Renewed Tensions around Nuclear Weapons

American and Russian armed forces together have 2654 nuclear weapons permanently armed and ready.

Within a few minutes they can be launched. The combined effect is equal to 100,000 times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.

Bruce C. Blair works for the World Security Institute. This week he presented figures at one of the conferences on a nuclear-weapons-free world organized by the Norwegian government. According to Blair, the end of the Cold War has produced nothing. The U.S. and Russia–which together possess 95 percent of the 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world—continue to manage their arsenals just as they did during the Cold War. There were, in the days after the Cold War, initiatives to achieve a real deceleration in the arms race. For example, the American president George Bush Sr. and Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev signed in July 1991 the so-called START treaty, where they agreed to reduce the number of strategic nuclear weapons by 40 percent. In December 2009 that treaty expires, including the mutual notification provisions and inspections.

That will not happen if it is up to the Americans George Shultz (former Secretary of State 1982-1989), William Perry (former Secretary of Defense 1994-1997), Henry Kissinger (former Secretary of State 1973-1977) and Sam Nunn (former Senator 1972-1997).

The four have framed a plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons. “The goal is like the top of a very high mountain. From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain and it is easy to say that we will never be able to reach the top. But the risks of doing nothing are too great to ignore. We must chart a course to where the mountaintop becomes visible,” warn the four.

In addition to extending and expanding the START treaty, the quartet wants that nuclear weapons can not be launched within minutes in order to reduce the chances that the weapons are “accidentally” launched. Plans for massive launches of nuclear weapons, which can still be traced to the Cold War, must be destroyed.

Russia and the United States must together establish anti-missile defense systems, say the four politicians. At the same time, the security of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons must be increased around the world. NATO and Russia must freeze their nuclear arsenals and after a joint inventory, start dismantling them. To prevent the spread of nuclear (weapons) knowledge and skills, the International Atomic Energy Agency must be able to conduct more inspections. Finally, the ban on nuclear weapons testing that was agreed to in 1996 must be finally implemented.

Schultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn want the U.S. and Russia, in coordination with countries that have nuclear weapons, but also with states that do not have them, to set up additional steps. An important element of this is an international system for the supply of nuclear fuel. This way countries can forgo doing such themselves, for example by uranium enrichment or by or by the reprocessing of spent fuel rods from nuclear power stations. The international system must guarantee that the materials are not secretly used for the production of nuclear weapons and that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.

The Norwegian government presented this week a number of proposals that are feasible within two to five years. Whether that is realistic, is the question.

Thus concluded the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jonas Store, also host for the discussions, that in most countries not even a serious thought is given to the measures that would be necessary to enforce a ban on nuclear weapons.

One of those countries is The Netherlands. On the airbase Volkel, there sit 20 American nuclear weapons. A remnant of the Cold War. A war that, true, ended with the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, but an ending that did not lead to the dismantling of nuclear arsenals.

On the contrary, nuclear weapons are back and they are once more a dangerous element of international policy.