We also proposed that widespread enlightened childrearing would likely produce a generation of citizens who would find national-security policies that leave the lives of tens of millions hanging in the balance unacceptable. The introduction of courses on, if not arms control, national-security options, into schools at all levels would follow suit.

A prominent member of the disarmament community is already making significant strides in that direction. William Potter, the director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, kicked off a presentation he gave at the end of February with a description of the UN Experts Group on Disarmament and Nonproliferation Education, which he was instrumental in forming. (Though, he admits, “relatively little progress has been made to date in translating [it] into global action.”) He reveals the group’s raison d’etre:

[Because] of a fixation on quick solutions to immediate crises, neither national governments nor international organizations invest adequately in long-term programs of disarmament and nonproliferation training. As a consequence, we face a predicament on a global scale in which otherwise well educated citizens (and many of their elected representatives) are amazingly complacent about and ignorant of disarmament and nonproliferation issues.

Potter then spells out the Monterey Institute’s answer to the dearth of disarmament and nonproliferation education: “. . . as of fall 2010 we will offer the world’s first Masters Degree Program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies. Among the unusual aspects of this program will be its use of. . . negotiation simulations, coverage of the entire range of WMD threats [and] international internship opportunities.” [Emphasis added.]

In a non-graduate program in the past, Monterey used, “Skype and Teleconferencing to bring ‘real-world’ decision makers into the classroom,” such as Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance Rose Gottemoeller and U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Sergio Duarte. By end of that course, Potter said, it was “impossible to discern professional diplomats from many students.”

Nuke Tube?

Monterey has also “increasingly made use of various forms of distance learning, including lectures to students at Russian universities via. . . Facebook, Twitter, and our own variant of You Tube called ‘Nuke Tube.’” It has also “collaborated with Russian and Chinese universities. . . to develop nonproliferation textbooks and other training materials in those languages,” as well as “university courses in nonproliferation in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and. . . other post-Soviet States.”

Sounds promising — how can other schools be brought on board? “One of my long standing — but to date unrealized — recommendations,” Potter says is the passage of “legislation to create a National Nonproliferation Education Act, similar to the U.S. National Defense Education Act. . . to create competitive scholarships [to encourage] the best and the brightest students to specialize on WMD issues.”

How about the earlier grades? Potter remarks that, “Few high schools have curricula that expose students to issues of disarmament or weapons proliferation and strategies for their control.”

We shouldn’t wonder. Look at the reactions to teaching the Holocaust to kids. Deniers aside, some parents think that it scares kids; others, that it’s given favoritism over other tragedies by Jews who. . . Just. Can’t. Let It Go. In fact, since many parents believe in retaining nuclear weapons as deterrence, courses incorporating nonproliferation and disarmament are likely to be even more controversial.

Too bad. Exposing young students to nonproliferation and disarmament sure beats air raid drills, like when I was young.

“Nuclear war must be the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary world. People are not curious about the details. . . . almost everyone seems to feel adequately informed by reading one book about nuclear war.”
– Paul Brians

Fear of nuclear war isn’t the only reason that we avoid the subject. Since the end of the Cold War, most of us think the threat has all but evaporated. If tensions between the United States and Russia came to a head again, we always have deterrence. Of course, concern about nuclear terrorism is on the rise, but it’s left in the dust by the economy.

Meanwhile, many of us who derive scant solace from deterrence and would just like the world to be free of the cursed devices have noticed that President Obama seems to have a soft spot in his heart for disarmament. Finally, we can take a deep breath and relax. Right? Uh, no.

The president’s watered-down approach to other reform aside, “while progressive peace and security advocates clearly have an ally in President Obama. . . there is much work to be done with the Presidential advisors, Members of Congress, and (the target of the recommendations in this report) the American public, to ensure that this vision becomes a reality.”

Wait — more disarmament recommendations? Haven’t they been done to a fare-thee-well (no disrespect intended) by assemblages as august as Global Zero and the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament? These, however, aren’t recommendations for disarmament, per se, but for Talking about Nuclear Weapons with the Persuadable Middle (the title of the report quoted above).

Generated by an organization called U.S. in the World (USITW) last year, they’re “based on the analysis of the three research projects. . . and on other research projects undertaken on behalf of USITW” to facilitate communication with what might be called political independents. Among its recommendations:

Peace and security advocates should. . . “re-frame” the issue [of nuclear weapons] to help people see that it is the existence of the weapons themselves — not who has them – that poses the primary threat to global and national security. The fact that nuclear weapons are a source of risk — not the fact that they are morally wrong — should be presented as the underlying reason why the issue of nuclear weapons matters. [Emphasis added.]

Actually, by USITW’s reckoning, the risk needs to be placed on “the weapons themselves and not primarily with who has them. [Otherwise] there is no real case to be made for the U.S. addressing our own nuclear arsenal since most Americans view the U.S. to be a good and decent country.” In fact, “For many people, the very destructiveness of these weapons is the reason for having them (for deterrence purposes).”

Meanwhile, the phrase from the report that reads “not the fact that they are morally wrong” offers an opening to insert another personal-favorite quote:

“I just think that in the nuclear world, the true enemy can’t be destroyed. … In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.”
– Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide”

Bear in mind, USITW points out, “The Risk Reduction Frame is different from the Safety Frame. A Risk Reduction Frame points to a process by which we can enhance security.” Whereas, “A Safety Frame. . . often used. . . by those who favor maintaining or enhancing our nuclear arsenal. . . points to security under threat and suggests. . . we are either safe or unsafe [Black or white, no gray -- RW] which can lead people to want to hold onto our ’strongest/best’ weapons.”

Another hazard to skirt when communicating with PMs (persuadable middles): “. . . advocates must. . . understand the public’s perception of peace and security advocates and their agendas (pushing a particular ideology, promoting pacifism, etc.) and the role that validators and outside messengers can play.” In other words, lacking credibility with PMs, peaceniks need to fade into the background and cede the stage to “validators and outside messengers” such as generals, current and retired, who have seen the light about nuclear weapons.

The final point we’ll highlight: “When introducing the Risk Reduction Frame, advocates should be focused on the risk posed by nuclear weapons — not just the risk of vulnerable fissile materials (i.e., nuclear terrorism).” It seems that when using “nuclear terrorism as our starting point. … the public starts seeing the entire world as a scary place, full of enemies whose behavior cannot be modified or controlled in any way except through crushing them” with the aforementioned “strongest/best” weapons.

