St. George Spectrum
Thespectrum.com
November 1, 2009
Nuclear treaty
On July 16, 1945, in the pre-dawn darkness of the White Sands Proving
Ground in New Mexico, the Nuclear Age was born. Shot Trinity, the first
atomic test in the history of mankind, sent a deadly mushroom cloud plume
7.5 miles into the air. The force of the shock was felt more than 100 miles
away. The blast left a crater of radioactive glass in the desert 10 feet deep
and 1,100 feet wide.
Within a month, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, hastening the surrender of Japan. Within five years, more
than 340,000 Japanese residents perished as a result of the explosions.
The effects of the nuclear explosions were far reaching as the United
States continued to develop newer, stronger atomic weapons through the
tenure of the Cold War. The nuclear arms development race was
contagious, spreading to the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, China,
India and Pakistan. Since that first explosion in New Mexico, more than
2,000 other devices have been ignited, most of them at the Nevada Test
Site just to the west of us.
As we know in Utah, you don't have to have an atomic bomb land on top of
you to kill you. The fallout can be equally deadly as it floats through the
atmosphere, causing various cancers that have taken thousands of lives.
We know that nuclear weapons are very efficient killing machines. Through
the years, the nations of the world have worked to eliminate the threat of
another nuclear detonation, whether in anger or for development.
There was the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 and adoption by the United Nations of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996.
The United States helped develop the CTBT and signed it, but it has yet to
ratify it, which means that at any time, this nation could plunge back into
nuclear testing. We almost saw that happen not long ago when the
government tried to implement Divine Strake, a test planned for the
Nevada Test Site that would have served as a pre-cursor to the
development of so-called bunker buster nukes.
Public outrage led to cancellation of the project. There were concerns
about renewing the nuclear arms race or, at the very least, stirring old,
radioactive dust that had settled there since the last of the nuclear tests
decades ago back into the air.
It's time to put the same principles that proved effective in stopping Divine
Strake to pushing for the United States to ratify the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty.
Why? We already have a nuclear arsenal that far outweighs any other on
the globe. There have been proposals to reconfigure the existing weaponry
into newer, "smarter" nukes that have, thankfully, been defeated. The fact
is, if this nation was ever to begin launching nukes, there are more than
enough to get the job done, even if some are not quite as powerful as
others.
Secondly, we are much smarter these days about the effects of the fallout
that spread throughout the continental United States, Canada and even
Europe during the Cold War testing. We know the numbers of dead, dying
and severely diseased who, through no fault of their own, became victims
of atomic fallout.
We also know that we can set an example through ratification of the treaty
that would lead others to do likewise.
We helped write the treaty. We signed it. Now it's time to do the right thing
and ratify it.