think again

Did you, like me, think that once the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR broke up that the threat of nuclear war was pretty much over? Turns out we were wrong. According to a lecture I heard last night, the US and Russia continued developing and increasing our nuclear arsenals until 1995. And then--a fact which absolutely shocked me--in 2002, the Bush administration decided that it would cease acknowledging earlier nuclear weapons treaties signed under Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Believe it or not, there's even talk of going back on the 1963 treaty signed by Kennedy to ban surface nuclear warhead tests! Why exactly would we think of doing this? Here's one clue:

"Today, 70,000 warheads, 1,030 nuclear tests, and almost $6 trillion later, we stand on the edge of another era in the history of our uneasy relationship with the Bomb. Most people, apart from the relative handful whose job it is to monitor nuclear developments, probably assume that this era began nearly 16 years ago, with the end of the Cold War. They would be wrong. Because when the Cold War ended, what went unquestioned, in official circles at any rate, was the continued primacy and relevance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

"Now, one influential congressman is trying to change that. But his efforts, if successful, may not lead to a comprehensive review of the underlying rationale for the U.S. stockpile. Instead, his model is being embraced by the nuclear bureaucracy as the means to transform itself into a theoretically less expensive, more efficient, and more capable infrastructure, able to produce an entirely new arsenal geared toward today's and tomorrow's threats. The United States is on the verge of committing itself to churning out a new generation of nuclear weapons without fully vetting the consequences for itself and its efforts to halt and roll back proliferation worldwide."