How to make nuclear policy less insane
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As someone who grew up before the end of the Cold War and watched movies like Dr. Strangelove and WarGames, talk of building and deploying nukes always deeply disturbs me. Nuclear proliferation and brinkmanship easily can lead to their use — they’ve already been used twice, after all. Even a “small” nuclear war would be disastrous and more deadly than COVID-19 ever was. And a massive war could result in a “nuclear winter” engulfing the planet, as Carl Sagan and others warned.
So I was glad when Joe Biden as presidential candidate criticized President Trump’s development of new nukes, arguing that the current arsenal is “sufficient.” And I appreciated his comments when Biden said, if elected, he wouldn’t rely on nuclear weapons for defense and he would “work to bring us closer to a world without nuclear weapons.”
But I’m disappointed that that’s not the way President Biden’s nuclear policies have turned out so far. His budget proposal last month includes a call to expand funding for the United States’s already massive nuclear arsenal. Such a move could thwart attempts to limit global nuclear proliferation, and it keeps the catastrophic threat of “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, looming in the horizon.
At the same time, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Earl Blumenauer introduced the SANE Act (which stands for Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures). The bill would cut $73 billion from the nuclear budget over the next decade. Arms control groups like Beyond the Bomb and Peace Action support the bill. Markey and Representative James McGovern also recently proposed the HALT Act (which stands for Hastening Arms Limitation Talks), and it would impose a nuclear “freeze” — no testing, production or deployment of nukes — and it supports the US’s participation in international arms treaties.
Despite Biden’s and his predecessors’ rhetoric of limiting nuclear weapons around the world, especially in the Middle East and Eastern Asia, nukes have long had bipartisan support in the US. The Obama administration began a trillion-dollar nuclear “modernization” program, which went far beyond merely maintaining the currently excessive nuclear stockpile and infrastructure. Its ballooning budget now could add up to $2 trillion over the next three decades. The program drew criticism from peace advocates and nuclear experts, since the US and Russia already still have the ability to destroy human civilization many times over — and hundreds of those nuclear missiles remain on “hair-trigger” alert, a Cold War relic that allows them to be launched at a moment’s notice, potentially including a false alarm.
To this arsenal former President Trump added new, so called “low-yield” nukes, packing the destructive power of between 5,000 and 10,000 tons of TNT, or half as devastating as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima 76 years ago. Now Biden and his Congressional and military allies want to add the world’s biggest nuclear missile yet, which costs $100 billion to build and would be launched from silos, as well as new sea-launched cruise missiles. But we don’t need all these new nukes, and there’s no need to continue Trump’s dangerous nuclear policies. The Doomsday Clock is already too close to midnight, thanks to climate change and pandemics, without nuclear weapons putting our civilization further at risk.
The SANE Act would cut some 10% off the next decade’s nuclear budget and it would dramatically reduce the intercontinental ballistic missile fleet and the number of deployed strategic warheads. In addition to the nuclear programs the bill limits or cancels, the hypersonic missile program, which began during the President George W. Bush’s administration and includes weapons armed with nuclear warheads, could be cut as well.
But ultimately this isn’t just about trimming more fat off a bloated budget or slimming the nuclear stockpile a bit more. It’s about competing visions of the future. Nuclear weapons seem to signal power and dominance through the threat of violence, but I don’t believe our current and growing nuclear arsenal supports deterrence. Instead, we’ll surely see more arms races with Russia and China. It’s not hard to imagine an escalating conflict over Taiwan, the South China Sea, Ukraine, or NATO’s eastward growth. The expanding American nuclear stockpile also undermines nonproliferation efforts around the world and makes it difficult for the Biden administration to negotiate with Iran and North Korea in good faith.
These debates aren’t even just about avoiding war: they involve deciding what our society’s priorities are. We can address climate change and pandemics, or we can increase risks of a nuclear catastrophe. We can invest in healthcare, education, and clean energy, or we can expand the nuclear war machine. We can’t do both.
More about me: I’m an astrophysicist turned writer and freelance journalist based in San Diego. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net and on Twitter @raminskibba. I’m also the former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express here are mine alone. You’re welcome to share this newsletter, and if you like what you’ve been writing or want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thanks!