Nothing could be more counterintuitive to disarmament advocates. They instinctively invoke nuclear terrorism to make the case for disarmament. It’s tough to disagree with USITW, though, that it’s a stone better left unturned.

However valuable, USITW’s recommendations fall short of enlightening the public to some of nuclear weapons’ underlying issues. For example, helping people understand that nuclear war is but war write large. When states retain conventional weapons capable of mass extermination, disarmament is but a Pyrrhic victory.

Ultimately we need to face our shadow selves and stop demonizing other states or races. Author Paul Levy quotes Carl Jung, who wrote of “the overweening pretensions of the human shadow, which we so gladly project on our fellow man in order to visit our own sins upon him with apparent justification.” Levy adds: “Projecting our own evil outside of ourselves seemingly relieves us of the burden of having to deal with the evil within us. And yet [it's] the primal act which generates the very ‘evil’ that we are attempting to avoid in the first place.”

Obviously, even if universal health care came to pass, the public isn’t going to flock to psychotherapy in search of its shadow self. What’s more important is that we turn our attention to raising children disinclined to project their darker impulses unto others. As psychohistorian Jerrold Atlas phrases it, we’ve been “too slowly improving childrearing and too fast evolving destructive technology” such as nuclear weapons.

Simply put, children must be kept safe from violence and sexual abuse. As the noted Swiss psychotherapist and author Alice Miller wrote: “The total neglect or trivialization of the childhood factor operative in the context of violence. . . sometimes leads to explanations that are not only unconvincing and abortive but actively deflect attention away from the genuine roots of violence.” In other words — surprise, surprise — abusing a child predisposes him or her toward violence and, arguably, an inclination to advocate or support violent solutions to international conflict.

To decrease violence against children in recent years, laws banning corporal punishment and programs that teach high-school students childrearing and provide children with empathy training have been instituted, along with community centers to teach parenting skills. The more they’re implemented, the more children will grow up unmarked by abuse. In short order, fewer individuals in positions of authority will find that strategies putting enormous numbers of individuals in harm’s way make sense.

In the interim, while USITW is not posting trail markers to world peace, we should be grateful that it’s presenting us with “a public education campaign that pursues short-term policy gains while advancing the long-term objective of the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.” If disarmament advocates tweak their “messaging” to accord with USITW’s recommendations, they might find that they could get used to their newfound success communicating with the public.

Meanwhile, many of the president’s supporters, along with the disarmament community (however much the two overlap) “fear that over the past year he has moved too cautiously” thus leaving open “the possibility that the United States might use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, perhaps against a nation that does not possess a nuclear arsenal.”

An ostensibly critical feature of our nuclear-weapons program is the Triad — three different delivery systems: the first two, land-based silos and submarines from which to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the third, bombers. Disarmament has a triad too — of, not persons, but policies non grata — which we’ll instead call the Tripod. The first leg — retention of the right to first use of a nuclear attack; the second, the option to respond to a non-nuclear attack such as biochemical; the third, the option to attack a non-nuclear nation. If disarmament supporters’ concerns about the Nuclear Posture Review come to pass, the Tripod remains intact.

As if that’s not enough for those who believe in disarmament, “Mr. Obama has already announced that he will spend billions of dollars more on updating America’s weapons laboratories to assure the reliability of what he intends to be a much smaller arsenal. … At the same time, the new document. … relies more heavily on missile defense.” As it did with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, missile defense is clogging the pipelines of the START II negotiations with Russia as we speak.

That said, at Slate, the estimable Fred Kaplan writes:

This posture review, like the two before it. . . will almost certainly not result in anything new, even if it alleges otherwise. Even if President Barack Obama does pursue some new nuclear policies. … whether that happens will not be determined by the conclusions of an executive review.

Still, there’s another troubling feature of the Nuclear Posture Review that’s going unnoticed by most. Before alluding to it, Shanker and Sanger cite another review: “Mr. Obama’s recently published Quadrennial Defense Review [which] includes support for a new class of non-nuclear weapons, called ‘Prompt Global Strike,’ that could be fired from the United States and hit a target anywhere in less than an hour.”

Those targets include:

. . . the leadership of Al Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, or. . . an impending missile launch from North Korea. But under Mr. Obama’s strategy, the missiles would be based at new sites around the United States that might even be open to inspection, so that Russia and China would know that a missile launched from those sites was not nuclear — to avoid having them place their own nuclear forces on high alert.

But Russia watcher Alexander Zaitchik (also the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, to be published shortly) doesn’t find that too reassuring:

“Prompt Global Strike” scares the hell out of me. The idea that inspections are going to allow Moscow to remain calm in the event that a “large strike” emanates from the U.S. does not seem credible. What’s to say mobile launchers weren’t wheeled in the next day [after an inspection]? A bunch of ICBM blips on a radar screen are still a bunch of ICBM blips. In such a small decision window, I don’t want jittery paranoids in bunkers having to do calculus in which the biggest factor is U.S. claims of, “Trust us! They’re conventional!”

A product of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Prompt Global Strike can be launched from submarines too and — if the Pentagon has its way (and the money) — space one day. Sanger and Shanker refer to Prompt Global Strike as Obama’s strategy, but it’s actually been “in slow development since the 1990s, and now quickly coalescing in military circles,” according to Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman for Popular Mechanics in 2007.

Eventually, he wrote, “Prompt Global Strike could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal. One candidate: the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile. . . is designed to hit Mach 5 — roughly 3600 mph.” In other words, as Global Security Newswire points out, it’s “the first weapon other than a ballistic missile to fly at hypersonic speeds.”

Returning to how liable they are to become the victim of mistaken identity Shachtman addressed the question of “whether such an attack can be deployed without triggering World War III: [the Tridents] look, and fly, exactly like the deadliest weapons in the American nuclear arsenal.” Also, “The Navy’s plan calls for arming Ohio class subs with two conventional and 22 nuclear Trident II missiles.” Talk about your recipes for disaster: “To outside observers, the subs’ conventional and nuclear weapons would appear identical.”

Furthermore, Shachtman writes:

Traditionally, the U.S. strategy is to shoot missiles over the North Pole. But the current, most likely Prompt Global Strike targets, North Korea and Iran, lie south of China and Russia — which would put those countries right under a pole-launched flight path. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes.

All in all, Prompt Global Strike’s “nuclear ambiguity issues,” as the Senate Armed Services committee called them, don’t go a long way to inducing peace of mind. But while closing “the prompt global strike capability gap as quickly as possible remains a top STRATCOM priority,” said a STRATCOM spokesperson, it doesn’t expect to begin deploying until 2015.

