All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is David Krieger.
He's president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at WagingPeace.org and specifically want to ask him about nuclear bombs today at CommonDreams.org.
A new article, How Many Nuclear Weapons Still Threaten Humanity?
It's more than you want to know.
Tell us David, how many nuclear weapons?
Welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks, Scott.
It's good to be with you.
And there are still over 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world.
I was writing about a new study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that just came out and their report is that there are about 20,500 nuclear weapons still in the world.
All right.
Well, can you break that down for us a little bit?
Most of that is the U.S. and Russia.
Almost all of that is in the arsenals of the United States and Russia.
In addition to the U.S. and Russia, they identify six other countries and I would actually add a seventh.
But the ones they identify are the UK, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan.
And the one I would add to that is North Korea.
So I believe there are nine nuclear weapon states.
North Korea, they don't put in because they're not certain about whether they actually have the engineering capacity to develop an operational nuclear weapon.
But since North Korea has tested nuclear devices twice, it at least seems likely that they also are one of the nuclear weapon states.
But according to the CPRI report, there are four countries that have deployed nuclear weapons and those are the U.S., Russia, UK, and France.
And then, according to their view, Israel, India, Pakistan, and China don't have their nuclear weapons deployed.
They have nuclear weapons, but non-deployed.
In the case of China, for example.
Yeah, I was surprised to see that, that the Chinese, they don't have nuclear bombs on the tips of their missiles ready to go, huh?
That's right.
They keep their nuclear warheads separated from the delivery vehicles.
So if you measured, if you counted the number of nuclear warheads that China has in the same way that the United States and Russia count their nuclear warheads in the New START Treaty, you would say that China has, by that counting method, China has zero nuclear weapons.
In fact, China has about 200 to 240 nuclear weapons.
Well now, I don't think I saw in here any differentiation between who's got thermonukes and who doesn't.
Now, the Indians and the Pakistanis, they all use just plutonium fission bombs?
I believe that is the case with India and Pakistan.
And I believe that the United States and Russia, UK, France and China all have thermonuclear weapons.
And I would say there's a good possibility that Israel's nuclear weapons could be thermonuclear as well.
Well, I guess this is secondhand, sort of, kind of, but it was Daniel Ellsberg told me that Mordecai Venunu had told him that they had 600 nuclear weapons.
Some of them, I don't know about the majority or anything, but at least some of them being H-bombs.
Well, there are different reports on how many nuclear weapons Israel has, and the most common reports that I've seen put the number between, somewhere between 80 and 200, and the CPRI study actually puts the Israeli nuclear arsenal at 80 weapons.
That's more than enough, right?
80 nukes is far more.
Yeah, anything above zero is more than enough.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, I forget who it was, but some mathematician once wrote that, hey, you know, just the fact that these things are sitting around means that there's a statistical probability greater than zero that at some point one or more of them will be used.
Just simple as that.
We've got to get rid of these things.
I couldn't agree more.
I think nuclear weapons continue to threaten humanity, and we continue not to do enough to move these weapons toward zero.
This report did point out that the number of nuclear weapons decreased by about 10% over the last year, and the trend is in that direction.
But I would say the trend is not rapid enough, and at the same time, most of the major nuclear weapons states, or actually all five of the initial nuclear weapons states, are continuing to modernize their nuclear weapons, and India and Pakistan are continuing to grow their nuclear arsenals.
In those two countries, the arsenals actually increased from 2010 to 2011.
Well, and you know, just to read here about the new START treaty, as you write right here in the first paragraph of this piece at Common Dreams, right now, America and Russia both have a bit more than 2,000 nukes, deployed nukes each, and they're supposed to be down to 1,500 by 2017.
I mean, boy, we're talking snail's pace of getting rid of these things.
Yeah, you know, when President Obama came into office, he was talking about, he was talking about a world without nuclear weapons, but he also said at that time, but he didn't see it happening within his lifetime.
So, not talking about a very rapid pace, but new START, that treaty, was meant to be just a starting point.
You know, President Obama, I think, along with President Medvedev, believed that they were going to take that step for the new START treaty, and then continue negotiations to bring the numbers down further.
But at this point, they still haven't made any progress, and we, beyond that, beyond the goal of 1,550 nuclear weapons, and that, I should say, is not just 1,550 nuclear weapons, it's 1,550 deployed strategic weapons, so it doesn't count reserve weapons, and it doesn't count weapons waiting to be dismantled.
Right.
And so, you know, that isn't a very rapid pace, and it means that we're still facing a number of dangers from nuclear weapons.
Are they useful for anything other than threatening genocidal responses or, you know, mutually assured destruction?
I guess I could imagine, you know, using neutron bombs in space to take out other incoming nukes, or maybe taking out a field of missile silos, hardened missile silos with nukes in order to, you know, preemptive strike, that sort of thing.
But as far as, you know, in any kind of battle that I can imagine, you know, using them against conventional forces, tank divisions, or ships at sea, it doesn't seem like they'd be effective, really, for that kind of thing.
Well, they might be effective, but it would also be a vast overkill.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I talked us right into the break here, David.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's David Krieger.
We'll be right back.
Talking nukes.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Krieger.
He's president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at WagingPeace.org, and we're talking about the global nuclear weapons stockpile here.
I was asking whether these are really just good for mutually assured destruction, or whether they actually could be very useful on a battlefield, and David, I think you were saying, yeah, you could take out tanks with them, but it's overkill.
