Daily Archive

The very real threat of nuclear war hasn’t been on the radar since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  Yet the capacity for self-annihilation remains.  Consider the question raised by Daniel Ellsberg: 

“When I say that there is a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs, I’m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.”

He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they’re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (“use them or lose them”). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and

“can be called back — in fact they don’t even have to be called back, they can… circle until they get a positive order to go ahead… That’s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians… Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don’t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning… to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

And he concluded: “To remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.”

It would be a great step toward securing the world from a nuclear extinction level event, but the geopolitics of the situation make the move a contested one at best.

If the death of everyone can still be maintained with bombers and submarines do we really need the extra death (and extra threat) of ICBM’s?  Is it even rational to consider the move as it might embolden the Russians and Chinese with even the perceived move away from MAD?

It is a calculus that makes sense in terms of lowering the threat to the entire world, but are the corresponding consequences (real or perceived) worth the risk, as it would have to be the US that would stand down first.