Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE END OF DISARMAMENT AND THE ARMS RACES TO COME

2002; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

2327-641X

Andrew Lichterman, Jacqueline Cabasso,

Nuclear Issues and Defense

Somehow we must transform dynamics of world power struggle from negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for purpose of making and prosperity a reality for all of nations of world. In short, we must shift arms race into a peace race. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964) THE DECADE THAT HAS PASSED SINCE THE END OF THE COLD WAR REPRESENTS A historically unprecedented period of squandered opportunity. Prospects for a new era of cooperative global security have been replaced reality of an increasingly unilateral and aggressive U.S. foreign policy, in which potential use of nuclear weapons is again becoming thinkable. Moreover, U.S. behavior in international arena is eroding network of security treaties that has helped to stem spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, thus contributing to creation of conditions that threaten to spark new arms races. (1) Nuclear Arms Racing: Destructive Power Off Human Scale The United States was first and remains only county to have used nuclear weapons in war. The estimated number of acute deaths (within two to four months) resulting from explosions and firestorms generated two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 is as high as 220,000 (RERF, 2002). As awesome and terrible as destruction caused those first bombs was, it is miniscule compared to destructive power of today's nuclear arsenals. The U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled start of an entirely new kind of arms race, one that according to Theodore Taylor, a prominent early nuclear weapons designer, moved human capacity for destruction clear off human scale. (2) Herbert York, first director of Lawrence Livermore National (nuclear weapons) Laboratory, estimates that by 1950 nuclear-arms race had reached a point such that we could duplicate destruction of World War II using nuclear weapons, except that while that conflict had lasted for more than five years, devastation could now be reproduced in a single day (York, 1970: 33). The subsequent development of hydrogen bomb resulted in a thousand-fold increase in explosive yield. According to York, beginning of 1960s, nuclear weapons in U.S. stockpile had reached the energy equivalent of some ten thousand World War IIs, most of which could be released in a matter of hours. We had reached a level of supersaturation that some writers characterized word 'overkill,' an understatement in my opinion (Ibid.: 42). More powerful and sophisticated delivery systems accompanied development of more powerful and sophisticated nuclear warheads. The Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 began a space race that also fueled fears of a Soviet-led gap. John F. Kennedy exploited these fears during 1960 presidential campaign, although as it turned out, missile gap favored United States. The U.S. went ahead anyway with an accelerated deployment of nuclear missiles, provoking Soviets to engage in a new missile race. (3) By time Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), which banned atmospheric nuclear testing, was negotiated in 1963, there were more than 34,000 nuclear weapons in world -- nearly 30,000 of them in U.S. arsenal (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1997). The PTBT raised hopes that nuclear arms race would be curtailed. However, it turned out to be primarily an environmental health measure, in that it protected populations from exposure to radioactive fallout from testing. In U.S., under pressure from politically powerful nuclear weapons laboratories (the heirs to Manhattan Project) and their allies, underground nuclear testing was expanded, and arms race continued unabated. …