In this final chapter I take a broad look at a number of issues related to the control of nuclear arms that extend beyond nuclear testing. I examine the consequences of a major nuclear exchange, the concept of nuclear winter, attempts to limit nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, the possibility of eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons, and the role of scientists in reducing the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. My list is only partial.
DANGERS OF HAIR-TRIGGER ALERTS AND UNAUTHORIZED LAUNCHES OF DELIVERY SYSTEMS FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Nearly everyone agrees that a major exchange of nuclear weapons would be a great disaster of unprecedented dimensions and horrors. Nevertheless, preventing such an exchange involves considerable disagreement. I am of the school that thinks that the use of even a few nuclear weapons would be a major catastrophe, and that nuclear weapons have only one use—deterring others from using them. Some people in the United States, however, believe that nuclear weapons could be used to destroy chemical and biological weapons, destroy deep bunkers for nuclear arms, attack terrorists, or conduct a limited war.
It is a mistake to think that chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons —sometimes collectively called weapons of mass destruction—are of equal lethality. While deadly, scenarios that involve chemical and biological weapons are nearly always much less destructive than those involving nuclear weapons.
A decision by the Russian Republic to attack the United States with hundreds to a thousand nuclear weapons—a so-called “bolt out the blue”—has not been considered a likely scenario since the end of the Cold War in 1991. The greater danger today is that many nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger alert and might be used in a rapid response (fire on warning) in response either to a false alarm (believing one is under attack) or to an unauthorized launch of one or more delivery vehicles. Just the firing of one missile with multiple warheads by one country against the other—such as either the Russian SS-18 or the U.S. Trident II—could destroy four to eight major cities. The threat of computer hacking is now an additional concern.
Russian land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) can reach the United States in as little as twenty-five minutes, submarine-launched missiles in as little as ten minutes. Once the United States detected their launch, even less time would remain before impact. This would allow high-level officials only five to ten minutes to deliberate whether they should launch U.S. strategic forces against Russia before command and control systems and land-based missiles sustained damage. About two minutes would be needed to transmit launch orders, three minutes for firing those missiles, and a few more minutes for them to fly a safe distance from their home bases.
A strong rationale exists for either the United States or Russia to fire on warning, launching a retaliatory strike while enemy nuclear missiles presumably are still en route and before detonations occur, to avoid loss of land-based missiles, bombers, and command and control facilities. Nevertheless, fire on warning is a particularly dangerous practice because it could well occur in response to a false alarm. This is particularly true for land-based missiles with multiple warheads because one or two incoming warheads could destroy a single missile with up to ten warheads. Russia has a larger percentage of its long-range warheads on land-based missiles, many of which contain multiple warheads (MIRVs), while the United States has more of its strategic warheads on submarines. These U.S. assets deployed well at sea are not vulnerable to a sudden attack, but their land-based command and control facilities are.
The United States also has the better early warning systems. Russia, therefore, is more likely to fire on warning in response to a false alarm that is not identified as such in the ten minutes or so required to launch its larger land-based assets. Russia may believe it has even less warning time because it fears the use of missiles launched from U.S. Trident submarines in the northeast Atlantic Ocean off Norway. Once a few nuclear weapons are fired, an orgy in which many more weapons are set off seems highly likely. Missiles, unlike bombers, cannot be recalled or redirected to another site once they are launched.
NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS AND FALSE ALARMS
I have compiled from a variety of sources a list of accidents involving nuclear weapons and false alarms of impending nuclear attack that have occurred during the past sixty-five years. Soviet accidents have likely been underreported.
1. Northern British Columbia, February 13, 1950: A U.S. B-36B bomber crashed after jettisoning a nuclear bomb, the first known loss of a nuclear weapon. It did not cause a nuclear explosion.
2. Goldsboro, North Carolina, January 23, 1961: Two U.S. hydrogen bombs were accidently dropped when the B-52 carrying them broke up in midair. Three safety mechanisms on one bomb failed; the fourth and final mechanism worked and prevented explosions of several megatons.
