As the Cold War waned in 1989, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara shocked his Soviet hosts by telling a Moscow conference that the indefinite combination of nuclear weapons and human fallibility would inevitably lead to the use of nukes and the destruction of nations.
Either the nuclear powers will wise up and move eventually to eliminate all such weapons, or the planet in the 21st Century is headed for nuclear Armageddon.
Today a growing movement of prominent Americans, Russians, Europeans and others accepts that argument as basic truth. McNamara and other experts, including former CIA Director Stansfield Turner and former U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston of California, warn that time is running out and major reductions in nuclear arms, even unilateral cuts if need be, are vital to avoid a doomsday catastrophe.
In an interview with the Tribune last week, they called for cutting U.S. and Russian arsenals down to between 1,000 to 1,500 warheads apiece, taking most U.S. nuclear weapons off their hair-trigger alert status, renouncing a policy of "first use" of nukes, and banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons and all test explosions.
They argued that the end of the Cold War, which provided a window of opportunity to accomplish this, could close as a new century progresses and other nations compete to join the most dangerous club--as India and Pakistan did in 1998.
Proliferation threats loom as well, and experts--Defense Secretary William Cohen among them--predict that a nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil may occur within the next decade.
The struggle to completely eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth, however, is still regarded by many as a Utopian dream. Well over 30,000 nuclear weapons exist today, 95 percent of them in the U.S. and Russia. About 6,000 of those warheads remain on high alert.
The Clinton administration has done little to change basic U.S. nuclear defense posture, which essentially remains on a Cold War footing, because deterrence has kept the peace. The doctrine of mutual assured destruction has averted an unthinkable war. But for how long?
In the 55 years since the U.S. dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nuclear weapons have never been used in anger. But as long as they exist, sooner or later, it's only a matter of when, not if, they will be fired again--by a terrorist, by accident, or by design. The strategy of deterrence pursued by both Republicans and Democrats cannot be foolproof forever.
"We are convinced that there is graver danger now in the post-Cold War era that nuclear weapons will be used than was the case during the Cold War," warned Cranston, the founder and president of the Global Security Institute in San Francisco, a group that promotes a bipartisan appeal for responsible security policy and nuclear abolition.
"That's for a number of reasons," he added. "One is the chaos and lack of resources in Russia. This has led to a lack of proper command and control over nuclear weapons that leaves them open to an unauthorized use, an accidental use, or that terrorists or representatives of people like Saddam Hussein might buy or bribe or steal their way to getting nuclear weapon components and capacities out of Russia."
Cranston warned that the most likely scenario might not even be thwarted by a U.S. nuclear deterrent. It may well come from terrorists smuggling a warhead into the U.S. from Canada, perhaps aiming at a Midwestern city or mounting a weapon of mass destruction inside a ship that sails into New York, Boston or Baltimore.
Equally worrisome, the Cold War is over but the U.S. and Russia keeping arsenals on maximum alerts would require a launch-on-warning scenario even if the other side launched an errant missile by accident--leaving only 15 minutes to decide the fate of the planet.
Britain, France and China are also in the nuclear club. India and Pakistan have come out of the closet. Israel doubtless is nuclear armed. North Korea probably has the bomb, while Iraq and Iran are surely working on it.
Accidents are not theoretical possibilities. They have occurred numerous times, nearly leading to full-scale exchanges between Moscow and Washington. For example in 1995, the Russians wrongly interpreted a Norwegian weather rocket as a U.S. ICBM attack. President Boris Yeltsin came within five minutes of ordering full-scale retaliation even though Norway had warned the Russians in advance of the harmless launch.
McNamara, Cranston, Turner and Jonathan Granoff, the Global Security Institute's CEO, have joined senior arms and security experts, former generals, business executives, actors and scientists to call on the next president to drastically reduce the number of weapons and de-alert others in well-defined stages. Long term, they would move toward a policy of eliminating such arms altogether, while increasing global monitoring, verification and control along the way to a nuclear-free world.
Both presidential candidates supported development of a national missile defense system to knock down missiles fired by rogue states, but McNamara calls that idea "extremely dangerous," acknowledging concerns in Russia, China and Europe that it will spark an arms race. Turner disagrees, arguing that defenses are inherently stabilizing.
Cranston points to polls showing that 80 percent of Americans believe the world would be better off without nukes, but there is no particular urgency about this, so the presidential candidates gave it short shrift in the campaign.
But McNamara argues in an unpublished manuscript he is co-authoring called "Wilson's Ghost" that nearly a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union such a lackadaisical outlook is "exactly the wrong attitude." In 1998, he observed, the U.S. deployed 7,256 warheads to Russia's 6,340. If roughly one-third of those arsenals were used in an attack on enemy military targets that would be enough capacity to kill about 67 million Russians and 75 million Americans. This nuclear posture remains a costly, suicidal recipe for catastrophe.
Costly is an understatement, Granoff points out, estimating the U.S. has spent $5.5 trillion on its nuclear arsenal over the years, while U.S. taxpayers shell out about $100 million a day to keep it. This does not even consider the moral implications of deploying for national defense a weapon that essentially relies on genocide to deter an enemy.
No doubt, conservative Republicans and hawkish Democrats won't find it easy to embrace the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons, Turner admits, but he argues it can be done carefully and safely in stages, and without time-consuming treaty negotiations.
"We need a unilateral approach," Turner said. "George Bush Sr. took this in 1991 in withdrawing almost all of our tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and Asia, all of our tactical weapons from ships in the Navy. Nine days later [Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev made a very similar move on his side . . . Those moves have all held up to this time and the world is safer."
Turner is convinced it is also safe to de-alert nuclear weapons, removing the warhead to make it hard to launch on warning. He proposes a kind of "strategic escrow," in which warheads are removed from the missile and moved into storage, perhaps up to 300 miles away, under monitoring by Russian observers.
"I'm not talking about de-alerting the whole arsenal," he said. "I think if you can maintain 100 at full alert, you've got much more than you could possibly need, and certainly more than enough to deter them."
Even one of these bombs should be enough of a threat to deter a nation from using them. McNamara recalls that it was enough to deter President John F. Kennedy from invading Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis.
"Kennedy said, in private, `No way would I as president expose East Coast cities to one.' Was he right or wrong? I think he was right," McNamara concluded, arguing that none of the nine U.S. presidents since Eisenhower would ever have risked initiating a nuclear strike. The risks were simply too apocalyptic.