Think Again: Nuclear Weapons

President Obama’s pledge to rid the world of atomic bombs is a waste of breath. But not for the reasons you might imagine.

BY JOHN MUELLER | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

"Fabricating a Bomb Is 'Child's Play.'"

Hardly. An editorialist in Nature, the esteemed scientific journal, did apply that characterization to the manufacture of uranium bombs, as opposed to plutonium bombs, last January, but even that seems an absurd exaggeration. Younger, the former Los Alamos research director, has expressed his amazement at how "self-declared 'nuclear weapons experts,' many of whom have never seen a real nuclear weapon," continue to "hold forth on how easy it is to make a functioning nuclear explosive." Uranium is "exceptionally difficult to machine," he points out, and "plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed." Special technology is required, and even the simplest weapons require precise tolerances. Information on the general idea for building a bomb is available online, but none of it, Younger says, is detailed enough to "enable the confident assembly of a real nuclear explosive."

A failure to appreciate the costs and difficulties of a nuclear program has led to massive overestimations of the ability to fabricate nuclear weapons. As the 2005 Silberman-Robb commission, set up to investigate the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war, pointed out, it is "a fundamental analytical error" to equate "procurement activity with weapons system capability." That is, "simply because a state can buy the parts does not mean it can put them together and make them work."

For example, after three decades of labor and well over $100 million in expenditures, Libya was unable to make any progress whatsoever toward an atomic bomb. Indeed, much of the country's nuclear material, surrendered after it abandoned its program, was still in the original boxes.

CORNELL CAPA/MAGNUM PHOTOS

 

John Mueller is professor of political science at Ohio State University and author of Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al Qaeda.

M WILK

9:45 AM ET

January 7, 2010

Very Good Points

Some clear headed thinking in place of the dangerous rhetoric we have been hearing on this issue is long overdue, especially in the case of Iran. Ideally Iran would remain nuclear weapon free but it would hardly be the end of the world if it were to aquire them. Indeed, if I was Iran I would be trying to aquire weapons and for very sane reasons. Iran lives in a very dangerous neighborhood that includes several nuclear powers, Russia, China, India and Pakistan. Of course there are also the several hundred nuclear weapons that officially don't exist but really do in Israel, the country that pioneered preemptive strikes in that region. Would we have pushed so quickly into Iraq if we knew Saddam had some nuclear weapons ready to use? I'm sure Iran notices that we don't make threats against Pakistan, a country that supported the Taliban for years and was actively trading nuclear materials.

While the current government of Iran is nasty at best, all information I've seen indicates the general population is more western oriented and Pro-American than the majority of our so called "allies" in the region. I doubt that would be the case if either we or Israel launched a major military strike against their country. Look how quickly our opinion of the entire Islamic world changed when a few Saudi Arabians flew some airliners into our buildings.

Hope people think about what you wrote and that sanity continues to prevail!

 

BACKSTREET BOY

5:26 AM ET

January 9, 2010

A great article. I loved

A great article. I loved this: if world has already been taking the 'burden' (happily?) of nuclear China, America, Britain etc, why can't it go fine with just two nuclear N Korea and Iran added in coming years? No one could say no.

I loved M Wilk's too.

 

HSCHMIDT

6:41 AM ET

January 9, 2010

Rethink the rethinking please

You have included some good points, but some of your statements are quite far-fetched.

1. "But for more than 60 years now all they've done is gather dust while propagandists and alarmists exaggerate their likelihood of exploding"

It is like saying 'I have always followed the traffic rules and have had no accident. It proves that they are bogus' and starting to ignore all red lights. Good luck.

2. "...the Soviet Union from instituting Hitler-style military aggression, a chimera considering that historical evidence shows the Soviets never had genuine interest in doing anything of the sort."

Soviets definitely had this aim. The only real difference between the Soviet communism and the Nazi fascism is that the Nazis based their ideology on racist assumptions. I spent 20 years of my life in a Soviet-dominated country, and, believe me, it was really close to a Nazi regime. The Soviets only failed because the U.S.-led Western coalition surprisingly resisted the threat.

 

AKVUSN EH

4:35 PM ET

January 10, 2010

Exactly right

and I would add: the author, in dismissing the utility of nuclear weapons leaves out one very topical and practical use, expected to soon be a reality. That is, deterrence by Iran against military regime change. Such an action would surely be viewed as an existential threat thus making battlefield use a realistic possibility.

 

JERRY DUNLEAVY

7:28 PM ET

January 10, 2010

Actually, Nukes ARE Dangerous. Duh.

The author of this article makes all of his claims with one huge advantage-- he can make any claims that he wants about the dangers (or lack thereof) of nuclear weapons, because current reality (you know, actually taking nuclear threats seriously) thankfully does not match his preferred fantasy world. The real reason why nuclear weapons have not (up to this point) been used (outside of their first usage) is exactly because of all of our worrying and our extensive efforts to halt their spread and to warn about the consequences of their deployment.

