A Nuclear World with Nuclear Problems

Kennette Benedict is the Executive Director and Publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Before joining the Bulletin in 2005, she directed the International Peace and Security program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for 13 years. She received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University.

A 2010 CNN poll suggests that only 36 percent of Americans consider nuclear war a serious concern while 24 percent are not at all concerned. Do you believe that popular perception reflects reality in relation to the possibility of a nuclear conflict? Why or why not?

It depends on what you mean by nuclear war first of all. Certainly the days of a full-out nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union – now Russia – and the United States are now pretty much now gone. A lot of the focus has now been on nuclear terrorism. In other words, will groups like Al-Qaeda or others be able to get a hold of this fissile material – the bomb making material – or a bomb and bring it by cargo ship or truck into the United States and make for a really disruptive attack?

So the public perception that full nuclear war is not as much of a concern is probably accurate. But I do think that people generally don’t understand how much risk we face from the weapons that are still here, left over from the Cold War. The US and Russia each have 800 nuclear warheads poised and ready to launch within about 10 minutes of a command. Those weapons can take as little as 30 minutes to cross the Atlantic and have them land on our soil – 800 of these bombs that are anywhere from 15 to 300 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So these are extraordinarily horrible weapons and we still have them on this high launch readiness. I think that’s something that people don’t want to talk about; our administration doesn’t want to talk about it and neither do the Russians. Nor has either government done anything to reduce the threat.

What the Bulletin is here to do is to try to keep the news about nuclear weapons and nuclear risk in front of the public. We do it with the doomsday clock which we bring out every year to inform people about the dangers that we still face from the nuclear bombs, the nuclear legacy, and the nuclear material that’s still out there.

The siting and production of nuclear weapons was secret and still is secret. The only reason we have any idea about how many weapons there are is because the Bulletin publishes these estimates. We’re the ones who since 1987 have been trying through various ways to make these estimates that, it turns out, are pretty good.

Actually, for those who are inclined to think about democratic theory, we really don’t live in a democracy in relation to nuclear weapons. We have no say over the acquisition of nuclear weapons, certainly during the Cold War, but it has extended through present day. We are completely and utterly uninformed, and, in that sense, we don’t live in any kind of a democracy. Robert Dahl, who was a political scientist, called this a kind of guardianship; we think that people in charge – the military and political leaders – have some control over these weapons, but we certainly haven’t been brought into the conversation in any real, substantive way.

It’s a real challenge, not only technologically, but politically, philosophically, and economically. It’s one of those things that is so huge it’s really difficult for people to get their arms around. It’s something that challenges our society in many different ways.

The President’s 2014 budget request projects that the federal government will spend nearly $4.5 billion for the modernization of the country’s nuclear deterrent over the next five years. In a post-Cold War world is this strategically necessary or is it a political tool to assuage the public’s fears about nuclear threats?

The problem we have is how to move from today to a world that’s relatively free of these weapons. It is a political issue; the bureaucracy and military have a vested interest in keeping nuclear weapons. There are also a number of people whose jobs – in nuclear labs and the design labs at Los Alamos – depend on the nuclear program. Many districts have large nuclear design facilities and people would like to see jobs remain. Thus our focus is on modernizing and preserving what we have. People will say, “well we’re not sure these weapons will stay operational for a number of years” or “we need to make sure that we can do computer simulations, which can test to make sure they’re going to be okay.” It’s all in aid of preserving and conserving what’s there while we’re waiting for agreements to be made to actually dismantle the nuclear bombs.

So it’s political, it’s jobs, it’s prestige to some extent, and it’s practical concerns about the difficulty of dismantling the program, but it’s also just inertia. There’s no one who’s saying “we don’t need these anymore, we’re bringing them down” and anyone trying to do that would of course be accused of risking our national security because who knows what would happen. Nuclear weapons are part of our heritage, and we have yet to see a leader who can really make change happen on this issue.

There was another poll that said that 83 percent of Americans find North Korea and Iran to be critical nuclear threats to our safety. Along those lines, do you think that’s kept the American public more engaged with the dangers of nuclear weapons than it might otherwise have been since the cold war ended?

I think these two issues are really symptoms of the unraveling of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty has kept people assured since 1968 that the whole world wouldn’t become one bristling with nuclear weapons where every country would have one. These two countries, which for very different reasons are in the news, defy the treaty and thus serve to keep nuclear issues at the forefront of people’s minds in a way that the 800 nuclear weapons that the US and Russia still have ready to go do not. To me, and to many here at the Bulletin, North Korea and Iran aren’t really the large risks that we’re facing.

Is it still important that these countries keep people thinking about nuclear weapons?

Yes, although I think it gives a false sense of security. It gives the impression that the danger is somehow “over there” and we don’t have to do much about it. It also reinforces this idea that it’s only bad guys who have these nuclear weapons or want to have these nuclear weapons. Well we have a lot of them, are we a bad guy? So I think it is, in a way, a distraction from the problem of existing nuclear weapons.

I also think it may be something of a distraction from dealing with the spread of civilian nuclear technology, which is a dual-use technology and which many people would like to see spread even further to deal with the problems of climate change. These are complex problems, and just saying that this bad guy in Iran or this bad guy in North Korea are after nuclear weapons simplifies the problem to a degree that frankly is almost boring. That may be an anathema to some of your readers, but it doesn’t tax people very much to think about nuclear weapons and bad guys; it’s harder to think about nuclear weapons and good guys.

Do you think it is more difficult to keep young people – who have not grown up with the specter of the Cold War – engaged with the idea of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation?

Yes, because by the late 1980s and into the ‘90s popular perception was that we had gotten rid of the nuclear threat because we were no longer at odds with the Soviet Union. I’m hoping that people my age, who were in the “duck and cover” generation, make the elimination of nuclear weapons a major priority. We should just make a big fuss the way we used to make big fusses about a lot of things and get leaders to change national policy. We know how to do it and scientists know how to dismantle nuclear weapons. We’ve been dismantling them in the United States and in the Soviet Union for years. We’ve gone from a high of 70,000 nuclear weapons in 1987 down to about 19,000. That’s pretty good. So we can go the rest of the way, but we need another big push, and I think it should be my generation, who grew up with them, who understands them, to put them away.

On the other hand, I do think that young people today will face the issue of nuclear power in the context of climate change. Nuclear power is a potential source of clean energy that does not emit carbon dioxide, but it can also be used for nuclear weapons, so it will be a tricky problem. It’s going to be complicated, and it’s not going to have this kind of titanic struggle between the two super powers in the background like during the Cold War. It’s going to be more nuanced, more difficult, and so I would hope that in the discussion about climate change this generation takes a serious interest as we get to some of the solutions.

In addition to reading the Bulletin, how can people who are interested in this topic become more involved?

Well the Bulletin is the first place to go, but there is also a group called Global Zero. The organization, which is mostly for students, is working towards a world that is free of nuclear weapons. They have set up chapters in most of the universities around the U.S. The Federation of American Scientists, which is a sister organization of ours, also devotes much time and space to this. The Union of Concerned Scientists does as well, not so much on nuclear weapons, but certainly on climate change and what nuclear power is going to do in the future.

Feature Image: cc/(Devin Ford)