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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

No nukes or Armageddon?

In September, President Obama led the United Nations in the adoption of a resolution that calls for a world free of nuclear weapons, with further reductions in the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals an important part of that effort.

But instead of making the world a safer place, such reductions could lead to a more dangerous world, perhaps even a "Nuclear 1914," argues Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington think tank. Sokolski was speaking in Colorado Springs, Colo., yesterday at the Heritage Foundation's conference "The WMD Threat and America's Communities."

Sokolski says that over the next 10 years, while the United States and Russia would be reducing their weapons stockpiles to about 1,000 warheads, nuclear states such as China, India, Pakistan and Israel could be increasing theirs. Instead of having a much larger advantage, the United States could find itself within a few hundred weapons of these other countries. 

In addition, the club of nuclear states is likely to grow, not shrink, in the next 20 years. Sokolski notes that 25 states have signaled their intentions to build large nuclear reactors -- what Sokolski calls "bomb starter kits" -- by 2030. "This could be a very different world," he writes in his paper "Toward Zero and Armageddon?"  "Every weapons state currently in existence first brought a large reactor on line as part of their efforts to acquire their first bomb."

The world would go from one in which most of the nuclear weapons states are allies or strategic partners of the United States, to one where many more possible adversaries would be nuclear powers, Sokolski says. His list of potential nuclear states consists of Iran, Syria, Algeria, Turkey, North Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, South Korea and Japan.

He writes, "In such a world, the prospects for nuclear terrorism would be heightened but not just because there would be more opportunities to seize nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons materials. In addition, there would be more military and civilian nuclear facilities to sabotage. Finally, and most important, such a world would be so unstable that nonnuclear events, perhaps as limited as an assassination of the type that triggered World War I, could possibly trigger larger conflicts that could go nuclear."

In other words, "Nuclear 1914."

 

 

  

 
Posted by Kevin Ferris @ 4:34 PM  Permalink | Post a comment
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