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Bush’s Nuclear Madness
Countdown to Midnight

by Frida Berrigan

eneath the glossy veneer of handshakes and photo-ops at the announcement in May of the U.S.-Russia agreement on strategic nuclear warhead reduction is a sobering reality. The Kremlin event only demonstrates the fragility of such agreements.

The agreement by the two largest nuclear powers to reduce deployed strategic warheads by two-thirds over the next ten years was heralded as a historic breakthrough. In some ways it is: It is the first agreement on nuclear weapons reductions of any kind in more than a decade.

But the agreement nevertheless leaves the Bush administration free to do pretty much anything it wants. As Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central observed, “Instead of being able to blow the world up 11 or 12 times over, we’ll only be able to do it 4 or 5 times.” The agreement:

• Sets no schedule for the reductions, as long as the desired levels—1,700-2,200 deployed weapons, compared with roughly 6,000 on each side now—are reached by 2012. (In theory, either side could even increase deployed weapons between now and then as long as they come back down to the agreed levels by the end of the ten-year period.)
• Weapons withdrawn from active service do not have to be destroyed; thousands may be saved as part of the “active response” force the Bush administration wants to maintain so that it can re-deploy weapons on short notice.
• Research and development of new kinds of nuclear weapons, like the bunker busting “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator,” will not be restricted, and missile defense development will move ahead at full speed. In fact, when the agreement comes into force, the U.S. will continue to make massive new investments—at least $33 billion in the next five years alone—in its “New Triad” of long-range strike systems, missile defenses, and a revitalized nuclear weapons production complex. And that doesn’t even take into account the additional billions the administration will be spending on the militarization of space, which Defense Secretary Rumsfeld sees as the “new high ground” for guaranteeing U.S. military superiority for generations to come.
• Finally, to top it off, either side can withdraw from the agreement with just 90 days notice.

No wonder one Bush official described it as “our kind of agreement.”

Emphasizing the trivial aspects of the Bush-Putin “agreement” is the release in March of classified portions of the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review (which got only limited media attention when first released in outline form in January) that name nuclear weapons as a central and usable component of the U.S. “anti-terror” arsenal. The Pentagon report stresses the need to develop new nuclear capabilities for use against hardened underground targets like bunkers. The Bush policy appears to take this dangerous approach a step further by embracing the development of “usable” low-yield weapons (known as “mini-nukes”) as a central goal of U.S. nuclear policy.

The review suggests shifting U.S. strategic forces from the Cold War triad of ICBMs, bombers and submarine launched ballistic missiles to a triad of forces that includes both non-nuclear and nuclear strike capabilities and highlights the costly Star Wars “defense” system.

Given all of this, it is uncannily prescient that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a historic antinuclear organization founded by Manhattan Project scientists, moved the minute hand of their “Doomsday Clock” closer to nuclear midnight this past February 27.

The Doomsday Clock was designed by the Bulletin founders in 1947 to evoke both the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of military attack, the countdown to Zero Hour. The clock has stood between 17 and nine minutes to midnight since the end of the Cold War. At the height of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1984 the clock stood at three minutes to midnight, dramatically expressing the imminence of nuclear danger.

This most recent “tick-tocking” from nine to seven minutes before nuclear midnight was triggered by a series of serious setbacks in international security catalogued in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ February press release:

• Too little progress on global nuclear disarmament;
• Growing concerns about the security of nuclear weapons materials worldwide;
• The continuing U.S. preference for unilateral action rather than cooperative international diplomacy;
• U.S. abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and U.S. efforts to thwart the enactment of international agreements designed to constrain proliferation of nuclear chemical, and biological weapons;
• The crisis between India and Pakistan;
• Terrorist efforts to acquire and use nuclear and biological weapons;
• The growing inequality between rich and poor around the world that increases the potential for violence and war.

The Bulletin concludes with a grim but inescapable picture: “Moving the clock’s hands at this time reflects our growing concern that the international community has hit the ‘snooze’ button rather than respond[ing] to the alarm.”

Frida Berrigan is a Research Associate at the World Policy Institute and a member of WRL’s Executive Committee.