Buy the Nukes: Deterrence Is Dead, But We Can Kill the Nuclear Threat
by Gar Alperovitz, Kai Bird, Thad Williamson
The Nation (January 22, 1996) Vol. 262, No. 3: 11-14.
Copyright 1996 The Nation Company Inc.

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America is a nation uniquely protected from invasion by two oceanic moats.

But it remains vulnerable to nuclear weapons. Many are relatively small, easy to produce, cheap and easy to deliver. With the end of the cold war, they present a threat to the United States that is growing, not diminishing.

The Pentagon's budget, however, deals with the new threat almost as an afterthought. Instead, it seeks to fight wars in all parts of the globe and hold on to nuclear weapons of various sizes and shapes.

In the wake of the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings, it is no longer difficult to imagine a determined terrorist group getting its hands on a crude nuclear device. Given the large number of nuclear weapons scattered around the globe--and the Russian mafia's exploitation of ever greater economic insecurity in the former Soviet Union--the ingredients for instruments of mass destruction can all too easily be smuggled out of current inventories. In August 1994 German police recovered almost a pound of plutonium at the Munich airport; in December 1994 Czech police seized more than six pounds of highly enriched uranium from the back seat of a car in Prague. In February 1995 Russian Interior Minister Viktor Yerin reported that he was investigating some thirty cases in which radioactive materials had been stolen from Russian nuclear facilities.

It would be tragically simple to hide a nuclear weapon aboard a freighter bound for New York or San Francisco harbor. Consider also the vast expanse of the American-Canadian border and the number of immigrants who illegally cross over from Mexico every day. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, now director of Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs, observes that a "criminal or terrorist group could even ship a weapon into the United States in pieces small and light enough to go by Federal Express, U.P.S. or even the U.S. postal service."

Under the START II treaty, now awaiting ratification here and in Russia, the United States will reduce its strategic warheads from roughly 8,000 today to 3,500 by the year 2003. But after tactical weapons are added in, there will still be nearly 12,000 nuclear weapons outside the U.S. arsenal.

By the end of the 1990s some 100 metric tons of plutonium are expected to be extracted from obsolete U.S. and Russian weapons. So long as vast numbers of nuclear devices and unsecured fissile materials exist, prospects for preventing diversion to other countries or organizations will remain dubious.

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