Thursday, January 14th, 2016
Stephan: When I hear Republican Presidential candidates talk about using our nuclear arsenal I cringe. I was in government as Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to the Chief of Naval Operations at the height of the Cold War. The overwhelming concern of geostrategists in the early 70s was nuclear war, and the question we asked was if there was such a war could civilization survive? Could life survive in its present form? The answers were unclear and very problematic. That utter fear (if people were being honest) was what drove the START Treaty. All of that seems to have been forgotten by the conservative cretins running for President.
I had thought the blatant ignorance of the candidates would provoke the more responsible media to talk about nuclear weapons in a rational way, and begin a discussion about the fact that the U.S. and Russia still maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, at a cost of billions of dollars. Naive fool I. This is the only responsible piece I have seen, and it is written by William Broad, whom I knew even earlier when I was the editor of Sea Power magazine. Broad has been thinking and writing about nuclear forces for decades and understands these issues in a way few do. Read this and think carefully about what he and Sanger are saying.
The new B61 Model 12 nuclear bomb.
Credit: Randy Montoya/Sandia Labs
As North Korea dug tunnels at its nuclear test site last fall, watched by American spy satellites, the Obama administration was preparing a test of its own in the Nevada desert.
A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites. And its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.
In short, while the North Koreans have been thinking big — claiming to have built a hydrogen bomb, a boast that experts dismiss as wildly exaggerated — the Energy Department and the Pentagon have been readying […]
I celebrated when Gorbachev and Poppy Bush, I thought, ended MAD, mutually assured destruction. I did not have children, for I thought it cruel to bring beings into existence where they could be summarily extinguished by some distant idiot. To see it brought back by this Nobel Peace Prize winner makes me ill. But then, as you know, we have not had a president with military experience since… Poppy, Junior’s bag (flight suit costume) aside.
MADness indeed! Golly then, Let’s consider putting a game show host in charge of this.
But this is not unlike the generational betrayal of Teddy Roosevelt’s Forest Service, where he formed it to protect the forests from the Timber Barons and it ended up feeding the forests to them. Wistfully, as I see the Nature Conservancy drilling in their own reserves, I observe this betrayal no longer takes a generation.