Originally published on the CGS blog on September 17, 2013.
With the intense media attention that Syrian chemical weapons have generated for the last month, now is the time to consider other weapons of mass destruction and the pressing need to eliminate them for good. Chief among such weapons are of course nuclear weapons. While we hope that the Assad regime will sign on to the Chemical Weapons Convention and turn over its stockpiles, Syria is not the only country in the region that has weapons of mass destruction. Syria’s neighbor to the southwest, Israel, has an arsenal of 80 nuclear warheads.
Along with Israel, eight other countries have nuclear weapons. Without a doubt, nuclear warheads have the most destructive potential of any weapons yet devised. One has only to look at the terrible consequences of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to understand this; bombs built after World War II are exponentially more powerful. And even though nuclear weapons have not been used since, the long history of near misses, or “broken arrows“, shows the extreme danger that looms over all of us as long as these weapons exist.
In 2010 the United States and Russia, holders of the first and second largest operational nuclear arsenals respectively, signed a bilateral agreement, known as New START, in which both countries agreed to significantly reduce their number of active nuclear weapons. While this was a good first step, the agreement allows both countries to maintain 1,550 active nuclear devices, 700 of which are permitted to be deployed. In June of this year, U.S. president Barack Obama spoke in Berlin about the need for continuing negotiations with Russia to reduce U.S. and Russia nuclear stockpiles even further.
This track is important for the United States to continue to pursue. Even better would be for the United States to take the lead in multilateral negotiations with all of the world’s nuclear powers to first bring non-party states on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and second to pressure all nuclear states to live up to their commitments under the NPT to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
Rather than continuing to penalize (and demonize) countries like Iran for pursuing nuclear programs, the United States should practice what it preaches and dismantle its own nuclear weapons. This would set a powerful disarmament precedent. We as citizens of the United States and as human beings cannot afford to continue to let any nation, particularly our own, stockpile weapons with the capability of wreaking havoc on the planet’s environment and literally destroying civilization as we know it. The stakes are just too high to put this issue on the back burner any longer.
