The output at Rocky Flats, which at one point during the Cold War hit 1,000 pits per year, dwarfs the modern ambitions of Los Alamos. Still, the new production is expected to generate levels of radiological and hazardous waste that the lab has not experienced. This comes on top of the contamination already present, which the government estimates will cost some $7 billion to clean up.
“We’re endangering our community for an unnecessary arms race that puts us all at risk,” says Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
Mr. Hennigan says, almost in passing, that “nuclear weapons do deter our adversaries.”
There is a lot to unpack in these six words. There certainly are situations in which one country’s nuclear weapons do deter its adversaries. Russia’s threats to use its nuclear weapons have clearly deterred the United States and NATO from doing more to support Ukraine.
But does deterrence guarantee that these weapons will not be used? Because a failure of deterrence will cause a catastrophe beyond reckoning.
A nuclear war between the United States and Russia could kill hundreds of millions of people in the first afternoon, and the ensuing climate disruption and famine could kill three-quarters of humanity over the next two years. Is there any conceivable benefit that can be derived from possessing these weapons that is worth running this terrible risk?
There have been many near misses already during the nuclear weapons era, crises where certain countries actually began preparations to launch nuclear weapons.
As former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara pointed out, we have not survived this far into the nuclear era because we knew what we were doing. Rather, as McNamara put it, “It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”
The idea that deterrence makes us safe is a dangerous myth. As our highest national security priority, we should be actively seeking a world without nuclear weapons. We don’t know if such an effort can succeed; we have never tried. We do know what will happen if deterrence fails.
Ira Helfand
Northampton, Mass.
The writer is a former president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
The United States is estimated to have roughly 3,700 warheads in its active arsenal. This includes 1,670 thermonuclear warheads deployed on 660 powerful long-range missiles on land and at sea or available for delivery on strategic bombers. There are also another 100 tactical nuclear bombs that can be delivered on shorter-range aircraft, according to independent estimates.5 The use of a fraction of these weapons, many primed for launch within minutes, would lead to mass destruction on an unprecedented global scale.
Contrary to the hype, more nuclear weapons would not improve, on balance, the U.S. capability to deter nuclear attack. In fact, significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.
The experience of the Cold War proves that nuclear arms racing produces only losers and increased risks for everyone.
U.S. Air Force technicians perform maintenance on a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Plans to replace the Minuteman missile with the Sentinel ICBM could be in trouble because of the Sentinel’s rising costs and production delays. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Airman 1st Class Kristoffer Kaubisch)
Nevertheless, following more than a decade of deteriorating relations between the United States and its main nuclear rivals, dimming prospects for disarmament diplomacy, and major nuclear weapons modernization efforts, China, Russia, and the United States are now on the precipice of a dangerous era of unconstrained nuclear competition. Concern in U.S. national security circles about Chinese and Russian nuclear capabilities has grown since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine effectively shut down the U.S.-Russian nuclear risk reduction and arms control dialogue. The Kremlin has rejected the White House proposal to negotiate a new nuclear arms control framework to replace the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which expires on February 5, 2026.1 China has declined U.S. offers to continue bilateral discussions on reducing nuclear risk and on nuclear postures.2
Moreover, as the U.S. intelligence community forecasts that China could amass as many as 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, with several hundred of them deployed on a larger force of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), some members of the nuclear weapons establishment, leading members of Congress, and Biden administration officials have suggested that the massive U.S. arsenal may not be sufficient to deter two “near peer” nuclear rivals.3 China is currently estimated to have some 500 nuclear weapons and 310 long-range, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.4
In 2023, the nine nuclear-armed states spent a combined total of $91,393,404,739 on their arsenals – equivalent to $2,898 a second. ICAN’s latest report “Surge: 2023 Global nuclear weapons spending” shows $10.7 billion more was spent on nuclear weapons in 2023 than in 2022.