Still, ultimately, write Shanker and Sanger, “the administration believes it could create a new form of deterrence — a way to contain countries that possess or hope to develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, without resorting to a nuclear option.”

Lost in the translation from the nuclear option to conventional weapons is exactly what kind of attack are we talking about? What does it feel like to be well and promptly globally struck? Shachtman again:

When the order [from the president to launch] comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. … Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident’s four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. … Just above the target, the warheads. … filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. … detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods. … Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.

Prompt Global Strike may result in fewer fatalities, less environmental damage, and no nuclear winter. But, for all intents and purposes, it appears to be a modern-day version of a Dresden firestorm. Using the phrase “conventional” weapons today doesn’t do justice to DARPA and the Pentagon’s warped imaginations, which are anything but conventional.

In fact, Prompt Global Strike beggars the question: What good is disarmament when what replaces nuclear weapons doles out a quality of death that’s at last as nightmarish as from a nuclear attack? Our overarching mission is clear. We need to ensure that nuclear disarmament, should it come to pass, is accompanied by the consignment of mass extermination as a national-security strategy to the charnel house of history.

His bad news, though, is about Iran, where, he recently wrote in the National Interest, “a weapons-inspection regime. . . will not work. Inspections themselves are most effective when both the state being inspected and the inspecting countries are fully on board — and even then there are limits.” For example, the “number of inspectors and level of intrusiveness necessary to ensure that [there are no nuclear weapons] in a country Iran’s size is far greater than anything that can be contemplated.”

That said, “The aim is not the unachievable — detecting all cheating [but only] to create the equivalent of a strong plate-glass window that Iran would have to shatter if it were to embark upon a [nuclear-weapons] program — and that inspectors could be reasonably expected to detect that shattering.” All things considered, according to Kay, “Inspection and verification are often thought of as ways to prevent a state from developing nuclear weapons [but that] would be well beyond the capabilities of any conceivable inspection regime.”

Inspection is only one element of verification, which is the process of verifying, or checking, the number and types of nuclear weapons (if any) allowed a country by the treaty(ies) it’s signed. Verification is also conducted via satellites, telemetry (data transmission), radar tracking of missiles launches, and seismic monitoring of underground tests.

If there’s any issue with which no one should have a problem, it’s got to be verification, right? Alas, as we’ve learned in recent years, no issue escapes the all-seeing jaundiced eye. Raise the issue and a disarmament advocates may find him or herself burned by hawks and independents — policy wonks and the public both.

Verification has been called a trap by the Topos Partnership, “communication strategists” hired by the Union of Concerned Scientists to devise the most effective “messaging” for taking disarmament to the people. Among other things, Topos utilized focus groups to produce, jargon aside, a helpful report titled From Asset to Liability: Developing a Message Strategy on Nuclear Weapons in January 2009. It actually advises avoiding the subject of verification (same with nuclear terrorism, about which more in a future post).

A conversation on verification can easily result in a strong default view that we can never know what other actors/countries are doing when it comes to nuclear weapons, and can’t effectively monitor/verify what they are doing. Focusing on the topic usually leads to counterproductive conversations [such as. . .] “I think a worldwide ban. … will only create situations where countries will lie to each other.” [31-year old woman, Florida] “It’s foolish to assume that without 100% accuracy, we would be 100% safe.” [40-year old man, Massachusetts]

To hawks, verification is another hammer with which to bludgeon disarmament, along with deterrence and “deproliferation.” (A term coined by Amitai Etzioni, deproliferation, he writes, “calls for removing the access to nuclear arms. . . first and foremost in unstable and noncompliant states, and only then in all others.”) We asked Christopher Ford, who served as United States Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation during much of the Bush administration and is now with the Hudson Institute, to clarify the conservative position on verification. As nuanced a spokesman for his cause as you’ll find, he actually refrains from wielding verification like a blunt instrument as some conservatives do. . .

To my eye, the last few decades of U.S. political history suggest that conservatives tend to have a bit less trust in the good faith of an adversary — and to put less stock in the idea that violations will be deterred in part simply because they are “illegal.” As a result they tend to worry a bit more about verification than liberals, who seem to assume that treaties have a compelling force simply because they are treaties.

Bear in mind that conservatives are notoriously treaty-averse. Ford continues:

That said, everyone also seems to agree, at least in principle, that verification isn’t a one-size-fits-all concept. … Even conservatives didn’t feel the need to have special verification procedures in the Moscow Treaty of 2002, because it was assessed that both the United States and Russia wanted to reduce (and would be reducing) their numbers of warheads anyway. Given that reductions seemed likely whether or not there was a treaty, and since START [the U.S.-Russia treaty, currently being renegotiated, that limits warheads and missiles -- RW] verification measures then provided at least some (highly indirect) window upon deployed warhead numbers, the Bush Administration felt perfectly comfortable without verification provisions in the Moscow Treaty. In circumstances in which the other side is perceived to have both incentives and the capability to cheat, however — as with denuclearization in North Korea — I’d expect conservatives to be much more hard-core on verification. And I’d hope they wouldn’t be alone: liberals’ faith in arms control depends upon it actually controlling arms! Everyone should care about verification. They’d better — without it, arms control and disarmament wouldn’t exist.

Conservatives, though, worry that the Obama administration, for example, will offer concessions on verification in order to conclude a treaty. But what if “sweeteners,” as Ford calls them below, are, in fact, an acknowledgment that verification — in the spirit of the Moscow Treaty of 2002 to which Ford alludes above — don’t need to be onerous?

In a recent Arms Control Association Threat Assessment Brief, New START Verification: Fitting the Means to the Ends, Greg Thielmann details just how the new START treaty might not require as severe a verification regime as in the past. [Emphasis added.]

The treaty’s verification provisions are means to providing confidence that the sides are complying with [lower nuclear-weapons] limits. Although the goal is to establish the high confidence levels [instilled by] the original START. . . the successor agreement will achieve that goal with more focused and up-to-date methods. [The original] START’s. . . elaborate verification measures. . . were born of the Cold War. New START verification can be streamlined in accordance with the new, simplified limits and in response to post-Cold War realities.

Is Less Really More?