His arguments are akin to looking at the laws against kidnapping in this country (i.e., no negotiating with kidnappers, no paying of ransoms, incredibly stiff prosecution of perpetrators), and looking at the corresponding very low rates of kidnapping in this country, and therefore concluding that laws against kidnapping must be stupid and worrying about kidnapping must just be unrealistic-- after all, kidnapping rates are low, so therefore the laws against kidnapping must be pointless, and kidnapping must not be a threat! The much more obvious and reasonable and correct position is, of course, that these laws and our efforts are exactly what are effective in preventing such crimes.

The same goes for nuclear weapons-- we have made their acquisition difficult, we have put in place incredible security measures, and we have made it abundantly clear that their usage would have devastating consequences (and, I might add, we have gotten lucky)-- and they have, up to this point, not been used since the end of the second world war (although contrary to what the author would have us think, they have been on the brink of being used a number of times, including in a few different Cold War scenarios like the Cuban Missile Crisis, during escalations between India and Pakistan, etc). Now, we could conclude that, since nukes haven't been used recently, then they must not be a threat; but, since we aren't totally insane, we understand that nukes are indeed a threat and it is only our constant vigilance that has stopped them from being used, and that their non-usage in the future is by no means guaranteed.

Our author should thank God that he can make his armchair pontifications about nuclear weapons 'not being dangerous' while under the umbrella of American nuclear deterrence and under a global nuclear non-profileration regime that has done its utmost to limit the spread of these weapons. Things would be bad indeed if we took the author's advice and pretended like these weapons weren't frighteningly dangerous.

 

JFHOU25

7:42 AM ET

January 29, 2010

I don't think he denies they are dangerous

I think your whole post is about your misunderstanding of his point.

First, Mueller doesn't say Nukes are not dangerous, he says the menace they are said to be is overblown. Meaning: If political leaders say the deterrence worked during the cold war because the amount of weapons frightened each sides (US and Soviet) doesn't mean it is the case. They can be a certain amount of that, but there also is the problem of making actual use of those weapons. They are impractical weapons by design...

They don't target military objectives, they are designed to kill civilians... Posing a real moral dilemma... Point being: the deterrent in not the fact that a country possesses nuclear weapons and threatens to use it on someone else, it is the weapon itself that act as a deterrent to the possessor. Just look at the amount of speech work it took for the US to legitimate it's 2 bombing of Japan? It was by no mean evident that killing so many civilians was needed to end a war that had an already determined outcome. The amount of justification needed serves as proof of the moral dilemma it posed to political elites in taking the decision. Meaning the deterrent was effective on the user, not on the receiver.

Would they be used by terrorists? Probably not either. Why? Because they are indiscriminate. They don't let you chose a target, they kill everyone in the area. Supporters and foes alikes. How does a political group keeps its case valid if it does that? Impossible.

I suggest you look for Michael Waltzer's book on morality in war, David Campbell or Lene Hansen on the use of discourse of dangers by political elites or Nina Tannenwalt's book on the nuclear taboo. Those serve as a nice basis for analysis of the cases of overblown nuclear menace. Including the case of the whole cold war

 

DIRECT_HEX

9:37 AM ET

January 11, 2010

Inherently sensible article

I think this made some very sensible points. Though, I wouldn't be so blase about the effect of a Nuclear blast both politically and economically.

 

EMEEK

3:29 PM ET

January 11, 2010

Loss of Scientists?

The author claims that the nuclear weapons race created a loss of scientists, who, I suppose we are to assume from this article, would have been making contributions elsewhere if not tied up in weapons research. But the scientific gains from weapons programs have infiltrated into the private sector. Specifically, Weapons researchers have developed computer technology and computer codes to model radiation (useful in nuclear energy, medical radiation therapy), and satellite technology (ICBM technology), just to name a few. So one could make a case that weapons research caused technological advances.

 

M WILK

1:08 PM ET

January 13, 2010

Misleading to Attribute those Advances to Nuclear Weapons

Our current Nuclear Energy Technology started primarily with Rickover's Nuclear Navy. He was looking for the ideal power source for submarines. Once physicists realized a self-sustaining chain reaction was possible they really didn't need weapons science to design power reactors.

ICBMs and indeed all advanced rocket technology originates from the work done by Werner Von Braun on the German V2 Rocket of WW2. Von Braun later led the US Apollo program.

Modern computer design stems from work done by British Mathmatician Von Neuman. He and his colleagues worked on breaking codes during WW2, they were not weapons researchers.

A lot of really bright scientists worked on Nuclear Weapons, but partly due to the secrecy surrounding those programs, I don't believe a whole lot of it resulted in major advances in other areas at least in proportion to the huge amount of effort expended. Fermi was a great physicist before he worked on Nuclear Weapons and the same could be said for many of the others.

 

THEFINEPRINT

1:54 PM ET

January 13, 2010

Foolish

Forgive me for saying this as it is to soon to make such comparisons but for the fools who think that a nation could handle one single large scale nuclear detonation in a major urban area the earthquake in Haiti should be forever noted. I make this point hesitantly since I fear it is not appropriate at this time, but it is noteworthy. I can only hope that survivors are able to get aid in time - with 3 million displaced this is going to take an humanitarian effort unseen in modern world history. No nation would be able come to the aid of a radioactive zone where upward of 500,000, 1,000,000 or more were killed. This is the most foolish article I have ever read on the nuclear threat. In fact I will go as far to say it is a SIN to try to convince people that the points in this article are at all accurate.