3. Palomares, Spain, January 17, 1966: A U.S. B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs collided with a tanker during aerial refueling. Three of those weapons were found on land. The nonnuclear explosives in two of them detonated upon impact with the ground, resulting in radioactive contamination of a 0.78 square mile (2 sq km) area. This is an example of weapons’ being “one-point safe” in that strong blows to the chemical explosives did not detonate one or more nuclear explosions. The fourth weapon fell into the Mediterranean Sea, where it was recovered intact after a two-and-a-half-month search.
4. Thule, Greenland, January 21, 1968: A B-52 crashed onto sea ice after a cabin fire. Four hydrogen bombs ruptured and dispersed widespread radioactive contamination. No nuclear explosions occurred.
5. Use of a wrong tape, November 9, 1979: Computers of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) indicated a full-scale, preemptive Soviet attack against the United States. U.S. military officers feared the worst for six minutes before recognizing it as a false alarm. A NORAD technician had mistakenly loaded a simulation into the system without identifying it as such.
6. Damascus, Arkansas, September 1980: A nonnuclear explosion occurred in a Titan II missile silo when an airman dropped a socket from a wrench that pierced the skin of the missile. The warhead landed about 100 feet (30 m) from the entry gate of the launch complex. No radioactive material was dispersed, and a nuclear explosion did not occur.
7. A Soviet error, September 26, 1983: The Soviet early warning system mistook bright flashes to mean that the United States had launched five nuclear missiles at the USSR. Disobeying orders, a Soviet lieutenant colonel in charge decided against informing his superiors. He reasoned correctly that a system malfunction had occurred because the United States would not have launched an attack of just five missiles.
8. A failed communication, January 25, 1995: A communiqué from the Norwegian government describing the launch of a research rocket to study northern lights never reached the Russian military. For a few minutes, Russian radar operators believed they were under attack by the United States. The alarm reached high levels of the Russian government.
9. Hacking into U.S. launch orders, 1990s: An in-depth investigation of safeguards found an electronic “backdoor” to the naval communications network used to transmit launch orders to U.S. Trident missile submarines. Whether the network was actually ever hacked into is not known.
10. Missing U.S. cruise missiles, August 29–30, 2007: Six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were loaded onto a U.S. Air Force plane, flown across the country, and unloaded. For thirty-six hours, no one knew where the warheads were, or even that they were missing.
BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE
Present versions of U.S. defensive missiles, which do not contain nuclear warheads, destroy a target missile by either colliding with it or detonating a chemical explosion close by. It must get very close to its target, which is moving extremely fast, in a very short amount of time. It is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Defensive missiles are still in the process of being developed and tested. Even though many have already been deployed, many U.S. tests have missed their targets.
Missile defense is not a new concept. Various U.S. versions go back to the 1960s, including the nuclear explosion code-named Cannikin of about 4500 kilotons, which was conducted at Amchitka Island in the Aleutians in 1971. It was intended for use with an early missile interceptor, which may have been deployed briefly before Congress defunded it. In 1983 the Reagan administration proposed a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an ambitious project that would have constructed a space-based antimissile system intended to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” This program was dubbed “Star Wars.” One version of SDI involved high-powered lasers on U.S. satellites that could be aimed in specific directions at missiles soon after they were launched. Because the satellites would have been vulnerable to a preemptive attack, the system would have to be fired in a matter of minutes once a real or supposed launch of Russian or other missiles was detected.
In December 2001 President George W. Bush gave notice to Russia that in six months the United States would withdraw from the bilateral Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. The United States did withdraw and went on to deploy defensive missiles in Alaska and Eastern Europe and on ships in the eastern Mediterranean.