It's overkill, and it's also provocative.
I mean, if one country thinks that it can use weapons that are, by their nature, illegal and immoral, well, that opens the door to every country doing it, and I don't think that's where any country wants to go.
So right now, the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, and particularly the United States, which has used nuclear weapons in warfare back in World War II, I think have a strong moral obligation and a practical obligation as well to do what they can to lead toward a nuclear weapons-free world as rapidly as possible.
All right.
Now, just to play the state's advocate here, same thing as the devil to me.
Seems like nuclear weapons, more or less equal distribution of, or not necessarily equal, but widespread distribution of nuclear weapons among the major powers has prevented war between the major powers.
Now, of course, this is no good for the people of the Southern Hemisphere, really, but the Europeans have not gone to war in a longer time than ever before because of, you know, the politicians themselves could get killed in the thing.
Well, I think that's a gloss that some of the leaders in the national security states would like to see the public buy, but you know, it's been 65 years since the end of World War II when nuclear weapons were used, and that isn't a very long time in the scheme of things.
And during that time, the nuclear weapons states actually have come close to nuclear war on a number of occasions by both accident and design, and perhaps the closest call was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
There's no reason to believe that any public, even in countries that have nuclear weapons, maybe especially in countries that have nuclear weapons, are safe from becoming victims of nuclear weapons just because their country possesses nuclear weapons.
Everything is based with nuclear weapons on the theory of nuclear deterrence, meaning if you have nuclear weapons, you believe somebody won't attack you because you have these weapons and threaten to retaliate.
But nuclear deterrence has many, many flaws.
We had a conference on that earlier this year and came out with what we called the Santa Barbara Declaration that was recently entered into the congressional record.
It talks about the flaws with nuclear deterrence.
You know, the most obvious flaw with nuclear deterrence is that it demands rationality of leaders, and I think you or anyone would be hard-pressed to find political leaders that are rational at all times under all conditions.
Or even part of the time.
Yeah, well, you could go there.
But without rationality, nuclear deterrence theory makes no sense at all.
And certainly nuclear deterrence theory doesn't work against countries that you can't, against peoples that you can't locate.
So if a terrorist were to get a nuclear weapon, one or more nuclear weapons, deterrence would have no power whatsoever because the threat to retaliate would be totally incredible.
Hmm.
Well, and you know, there was something that came out less than a year ago, I guess.
Must have been last fall by, it was I think Air Force generals and very close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, like very high up, Robert Gates right-hand man kind of a thing, that said we only need 14 nukes and that'll be enough to deter anybody who needs deterring.
That's plenty to take care of Moscow and Beijing and Berlin if we need to.
And so we don't, anything more than that is just dangerous to have around.
And that was even at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Well, right up there.
Yeah, I don't, there was a study a year or so ago where three Air Force officers, maybe a civilian related to the Air Force, but there were three authors all connected with the Air Force and they said 311, I think the figure was.
But, you know, there are many different figures of what would constitute minimum deterrence.
All of those figures are far under where we stand now.
And we should be, we should be moving in that direction, but really our goal should be zero nuclear weapons.
It's not just a question of what somebody thinks would be effective for nuclear deterrence.
The real question, I think, is how do we get to zero?
Well, yeah, that was my point is that they're conceding your point.
I mean, they're basically saying that, you know, they're conceding 99% of the argument to you, sir, and saying, well, you know, these, this giant stockpile of nuclear weapons is completely unnecessary, really.
And then so they say they need 14.
I say, no, you're right.
We need zero.
And after all, we could carpet bomb, we could, our fighter jets can control the airspace of any part of the world in an afternoon if they insist on it, and pave the way for our heavy bombers to come in and carpet bomb any capital city we felt like off the face of the earth with daisy cutters and conventional TNT bombs.
And that doesn't sound particularly desirable.
No, not at all.
But it's certainly, we wouldn't need a nuke to do it.
We wouldn't.
And, and, and as long as, as long as we, the United States is as the most powerful military country in the world, most powerful military forces in the world continues to rely upon nuclear weapons.
We're setting an example, in essence, for other countries that, that these are, that these weapons are useful.
And, and we've been doing that now for quite a while.
We did, we certainly did it in relation to Iraq and North Korea, where we had problems with both countries and Iraq, which didn't have nuclear weapons was invaded and occupied and North Korea, which did have just a few nuclear weapons or nuclear capabilities.
We've been trying to negotiate with them.
So that I think sends a strong message to other countries too.
And we don't, we don't want to see nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries.
But the only way I think we're actually going to prevent that in the medium or longer term is to move to zero nuclear weapons for everyone.
And that's going to require US leadership, by the way.
It's not going to happen.
If the US doesn't lead, the Russians won't be able to reduce their nuclear weapons arsenals.
If the Russians don't, the Chinese won't and so on.
Well, I totally agree with that.
I think we could just unilaterally disarm.
We still have the conventional forces to retaliate even from an aggressive nuclear strike by any power, which we're more or less friends with the Russians and the Chinese.
And of course, all the Europeans, we don't have any enemies anyway, really.
So, right.
And just, just to be clear, I'm not suggesting unilateral disarmament.
I'm suggesting US leadership to get every country at the bargaining table to do what is necessary to take the necessary steps to go to zero nuclear weapon.
Right.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time on the show, David.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
That's David Krieger at WagingPeace.org, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
