A Case For Unilateral US Nuclear Warhead Reductions

Lasrick writes "Interesting read of the geopolitics between the U.S. and Russia when it comes to reducing nuclear warheads. Pavel Podvig is a physicist trained at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology who works on the Russian nuclear arsenal, US-Russian relations, and nonproliferation. His take here is essential to understanding what is happening between Washington and Moscow on nuclear weapons cuts." Reader auric_dude also sent in a link to a few other views on the issue.

Comments

It's a about money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is really pricy. They're full of dangerous things. They require LOTS of upkeep. You have to guard them. (They have the power to destroy the world after all) The infrastructure to maintain your active arsenal is massive and costs piles of money, which seems silly for something you hope to never use.

Some say the nuclear arms race was as much as way to drain money out of the USSR until it collapsed as much as anything else. We're done with that, and I'm sure both sides are sick of throwing money in to a pit. You really only need to blow the world up once, if you're going to do it at all.

I also hear that most nuclear material for peacetime power reactors comes from decommissioned nuclear warheads.

Re:It's a about money.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.

There's a little thing called "shelf life". Nukes have one, too.

Re:It's a about money.

[Arker]

"Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey"

Not really. A one-time cost to decommission, defrayed by salvage, versus a large recurring expense.

"Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East."

Cant say that I disagree on that. But nukes are extremely expensive toys and the maintanence cost is huge, and NOT mostly on personel. Just maintaining the nuclear arsenal accounts for around $18million a year currently and it's rising every year.

These are very delicate, precision machines, and each and every one of them is a minimum of 20 years old, many much older than that. As time goes on they require more maintanence, and it becomes more expensive.

I'm no naive hippy and I am ok with paying for deterrence. But it's clear we could cut our stock in half tomorrow with no reduction in deterrence. An arsenal that is capable of destroying the entire planet is in no way inferior to one that would be capable of destroying the planet a dozen times. It just costs less.

What the US administration has been trying to do, however, is get the Russians to make some concessions in return for us reducing our stock. This just wasnt a great approach to take. It probably actually spooked the Russians, who wonder why we are so concerned about their arsenal, hmmm? And they have other reasons to resist. They have indicated they are not interested in bilateral agreements that were reasonable back in the cold war days. It's a multipolar world, there are many nuclear nations, not just two and their respective pack members. The Russians want negotiations that include all the other nuclear powers as well. And the US administration would probably find that very reasonable if it werent for Israel...

At any rate we should cut stock for a number of reasons. It would soothe the Russian fears and might well lead to them reducing their own stock in response, but that's not the reason to do it, that's just some possible gravy.

"If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there."

True that.

Re:It's a about money.

[tlambert]

"committing seppuku after Fukushima made them paranoid"

That is some calloused, thinly veiled racism you felt you had to add there at the end, huh?

It's a cultural, not racial, reference which was actively relevant until 1970, and is still popularized in NHK broadcast dramas of the Shugunate Era in present-day Japan. It carries the appropriate connotation of "killing oneself over a point of honor". If you read the news reports, the U.S. Navy offered assistance in the early hours of the Fukushima incident, and were rebuffed "as a point of honor".

Would you have preferred I referred to the Hindu practice of Sati? That's also a cultural reference, and while it would be a stretch, one could argue that keeping their nuclear program shut down would be the equivalent of a woman throwing herself/being thrown on the funeral pyre of her husband out of grief.

I think a Bushido-style loss of face is a more apt metaphor for a cause of action in this case, however.

"Deployed"

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA consistently refers to a reduction in "deployed" warheads. For those who don't understand the nuance, there are still many more warheads not currently deployed. We call those "stockpiled" arms. A reduction in deployed warheads is pointless unless we talk about a global (no pun intended) reduction in arms. Why, you ask? Because we have stealth bombers and fighters with global reach. Those stockpiled weapons could be locked and loaded on our jets in short order if we wanted. Suddenly, they are now "deployed" warheads.

The truth remains, until nuclear weapons stockpiles are reduced below MAD levels, reduction in arms is just for show. We'll always have enough in storage to kill each other a few times over, but that's not really what matters. What matters is that we are constantly trying to establish a dialog with people who don't like us rather than take a beligerant stance. That, more than anything else will result in reduced nuclear tensions.

Re:"Deployed"

[murdocj]

I have a hunch that the stockpiled nukes are not sitting in crates next to the $100 hammers.

Re:wrong

[ShanghaiBill]

I think like 16 or something would destroy the entire world's weather for decades so yeah, completely pointless.

No way. Just how big do you think these warheads are? In total megatons, America's nuclear arsenal peaked in the 1960s, and has been declining for half a century as accuracy as dramatically improved. You don't need a lot of yield if you can put it through a particular window in the Kremlin. Most ICBMs and SLBMs have warheads of only a few hundred kilotons. Cruise missile warheads are around 10-20KT. That is a Nagasaki, not a Castle Bravo.

Re:My Argument

[clarkkent09]

Russians will never give up nukes. It's their only defense against China.

Article is not very good

[phantomfive]

It's cliche to say the article is not very good, but in this case it truly is missing a serious point:

No plan to get rid of nuclear weapons can be complete without taking China (and others) into consideration. We are at the point that it's not just a standoff between Russia and the US, who both have been reducing their nuclear weapons. Other countries have been actively increasing them, and unless they join in the movement, Russia and the US leave themselves completely vulnerable if they don't maintain at least some nuclear weapons.

I'm in favor of getting rid of nukes, but you can't assume it's just a game between Russia and the US, as this article does.