In 2023 China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK and US spent a combined $91.4 billion on their nuclear arms, which breaks down to $173,884 per minute, or $2,898 a second. The United States’ share of total spending, $51.5 billion, is more than all the other nuclear-armed countries put together and accounts for 80% of the increase in nuclear weapons spending in 2023. The next biggest spender was China which expended $11.8 billion with Russia spending the third largest amount at $8.3 billion. The United Kingdom’s spending was up significantly for the second year in a row with a 17% increase to $8.1 billion.
$387 billion in 5 years
“Surge” is the 5th edition of ICAN’s global nuclear weapons spending report. In the last 5 years, $387 billion has been spent on nuclear weapons, with the yearly spending increasing by 34% from $68.2 billion to $91.4 billion per year, as all nine nuclear-armed states continue to modernise, and in some cases expand, their arsenals. Alicia Sanders-Zakre, co-author of the report [and NukeWatch’s summer 2019 intern] noted:
“The acceleration of spending on these inhumane and destructive weapons over the past five years is not improving global security but posing a global threat.”
UN secretary general makes plea for nuclear states to agree on mutual pledge not to be first to use nuclear weapons
“The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has warned that the spread of artificial intelligence technology multiplies the threat of nuclear war, and that humanity is now ‘on a knife’s edge’ as dangers to its existence coalesce.”
Delegates listen to a message from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during the First Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (AFP or licensors)
Guterres’s warning is due to be shown on a recorded video to be played on Friday morning at the annual meeting of the US Arms Control Association (ACA) in Washington.
In the video, the secretary general makes his most impassioned plea to date for the nuclear weapons states to take their non-proliferation obligations seriously, and in particular, agree on a mutual pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.
“The regime designed to prevent the use, testing and proliferation of nuclear weapons is weakening,”
A senior Biden administration official warned on Friday that “absent a change” in nuclear strategy by China and Russia, the United States may be forced to expand its nuclear arsenal, after decades of cutting back through now largely abandoned arms control agreements.
The comments on Friday from Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the National Security Council, were the most explicit public warning yet that the United States was prepared to shift from simply modernizing its arsenal to expanding it…
It starts with a sudden attack. North Korea, out of paranoia and fear, launches a nuclear strike on the United States, hitting its targets. The United States retaliates with a salvo of its own nuclear missiles. However, in order to hit North Korea, the missiles must pass over Russia. Attempts to communicate with the Russian president fail and Russia’s nuclear warning system makes him think it’s an attack on his country. So he launches his nuclear bombs, this time at the United States.
It’s a global nuclear war. And it happens in minutes.
That’s the setup at the heart of “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” a new book by investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen. The book, released at the end of March, outlines how one attack from an isolated state can set off a chain reaction of nuclear policy, with poor communication and split-second decisions triggering widespread nuclear war. It’s a fictional scena
We rarely consider the dangers these days, but our existence depends on it.
“‘Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,’ cautions UN Secretary-General António Guterres. ‘We must reverse course.'”
Nuclear war is madness. Were a nuclear weapon to be launched at the United States, including from a rogue nuclear-armed nation like North Korea, American policy dictates a nuclear counterattack. This response would almost certainly set off a series of events that would quickly spiral out of control. “The world could end in the next couple of hours,” Gen. Robert Kehler, the former commander of US Strategic Command, told me in an interview.
We sit on the razor’s edge. Vladimir Putin has said he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction should NATO overstep on Ukraine, and North Korea accuses the US of having “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” For generations, the American public has viewed a nuclear World War III as a remote prospect, but the threat is ever-present. “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” cautions UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “We must reverse course.”
So far, we haven’t. The Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war remain firmly in place.
The US government has spent trillions of dollars over the decades preparing to fight a nuclear war, while refining protocols meant to keep the government functioning after hundreds of millions of Americans become casualties of a nuclear holocaust, and the annual budgets continue to grow. The nation’s integrated nuclear war plan in the 1960s was utter madness. It almost certainly remains so today.
The threat of nuclear war has dangled over humankind for much too long. We have survived so far through luck and brinkmanship. But the old, limited safeguards that kept the Cold War cold are long gone. Nuclear powers are getting more numerous and less cautious. We’ve condemned another generation to live on a planet that is one grave act of hubris or human error away from destruction without demanding any action from our leaders. That must change.