Thielmann elaborates:

[The original] START was negotiated when Moscow could command the full resources of all 15 Soviet republics, [for instance] the prodigious missile production and design facilities of Ukraine. [In the interim, the] sophistication of . . . technical means such as imagery and signals intelligence has taken a quantum leap [along with dramatic] advances in commercial optical imagery systems. … Fifteen years of treaty implementation. . . have likewise broadened and deepened the knowledge base of the two sides concerning each other’s strategic systems and operating procedures, and it has raised the level of mutual understanding and trust.

Ronald Reagan was fond of repeating, “Trust, but verify.” Has the time come to turn his saying inside out and instead declare: “Verify, but trust”? Even David Kay believes that for a weapons-inspection program to work, “a prerequisite is trust.” Ford, who reminded us above that conservatives tend to be less trustworthy, responds:

Thielmann places great faith in overhead imagery [which] can tell you things about numbers of missiles in silos, but it is somewhat less useful with mobile missiles of the sort in which Russia is now investing (you have to know where to look), and it isn’t really helpful at all with regard to questions such as the number of warheads that could be or are loaded on them, or issues of missile performance. If the Russians encrypt key aspects of the telemetry signals they use in missile testing and play games with on-site inspections of missiles themselves [you] can have all the GeoEye snapshots you want, but I can still hide a warhead in an oil barrel in my driveway, and you’ll be none the wiser.

He adds: “The era of reductions that are easy because both sides really want them will soon close: how low will Russia be willing to go before it wants to put on the brakes? This is not good news for the verification world. . . except, I suppose, with regard to job security.” Then he echoes Kay’s “strong plate-glass window”:

Traditionally, U.S. officials have tended to approach verification from the perspective. . . that you don’t have to have perfect detection, but you do need to be able to detect violations that would have a significant impact upon the military balance. … But things change in this regard as numbers get lower, and especially at “zero.” … Washington already knows full well how important it can be to have a mere handful of atomic weapons in what is otherwise a world of zero: that was our situation between 1945 and 1949. … As numbers get lower, in other words, the demands upon verification become vastly more stringent.

But Ford actually feels that Thielmann’s streamlined verification for the new START treaty “can probably handle the [treaty's] modest demands. … (After all, the top of President Obama’s proposed range for deployed warheads is a paltry 25 weapons below the bottom of the range President Bush adopted in the 2002 Moscow Treaty. …) That is not to say, of course, that I can guarantee. . . that too much will not be conceded on ancillary issues or “sweeteners” in the Obama Administration’s political desperation for an arms reduction deal.

If you think it’s bipartisanship that prompts a conservative to agree that verification that’s been streamlined is sufficient for START II, bear in mind that Ford defines the treaty’s demands as “modest.” It may just be that he deems the treaty too watered down to constrain the other party, in this case Russia. Why waste time then worrying about its verification? On the other hand, to a conservative, the up side of a weak treaty is that it’s the next best thing to no treaty.

There is one way of course to exponentially enhance the effectiveness of verification. Barry Blechman, the co-founder of the Stimson Center, explains in a New York Times op-ed [emphasis added]:

Critics cite cheating as the main reason to dismiss disarmament, ignoring that, even without cooperative verification, American intelligence has detected every past national effort to develop nuclear weapons before those weapons became operational.

Furthermore, elimination is simpler to verify than any reduction in the number of warheads. In a disarmament regime, the entirety of the nuclear complex would be monitored, shielding nothing from inspectors’ eyes. Discovery of a single warhead or kilogram of fissile material in an undeclared location would blow the whistle.

In other words, the smaller a state’s nuclear-weapons program, the less time and money the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) need to spend on verification.

Some of us are oblivious to the threat of nuclear war; others shrink from it in fear. Many operate under the assumption that there’s no longer anything to worry about because we survived the Cold War intact. Besides, there’s always deterrence. Like a trusty old shotgun in the corner, we try to reassure ourselves, it’s served us well for 50 years.

To the rest of us, the Bomb has been taken down a peg from its status as the existential threat to sharing that title with climate change and the economy, both of which have grown increasingly combustible. In fact, the United States may be closer to divesting itself of its nuclear arsenal (thanks, in no small part, to our current president) than restoring our economy and the environment to health.

Whoever thought ridding the world of nuclear weapons might be the easiest — the least impossible, anyway — of the three?

But just because total disarmament seems like an idea whose time has finally come doesn’t mean it’s a foregone conclusion. It’s true that the days when three quarters of a million people would descend on New York’s Central Park chanting “No nukes,” as they did in June of 1982, are long gone. How then, aside from signing petitions or calling our representatives, can we move the threat of nuclear war to the front lines of our national consciousness ?

For starters, we can make nuclear weapons personal. Why not encourage each other to summon up memories and emotions — ideally, our earliest and most primal — that the subject of nuclear weapons invokes in us?

For those of us who confine our attention to family or community, as opposed to the nation or the world, our personal responses to nuclear weapons may not be apparent to us. But listening to others’ nuclear narratives might call up our own. For the first nuclear generation, it may be private doubts about Hiroshima and Nagasaki; for Baby Boomers, memories of “duck and cover” and the Cuban Missile Crisis; for those who came of age in the eighties, Reagan’s first bellicose term; for the youngest among us, the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Also, there’s that old standby — appealing to fears about our children. Let’s ask each other to imagine a future in which our children are subject to the same risk of incineration in a nuclear conflagration as we grew up with. (Though it must be admitted that appeals to consider the fate of future generations don’t seem to have persuaded most of us that the economy requires fundamental reform or that climate change needs immediate attention.)

Sharing personal stories is more likely to incite sympathy for disarmament than the issuing of edicts by its advocates and the importuning of peace workers. In fact, assembled into a film, such stories have the potential to form the third leg of a tripod of impactful nuclear movies along with Dr. Strangelove and The Day After.

Sure, a nuclear-free world may still be at least a generation away. But, with disarmament only months removed from the state of inertia it was in during the previous administration, we must ensure that its newfound momentum continues and pin policymakers down to a long-term course of action. Why not put the difficult early days of the process behind us as soon as we can? After all, it takes a decade or more to decommission enrichment and reprocessing plants.

Finally, if telling our nuclear stories contributes in some small way to committing the world to disarmament, it will embolden us. In turn, we can replicate that success in realms where we’re now mired in impotence, such as the environmental and the economic.

But, when it comes to nuclear weapons, both policy and public opinion have been listing to the left — or peace-ward — for decades. In fact, it wasn’t long after their use by the United States in World War II that nuclear weapons developed a bad rep. Soon, President John F. Kennedy helped secure the passage of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Twenty years later, even Reagan himself displayed a visceral distaste for these instruments of extermination. President Obama simply resuscitated existing sentiment stifled by the Bush administration.

