25, 1995, when a U.S. weather rocket launched from Norway was mistakenly identified as a submarine-launched attack on Russia. For the first time in Soviet-Russia history the “nuclear suitcase” was activated and President Boris Yeltsin was given 12 minutes to decide whether to launch a full-scale attack on the United States.
In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” former Russian national security adviser Alexander Lebed said that the Russian military could not find more than 100 of the suitcase-sized nuclear bombs–each capable of killing up to 100,000 people.
It is incomprehensible that this danger has been allowed to continue, and it is time to do something about it.
A group of prominent international military authorities, led by Gen. Lee Butler, former head of the Strategic Air Command, has called for the immediate “de-alerting” of strategic missiles, physically taking the warheads off the missiles so they cannot be launched without hours of preparation time. Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin need to heed the general’s warning and agree to a mutual, verified de-alerting of their nuclear missiles.
Still, even de-alerted warheads can be diverted for nuclear terrorism, and this danger has become particularly grave with the breakdown of military command and control systems in Russia.
One approach to this danger is stepped-up police and military activity against potential terrorists, and this approach has its advocates. But there is a better way: the abolition of nuclear weapons. We don’t need these weapons; their continued existence is the greatest threat to our security. It will be a lot easier, and infinitely more desirable, to eliminate 40,000 nuclear warheads than to create a global police state to monitor the activity of more than 6 billion human beings.
As part of the abolition process, the U.S. needs to continue to assist Russia in safeguarding and securing its nuclear materials and facilities. Perhaps some day we will be able to end war and terrorism altogether. In the meantime, we can and must make sure that if people do fight, they do not have access to nuclear weapons.
