April 11, 2000
The end of the Cold War did little to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons, according to the participants in a panel discussion sponsored by the Center for International Security and Arms Control.
In the discussion titled “So You Think Nuclear Weapons Went Away With the Cold War?,” five experts agreed that the political deterioration in Russia and nuclear proliferation in the 1990s probably make the threat of nuclear attack greater than ever.
In a panel preceding ABC’s live remake of the movie “Fail Safe,” former Senator Alan Cranston; Radiology Prof. Herb Abrams; George Bunn, a former general council for the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Sumit Ganguly, visiting fellow; and Scott Sagan, co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security, agreed that the risk of an attack was greatly underestimated by the general public, that the United States and Russia should take their nuclear missiles off any sort of hair-trigger alert and that American pursuit of a missile defense system would be foolish.
They disagreed in their assessment of more specific issues, including the possibility of the Senate reconsidering its 1999 rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the risk of nuclear attack in the conflict between India and Pakistan.
They emphasized that humanity’s goal should be complete nuclear disarmament. “We must mend our ways and change present policy to get rid of the weapons before they get rid of us,” said Senator Cranston. “If they’re around forever, sooner or later they will be used.”
According to Cranston, of the thousand or so false signals of nuclear attack between the United States and Russia or the Soviet Union, experts have usually realized the mistake quickly, as when the moon or a flock of geese were misread as missiles.
But on one occasion, the chief of the National Security Agency was awakened in the middle of the night and informed that the United States was “under massive attack” before officials realized that a training simulation had accidentally been inserted into the missile detection system.
On another occasion, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was awakened and told a U.S. missile was approaching. He later found that it was a Russian-authorized Norwegian test missile. Russia’s Embassy in Norway had neglected to tell the military.
Such false warnings are frightening, said moderator Sagan, particularly because the United States and Russia have the ability to retaliate so quickly. “The major difference between nuclear weapons and [other types of weapons] is not the number of people they would kill, it’s the speed by which we could kill,” he said.
In the name of deterrence and the strategy of “mutual assured destruction,” wherein one side would launch all of its missiles before any landed on its territory, we have created a world where we “take decisions out of politicians hands” and “cooler heads may not prevail.”
The risk of false attack or alarm has increased beause Russia has not allocated enough money to maintain the safety of its missile detection and launching equipment, according to Cranston. That it has also not regularly paid its military officials and nuclear scientists has increased the chance that terrorists “with no compunction about using them to attack us” will be able to steal or bribe their way to nuclear capability.
Claiming, to uncomfortable laughter from the audience, that Stanford University was one of the eight targets in the Bay Area, Abrams described the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The effects of superfires, radioactive craters, overwhelmed hospitals, toxic air and opportunistic epidemics would be so great, he said, that “an attack, even if accidental, might prompt retaliation.”
“We must take all missiles off high alert, remove the capability of rapid launch, and fulfil our obligations to . . . . the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” he said.
According to Bunn, the non-nuclear countries who have signed this treaty agreed not to develop nuclear weapons with the understanding that the admitted nuclear powers – the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China – would negotiate in good faith towards reducing and eliminating their weapons. “Most do not believe they have,” he said, which raises doubts about their continued commitment to the treaty.
A specialist in nonproliferation issues, Ganguly called the Nonproliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty “disingenuous,” or unfairly slanted towards the existing nuclear powers.
He defended India and Pakistan’s decision not to sign either treaty before asserting themselves as nuclear powers in 1998. They objected to the treaties on the grounds that they “only exhorted” nuclear weapons powers to take steps toward disarmament and that they prevented the protection of their national security.
According to Ganguly, Chairman Mao Tse-tung of nearby China said “he could entirely conceive of nuclear war because enough Chinese would survive that its civilization as we know it would still survive.”
Furthermore, according to Ganguly, although the global environment is more dangerous than before, the risk of nuclear attack in India and Pakistan is “considerably exaggerated.” He said, “there is a much greater likelihood of conventional war, even as early as this summer.”
Assessing future prospects, the panelists were varyingly hopeful. If ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a first step in the right direction, George Bunn was pesimistic.
A two-thirds majority, which is necessary to ratify the treaty, is difficult to assemble and too many Senators have committed themselves to a position opposing the Treaty, Bunn believes. “You have to wake up the American people [on this issue]. . . . and I don’t see that happening.”
Senator Cranston disagreed. “I’m convinced the treaty is not dead,” he said. The Senate’s rejection of the treaty was highly partisan – with Republicans voting against it and Democrats voting for it – and “that’s not the way people think in the Senate.” There were “a good number of Republicans who were unhappy with the outcome.”
All agreed that an anti-ballistic missile defense system would be inadequately effective and destabilizing.
According to Abrams, equipment deterioration and unreliability, the massive amount of computer code required, the difficulty of discriminating missiles from noise, the difficulty of testing the system and its inability to prevent smuggling weapons into the country are all reasons not to invest billions of dollars in a missile defense system.
Moreover, since the United States has signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits such a defense system for fear of destabilizing the balance constructed by the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction,” constructing the defense system would provoke Russia and China.
“If we do it in defiance of Russia and China, I see no hope in the near future of controlling nuclear weapons,” Abrams said.
According to Cranston, by refusing to pursue complete disarmament, we risk billions of lives. “[Every day we keep our nuclear weapons] we put the people of the world at risk under the fleeting notion of our national security,” he said.
Reacting to the panelists afterward, freshman Greg Wientjes said, “It seemed at the time of World War II we had to make the bomb, because there was evidence Hitler was pursuing it.and there are still people out there who believe it’s actually saving lives.”
He said, “it seems like the answer is to abolish, but that seems impossible. It’s the kind of stuff nightmares are made of.”