The net result is that virtually nobody calls for the use of nuclear weapons anymore, or even increasing our arsenal. Conservatives have been forced to content themselves with:
1. However successful an attempt to staunch the rush to disarmament — clinging to the principal of deterrence.
2. Missile defense systems (perhaps a surer source of defense contracts these days than nuclear weapons).
3. Warning that lowering standards on verification (that a state is in compliance with a treaty) renders said treaty worthless.
4. Replacement of aging nuclear warheads. Even though the administration and Congress killed the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, conservatives still call for modernization.

With the obstructionist measures we’ve all come to know and love from conservatives, Owen Graham of the right-wing Heritage Foundation writes (emphasis added):

On December 16, 41 U.S. Senators voiced their concerns and signed a letter saying they will oppose the new [START] treaty if it does not include specific plans for U.S. nuclear modernization. [Many] Americans likely believe that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is in top shape. … Unfortunately, the truth is that America’s nuclear infrastructure is rapidly aging, in deep atrophy, and struggling to maintain its reliability and effectiveness.

But, in December, Arms Control Today reported on a panel of scientists known as JASON, which by now you may have heard about. It “found that the [l]ifetimes of [existing] nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, according to an unclassified summary of the report.”

And with no nuclear tests either. In fact, “the report could also bolster efforts by the Obama administration to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). … ‘The burden of proof is now on CTBT skeptics,’” said an official of the administration.

Even though some nuclear states, such as the United States, have failed to ratify the CTBT, its spirit is observed. Except, of course, for North Korea, no state has tested a nuclear weapon since 1998. Still, today nuclear weapons can be developed with the help of simulated testing.

But, wrote Yousaf Butt at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2008, “Contrary to what proponents of untested new warheads assert, the more credible deterrent in the eyes of one’s adversary will always be the tested legacy weapons.”

By which he means existing bombs from the golden age of nuclear weapons when a megaton was a megaton. “On the other hand,” he added, “if the proposed new warheads are eventually tested, this will make it more difficult to stop other nations from doing the same.”

In other words if a state wished to develop a new warhead and make it as credible a deterrent as the “classic” nukes, it would have to open the Pandora box of nuclear testing to all. The final word from Butts: “Either way [developing] new but untested nuclear warheads is detrimental to U.S. security.”

The ICNND is chaired by Gareth Evans, Australia’s respected one-time foreign minister who has since dedicated his life to preventing and resolving deadly conflict, and Yoriko Kawaguchi, Japan’s former minister of foreign affairs. Its other members are mostly individuals who’ve held high positions in government, including a former chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff, a former prime minister of Norway, and Prince Turki Al Faisal of the Saudi royal family.

Come to think of it, the commission’s mainstream membership is reminiscent of that of the recently concluded Congressional Commission on the Nuclear Posture of the United States. The latter included, on the one hand, Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry, since reborn as a disarmament advocate, and, on the other, former CIA director and noted hawk James Woolsey. Among the Nuclear Posture Review Commission’s recommendations were ratifying the follow-up treaty to START, but not the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In effect, it nullified itself.

But disarmament itself was central to its deliberations, while in the ICNND’s case, it was its raison d’etre. Titled “Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers,” the ICNND’s report counsels disarmament in studied steps.

Reading it proves slow going — it’s as nuanced as it is comprehensive — but it’s no slog. To those of us who’d like to see a shortened route to disarmament and one shorn of the nuclear-energy programs ICNND considers essential to its agenda, the results of the report disappoint to a degree. On the other hand, it’s awash in keen observations and sound reasoning. As I work my way through it (about one-third thus far) I’ll highlight some of those — as well as have some fun with it.

Let’s begin with what the report refers to as nuclear weapons “delegitimation” (which, apparently, is to “deligitimization” as “preventive” is to “preventative”). The report reads:

If we want to minimize and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons, the critical need is to change perceptions of their role and utility: in effect, to achieve their progressive delegitimation, from a position in which they occupied a central strategic place to one in which their role is seen as quite marginal, and eventually wholly unnecessary as well as undesirable.

We’re part way there, according to the report, because. . .

. . . it is now broadly accepted that nuclear weapons have little or no utility as instruments of warfighting [because, among other things nuclear weapons], creating impassable terrains and causing long-lasting environmental damage, cannot rationally be used to take territory.

Not only are nuclear weapons weighed down by the irony that they’re inherently unusable, but one rung down the hierarchy of irony resides the humbling knowledge that the biggest, baddest weapons ever invented are of absolutely no use when it comes to seizing territory. If one state covets another for its resources or whatever and were to attack it with nuclear weapons, the resale value on the acquired state immediately plummets.

Even if the conquering state were willing to help rebuild its newfound acquisition, needless to say, great swaths of it are rendered uninhabitable by radiation. Of course, a nuclear-weapons advocate might make the case that not only do nuclear weapons deter a world war, they’re the reason that while states may fight over disputed territory like Kashmir, they no longer seek to acquire new territory.

As opposed to conquest or world wars, today small wars are all the rage. But nuclear weapons. . .

. . . lack finesse in a world where advanced militaries increasingly focus on reducing collateral damage and civilian deaths. …. weapons of choice in war these days are precise in both targeting and effect.

The last sentence might be amended to read “weapons of choice in war these days are intended to be precise in both targeting and effect.” Meanwhile lacking finesse is an understatement when speaking of strategic (high-yield) nuclear weapons. But what about tactical, or battlefield, nukes?

A claim that those lack finesse could, in fact, be taken as a challenge to proceed with the development of nuclear bunker busters or to resurrect the infamous Davy Crockett, a glorified grenade launcher for the smallest tactical nukes. Never mind tactical, would a nuclear handgun be a “tactful” nuke? Meanwhile, here’s another sleeping dog we should let lie.

. . . there is a strong taboo on the actual use, if not possession, of nuclear weapons: a profound. . . constraint. . . against using weapons of such indiscriminate and disproportionate destruction.

The frequent use of the word taboo as an explanation for why nuclear weapons remain holstered is enough to make one flinch. As we all know, the adjective taboo only increases the allure of an action and makes it that much more tempting.

Next, the report reads (emphasis added):

Nuclear weapons are essentially self-deterring for actors who depend upon public support from their own populations, their allies, and broader international society. Every time states have come close to their use they have recoiled.

