OTR Politics - May, 2005

Author's Preface: This is the first of two extended sections from a long piece about the end of the world I did for Harper's. A sample of the relevent conversation I had with my editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan:

JOHN: Tom, we like the piece a lot.
TOM: Yeah? That’s great.
JOHN: But we think you need to lose the thirty-five-page aside on nuclear weapons.
TOM: That’s outrageous! You’re tearing the spine from it!

I eventually saw things John’s way, and cut the sections in question. Recently came upon them again, and was struck by how much (and how little) the world has changed since I wrote them, in the fall of 2002. - T.B.

Look for The Second Aside, "The Doomsday Clock, Davy Crockett, and The Terrible Divinity of Objects," in the June issue of OTR.

The First Aside: "That Genie"

Sanity has never much distinguished the nuclear debate. Few have exposed the weapons’ fundamental lunacy better than Martin Amis: “What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons.”

In a little over a decade, nuclear arsenals have gone from a source of mass hysteria to shrugged-off constituents of a world secure in its insanity. The weapons have lost their status of marquee anxiety. The specter of being infected with smallpox or pneumonic plague (100 percent fatality rate if untreated by antibiotics one day after infection) now seems far more dreadful than the nanosecond death of a nuclear shockwave - at least in the cinema of the human mind. But then we all grew up with nuclear weapons; they are as familiar as grandpa. They are bullies, too, and as such somehow ludicrous, laughable. All one must do to be safe is avoid them. This is not difficult, since to avoid them simply means refusing to think about them, which is also easy because they are so familiar. Weaponized saritoxin and ricin (high lethality, no vaccine) are foreign, invisible, and above all they are new. We do not yet know what they want, or how to stay out of their way. Run!

The theoretical prohibition of the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, as established by international conventions and treaties, has been universally applauded, at least in public, as a moral rejection of weapons of mass destruction. Whereas nuclear weapons are still being manufactured. Perhaps it needs to be said again. Perhaps we have forgotten. Nuclear weapons are the single most destructive force on the planet - they are the yardstick by which we measure all other forms of destruction. These weapons achieve their devastating grandeur first by waging war on the atom itself, bombarding it with neutrons and splitting its nucleus, typically that of enriched plutonium or uranium, into several parts. Each broken nucleus releases energy, and additional neutrons, that split more nuclei, that release additional neutrons, and so on, until the chain reaction, measured in tenths of a second, sends forth a massive rolling breaker of fire and heat that leaves behind it an illumed residue of deadly radioactivity.

All nuclear weapons rely on a central core of fissile material. To create the necessary chain reaction, the core of nuclear material must be formed into a critical mass, meaning that enough fissionable material is packed into a sufficiently small area to enable a self-sustaining number of fissions to take place. (The minimum amount of fissile material needed to produce a nuclear explosion is, of course, classified.) Some weapons rely on a basic fission chain reaction while others use the first, fissioned explosion to fuel a second, more powerful reaction. In the first method, the initial critical mass is created by shooting one subcritical mass into another subcritical mass. This is called a gun device. The Hiroshima bomb (Fat Man) was a gun device. The second method is to take the subcritical fissile material and compress it into a critical mass. This is called an implosion weapon. Most modern warheads are implosion weapons, as they are smaller. Nagasaki (courtesy of Little Boy) was the result of an implosion weapon. Guns, implosions - and we have not even seen the blast yet. Modern nuclear devices are largely “boosted” weapons because, back in the fifties and sixties, it was decided that the most destructive man-made force the world has ever known could stand some fucking improvement. These modern devices inject other materials, such as tritium, into the heart of a nuclear explosion, the energy of which triggers fission in the boosting materials. These weapons are hotter, they are thermonuclear.

The technology required to build a nuclear device is promiscuously available and widely understood. (American spies did not “give” the bomb to the Soviet Union any more than they gave math and physics to the Soviet Union. The only question that Soviet atomic scientists needed answered - Will it work? - was provided with the exclamation point of a mushroom cloud.) But building nuclear weapons requires time and money. The most difficult part of the process is getting a hold of a sufficient amount of weapons-usable fissile material. The only naturally occurring fissile material is Uranium-235, though it makes up less than .1 percent of the world’s known uranium supply. Every other fissile material must be “enriched” in a nuclear reactor and then chemically separated. To do this secretly and quietly with uranium, for instance, a nation would need to have large uranium deposits, a uranium mine, a uranium mill, a conversion plant, and an enrichment plant. To make weapons-usable plutonium is no less complicated and as materiel-involved. Every country that has tried to develop nuclear weapons by the plutonium method - India, Iraq, Israel, and Pakistan - was eventually forced to seek outside assistance.

