Danger

Nuclear weapons expert Graham Allison gives us less than 50-50 odds to make it to 2015 without a nuclear terrorist attack. And sometimes he’s the optimist in the room.

Why do we live in such a dangerous time? Our own nuclear arsenal, whether we have 10 bombs or 10,000, can’t deter a terrorist bomb—delivered with no return address, by boat or truck.

Worse, our own nuclear weapons (and those of the other nuclear powers) are the greatest incentive for non-nuclear countries to build their own bomb. They’re increasingly sick of being told on the one hand that nuclear weapons are indispensable to the security of those who have them, but on the other, that the have-nots don’t need them. You can’t preach temperance from a barstool.

DETERRENCE IS OBSOLETE

If any of the three dozen nuclear-capable countries decides it needs its own bomb, it could start a new arms race. And then it’s a virtual certainty that bomb material—the hard part of building a nuclear weapon, the part you can’t do in your basement—will fall into terrorist hands, whether deliberately or by theft.

What all this means is that the principle of deterrence is obsolete. The arsenal we built to ensure our security is now making us less and less safe. We can still change course. But time is running out.

If this is frightening, that means you’re paying attention.

HOW’D WE WIND UP IN THIS SITUATION?

To understand why so many top experts are so alarmed, we have to understand how we got here.

It starts in 1970, when all but four countries signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

At the heart of the treaty is a simple bargain: the five nations that had nuclear weapons as of 1968 agreed to eliminate their arsenals entirely, and everybody else agreed not to acquire them. The members of the treaty meet every five years to review their progress—a process which happens next in 2010.

In other words, the nations of the world agreed that nuclear weapons were a temporary evil and that we should move toward doing away with them altogether. Now, 1970 was the height of the Cold War, and nobody expected nuclear disarmament to happen any time soon. The bargain was a placeholder, an insurance policy, a hope.

But then the Cold War ended faster than anyone thought possible. At first, people promptly forgot about nuclear weapons. President Clinton told the world that children in the U.S. and Russia can sleep safely because the missiles have been de-targeted, which is like saying you should feel safe because someone who was once pointing a gun at you is now holding it at his side.

But you can’t have tens of thousands of these things laying around and not expect somebody to notice, even if the general public is happy to ignore their existence.

Cut to 2005. The NPT review conference is a disaster. Nearly 15 years after the Cold War’s end, the non-nuclear nations are impatient with the nuclear weapons states’ inaction on their pledge to disarm. They are losing faith that the nuclear powers are going to hold up their end of the bargain.

So we arrive at the clear and present danger we face today. Nine nations possess between 22,000 and 27,000 nuclear weapons between them, 95 percent of which are American or Russian. Some three dozen nations possess the technology to start nuclear weapons programs today. And the nuclear powers are still not making good on their promise to disarm.