In the coming weeks, Washington, Beijing, and other capitals need to pressure Putin to abandon any ideas about putting nuclear weapons in orbit. As President Joe Biden noted on Feb. 16, that deployment “hasn’t happened yet, and my hope is it will not.”
Fifty-seven years ago, through the Outer Space Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to codify a fundamental nuclear taboo: nuclear weapons shall not be stationed in orbit or elsewhere in outer space. But there is growing concern that Russia is working on an orbiting anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons system involving a nuclear explosive device that would, if deployed, violate the treaty, undermine space security, and worsen the technological and nuclear arms race.
The flash created by the Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test on July 9,1962 as seen from Honolulu, 900 miles away. (Wikimedia Commons)
The White House confirmed on Feb. 15 that U.S. intelligence uncovered evidence that Russia is developing an ASAT weapon that “would be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, to which more than 130 countries have signed up to, including Russia.” Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a nondenial denial, claiming on Feb. 20 that Russia remains “categorically against…the placement of nuclear weapons in space.”
An ASAT system involving a nuclear explosive device could produce a massive surge of radiation and a powerful electromagnetic pulse that, depending on the altitude of the explosion and the size of the warhead, could indiscriminately destroy, blind, or disable many of the 9,500 commercial and military space satellites now in orbit.
“In his New Year’s Day address Monday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said he will strengthen his military’s preemptive strike, missile defense and retaliatory capabilities in response to the North Korean nuclear threat.”
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his military should “thoroughly annihilate” the United States and South Korea if provoked, state media reported Monday, after he vowed to boost national defense to cope with what he called an unprecedented U.S.-led confrontation.
North Korea has increased its warlike rhetoric in recent months in response to an expansion of U.S.-South Korean military drills. Experts expect Kim will continue to escalate his rhetoric and weapons tests because he likely believes he can use heightened tensions to wrest U.S. concessions if former President Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site in northern Kazakhstan, where hundreds of nuclear bombs were detonated by the Soviet Union until 1989, is now dotted with craters and boreholes [CTBTO Preparatory Commission/Wikimedia Commons]
In the quiet and peaceful steppe of Kazakhstan, a dark and ominous legacy lingers beneath the surface. Over four decades between 1949 and 1989, 456 nuclear bombs were detonated by the Soviet Union at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northern Kazakhstan.
While the echoes of nuclear explosions have long faded, the scars of nuclear testing run deep. More than 1.5 million people in Kazakhstan were exposed to the toxic fallout from those tests. Countless lives were irreversibly altered, and the environment was forever scarred. I am a living testament to the horrors of nuclear testing, as I was born without arms due to the effects of nuclear radiation.
“…Human beings make the threats, evaluate the threats, and decide how to respond. If human beings are prone to folly—and we are—and if human beings run the deterrence process, then nuclear deterrence is inherently flawed. It will fail. Over the long run it cannot be safe. Eventually, human failure will lead to a catastrophic nuclear war.”
Almost everyone who works actively against nuclear weapons is, at some level, appalled by the immorality of nuclear weapons. This makes sense because the indiscriminate killing of children, grandparents, people with disabilities, and a host of other ordinary folks is appalling.
As a result, the first argument that almost all activists reach for is moral. They bring forward hibakusha to put a human face on the immorality. They talk about the indigenous people who suffered during the mining and production of nuclear weapons. They show graphic pictures of the destruction, the burns, the radiation sickness, and other catastrophic damage done by the bombings. They say, in effect, “Look at the immorality!” They sometimes point to it with a hint of outrage in their voices. How can people not be moved by these horrible, immoral acts?
And yet here we are, 78 years later, in the midst of a second nuclear weapons arms race. Every nation that possesses nuclear weapons is either expanding or upgrading its nuclear arsenal. How can this be?
The Russian foreign ministry has said Moscow will view any move to return US nuclear weapons to the UK as an escalation and will respond with “countermeasures” for its own security.
The foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova was responding to a report last week about an item in the 2024 US air force budget for building a dormitory at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk for personnel on a “potential surety mission” – military jargon for nuclear safety and security. It raised the prospect of the return of US nuclear weapons to British soil for the first time in more than 15 years.