The second most difficult aspect of assembling a well-made bomb is the construction of - thank God - extremely visible facilities, such as the French-made Iraqi reactor the Israelis preemptively destroyed via airstrike in 1981. These and other factors have made a completely clandestine nuclear program, so far, virtually impossible.

More than 31,000 nuclear weapons are still maintained by the Big Eight (the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, China, and Israel) known - or, in Israel’s case, greatly suspected - to possess nuclear weapons. China’s arsenal is thought to number 410 weapons. France: 350. The United Kingdom: 185. Israel: 100. India: 30. Pakistan: five. In other words, 95 percent of these weapons belong to the United States and Russia, and more than 16,000 of them are “operationally deployed,” ready for launch in a few minutes’ time. And what, incidentally, would we say of a nuclear regime that was converting 3,200 airburst weapons into highly accurate, high-target counterforce weapons, despite its clear violation of Article VI (“the cessation of the nuclear arms race”) of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and of that regime’s own pledge, signed by its president, of “no new nuclear weapons production”? What if that regime was hiding this reengineering of its arsenal in its own internal documents? What if that regime then attempted to pull out of its own non-proliferation treaties, many of which it originated? We would no doubt regard this regime as a menace to the world and itself. The regime, of course, is our own.

The amount spent between 1940 and 1996 on developing and maintaining our nuclear weapons was $5.5 trillion - eleven percent of all government spending during that same period. Every year another $98 billion is tacked onto this deathly gratuity while we maintain and develop our useless arsenal. “Useless” because the weapons have no military use. It brings not a little despair to point this out, especially in light of $5.5 trillion, but it is true. The creation of the majority of the 65 types of warheads the United States manufactured between 1945 and 1991 was not due to bloodthirsty generals demanding that another log be thrown onto our smoldering nuclear campfire but can rather be credited to complicated inter-service rivalries between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, two of our most prominent nuclear weapons designers. Each company sought as wide a variety of weapons possible not to make the world safe for America but to safeguard their funding and dominance. Weapons of mass destruction are, to such fire merchants, product, and each season requires the debut of a fancy new line. This is the nature of business, even when the final product cannot be used.

Many generals do not care for nuclear war. “It is morally wrong,” Lee Butler, the former Air Force Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Strategic Command, wrote in 2000, “to continue to adhere to a national defense doctrine that accepts the possibility of shearing away entire societies.” Norman Schwartzkopf wrote after the Gulf War that he “would never have recommended” the use of nuclear weapons. Before his retirement, General Charles C. Horner, who served as Allied Air Force Commander during the Gulf War, declared nuclear weapons “obsolete” and called for their complete eradication. While strategizing prior to the Gulf War, General Colin Powell blanched at the idea of even thinking about letting “that genie loose.” Of course the United States would not want to use nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney agreed. “But take a look,” Cheney urged, “to be thorough.” Powell did take a look, and the projected results of using even small tactical nukes were so disquieting that he had the analysis destroyed.

Useless. Every president since Eisenhower has publicly endorsed the position that nuclear weapons should be done away with. In Korea, in Indochina, and in the Persian Gulf the use of nuclear weapons has been thought about and summarily rejected. George Bush the Greater famously threatened Saddam Hussein with the “strongest possible response” if he used chemical weapons on U.S. soldiers or set fire to Kuwait’s oil fields - after privately determining he would under no circumstances resort to nuclear weapons. Here we find a president contemplating the gravest possible provocation - gassed American soldiers - still refusing to opt for the possibility of nuclear retaliation. Hussein lit up the Kuwaiti oilfields anyway, and we still have our nuclear weapons.

Significant accomplishments have been achieved in arms reduction, though most are now quite elderly. John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Arms Control and Disarmament Agency negotiated terms that allowed Italy and Sweden, most notably, to abandon their already-underway nuclear programs. The Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 similarly prevented much of the Western world from embracing its nuclear future in exchange for living under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.” The Soviets, too, insisted on non-proliferation among their allied states, though not usually through the niceties of diplomacy. The NPT, in dividing the world into nuclear (those that detonated a device before 1967) and non-nuclear weapons states, established an international norm against proliferation. Since the NPT only four nations (China, India, Israel, and Pakistan, none of which signed the treaty) have overcome the stark diplomatic and technical barriers to building a nuclear arsenal, and forty-four states believed “nuclear-capable” have not seized that capability. Disarmament is not unprecedented: Brazil and South Africa both abandoned their nuclear weapons, while the Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakstan each surrendered for dismantlement the warheads left upon their soil after the Soviet meltdown.

