Andrew Happel
Despite the end of the Cold War the United States maintains an arsenal of
nuclear weapons numbering in the thousands. These warheads remain only as a
monument to a bygone era of bipolar conflict, but they lack purpose in today’s
multilateral world. Nuclear weapons have displayed no utility in preventing
conflict, and pose an increasingly great risk to humanity through their very
existence. Due to the hair trigger alert status of America, and Russia’s nuclear
arsenals, any nuclear accident or miscalculation threatens to escalation to global
thermonuclear war. Despite the “bigger bang for the buck” billing of nuclear
weapons, the actual costs have been much higher than advertise! d or
anticipated. The costs of nuclear weapons have proven to far outweigh the
benefits provided to society, and because of this the United States federal
government should take steps to unilaterally disarm its nuclear arsenal.
Those who support the theory of deterrence are correct that since the
advent of nuclear weapons there has not been a direct confrontation between
nuclear superpowers. And deterrence is a public good, that everyone benefits
from regardless of whether or not they pay for it, and its value is indeterminate.
So it is impossible to truly calculate the benefits provided by nuclear deterrence.
However nuclear weapons do not provide the “bigger bang for the buck”
as stated by nuclear advocates. In fact since 1940 nuclear weapons have
accounted for more military spending than any other military program, at
approximately five trillion dollars. That does not even include negative social
and environmental externalities, or the trade off with economic growth caused
by nuclear weapons. Supporters of nuclear weapons also claim that nuclear
weapons can deter the use of chemical and biological weapons as well as attacks
by rogue nations and terrorist groups. But the United States policy is that it will
not use nuclear weapons against an opponent that did not have nuclear capa!
bility, excluding countries with only biological or chemical weapons as well as
rogue nations and terrorist organizations. The Chemical Weapons Convention
and Biological Weapons Convention are designed to eliminate chemical and
biological weapons, eliminating the need for nuclear deterrence. Most of the
benefits of nuclear weapons are over exaggerated, or fabricated.
The existence of nuclear weapons creates the necessity for their existence
and drives other nations to struggle to develop nuclear weapons for themselves.
Countries struggle to develop nuclear weapons in order to stay ahead of their
enemies which in turn causes their enemies to develop nuclear weapons in order
to keep up, fueling vertical proliferation like what occurred in the USA and USSR
during the Cold War. However the exclusive nature nuclear weapons, causes
other nations to attempt to acquire nuclear technology, in order to attain the
status of nuclear power, and creating horizontal proliferation. Nuclear weapons
will just give rise to more nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons present a number of dangers, the most critical of which
is the threat of accidental or miscalculated use of the weapons, which is
compounded by the hair trigger alert systems of the nuclear powers that make
any nuclear situation threaten global crisis. At least three times in America our
nuclear weapons have been put on alert, because of an accident or failure in the
nuclear chain of command. Most notably in the 1970’s in North Carolina when
flight control lost contact with a B-1 bomber on a training mission, and almost
started a nuclear war with the USSR, the plane had actually crashed in the
Atlantic Ocean. The Russian nuclear infrastructure is particularly dilapidated,
after years of suffering under Ru! ssian economic hardship, making the risk or
accidental or unauthorized launch substantially high in Russian nuclear
facilities. The threat is continually increasing as more nations develop nuclear
weapons and nuclear infrastructure continues to deteriorate in countries with
nuclear weapons already.
The cost of nuclear weapons is also astounding, and not just the monetary
cost, which has been over five trillion dollars since 1940. The government hid the
true cost of nuclear weapons by funding nuclear programs through the DOE and
AEC budgets, allowing exorbitant government funding for nuclear weapons.
This spending has had a couple of impacts: on the labor pool for technological
industries, and on inflation. Government contracts and industries drive up the
salaries of engineers and scientists, making it more difficult for private research
industries to compete in the labor market. The other impact of government
spending on nucle! ar weapons is that it fuels inflation, by pumping billions of
dollars into the economy, without creating any marketable good to soak up
excess currency from the market. This means that people have more money to
send on the same amount of goods, and are thus willing to pay more for the
same goods, increasing the price of goods. The problems is that the increased
currency flow only affects a small amount of the population, those employed in
the nuclear industry by the government, so the economy over all will suffer from
the effects of inflation. There are also negative environmental and health related
externalities, created from the development of nuclear weapons. There have
been numerous recurring health problems reported by employees of the nuclear
industry, and many private industries will not hire ! former employees of the
government’s nuclear weapon research, because they are not willing to provide
them with health care coverage. And the wastes produced by the production
and decommissioning of nuclear weapons is environmentally damaging and
impossible to dispose other than burying it in secluded regions of the country, as
is our current practice. These are all costs associated with the deployment of
nuclear weapons.
The United States has always been influential in determining international
policy regarding nuclear weapons. So unilateral action to disarm nuclear
weapons by the USA would undoubtedly create an international impetus to
disarm nuclear weapons, and reduce the threat that nuclear weapons present to
humanity. By taking the initial steps towards disarmament, including removing
nuclear weapons form alert, de-targeting strategic weapons, and removing
warheads from delivery vehicles, the United States would set an international
trend toward disarmament, creating a much safer world.
Bibliography
Schwartz, Stephen I.. Atomic Audit. The Brookings Institute, Washington D. C..
1998.
Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.
http://www.dfat.gov.au/cc/cchome.html
The Acronym Institute. http://www.acronym.org.uk/
Nukefix. http://www.nukefix.org/link.html