Gareth Evans: Nuclear Threat Cannot Be Ignored
[Gareth Evans, former foreign minister and president emiritus of the International Crisis Group, is co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.]
People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten.
True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And with Cold War tensions long past, it is all too easy for policymakers and publics to resist the doomsayers, be complacent about the threats that these weapons continue to pose, and to regard attempts to eliminate them, or contain their spread, as well-meaning but futile.
But the truth is that it is sheer dumb luck -- not statesmanship, good professional management or anything inherently stable about the world's nuclear weapon systems -- that has let us survive so long without catastrophe. With 23,000 nuclear weapons (equivalent to 150,000 Hiroshimas) still in existence, more than 7000 of them actively deployed, and more than 2000 still on dangerously high launch-on-warning alert, we cannot assume that our luck will hold indefinitely.
We know now with multiple revelations about human error and system breakdown on both the American and Russian sides during the Cold War years and since that even the most sophisticated command and control systems are not foolproof. We know that some of the newer nuclear-armed states start with systems much less sophisticated than these. And we know that, across the spectrum of sophistication, the risk of destabilising cyber attack beating cyber defence is getting ever higher....
Read entire article at The Australian
People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten.
True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And with Cold War tensions long past, it is all too easy for policymakers and publics to resist the doomsayers, be complacent about the threats that these weapons continue to pose, and to regard attempts to eliminate them, or contain their spread, as well-meaning but futile.
But the truth is that it is sheer dumb luck -- not statesmanship, good professional management or anything inherently stable about the world's nuclear weapon systems -- that has let us survive so long without catastrophe. With 23,000 nuclear weapons (equivalent to 150,000 Hiroshimas) still in existence, more than 7000 of them actively deployed, and more than 2000 still on dangerously high launch-on-warning alert, we cannot assume that our luck will hold indefinitely.
We know now with multiple revelations about human error and system breakdown on both the American and Russian sides during the Cold War years and since that even the most sophisticated command and control systems are not foolproof. We know that some of the newer nuclear-armed states start with systems much less sophisticated than these. And we know that, across the spectrum of sophistication, the risk of destabilising cyber attack beating cyber defence is getting ever higher....