Advanced long-range missiles carrying nuclear weapons typically involve several stages. They are most vulnerable in the initial stage after launch, when they move relatively slowly from the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere. Nevertheless, once they are detected, little time is available to attack them with anti-ballistic missiles. Now lighter and having burned much fuel, intercontinental and intermediate-range missiles with one or several warheads then travel long distances above the atmosphere through the near vacuum of space. Many decoys or penetration aids can be released from the missile while in space. Lightweight decoys are very difficult to distinguish from warheads in space because neither decoys nor warheads are slowed by atmospheric friction. The warheads finally reenter the atmosphere above their targets, descending very fast. Very little time is available at this point to destroy them.
A major missile attack by either Russia or the United States likely would involve hundreds of warheads. To be successful, a defensive system must destroy all of them, which seems exceedingly remote. Even if only a small percentage of them were not destroyed and reached their targets, the immense destruction would be a national disaster unprecedented in human history. In fact, the United States has long emphasized that its ballistic missile defense system cannot counter more than a small percentage of Russian intercontinental missiles. To keep the momentum up and to fund current anti-ballistic missile systems, the United States has emphasized that they are intended as a counter against “rogue” countries.
The emphasis now is on destroying one or a few nuclear missiles launched by either Iran or North Korea against either the United States or its allies. Deploying anti-missile systems to do that understandably creates fears in China and Russia for the safety of at least some of their existing missiles. Either of those countries is likely to respond by deploying more intercontinental missiles, making the United States less safe, and both are likely to resist reducing the number of intercontinental missiles further in future arms control agreements.
A missile launched by either Iran or North Korea that carried a nuclear warhead anywhere near the United States would almost certainly trigger a massive attack by the United States. In my estimation, the United States is much too concerned about a nuclear attack on either it or its allies by either Iran or North Korea. Israel, a strong U.S. ally, can be counted on to defend itself against attacks by Middle Eastern countries. Israel’s nuclear capabilities are large enough to provide sufficient deterrence against Iran’s using nuclear weapons against it. The United States should worry more about North Korea and Iran furnishing either nuclear weapons or know-how to other countries and to terrorists.
Many nonscientists in the United States do not seem to understand that most arms control experts in the scientific community regard a successful defense system against tens to hundreds of incoming warheads as a pipe dream. This is an instance in which technical considerations really are critical in formulating U.S. national security policy. In 2014 Israel’s “iron dome” shot down roughly half of the crude, short-range rockets that were fired into Israel from Gaza. Success in intercepting some of those rockets should not be confused with the immensely more difficult task of distinguishing many warheads that travel though space along with sophisticated decoys. It is important to note that nuclear weapons can also be delivered clandestinely by means other than ballistic missiles, including by trucks and ships.
Russia and China have long feared U.S. technological advances. Hence, each of them may well cooperate with the United States in further reducing nuclear weapons and their delivery systems if serious limitations are placed on anti-missile systems. This will be a tough pill to swallow for many people in the United States who believe in simplistic arguments that ABM systems can protect us from nuclear attack. Defense contractors and politicians who invoke patriotism continue to argue for new ABM systems. Thus far, for domestic political reasons, no U.S. president, no matter how intelligent, has dared to state that ballistic missile defense is unworkable and hugely expensive and that it diverts funds from many other things of great value to the nation, including other aspects of national security. The United States likely could obtain many important concessions from Russia and China in a “grand bargain” that would either eliminate or seriously restrict ballistic missile defense.
In 1986 President Reagan rejected limits on missile defense during his summit meeting with Russian general secretary Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. Reagan could not understand that his vision of a nuclear-free world was not compatible with his excitement for ballistic missile defense. Gorbachev, while interested in warhead reduction, also wanted major limits on defensive missiles. Placing severe limits on missile defense continues to be a major Russian objective.
As Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist at the University of Texas and a Nobel laureate in physics, stated in 2002, “There is nothing more important to American security than to get nuclear forces on both sides down at least to hundreds or even dozens rather than thousands of warheads and especially to get rid of MIRVs, but this is not going to happen if the United States is committed to a national missile defense.”