In other words, a nuclear power may operate under the assumption that its possession of nuclear weapons deters another nuclear power from attacking it. But the other state is at least as likely to be deterred from using its nuclear weapons by the prevailing zeitgeist. What’s more, it’s conceivable that even if the United States were attacked with nuclear weapons, a president such as Barack Obama might disdain a nuclear response and retaliate instead with conventional weapons.

Deterrence aside, a more recent argument that the proponents of nuclear weapons proffer for the retention of nuclear weapons is “the notion that because nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented they can never wholly disappear.”

No question — refuting the uninvented argument isn’t easy. But that’s why God created compliance and verification: Vigilance is all. Besides, mankind hasn’t been able to uninvent torture and slavery, but they’ve been eradicated. Oh wait, no they haven’t. Moving on, the report reads. . .

If these perceptions [about the uninvention of nuclear weapons] are to change, they have to be tackled. . . in a way which recognizes and respects. . . the weight of opposing arguments. … The necessary commitments to disarmament will not be achieved by simply denouncing the nuclear-armed states. . . for being in thrall to false theories and prey to unwarranted anxieties.

In fact, said states. . .

. . . can both recognize [the] long-term risks and at the same time fear the short-term impact on their security posed by the processes of disarmament. … They must be convinced that there is no incompatibility between nuclear disarmament and security.

As you can see, despite how hypocritical a state sounds when it calls for disarmament while also insisting on retaining nukes, concerns about a disarmament time frame are legitimate. Thus (emphasis added). . .

Those who advocate elimination need to break the process into manageable steps, countering perceptions that it is a leap into the unknown. … the number of diverse states that must cooperate to make nuclear abolition feasible is too great, and the issues too complex, to allow anything but incremental movement. Here as elsewhere in public policy, inertia tends to be the norm, major change the rarity, and sustaining major change extraordinarily difficult. The real alternative to an incremental approach is not more rapid change, but stasis. But doing nothing is not an option.

Advocates of our right to a speedy disarmament may not like the commission’s findings, but it’s difficult to dispute them. Next: solutions.

People have several incorrect impressions about nuclear winter. One is that the climatic effects were disproved; this is just not true. Another is that the world would experience “nuclear autumn” instead of winter. But our new calculations show that the climate effects even of a regional conflict [such as between India and Pakistan] would be widespread and severe. … far more than enough to destroy agriculture worldwide. … Even the warheads on one missile-carrying submarine could produce enough smoke to create a global environmental disaster.

Nuclear winter: the cherry on top of climate change.

• In recent months, concerns about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear missiles have been spreading. But the dominance that its military is once again asserting over its executive branch is testimony to its ongoing strength. Even infiltration is unlikely to result in the loss of a nuclear weapon or two to a terrorist group.

Still, despite its recent crackdown on the Taliban, there are some who think the Pakistani military might actually consider transferring its nuclear weapons to the Taliban or Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group thought to be behind the Mumbai attacks). As if possession of a nuclear weapons by one of those entities weren’t frightening enough, chances are it would let al-Qaeda in on the deal.

It’s bad enough when a state trades nuclear technology and know-how with another state, as the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, did with impunity. But what would spur a state like Pakistan, or its military, to dole out its weapons to a terrorist group? After all, chances are the latter will one day bite the hand that feeds it and use a nuke on Pakistan?

Shaun Gregory is the director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit in the United Kingdom. Writing in the Sentinel,, the West Point Combating Terrorism Center’s publication, he refers us to another author for some insight:

One argument for this, described in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent, is that states can become pressurized or incentivized to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorist groups because they are responding to threats from an external power but fear the consequences of being identified as the origin of a nuclear strike. In the context of severe international pressure on the Pakistan Army—particularly by India or the United States—the risk exists that Pakistan might be similarly incentivized.

In fact, if a state made a nuclear hand-off to a “non-state actor” and the latter made use of its nukes against an enemy the two have in common, it faces retribution from the world. As I’ve written about in a previous post, the developing science of nuclear forensics would likely be able to trace the nuclear weapons to their country of origin. Thus, transferring nuclear weapons to a terrorist group is doubly self-destructive if not suicidal.

• At Slate, its respected foreign-affairs columnist Fred Kaplan makes an, uh, provocative statement: “The thing is, the substance of nuclear-arms accords has little effect on the prospect of nuclear war.”

It’s unusual to hear the claim made that, in and of themselves, arms control treaties lack preventive powers. Usually, those in favor of disarmament have faith in the ability of treaties to thwart nuclear war. Hawks, meanwhile, claim they weaken us and invite attack. But what’s Kaplan getting at? He writes:

In the 1970s and ’80s, arms control negotiations were a surrogate for other kinds of diplomacy. They were useful not so much because of the treaties they produced but, rather, because they provided a forum for the two sides to talk about something. . . at a time when political differences precluded talks about anything else.

Kaplan doesn’t deny that. . .

. . . while relations are relatively healthy, Obama and the Russian leaders should nail down a new strategic arms-reduction treaty [START], which will reportedly cut each side’s “delivery vehicles”—the long-range missiles and bombers that carry nuclear weapons—from roughly 1,600 to 800 and the number of actual bombs and warheads from 2,200 to 1,500. …

But of a second set of talks planned to capitalize on the momentum of the new START, he writes:

. . . if Obama is serious about trying, in follow-on talks, to reduce the number of tactical nuclear weapons and nuclear warheads in storage, he will run into a set of near-intractable issues [because] intrusive inspections would be mandatory. Even talking about such matters in formal talks may. . . exacerbate tensions.

As for:

. . . “nuclear-wannabes” [they're] not likely to drop their ambitions simply because they witness the spectacle of the United States and Russia engaging in substantive arms reduction. In fact, as the larger powers hold fewer and fewer weapons, it may become more and more tempting for small powers to jump into the arms race, as it would put them in a position closer to parity.

For the most part, that’s an argument advanced by hawks — which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true. Kaplan adds:

The main point is this: The United States and Russia. . . now have the opportunity—in the post-Cold War, post-George W. Bush era—to work out common approaches and policies. There are only so many hours in the day, so many diplomatic forums requiring presidential involvement. It would be a shame to waste [the administration's time and energy] on a full-bore immersion into the trap-strewn pit of nuclear-arms negotiations.

Again, he’s not speaking of the START renewal, but its “follow-on” talks. (As I’ve noted before, what’s wrong with “follow-up”?) In the end, what Kaplan seems to be saying is that, instead of concentrating on arms control, it makes more sense to instead focus on putting the relationship between the United States and Russia on the best footing possible. Then arms control will take care of itself.

