Rick Raw: Nuclear Weapons Reduction to Zero is An Impossible Dream–New START Treaty Goes Before Senate

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@cdomcast.net

In April, President Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. For the treaty to take effect it requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The truth is: The Treaty is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

In this acrimonious political climate, the debate will be politically charged between the hawks (Republicans) and doves (Democrats). Nonetheless, the treaty will probably be ratified after every blowhard politician has his or her say.

Ostensibly, the United States will have to destroy more missiles than Russia. But, the Ruskies will have to destroy more warheads. The treaty allows both sides to pull out of the treaty for any reason.

The Russians have threatened to pullout if the United States continues to develop its missile defense plan, which was started during the Reagan administration, then called Star Wars. They don’t want the missile defense plan because they don’t have the technology to implement such an anti-missile system that would destroy incoming ICBM in space–advantage United States.

Idealists like Obama see a world without nuclear weapons–zero, nada, zilch. The initiative is a noble endeavor, but it’s not going to happen. With nuclear nations like Pakistan, India, Israel, and the fear of Iran developing nuclear weapons, the U.S., like Russia, will keep a hefty stockpile of nukes.

The fear of global thermonuclear war was born out of the nuclear arms race in the 1960s. Nuclear paranoia got started in 1960 during the Eisenhower administration.
We were rapidly building up our nuclear missiles even then. World War III loomed, and kids were duck and covering under their desks in school, like that would matter

People were building fall out shelters in their backyards. These tombs were useless because they would suck in a nuclear blast’s shock wave through the air vent. Worse yet, they wouldn’t keep out the nuclear radiation.

The U.S. military led by the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) devised a secret sinister nuclear war plan (just recently declassified) called SIOP (sigh-op) short for Single Integrated Operational Plan.

If invaded by the Soviets by any large scale attack, either conventional or nuclear, we would unleash a fusillade of nuclear warheads at targets in the Soviet Union, which would turn a large portion of Russia into a radio active wasteland. The all-out attack would kill millions of people, and radiate millions more, who would die of cancers in a couple of years.

Until SIOP was developed each branch of the military was building their own nuclear arsenal. The idea behind SIOP was to bring some order out of chaos. And so it was that SIOP was used to justify building as many nukes as they could crank out.

Basically, the SIOP analysts used a worst case scenario as a model, to wit: If Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, or communist China attacked in an alliance or individually, either with conventional weapons or nukes, the U.S. would initiate a massive retaliation destroying pre-targeted sites using nuclear weapons. It was dubbed "the doomsday scenario."–DEFCON 1

As the U.S. build up its nuclear missile arsenal, the Soviets were racing to catch up. Eventually, they had enough nuclear missiles aimed at us to launch a first strike, which would automatically trigger the launch of our missiles at Soviet targets. This Mexican stand off was called "mutually shared destruction."

By the 1960s, nuclear bombs were enhanced with hydrogen isotopes (thus the term thermonuclear)–giving them megaton power. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was in the kiloton range–thousands of tons of TNT as opposed to millions of tons of TNT.

Eventually, nuclear missile scientists were able to reduce the size of megaton bombs so that ten warheads could fit on one ICBM–the Titan II-- each aimed at a different target. The warheads separate in space and are guided to their respective targets.

The U.S. arsenal of nukes hit its peak in 1967 with 31,255–a staggering figure. The Soviets quickly matched it and even exceeded our massive stockpile.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Cold War disappeared from the lexicon. At the time, the U.S. had 19,008 nukes.

Now the nuclear club includes the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea–an unpredictable rogue state run by a crazed megalomaniac. There are other threats that keep s security specialists up nights, including dirty bombs and electromagnetic pulse weapons that fire all electronics.

Any attack on our allies–members of NATO, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel, would be regarded as an attack on the U.S., and our response would be nuclear. These countries know that, and it makes them think twice about mounting an attack on any of those countries. This is called–nuclear deterrence, or ultimate destruction.

So how many nukes is enough to brandish scary nuclear deterrence? No one has figured that out. But Russia is having a hard time protecting its aging stockpile, much of which has been already destroyed and filmed for proof.

If, for instance, Iran attacks Israel, they or the U.S. would retaliate with nuclear weapons. When the first nuclear bomb–a primitive device that wasn’t even tested–hit Hiroshima, the Genie was out of the bottle and the nuclear age was born.

The bottom line: We will always live in a world with nuclear weapons as a deterrent. How many is irrelevant. Now there is more than enough nukes to make the Earth uninhabitable. We must have the Big Stick (Nuclear Missiles) to threaten our enemies into not attacking us.
(All facts were gleaned from a "Time Magazine" piece by Fred Kaplan titled "No More Nukes?"