Also published here.
Since the beginning of April, there has been quite a rush of headline-making nuclear weapons news. The Obama Administration released its Nuclear Posture Review, which laid out significant changes from past such roadmaps; Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev signed a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which will keep both of our countries on track to further arms reductions in the future; and finally, President Obama held a very successful, and rather unprecedented, Nuclear Security Summit, that yielded not only good discussions, but solid national and international goals.
John Isaacs, the Executive Director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, is not given to hyperbole, so you know it’s a big deal when he says:
The last two weeks have arguably been the two most eventful weeks on reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons since the advent of the nuclear age.
There really was quite a lot going on, and you can read my series of posts on the events here.
A Timely Pulitzer Prize
All of the big stories I mentioned ultimately have their origins in the Cold War and the frightening arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The problems of nuclear weapons, and even biological weapons, didn’t just disappear when the Soviet Union collapsed. Twenty years later, we are still dealing with international security issues that started with the escalation of Cold War tensions and the resulting arsenals.
No one does a better job of pointing that out than author and Washington Post contributing editor, David E. Hoffman, who was just awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in the “General Nonfiction” category. His book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the Cold War, its key players, and the decisions they made — or in some cases, the decisions they didn’t make. It’s a must-read for policy wonks, lawmakers, and anyone interested in weapons of mass destruction and their role in past as well as present US relations with the rest of the world.
It’s also a must-read for anyone who’s had a general eye on the news and wants to know the bigger picture of US-Russian relations, and why it is absolutely essential that both countries ratify the New START treaty as soon as possible.
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No “Reset Button” For Tactical Nuclear Weapons
Also published here.
Gen. Roger Brady, USAFE Commander, is shown B61 nuclear weapon disarming procedures on a “dummy” in an underground Weapons Security and Storage System (WS3) vault at Volkel Air Base, Netherlands in June 2008. (Photo credit: US Air Force, via FAS. Click to enlarge.)
When the average American thinks of “US nuclear weapons”, they probably have a vague idea of large missiles ready to launch from silos at various locations in our country. Given the recent news coverage of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, they might even have a more specific idea of how these weapons are controlled, and who controls them.
What most people don’t realize is that US nuclear weapons aren’t all at the tips of ICBMs, and they aren’t all in America. Not only that, but not all of our weapons are even covered by a formal treaty.
I’m talking about “the little nukes that got away“, also known as tactical, or nonstrategic nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union amassed thousands of these smaller, more portable “battlefield” weapons. They ranged in size from artillery shells to B61 gravity bombs. Over the years, the numbers of US and Russian forward-deployed tactical nuclear weapons have declined, but even though the Cold War has been over for 20 years, there are still plenty of these weapons out there. The US currently maintains about 200 of them in five different European countries, in fact. The Russians maintain many more.
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