ABOLISHING NUCLEAR WEAPONS
On January 15, 2008, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn coauthored “Toward a Nuclear-Free World” in the Wall Street Journal. Shultz was U.S. secretary of state from 1982 to 1989; Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997; Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977; Nunn formerly chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee and was very involved with nuclear weapons and arms control. The title of their article was surprising because each of them had been moderate to conservative in their political and arms control views.
They stated, “The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear materials has brought us to a nuclear tipping point. We face the very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands…. With nuclear weapons more widely available, deterrence is decreasingly effective and increasingly hazardous.” They went on to say, “Without the vision of moving toward zero, we will not find the essential cooperation required to stop our downward spiral.” They listed many world leaders who supported their views.
Their call to move toward zero brought out many critics who mentioned old, much-used arguments: nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented; some countries will successfully hide weapons; not all nations will comply. One commenter on the proposal by Shultz and colleagues noted, however, that ending the Cold War was more utopian than the elimination of nuclear weapons and that 95 percent of nations are already nuclear free. Of course, it will take time to move toward zero, but many steps can be taken in the meantime. There is a need for good positive thinking about verifying movements toward zero.
Shultz and others advocate a series of steps to reduce the nuclear threat. An obvious one is to increase the decision times for the launch of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to reduce risks of accidental or unauthorized use. They also advocate the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a stronger nonproliferation regime, and an international system to manage the risks of the nuclear fuel cycle.
I think Schulz and others were weak on ballistic missile defense (BMD). They said, “Undertake negotiation toward cooperative multilateral ballistic-missile defense and early warning systems. This should include agreements on plans for countering missile threats to Europe, Russia and the United States from the Middle East.”
They do not mention one measure that I think is very important: a considerable reduction or elimination of missiles with multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). Because each of those missiles carries several weapons, they are more likely to be launched in response to warnings than missiles with single warheads. The understandable fear is that missiles with multiple warheads will be destroyed if they are not used quickly.
Kissinger remarked decades ago that the United States should have thought through more carefully the development and deployment of MIRVs. They were (and still are) very destabilizing to arms control. One missile with multiple warheads could destroy three to ten missiles of the other superpower.
I think that Shultz and others should have been stronger about nuclear weapons that are still deployed in Europe. They called only for a dialogue with other NATO countries and Russia about the forward deployment of weapons, a careful accounting of them, and their eventual elimination. Moving to eliminate tactical and other remaining nuclear weapons in Europe, including western Russia, seems to me to be amenable to negotiation. Those weapons are no longer deployed in Belarus, Kazakhstan, or Ukraine—countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
PROPOSED NEW U.S. DELIVERY SYSTEMS
The administration of President Barack Obama stunned arms control advocates by embarking on an aggressive effort to upgrade the military’s nuclear weapons programs, including requests to buy twelve new missile-firing submarines, up to a hundred new bombers, and four hundred land-based missiles over the next thirty years. Russia, whose nuclear delivery systems were degraded after the breakup of the Soviet Union, has made recent efforts to reverse that trend under President Vladimir Putin. That reversal, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, threats to Ukraine, a more aggressive China, and warfare with Muslim extremists have contributed to calls in the United States for increased nuclear capabilities. However, massive rebuilding of U.S. nuclear forces appears to have caused Russia to modernize more of its nuclear arsenal than previously planned in an attempt to keep up with the United States. These contribute to a new Cold War mentality and increase the dangers of nuclear war.
NUCLEAR WINTER
Over the past several decades, a number of authors have proposed that the detonation of large numbers of nuclear weapons could have profound and severe effects on climate, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. This, in turn, could damage crops and potentially cause as much loss of life as the immediate effects of blast, thermal radiation, fire, and fallout. Several examples of devastating destruction are known throughout Earth’s history. A 1980 paper in Science by Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and his colleagues described a global disaster 65 million years ago that they concluded resulted in huge decreases in temperature on Earth. They stimulated research on what R. P. Turco and his colleagues in 1983 termed “nuclear winter.”