However steeped in wisdom, that approach tempts fate. What if our next president harkens back to George W. Bush or the first term of Ronald Reagan? Aside from START, we’d be left with outdated agreements such as the Treaty on Nuclear Non-proliferation or those in limbo such as the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty.

• Proponents of deterrence claim that should it fail and nuclear war break out, we’d still come out ahead of where we would be if deterrence hadn’t been our policy all these years. Today, though, most don’t want to hear naked calculations about the possible sacrifice of millions of lives to save hundreds of millions.

But we caught prominent political scientist Daryl Press — currently working on a book about nuclear deterrence with frequent writing partner Keir Leiber — going all Herman Kahn in the comments section of an Arms Control Wonk post.

A deterrence failure that kills 10 million people would be terrible — but how does that tragedy compare with the benefit of avoiding the “missing” great-power war of the 2nd half of the 20th century? … Remember that great-power war — which killed roughly a hundred million people in the first half of the 20th Century — stopped happening when people developed nukes.

He’s assuming that deterrence kept the temperature down on the Cold War and prevented a third world war, a premise on which agreement is less and less unanimous. Press continues (emphasis added):

Nuclear “optimists” are often portrayed as being naive — e.g., they simply ignore the possibility of accidents, as you wrote. It’s just not true. Accidents will happen, and when they do lots of people may die. The argument of nuclear optimists is different: nuclear weapons may have ended once and for all one of the most destructive human activities: major, great-power wars of conquest. If so, that achievement may be well worth the continuing risk of accidents or war.

In turn, a nuclear “pessimist” might ask: How can the death of 10 million possibly be spun as a national-security success? How does the nuclear optimist justify thinking that’s the best we can do?

While invoking the NPT — that talisman of a treaty — on his way to the moral high ground, Salehi stumbled and took a header. Like his president, he just couldn’t keep his thoughts about Zionism to himself. Nor did he help himself or his cause by adding “we hope that the wise part of the West will overcome its irrational part so that it can seize the opportunity offered by Iran to end the current situation.”

Whenever you start feeling empathy for Iran’s nuclear inferiority complex, one of its officials shoots himself in the foot with comments ranging from anti-Israel to outright anti-semitic. What Salehi was addressing is Iran’s response to the West proposing to enrich uranium for Iran in Russia and France. As I wrote in a previous post:

Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki volunteered to hand over 400 kilograms of uranium in exchange for an equivalent amount of enriched material traded up front. According to Mottaki, the “remainder of the material would be traded over ’several years.’” But the agreement had called for Iran to hand over all 1,200 kilograms in one batch. The idea on the part of the West was to reduce the amount of uranium remaining in Iran to a level which was insufficient to enrich for military purposes.

As of a couple of weeks ago, it looked like the United States had finally had enough of Iran’s failure to comply with its offer. The Financial Times reported:

The Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would expand existing US restrictions to companies that sell and insure refined oil shipments to Iran, passed the House of Representatives with ease by 412 votes to 12. … “The only sanctions that matter are the gasoline sanctions. . .” Mark Kirk, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, told the Financial Times. … The measures are also backed by 77 out of 100 senators.

As usual, Iran’s trading partner Russia (as well as China) still isn’t sold on sanctions. In expressing his government’s doubts, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said, “We have no reason to believe that Iran plans to move in [the direction of developing nuclear weapons]” adding that “without serious proof (of this), it is irresponsible to pose such accusations.”

Congress’s idea of sanctions is sure to spread pain and suffering far and wide across Iran. Thankfully, as the Washington Post reports, the Obama administration shows. . .

. . . little apparent interest in legislation racing through Congress that would punish companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran. “We have never been attracted to the idea of trying to get the whole world to cordon off their economy,” said a senior U.S. official. … “We have to be deft at this, because it matters how the Iranian people interpret their isolation — whether they fault the regime or are fooled into thinking we are to blame.”

Following the administration’s lead, David Sanger and William Broad of the New York Times have, for the moment, ceased their usual greasing the skids for an attack. Instead they report:

Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.”

The Washington Post article reports, “high on the list of targets is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps [which] is playing an increasingly bigger role in Iran’s economy.”

It’s difficult to understand why the officials in the Post and Times stories, as well as the U.S. government for which they speak, think sanctions would give the average Iranian pause to reconsider its state’s nuclear power program. For argument’s sake, imagine that sanctions bring adversity to only the Revolutionary Guard (impossible, of course, because its businesses employ average Iranians). If little of the Iranian public suffers, what would it care if the nuclear power program was causing harm to the Revolutionary Guard?

Conversely, if a substantial percentage of the Iranian public was affected, what makes the U.S. government think that instead of directing its anger at the United States, it would redirect its anger to its own administration instead of the immediate cause, the United States? That’s a variation on how U.S. hawks — never willing to overlook a chance to turn wishful thinking into magical thinking — have claimed our bombing Iran will inspire its people to overthrow its own government.

Hitting the Bulls Eye with Targeted Sanctions

To make those sanctions as smart as possible, paint a target on the back of the Supreme Leader himself. A juicy article in the Telegraph catalogues “the private opulence and eccentric tastes of 70-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei” such as his system of palaces, and his fine horses and collectables. Also, “Claims from three intelligence officials, who have. . . fled Iran, have. . . documented the Khamenei family’s wide-reaching business connections, including interests in European manufacturers, African mobile phone companies and international commodities markets.”

The authors of the article refer to film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf as the Green Movement’s exiled leader. Though he was supportive of the Islamic Revolution’s early violent excesses, he now calls himself Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s official spokesman abroad. Makhmalbaf said, “If the Western governments are serious enough in putting pressure on the regime by applying economic sanctions, then they should follow these leads and find these bank accounts and confiscate their deposits to be returned to the Iranian people at a later time.” [Emphasis added.]

What a concept — return the funds that sanctions freeze to sanctions’ victims. Not something you hear much talk about in the West, is it?

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen speaks for many when he writes

. . .Setting aside the still debatable objective of this Iranian endeavor (nuclear ambiguity or an actual device?), it’s not in the midst of the current political turmoil that Tehran is going to break out of its back-and-forth tinkering. Inertia is always strong in Iran’s many-headed system. [Note] the risible, blustery confusion over a possible deal to export Iran’s low-enriched uranium. All this says — nay, screams — to me: Do nothing. … When I’m asked where the “stick” is in Iran, my response is the stick is Iranian society — the bubbling reformist pressure now rising up from Iran’s highly educated youth and brave women.

