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Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold
War, ten years ago, there are still more than 31,000 nuclear
weapons on our planet, 11,000 in the US; 20,000 in Russia --
with some 5,000 bombs in those countries poised at hair
trigger alert, ready to fire in minutes, and arsenals
numbering in the hundreds in the UK, France, China, and
Israel, with something less than that number in India and
Pakistan. Global stockpiles have been declining from a peak
of 70,000 warheads in 1986, but it was the enactment of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 1972 that provided an
opening for a series of arms control agreements - SALT I,
SALT II, START I and now START II-- that put successively
lower caps on the numbers of long-range
"strategic" nuclear warheads in the US and Russian
arsenals.
At
the time Russia ratified START II it also ratified the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which went down to
ignominious defeat last year in the US Senate as our Doctor
Strangeloves testified against its passage, despite
Clinton's deal-sweetener to buy their support for an end to
underground nuclear explosions with a "stockpile
stewardship" program for the weapons labs. This benign
sounding "stewardship" program actually authorizes
$4.6 billion each year for 10 years to enable our weapons
designers to develop new nuclear weapons with
computer-simulated virtual reality testing coupled with
so-called "sub-critical" nuclear tests in which
plutonium is shattered in tunnels 1,000 feet below the
desert floor at the Nevada test site, without causing a
"critical" chain reaction. We've detonated ten of
them since Clinton signed the CTBT but he says these don't
count as nuclear tests -- like not inhaling or not having
sex.
Putin
announced, upon the ratification of START II and the CTBT in
Russia, that he would like to begin START III talks and
reduce the long-range missiles from 3,500 to 1,500 or even
1,000 instead of the original levels contemplated for START
III of 2,500 warheads. This forward-looking proposal was
accompanied by a stern caveat that all Russian offers would
be off the table, including the START II ratification, if
the US proceeded with its current plans to build a National
Missile Defense (NMD) in violation of the ABM Treaty.
Astoundingly, US diplomatic "talking points"
leaked by Russia to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
revealed that our government was urging the Russians that
they had nothing to fear from our proposed NMD as long as
they kept 2,500 weapons in their arsenal at
launch-on-warning, hair-trigger alert. Despite Putin's offer
to cut to 1,500 warheads, or even less, we assured Russia
that with 2,500 warheads they would be able to overcome our
NMD shield and deliver an "annihilating
counterattack."
Copyright
© Alice Slater |