Alvarez and his colleagues sought to explain the sudden demise of the dinosaurs and many other species at the end of the Mesozoic era and the start of the Cenozoic geological era in Earth history. They proposed that Earth was hit by a large comet or asteroid that lofted debris high into the atmosphere and ignited multiple firestorms in forests. They sampled sediments at the Mesozoic-Cenozoic boundary at Gubbio, Italy, and reported unusually high concentrations of the element Iridium. Iridium, one of the platinum group of elements, is known to be more plentiful in meteorites than on earth. They concluded that the impact caused global decreases in temperature, loss of vegetation, and winter conditions that lasted long enough that many animals, such as dinosaurs, died of starvation.
The impact site was subsequently identified near the north coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Dated sedimentary deposits along the northern Gulf of Mexico indicate that a huge sea wave (tsunami) hit those shores soon after the impact. Damage to living species was particularly high in North America to the northwest of the impact site, leading to the conclusion that the impacting body traveled in a northwesterly direction before hitting Yucatán.
Large volcanic eruptions, especially those that release large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, are known to cause drops in global temperature for one to a few years. The large eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in 1883 caused global cooling of about 1.8°F (1°C) for two years. The even larger eruption of the earlier Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, one of the most powerful in recorded history, was followed by “the year without a summer.” Temperature decreases after such large volcanic eruptions are useful tests of models of longer-term climate changes and the role of human-induced global warming.
I have selected one article that examines possible climatic changes associated with a major nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States and another that describes the effects of an exchange between India and Pakistan.
Scientists Turco, A. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and C. Sagan—referred to widely as TTAPS—made computer simulations for their 1983 article in Science of a number of scenarios involving the exchange of nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union and the United States. Their baseline exchange involved 10,400 explosions with yields of 100 to 10,000 kilotons (0.1 to 10 megatons [Mt]). Fortunately, this example is not valid today because bilateral treaties have reduced the numbers of warheads of the two nuclear superpowers (see figure 17.1). Also, the maximum yields of warheads decreased as more missiles with multiple warheads were deployed and bomber payloads transitioned from mostly high-yield bombs to many missiles with weapons of lower yield.
TTAPS scenarios 12 and 14 are more appropriate today. Case 12 involved an exchange of 2250 warheads with yields of 200 to 1000 kilotons; two-thirds were focused on hardened targets like missile silos and the remaining one-third on urban and industrial targets. Scenario 14 involved 1000 warheads with yields of 100 kilotons (ten times smaller than in case 12) used solely against urban and industrial targets. According to TTAPS, both of these scenarios would still have great long-term consequences. A major exchange aimed at military and industrial targets alone would not be just a “surgical strike” with damage limited to those facilities, because many are located within or near urban zones. In addition to radioactive fallout, widespread fires would occur after most nuclear bursts over forests and cities.
TTAPS also focused on the potential effects on climate of huge amounts of smoke and dust carried into the atmosphere by a major exchange, which would cause cooling of the lower atmosphere by blocking sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth. Scenario 12, while less severe in its absolute impact than their baseline scenario, was projected to affect the atmosphere to an extent comparable to or exceeding that of a major volcanic eruption such as Tambora in 1815 and its following “year without a summer.” They stated, “Unexpectedly, less than 1 percent of existing [1983] strategic arsenals, if targeted on cities, could produce optical (and climatic) disturbances much larger than those previously associated with a massive nuclear exchange ~10,000 MT.” For case 12, 1 percent in 1983 is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the reduced strategic arsenals of the United States and Russia in 2017.
The Earth’s atmosphere consists of the troposphere, which extends from the surface to an altitude of about 6 to 8 miles (10 to 13 km). Above the troposphere is the stratosphere, which extends to an altitude of 30 miles (50 km).