While many U.S. warheads have been removed from the active stockpile, they have not been dismantled or destroyed. Instead, they have been placed in storage. Currently 5,000 warheads are collecting dust in various nuclear warehouses, and 12,000-plus plutonium pits are sitting in an Amarillo, Texas, weapons-assembly plant. Meanwhile we still target more than 2,000 Russian sites, which we remain capable of wiping out in thirty minutes, and successive U.S. and Russian administrations have resisted the push for a full inventory of these weapons, or for ways to confirm the destruction of those weapons both powers have already agreed to scrap. What looked like the first steps toward world disarmament in the early 1990s is now laid bare as perhaps the worst gentleman’s agreement in history.

Advocates for nuclear disarmament were hopeful about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits any nuclear explosion, whether for a weapons trial or peaceful purpose, for all time. On September 24, 1996, Bill Clinton became the first world leader to sign the CTBT, hailing it as the “longest sought, hardest fought prize in arms control history.” How long sought can be gleaned from Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 belief that not achieving a nuclear test ban “would have to be classed as the greatest disappointment of any administration, of any decade, of any time and of any party.” After Clinton’s signature the CTBT was held hostage by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, for the next three years. “I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT,” Helms wrote, weirdly, to the 45 Senate Democrats who pressed him to submit the treaty to the full Senate, which had been signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89, “[but] I do not share your enthusiasm for this treaty.” When on October 13, 1999, the vote finally came up on the Senate docket, Clinton essentially abandoned it, having blown the last of his political capital onto a size-eight Gap dress. On the day of the vote, each senator read his or her prepared statement to a mostly empty gallery. Republican James Inhofe from Oklahoma put forth the temper-tantrumish argument that since “virtually every country has weapons of mass destruction,” it would be a shame if we were to limit our capacity for developing more of our own. Number of countries without weapons of mass destruction: 168. Arizona Republican Jon Kyl maintained that, during the Cold War, the development of new nuclear weapons was “required . . . to sustain deterrence.” Whether this is true - I am prepared to believe that, largely, it is - it ignores the fact that we are no longer living in a world of Cold War geometry. Our potential adversaries presently capable of a nuclear assault - China and, under a generous assessment, North Korea - possess a total of 411 nuclear weapons. China could hit the U.S. with 20 Dong-Feng 5 missiles, each armed with a single five-megaton warhead, while North Korea could most likely not launch a missile farther than Hawaii. Frightening, certainly, but our current arsenal could, in any event, eradicate either country in an afternoon. Trent Lott revived the myth that nuclear testing “has maintained [our] confidence in the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons.” But only eleven of the 387 tests since 1970 were conducted to ensure warhead reliability. Nuclear testing is good for only one thing: developing more nuclear weapons. The Senate referendum failed to ratify the CTBT by a vote of 51 to 48 (West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd voted only “present”). A measure in which the country’s and the world’s most vital interests were at stake became the cheap theater of conservative Punches walloping liberal Judies. Limbaughnauts around the country cheered, and the rapid-response, launch-readiness postures of the Cold War remain unaltered. Shortly after the CTBT’s failure, an anonymous Senate aide told the Washington Times that this was “just a warm-up exercise for the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.” Emboldened by the lack of public outcry concerning the stillborn CTBT, the Republican party, having seized the presidency in its Bush.2 guise, announced in January 2002 its intention to excuse itself from just that Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The ABM Treaty, which has so clearly been terrorizing us all since its signatories put it into action in 1972, forbids the potential deployment of decoys - payloadless warheads, balloons, and missiles that give off false heat readings - that might accompany a nuclear attack, thus making missile defense (which did not then and still does not exist) difficult if not impossible. Defenses were curtailed, in other words, to keep offensive nuclear forces from growing. The ABM Treaty did not seek to limit the number of missiles a country could possess - the SALT treaties did that. But the ABM Treaty and SALTs 1 and 2 were all based on the same premise: huge numbers of nuclear warheads were not needed, unnecessary, and destabilized the world. The Bush administration’s rationale for mothballing the ABM Treaty holds that it is a relic of the Cold War, one that endangers U.S. security - rather like, for instance, nuclear weapons. Bush himself put it this way: “Russia is not an enemy of the United States and yet we still go to a treaty that assumes Russia is the enemy, a treaty that says the whole concept of peace is based on us blowing each other up. I don’t think that makes sense anymore.” What apparently makes sense to Bush are more, better nuclear weapons. Only this, the Bush administration has argued, “may dissuade a potential adversary from pursuing threatening capabilities.” But North Korea was girdled by U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea for 33 years, and the threat of immolation did not, by all evidence, prevent it from seeking out nuclear technology. Saddam's Iraq, Libya, Algeria, and Iran have pursued nuclear weapons beneath the atomic shadow of a superpower able to annihilate them.

