Tony Kinsella: Redundancy of warheads signals end of big wars
[Tony Kinsella is a columnist at the Irish Times.]
Our world became a little safer and a touch more mature yesterday when presidents Obama and Medvedev signed a deal to cut their nuclear arsenals by about 30 per cent to 1,550 warheads each. As the US and Soviet arsenals amounted to some 21,000 warheads 20 years ago, the continuing decrease is welcome news.
Leaders from 46 countries will meet in Washington next week for a nuclear security summit, and the review meeting of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will follow shortly afterwards. The planet’s other nuclear powers – China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and Britain with their 1,300 warheads – now face markedly greater pressure to cut their arsenals.
Many dismissed the historic call for a world free of nuclear weapons Obama made in Prague last April. Careful reflection and constructive negotiations have now brought the achievement of such a world that little bit closer.
The new US nuclear posture also takes a considerable step towards “no first use” in that Washington undertakes not to use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers who are in accordance with their non-proliferation obligations. While this undertaking excludes Iran and North Korea, it represents progress towards an acceptance of the exclusively strategic, or political, role of nuclear weapons today.
There was a brief window in the late 1940s when the US was the world’s only nuclear power. Washington could then employ nuclear weapons in the pursuit of tactical military objectives, as it did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Once the USSR became a nuclear power, we entered the era of nuclear deterrence.
This potentially suicidal stalemate was managed according to the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction, or Mad for short. Under the Mad theory nuclear warheads became lethal totems which nobody could actually use as any such use invited retaliation and annihilation. With the end of the cold war nuclear weapons mutated into national status symbols. Status symbols that their owners can no longer afford ethically or financially.
US budget difficulties would considerably ease if elements of defence spending could be diverted to other priorities. Moscow struggles to maintain the increasingly creaky forces it inherited from the Soviet Union.
London and Paris are beginning to dance around the financially attractive but politically fraught question of whether they might not be better served by a joint submarine-based nuclear deterrent. Neither country can realistically afford to maintain its four missile-launching nuclear submarines, and four is the minimum required to ensure that one is on patrol at all times.
While we have made extraordinary strides in our abilities to devise and manufacture artefacts, including thermonuclear warheads, neither human nature nor our systems of governance have kept pace. This leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where we depend on obsolete concepts and structures to manage the use of weapons capable of destroying humanity.
There is a systemic conflict between the development of ever more expensive and ever more deadly weapons and humanity’s ability to manage and eventually eliminate those weapons...
Read entire article at Irish Times
Our world became a little safer and a touch more mature yesterday when presidents Obama and Medvedev signed a deal to cut their nuclear arsenals by about 30 per cent to 1,550 warheads each. As the US and Soviet arsenals amounted to some 21,000 warheads 20 years ago, the continuing decrease is welcome news.
Leaders from 46 countries will meet in Washington next week for a nuclear security summit, and the review meeting of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will follow shortly afterwards. The planet’s other nuclear powers – China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and Britain with their 1,300 warheads – now face markedly greater pressure to cut their arsenals.
Many dismissed the historic call for a world free of nuclear weapons Obama made in Prague last April. Careful reflection and constructive negotiations have now brought the achievement of such a world that little bit closer.
The new US nuclear posture also takes a considerable step towards “no first use” in that Washington undertakes not to use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers who are in accordance with their non-proliferation obligations. While this undertaking excludes Iran and North Korea, it represents progress towards an acceptance of the exclusively strategic, or political, role of nuclear weapons today.
There was a brief window in the late 1940s when the US was the world’s only nuclear power. Washington could then employ nuclear weapons in the pursuit of tactical military objectives, as it did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Once the USSR became a nuclear power, we entered the era of nuclear deterrence.
This potentially suicidal stalemate was managed according to the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction, or Mad for short. Under the Mad theory nuclear warheads became lethal totems which nobody could actually use as any such use invited retaliation and annihilation. With the end of the cold war nuclear weapons mutated into national status symbols. Status symbols that their owners can no longer afford ethically or financially.
US budget difficulties would considerably ease if elements of defence spending could be diverted to other priorities. Moscow struggles to maintain the increasingly creaky forces it inherited from the Soviet Union.
London and Paris are beginning to dance around the financially attractive but politically fraught question of whether they might not be better served by a joint submarine-based nuclear deterrent. Neither country can realistically afford to maintain its four missile-launching nuclear submarines, and four is the minimum required to ensure that one is on patrol at all times.
While we have made extraordinary strides in our abilities to devise and manufacture artefacts, including thermonuclear warheads, neither human nature nor our systems of governance have kept pace. This leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where we depend on obsolete concepts and structures to manage the use of weapons capable of destroying humanity.
There is a systemic conflict between the development of ever more expensive and ever more deadly weapons and humanity’s ability to manage and eventually eliminate those weapons...