A World Without Nuclear Weapons

by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson

Right here, right now, we have two possible futures.

In the first future, nuclear weapons have been used for the second time in history.

The particulars of where and how are actually somewhat irrelevant. It may have been, but probably was not, the deliberate global nuclear war that my parents and grandparents feared at the height of the Cold War. Instead, it could have been an accident — like last summer, when the US Air Force mistakenly lost six nuclear-tipped missiles and left them sitting on a tarmac overnight, protected by a chain-link fence and a German Shepherd. Or, maybe it happened because the friction got too hot between nuclear neighbors like India and Pakistan.

Or maybe it happened — and this seems the likeliest possibility to those who make their careers in this grim odds-making — because a nonstate actor, a terrorist group, got hold of the material for a bomb and detonated it in some city, somewhere.

This is what that future looks like.

To begin with, the bomb is probably small by modern standards, about the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which is to say equivalent in explosive power to thirty million pounds of dynamite. It is easily hidden in a U-Haul truck or a shipping container, which is exactly how it is delivered, undetected until it is detonated.

The immediate fireball is roughly a mile wide, hotter than the surface of the sun, vaporizing everything within it. The broader blast wave levels buildings and generates gale-force winds that fuel massive firestorms. In an area covering approximately three square miles, fatality rates approximate 100 percent, killing perhaps 60,000 men, women, and children instantaneously. The view from space would look like the devil had ground his cigar into the face of the earth. And this disaster has only begun.

For example, 150,000 people have survived the immediate blast but suffered critical injuries. Tens of thousands will perish, in agony, within twenty-four hours as the medical infrastructure simply collapses under the weight of human misery and pain. We couldn’t handle something like this on our best day, and today our hospitals are a fallout zone and doctors and nurses are among the dead.

As the fires burn, a fatal plume of radioactive dust rises and rains death wherever the wind happens to be blowing. In the long term, this will leave approximately 320 square miles uninhabitable for a generation, particularly in a risk-averse nation like ours. In the immediate term, the plume causes an instant domestic refugee crisis as six million people evacuate neighboring areas. Adding to the difficulty, citizens flee urban centers nationwide, fearing a second attack. Chaos and terror grip the nation while violence skyrockets.

It almost seems banal to discuss money, given the loss of life, but the financial fallout would also cause massive suffering. The immediate damages from this blast approximate one trillion dollars, and this is just the start. Stock markets worldwide nosedive: what confidence can investors have in a world where cities can vanish in an instant?

But this isn’t the worst effect: no, the biggest problem is that nobody knows whether or where another bomb might be. So ports around the globe go on lockdown. Global shipping and commercial freight comes to a standstill. Store shelves and gas pumps run empty as a panicked populace conducts a run on supplies. Multinationals like Wal-Mart, dependent on a smoothly-running global supply chain, go bankrupt. One bomb has occasioned the greatest evaporation of wealth in human history.

Finally, unnoticed by civilizations come undone, those around the world who already hovered on the margin of subsistence die en masse. The charitable sector, encompassing everything that Christians care about — poverty relief, women’s and children’s rights, immigration reform, AIDS treatment, clean water, genocide prevention, creation care, you name it — simply vanishes. Nothing matters to anyone anymore, nothing except the Bomb: dealing with its effects and preventing another blast. The cyclone of fear and xenophobia that consumes capitals worldwide is the greatest friend to injustice of the modern era. Cruelties large and small multiply under the uncaring eyes of a population who has stared death in the face and now cares for nothing but survival.

This is why just one little bomb can be used to wage a terrorist attack on humanity itself — one bomb, out of the 20,000 that presently exist.

FROM ULTIMATE SECURITY TO ULTIMATE DANGER

These details may be new to some of us, but we obviously know that nuclear weapons are dangerous. That’s precisely why we have to have them, right? — so that the bad guys can’t get us. After all, who would attack us knowing that we could do the same or worse against the perpetrator? Such was the logic of the Cold War, appropriately named MAD: mutually assured destruction. It was, as Chuck Colson wrote in a BreakPoint column, a “morally problematic” logic, but it made a certain sense. And for all its flaws, it is at least ethically plausible, because it’s better for nuclear weapons not to be used than the opposite.

For nuclear deterrence to work, however, the bomb has to have a return address. Robert Gallucci, Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown and incoming president at the MacArthur Foundation, describes a situation like this:

One of these days, one of these governments fabricates one or two nuclear weapons, gives it to a terrorism group created for this purpose. The group brings one of these bombs into Baltimore by boat, and drives another one up to Pittsburgh. And then the message comes in to the White House: Adjust your policy in the Middle East, or on Tuesday you lose Baltimore, and on Wednesday you lose Pittsburgh. Tuesday comes, and we lose Baltimore. What does the United States do?¹

So, in our day, if the threat is less likely a first strike by the Russians and more likely a terrorist bomb, what good does an arsenal of 5000, 500, or even 5 nuclear missiles do us — when there’s nobody to bomb back?

But recognizing the futility of using nuclear weapons to deter nuclear terrorism is only the first step. To comprehend the full danger of our present situation, we also have to see the connection between present policies and the likelihood of such a future coming to pass. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 era, the deterrent arsenal we count on for protection is actually increasing the odds of our seeing the terrorist scenario described above.

To understand why, we have to take a long view of history. Back in 1968, when there were only five nuclear powers (the US, USSR, UK, France, and China, who are, not coincidentally, the permanent members of the UN Security Council), the world saw the writing on the wall: the more countries that got the Bomb, the more dangerous the world would be, where every regional skirmish threatened to turn into apocalypse. So the family of nations joined to form a grand bargain in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT): the nuclear weapons states agreed to disarm eventually, and the non-nuclear weapons states agreed not to build their own Bomb, and everyone was assured the right to peaceful uses of nuclear power.

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Comments

james hayes

Slavery was intrinsically evil. A weapon, like an ax , is morally neutral.

I am not convinced that we could afford to disarm with little hope that all adversaries would actually disarm.

Bob Snodgrass

I certainly disagree with Mr. Wigg-Stevenson's assessment on the need to disarm nuclear arsenals. History seems to show that disarmament is naive, even reckless. That's the claim of Professor David Schaefer, who sums up the point better than I could...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123923509427103247.html

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