Not that I’m advocating violent overthrow, but just because the momentum of an idea whose time has come peacefully succeeded in India and with communism doesn’t mean it will with an administration as tone-deaf as Iran’s.

Hill determined that their means of propulsion were — no surprise — an anti-gravity force field. Of course, he wasn’t able to conceptualize a working model. Had he been, NASA would no doubt have yanked him out of retirement and become involved in a tug of war with the Pentagon for his services.

How, you’re no doubt asking by now, do UFOs fit under the umbrella of “Nukes and Other WMDs”? Because they beggar the question: Why aren’t UFOs (assuming, for the sake of argument, a belief in their existence) powered by nuclear energy?

Perhaps it’s impossible to configure nuclear energy to that end. Or maybe, to extraterrestrials, it’s an ancient technology long ago superseded by less hazardous scientific advancements. Come to think of it, even for an earth technology, nuclear power is old — over 60 years.

We too would probably have developed an energy source to replace it (as well as oil, of course). But apparently the staggering cost of its development can’t be justified without a world war, as was Project Manhattan. Guess the planet’s looming doom thanks to climate change due in large part to fossil-fuel use doesn’t qualify.

Could it be that aliens, aside from repudiating nuclear energy themselves, are opposed to its use — not to mention that of nuclear weapons — by other civilizations? At about the same time as Hill’s book was published, a man named Robert Salas wrote about his experiences 30 years earlier when he was with the Air Force Strategic Air Command. His job was to operate, maintain, and protect a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile base in central Montana. Salas writes:

On March 16 1967, Captain Eric Carlson and First Lieutenant Walt Figel. . . were below ground in the. . . Launch Control Center [while missile] maintenance crews and security teams were camped out [above ground]. During the early morning hours, more than one report came in from [them] that they had seen UFOs. A UFO was reported directly above one of the. . . silos. …

Around 8:30 a.m., Figel. . . was briefing Carlson. . . when the alarm horn sounded. One of the Minuteman missiles they supervised had gone off alert. … Within seconds, the entire flight of ten ICBMs was down! … Power had not been lost to the sites; the missiles simply were not operational because, for some unexplainable reason, each of their guidance and control systems had malfunctioned. … When we were relieved by our scheduled replacement crew later that morning the missiles had still not been brought on line by on-site maintenance teams. …

Robert Kaminski [who] was the Boeing Company engineering team leader for [a subsequent investigation stated]: “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert. . .”

UFOs to Earth: The Milky Way Is a No-Nukes Galaxy

It turns out the nexus of nuclear weapons and UFOs is a hot topic on the Web. Spearheading efforts to gather information and investigate the subject is one Michael Salla (not to be confused with Salas cited above), who calls his popular website Exopolitics: The political implications of the extraterrestrial presence. (Aside to Dr. Salla: Ditch the goofy image of saucers buzzing the Capitol building.)

On the occasion of Obama’s Prague speech, during which he outlined his disarmament plans, Dr. Salla commented:

Obama’s intent to take steps towards a nuclear weapons free world has already been welcomed by many scientists, elder statesmen and national security organizations. If a select group of former military whistleblowers are to be believed, there are also others that will be happy to see the eradication of nuclear weapons — extraterrestrial occupants of UFOs.

Dr. Salla then cites whistleblowers, including Salas, who. . .

. . . concluded that UFOs are vitally interested in nuclear weapons and have actively interfered with these in an apparent effort to deter the US and other countries from ever using them. This is supported by the testimony of [others] such as Colonel Ross Dedrickson (ret.) who had worked with the US Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission [and who claimed]:

“After retiring from the Air Force I joined the Boeing company and was responsible for accounting for all of the nuclear fleet of Minuteman missiles. In [one] incident they actually photographed the UFO following the missile as it climbed into space and, shining a beam on it, neutralized the missile. I also learned of a number of incidents [in which] nuclear weapons sent into space were destroyed by the extraterrestrials.”

Raise your hand if you knew ICBMs, some with nuclear warheads, had been launched into space. (Me neither.) More recently, you may recall an episode of the Bush administration’s that gained a lot of mileage on the Web — the Divine Strake, which was a test of a 700-pound bomb planned for spring 2006 in the Nevada desert. Dr. Salla explains that, based on statements by officials in the public record, the test might have been intended as a simulation — proxy might be a better word — of a test of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) — a nuclear “bunker buster.” He writes:

[The] delay of Divine Strake may consequently have been a result of . . . generals opposed to a nuclear bombing campaign against Iran. There is, however, [another] explanation. [Extraterrestrials may have given] warnings through their communications with individuals and military officials of impending action to prevent the possible use of nuclear weapons.

What? You didn’t get the memo that the Pentagon and aliens were, well, sending memos to each other? Be that as it may, what exactly is it about nukes that aliens object to? Dr. Salla again:

[Former SAC man] Salas believes that UFOs interfere with nuclear weapons out of an altruistic desire to prevent nuclear war on Earth. Dedrickson, however. … claims that a nuclear weapons test over the Pacific in the 1960s was [something] that the extraterrestrials were really concerned about because it affected our ionosphere. In fact, the ET spacecraft were unable to operate because of the pollution in the magnetic field which they depended upon.

Furthermore, Dr. Salla writes that French UFO researcher Eric Julien, who wrote the visionary The Science of Extraterrestrials, “argues that there is a correlation between UFO behavior around nuclear tests and 74 alleged UFO crashes documented in Ryan Wood’s book, Majic Eyes Only.”

Seventy-four! Odds are that adds up to a higher crash rate per flight than earthly aircraft. If so, it’s a testament to how, as Julien sees it, “the use of nuclear weapons affects the time/space continuum in ways that disrupt UFO/extraterrestrial navigation and propulsion systems.”

Dr. Salla concludes that the use of nuclear weapons may be a threat to extraterrestrial civilizations. Planning to use them “could provoke extraterrestrials to respond in a preemptive manner.”

However open to the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrials, disarmament advocates shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for aliens to ride to their rescue. (It’s as chimerical as hawks who seek to huddle under missile defense systems.) But if extraterrestrials are darting about our atmosphere, it’s a safe bet that they can’t be happy about past tests of nuclear detonations and the prospect of their use in warfare. Apparently extraterrestrials perceive a truth about nuclear weapons that many of us on earth don’t — that they’re a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum.