Are You Willing To Risk An Accidental Launch?
Ron Rosenbaum has a great article in Slate discussing how our nuclear launch postures and command-and-control systems make us all to vulnerable to an accidental nuclear war due to the perception that we are being attacked by Russia. Considering the resumption of Russian “strategic flights” of nuclear-armed bombers that skirt American air space in Alaska as well as the general heightening of tensions between Russia and the US, I can’t think of a more important issue that trying to avert a Strangelovian catastrophe.
Rosenbaum profiles Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and the premier expert of nuclear command-and-control systems in the US and Russia, and it turns out that Blair is worried sick that the possibility for accidental escalation is all too high. He has four suggestions, all of which seem very prudent. One is not allowing “massive escalation” to be only one button push of the nuclear football away. This makes sense, for MAD to work, the massive retaliation doesn’t have to be immediate, it merely has to be possible. And considering the risk of a false positive, it’s an option you want to make very difficult to implement. Blair’s second idea is that not only do we “de-target” missiles (which we already have) but make targeting more than just a push of a button away. It should take hours to target missiles, not minutes or seconds. He also proposes “de-alerting” warheads so that they couldn’t be accidentally launched by hackers (scarily possible).
What’s odd about Rosenbaum’s piece is that he thinks that those first two steps, as opposed to steps three and four which propose removing warheads from missiles and putting the warheads in storage, is that he thinks they are especially politically palatable and thus would be easy to implement. I doubt this. The modern GOP has an incredibly revisionist attitude towards nuclear weapons, as shown by their desire to build bunker busters, not meaningfully reduce the nuclear stockpile and their dismissal of arms control. Do we really think that a president McCain would take such constructive measures, especially because he’s super adamant about a rising Russia? Also, would McCain or any GOP administration be the best at negotiating with Russia so that they would take these steps as well?
But what Rosenbaum’s scary piece shows more than anything is that the greatest threat of nuclear weapons is that someday they’ll be used. Which means that we still need to pursue the stated goal of every US president, and especially Reagan, of a world free of nuclear weapons. Considering the state of the world, nuclear weapons have become a great danger to those countries which already have them, and so it’s hard to say they’re making us safer. Tack on the possibilities of wildfire proliferation and accidental launch, and the case for abolition becomes even starker. To bring it all back to the presidential campaign, two candidates don’t support abolition, or at least steps towards that goal – Clinton and McCain – while Obama does. Obama also, in his short Senate career, spent a whole lot of time on proliferation issues and was one of the main supporters of Nunn-Lugar, a program which funds the removal and securing of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. It speaks very well of Senator Obama that he’s shown such foresight on the number one security issue for the entire world.
