The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (American Empire Project) - Hardcover

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World (0-8050-4467-4) and The Fate of the Earth among many other titles, is the Nation Institute’s Harold Willens Peace Fellow. His “Letter from Ground Zero” column appears in The Nation regularly. He also writes for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, and Tomdispatch.com. He is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

Chapter 1

The nuclear age has entered its seventh decade. If it were a person, it would be thinking about retirement—reckoning up its pension funds, weighing different medical plans. But historical periods, unlike human lives, have no fixed limit, and the nuclear age is in fact displaying youthful vigor. The birth of nuclear weapons in 1945 opened a wide, unobstructed pathway to the end of the world. Along that route was an end to cities, an end to countries, an end to continents, an end to human life itself. Sometimes one of these perils has moved to the fore, sometimes another, but all have continuously cast their shadows over the earth. After the end of the Cold War, the world’s nuclear arsenals seemed to have been tamed to a certain extent, but now they are growling and baring their teeth again. Indeed, the bomb is staging a revival, as if to declare: the twenty-first century, like the one before it, belongs to me.*

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union made every preparation for annihilation but held back from the final step—launching their globe-wrecking arsenals. With the Cold War’s end, those stockpiles were reduced, and the threat of apocalypse receded. But even as the number of warheads was declining the number of nations that possessed such weapons was growing. Nuclear danger, it seemed, did not so much wane as change shape. There were fewer bombs but they were in more hands. The bomb’s potential, recognized by all informed observers from the first days of the nuclear age, not only to threaten life on Earth but also, as the deadly know-how spread, to spring up at any point of the compass, was advancing toward realization. In that respect, the bomb is only now truly coming into its own. Having outgrown its parochial Cold War breeding ground, it is moving to take up residence in every part of the globe. India, Pakistan, and North Korea have acquired nuclear arsenals. China, a nuclear power since 1964, is doing likewise. Pakistan now targets India, while India targets Pakistan and, perhaps, China, in a new three-way nuclear arms race. Soon after North Korea’s first nuclear test, on October 9, 2006, the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, called for his country to open a new discussion regarding his country’s decision to do without nuclear weapons. Iran has embarked on a program to create nuclear power fuels that would carry it most of the distance to having the bomb, and Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East are showing fresh interest in nuclear energy and weapon programs. Israel, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the late 1960s, continues to improve its delivery systems.

Unfortunately, the new sources of nuclear danger have by no means replaced the old ones. The Cold War antagonists, rather than dispatching their gigantic arsenals into the historical dustbin that swallowed their geopolitical struggle, have held on to them. What is more, they have begun to refurbish their warheads and delivery systems, build new generations of nuclear weapons, and redeploy and retarget them. The seminal event was the attack of September 11, 2001, which set in motion one of the few true revolutions in American nuclear policy since 1945. In a radical reversal of former practice, which had been to seek to stop the spread of nuclear weapons through diplomacy and treaties, the United States now turned to military means, including overthrow of the offending governments—“regime change.” This policy was a corollary of a far more ambitious one, rightly called imperial by supporters and detractors alike, of asserting “unchallengeable” American military dominance over the entire globe. One result was the Iraq war, launched in the name of dismantling weapons of mass destruction and programs for building of them, of which the most dangerous was said to be an active nuclear program. Confusingly, Iraq, which of course had no such weapons or programs, turned out not to be an example of the evil in question; yet the idea of stopping proliferation by force, though as yet practiced nowhere else, has continued to enjoy wide acceptance and continues to inform policy.

Far less visible but no less important has been an equally radical change in American nuclear strategic policy—that is, the guidance given the United States’ nuclear forces. To the old Cold War targets have been added new ones in the third world. The Nuclear Posture Review of late 2002 specifically assigned nuclear weapons a counterproliferation role, soon rendered operational in a new Pentagon command called Global Strike, whose mission is to deliver “conventional or nuclear” strikes on any target anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice. Other Western nations have followed suit, declaring that state supporters of terrorist groups around the world are fitting targets for attack by their nuclear forces. France opposed the Iraq war, but it is building a new, nuclear-capable bomber, the Rafale, and a new submarine-launched ballistic missile, and its former president, Jacques Chirac, has declared that terrorist threats to France may be met with a nuclear response. The British government has similarly announced that Britain will replace its fleet of aging nuclear-armed submarines with a new, improved model, whose Trident missiles are  to be purchased, like the last ones, from the United States. Britain, too, cited the dangers of proliferation and terrorism as reasons for remaining nuclear armed deep into the twenty-first century.

The old and new arsenals have thus begun to hone in on one another, as nuclear weapons always do, missile targeting missile, bomb countering bomb. A highly volatile and violent contest—no longer bipolar but global—between some of the existing possessors of the bomb and new entrants or petitioners to the club, who hope to “deter” the great ones with tiny but potent arsenals, has begun to churn international affairs. Already, it has helped to produce the misbegotten American invasion of Iraq, launched in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there, and could in time produce other wars—with Iran, North Korea, or countries as yet unknown. As in the Cold War, the nuclear danger has become an axle around which the wheel of geopolitical events is turning.

In an inseparably related and long-predicted development, the world is also awash in nuclear-weapon technology, adding a new dimension to the dangers of proliferation, and raising the terrifying specter of a terrorist group that acquires and uses a nuclear weapon, or perhaps several of them, to lash out against a great city somewhere in the world. Tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people might die. The city would be rendered uninhabitable by radiation for decades. If it were a national capital, the nation’s government could be destroyed. Beyond these direct consequences lie indirect ones that are no less real for being veiled in great uncertainty. For example, if the country were the United States, would the government survive? What emergency measures might it adopt, and for how long? Would the Constitution remain in effect, and, if it were suspended, would it ever be restored? Would liberty around the globe be taken away by governments straining every nerve to prevent new attacks? Would terror-stricken populations of other cities flee to the countryside? Might the global economy collapse? Although such an attack, involving only one or a few of the world’s twenty-seven thousand or so existing nuclear warheads, would be the merest fraction of the kind of global holocaust that seemed so near at hand during the Cold War, its consequences bring us to a verge beyond which the imagination falters.

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