TTAPS found that more than two to three months after a major nuclear exchange, while soot would be largely depleted in the atmosphere by rainfall and washout, dust would dominate optical effects. In case 14, none of the smoke from urban fires in about a hundred cities would reach the stratosphere, whereas for many of their other scenarios it would. TTAPS found that fine dust in the stratospheric would be responsible for prolonged cooling lasting a year or more.
TTAPS calculated average cooling of land areas in the Northern Hemisphere as large as about 58o F (32o C) for case 14, the city attack, and about 11o F (6o C) for case 12. This was so even though case 14 involved only 10 percent of the megatonnage of case 12. Significant temperature changes would last about a hundred days for case 14 and about twenty to eighty days for case 12. This would mean subfreezing temperatures in many places even in the summer for case 14. According to TTAPS, much of the population of the Earth might survive the immediate consequences of a nuclear war, but “the longer-term and global-scale aftereffects of nuclear war might prove to be as important as the immediate consequences of the war [i.e., the effects from blast, thermal radiation, and fallout].”
In the decades after these early 1980s, studies on nuclear winter, computer power, and global circulation models of the atmosphere and oceans improved immensely, with three-dimension models replacing one-dimensional ones. In 2007, some of the authors of the 1983 TTAPS study revisited the subject using a modern climate model with current nuclear arsenals. They reached similar conclusions about firestorms created by attacks on about a hundred cities (like case 14 of 1983) and calculated temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening food supplies for much of the planet. Climatic effects of smoke from burning cities and industrial areas, lofted into the upper stratosphere, would last for several years, longer than they originally thought in 1983.
Also in 2007, Toon, one of the TTAPS authors, and colleagues did a computer analysis of a major exchange of nuclear weapons between Pakistan and India. They assumed that one hundred Hiroshima-size weapons of about 15 kilotons each were used to attack the densest population centers in each country—generally huge megacities. They concluded that those explosions would generate substantial global-scale temperature anomalies, though not as large as in a major exchange between the United States and Russia. The effects would degrade agricultural productivity to an extent that has led historically to famines in Africa, India, and Japan.
Wikipedia describes work and speculation about the effects of the burning of oil wells in Kuwait that were ignited by Saddam Hussein of Iraq in 1991 during the first Gulf War. About 600 wells were ignited; some were not extinguished for more than six months. Prior to their being ignited, Turco, J. W. Birks, Carl Sagan, A. Robock, and P. Crutzen stated to reporters from two newspapers that they expected catastrophic nuclear winter effects if Iraq went through with its threats to ignite 300 to 500 oil wells and if they burned for a few months.
S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia, a prominent denier of climate changes from human activities, and Sagan of Cornell University debated possible impacts of oil well fires in Kuwait on a TV news program. Sagan argued that some of the effects of the smoke lofting into the stratosphere could be similar to effects of nuclear winter and very similar to those from the eruption of Tambora in 1815. Singer, however, said his calculations showed that the smoke would rise to 3000 feet (900 m) and would be rained out in several days.
Sagan later conceded that his predictions did not turn out to be correct. He said, “it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 7 to 11o F (4 to 6o C) over the Persian Gulf but not much smoke reached stratospheric [higher] altitudes and Asia was spared.”
A 2007 study by Toon and others applied modern computer models to the Kuwait oil fires and found that individual smoke plumes were not able to loft smoke into the stratosphere. Nevertheless, smoke from fires over a larger area could extend into the stratosphere.
In the troposphere, the lower part of the atmosphere, temperature decreases with height; the troposphere turns over by convection and hence “washes itself out” with rain. The stratosphere, however, is more stratified (layered) because temperature there increases with height. Thus, small soot particles that make it into the stratosphere can remain there for a long time.
