J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Manhattan project, once wrote about the building of nuclear military programs: “I think that we will not be very successful in discouraging other powers from this course unless we show, by our own example and conviction, that we regard nuclear armament as a transitory, dangerous, and degrading phase of the world’s history...” These days, his words hold special significance.
Last week, Iran breezed by a U.N. deadline that required a halt to their uranium enrichment program. While Iran maintains that the program is dedicated to bringing nuclear power to its people, the universal consensus is that it might not be a terribly good idea to allow a country with known terrorist connections, and a public promise to destroy Israel, access to nuclear materials. Their violation leaves the door open for the U.N. to impose sanctions on the country, but no one besides the U.S. is eager to employ them. Security Council members will meet in Berlin this week to discuss options, and as of Saturday the European Union said it will engage in two weeks of dialogue with Iran to “clarify” its nuclear stance.
It’s hardly news that Iran is causing headaches for the Western world; their role in the Iraq War is allegedly substantial, as the U.S. has been stepping up its rhetoric in declaring Iran to be a supplier of arms and training to Shiite militants in Iraq. There have also been convincing links drawn between September 11 and the country. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has announced he has no plans to discontinue his nuclear program, asserting the nation “will not retreat an iota from its right to nuclear technology.”
Dialogue seems to be the key word for most nations involved in the issue, but assuming Iran sticks to its guns there will eventually be some sort of showdown. With the U.S.’s troops already stretched thin in the region, one-on-one warfare seems unlikely, but we’ve already seen what the threat of nukes can do. Unfounded accusations of WMDs in Iraq led us to the road we are now stumbling down. Says William Arkin, in a recent column in The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences, “one thing is clear, though, in the post-9/11 environment: A threat that is nightmarish and enduring and can neither be proved nor disproved is a powerful lubricant.”
But while the U.S. is denouncing nuclear programs around the world, we still hold the most nuclear weapons with nearly 10,000 warheads in our possession, over half of which are “active,” or ready to deploy. That’s double the number of Russia’s weapons, nuclear runner-up. And 96 percent of the world’s estimated 26,000 nuclear weapons are in possession of these two nations.
And those stockpiles, which have evaporated to the back of the public consciousness, are exactly where a nuclear bomb could wander off into the wrong hands. Graham Allison, the author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, says securing our weapons is the first step to reducing the risk of a nuclear terrorist attack. It stands to reason that dismantling as many nukes as possible, while still maintaining a small supply for defense, would be even better. And besides, there’s no discernable upswing to the ability to fry an entire country 20 times over instead of ten.
It may be impossible to predict the outcome of the situation in Iran, but one thing is absolutely certain: it is time for the U.S. and the world to take a long, hard look at the role nuclear weapons will be playing in the twenty-first century, and how to best ensure they are never used.