Fifty years into this most devilish bargain, it seems clear that nuclear weapons are a response to the world, not a way of affecting response. The U.S. built the bomb because of fears that Hitler would build one first. The Soviet Union built its bomb because the United States had one. England built its bomb because it feared American isolationism. France built its bomb in case England was vaporized. China built its bomb to prevent the Soviet Union and the United States from strong-arming it. India built its bomb not because it could (many countries could) but because China had one. Pakistan built its bomb because India had one. Israel is something of an exception. One cannot fight a nuclear war when one’s enemies are only miles away. Israel’s bomb, then, is a Masada weapon, a slashed wrist leaking radioactive blood. And what are ours?

President Bush has not been wholly pigheaded on the nuclear issue. In November 2001 he announced that “operationally deployed strategic warheads” would be reduced to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012 (still a much slower reduction than planned by previous administrations, including that of Bush’s father). While this is short of the 1,500 warheads Russia has been urging both powers scale back to, and while there remains acres of wiggle room within Bush’s statement, it was the first such commitment made either by the U.S. or Russia since 1997. In the last decade the U.S. has greatly curtailed its ICBM production, reduced its nuclear strategy systems by more than 50 percent, taken all bombers off day-to-day alert, and agreed to continue the already negotiated reductions in strategic nuclear forces. But a closer examination of the Bush administration’s plans, as embodied by its Nuclear Posture Review of January 2002, only unsettles. It turns out that the lower number of “strategically deployed” warheads is derived by no longer counting the warheads on submarines and bombers in overhaul as being operational. Since a number of submarines, each freighted with 192 warheads, are typically in overhaul at any given time, a lower number of deployed warheads is achieved without actually undeploying any warheads. The majority of warheads taken from delivery vehicles will not be dismantled but stockpiled in a “responsive reserve,” which will allow them the luxury of redeployment on a few weeks’ notice. The Nuclear Posture Review goes on to conclude that many thousands of nuclear weapons will remain in their triad of submarine-, bomber-, and land-based launch platforms indefinitely. Since submarines are the most “survivable” leg of the triad, they will retain the largest number of warheads. Most troublingly, the review calls the use of nuclear weapons even if an instigating attack is non-nuclear, straightforwardly stating that the U.S. must rely on nuclear weapons to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction, be they chemical, biological, nuclear, or none of the above. This is a staggering shift in traditional American nuclear mores. “Within the new nuclear use policy,” Joseph Cirincione notes in the invaluable Deadly Arsenals, “there are few if any military contingencies that might not allow the U.S. to respond with nuclear weapons.” Above all, the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review is most strident in its insistence to freely develop new, low-yield nuclear weapons, despite the various treaty violations implicit in doing so. Again the uniformed military largely resists this policy, as it does not wish to see its soldiers fighting upon radioactive battlefields, however “low-yield” the assumed fallout will be.

The call for reducing our nuclear arsenal is not, as many civilian hawks will argue, the slope down which we willy-nilly slip toward grievously shortchanging the U.S. military, the most powerful conventional force the world has ever known. More money should be spent on our military, at least in certain neglected areas. Higher salaries for more soldiers, for instance, so men and women who work for UPS in the summer do not spend their Christmases in Mazar-i-Sharif away from their families. It seems clear that we should similarly invest in better conventional weapons, such as the microwave bomb (which releases a pulse of electromagnetic energy able to fry any nearby electrical systems) and the Hellfire anti-tank missile (which sprays a deadly jet of molten copper into the hull of a tank, thereby allowing a single helicopter to devastate a flotilla of enemy armored vehicles). It is myopic to believe that we do not need a well equipped and, if need be, devastating conventional military force, especially when one considers the very real dangers we face from nationless terrorists. But a nationless enemy cannot be fought with weapons whose only legitimate target can be nations.

The nation of China has responded in no clear way to our planned development of our nuclear “options.” Two Chinese air force colonels, however, recently published a treatise entitled Warfare Beyond the Rules, said to be much read in Chinese military circles, which argues that since China cannot be expected to compete with the United States on a purely nuke-for-nuke level, perhaps other methods of warfare - chemical, terrorist, ecological - should be considered. From this we can logically intuit that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is not benign. They are radioactive in fact and spirit.

Another strap of our nuclear straightjacket tightens: If we cannot assume the goodwill of the world, how, then, buried within our fantastic farrago of missiles, can we expect goodwill to be assumed of us?

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. Petersburg.