Criticisms of the “nuclear winter” concept and the effects on the atmosphere of the fires in Kuwait led many U.S. policy makers to ignore the possible consequences of a nuclear winter. One statement called it “nuclear fall.” Note that the papers I have cited by Turco, Toon, and others were published in prominent refereed journals, whereas the remarks by Sagan and Singer were not. In 1987, Michael Kelly of Cambridge University and the British Climatic Research Unit stated, “although there are a handful of vociferous critics, the atmospheric community is united in its conclusion that the threat of nuclear winter is genuine.”
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, relatively little work was published on nuclear winter. I strongly believe a vigorous debate on the subject is needed today. Even without as severe climatic effects as proposed by TTAPS in 1983, it is hard to dismiss the huge climatic effects from a major nuclear exchange.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF SEISMOLOGISTS IN MONITORING A FULL TEST BAN TREATY
Since the first calls for a CTBT in the 1950s, seismological instrumentation and techniques to monitor nuclear testing have improved immensely. None of the states possessing nuclear weapons that signed the CTBT in 1996 has detonated a nuclear explosion of military significance for twenty years. The CTBT has acted as a barrier to the development and testing of new generations of nuclear weapons. Serious evasion schemes, while still topics of political and occasional scientific debate, are considered exceedingly difficult to conduct without being detected by seismic methods, radionuclide sampling, and satellite imagery. Methods to muffle nuclear explosions in underground cavities have been determined to be unfeasible down to very small yields. Over the past fifty-five years since I became a graduate student at Columbia, the field of seismology has come full circle, finally fulfilling its long-thwarted promise to verify a nuclear test ban.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE
I have read a number of publications by two psychiatrists, Robert Jay Lifton and Jerome Frank, who have written on psychological aspects of the nuclear arms race. I was fortunate to meet briefly with Frank at Johns Hopkins University when I gave an invited lecture on verifying a full test ban treaty. Frank, who died in 2005, was one of the founders of Physicians for Social Responsibility. I recommend his 1982 book Sanity and Survival in the Nuclear Age: Psychological Aspects of War and Peace.
Following his work on Hiroshima survivors, Lifton became a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons. He argued that nuclear strategy and war-fighting doctrines made even mass genocide banal and conceivable. Among his books, I recommend The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1979) and Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism (Basic Books, 1982). Very little attention is devoted to this important topic in the United States.
WHY I WORK ON SUCH A FRIGHTENING TOPIC
I am sometimes asked why I work on such a frightening and depressing topic. I explain to myself that this is the major issue of my lifetime. With my scientific knowledge, I hope to contribute in some small way to preventing the use of nuclear weapons. I regard this as my duty as an informed citizen, especially in a country that possesses vast numbers of nuclear weapons. I hope this book will convince others to learn more about these issues and to become more involved. I support the advice of Edmund Burke, the British-Irish orator, political theorist, and philosopher, who said, “Nobody made a greater mistake than the one who did nothing because they could only do a little.”
A major nuclear exchange would be a cataclysmic disaster with a level of destruction unprecedented in the entire history of our species. Some people have argued that because nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945, the probability of their use is very small. The world has been fortunate that nuclear weapons have not been used since then, but this could end at a moment’s notice. False alarms, accidents, and the near miss of the Cuban missile crisis are not very reassuring about nuclear weapons’ not being used in the future. The probability per year of a nuclear exchange may be low, but if it happens, the consequences will be catastrophic. Getting the public and governments to deal with rare but catastrophic events is difficult but very necessary.
The Trump administration has made threatening remarks about nuclear weapons. As of mid-2017 it is not clear if it might either use nuclear weapons against an advisory such as North Korea or resume nuclear testing. If it resumed testing, the yields of explosions likely would be large, abrogating several arms control agreements, and other countries almost certainly would resume testing.
Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a Doomsday Clock symbolizing the dangers to humanity of a nuclear exchange (figure 18.1). It has been set between two and seventeen minutes to midnight at various times since 1947. In early 2017 it was reset from three to two and a half minutes to midnight.
FIGURE 18.1
The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. October 2016.