“If this step is ever made, we will view it as escalation, as a step toward escalation that would take things to a direction that is quite opposite to addressing the pressing issue of pulling all nuclear weapons out of European countries,” Zakharova said.
“The agency spending more on pit production than originally envisioned isn’t technically a cost overrun because no funding baseline was ever established…This means there’s no benchmark anyone can point to and say the agency has spent too much, she said, which in turn leaves funding for pits open-ended.”
Federal officials estimate Los Alamos National Laboratory won’t produce 30 nuclear bomb cores until 2030 — four years after the legally required deadline.
A plutonium pellet, “illuminated by its own energy,” according to the Department of Energy. DOE
The additional time needed to produce 30 bowling-ball-sized warhead triggers, known as pits, will cost the lab significantly more than originally estimated, a government watchdog said in a newly released report.
The agency in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal estimates in the Government Accountability Office report it will take until 2030 for the Los Alamos lab’s plutonium facility to be capable of making 30 pits.
“My book chronicles the birth of the nuclear age. Since the first nuclear testing and bombing in 1945, the man-made nuclear danger has continually increased. Now, today’s 13,000 atomic weapons are unthinkably destructive, indiscriminate, climate-altering devices that can be unleashed by design, by sabotage, or by accident. Therefore, I strongly endorse Congresswoman Norton’s Nuclear Abolition and Conversion Act, H.R. 2775…”
“Thanks to the bipartisan efforts of U.S. Sens. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the Senate recently passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act making Trinity Downwinders, and communities in three other western states, eligible for recognition and compensation by the federal government. It is now up to congressional leaders to meet in conference and negotiate a final version of the bill.”
Of all the chores I had to do during summer visits to my grandmother Savina’s home in southern New Mexico, hauling water out of the cistern was my least favorite.
As a city kid, I was always puzzled by the fact that she still insisted on using rainwater for cooking and cleaning, even after my family had upgraded her house with indoor plumbing. But I knew better than to question the wisdom of a woman who had managed to lift her family out of rural poverty in the span of a single generation and conceded that maybe the tortillas she cooked on her wood-burning stove did taste better with fresh rainwater. It certainly never occurred to her that the rainwater in that cistern, along with most of the locally harvested food she used to sustain her large family, was likely contaminated as a result of the detonation of the world’s first nuclear weapon, which occurred 72 miles west of Savina’s home on July 16, 1945. Continue reading
Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester stands to denounce nuclear weapons on April 4, 2023, during a community meeting with representatives from Los Alamos National Laboratory at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Wester and representatives of other faiths and anti-nuclear groups organized a prayer and remembrance ceremony Sunday afternoon at the Santa María de la Paz Community Hall on the anniversary of the Trinity test north of Alamogordo and a 1979 uranium mill spill near Church Rock. Jim Weber/New Mexican file photo
On July 16, 1945, the world was changed forever by a flash in the New Mexico desert.
The state’s link to that fateful day — from the builders of the first atomic bomb, to its 1945 detonation in a test at Trinity Site, to the victims of contamination decades later — gives New Mexico a special responsibility to lead the way to a peaceful future free of nuclear weapons, Archbishop of Santa Fe John Wester said Sunday afternoon…
…Seventy-eight years after the device was exploded in a test north of Alamogordo, its reverberations are still being felt. Wester has made nuclear disarmament one of his key causes. He and representatives of other faiths and anti-nuclear groups organized a prayer and remembrance ceremony Sunday afternoon at the Santa María de la Paz Community Hall on the anniversary of the Trinity test north of Alamogordo and a 1979 uranium mill spill near Church Rock.
“These are two examples of nuclear colonialism in rural New Mexican communities and what makes today such a politically and emotionally charged day,” said Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México, a book that examines the state’s nuclear history in the context of the Spanish and American colonialism that preceded it.
Gómez said the national laboratories that employ so many New Mexicans could be repurposed to discover cures for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reinforced warnings that Russia may be planning to sabotage the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which Moscow’s forces have occupied since the start of the war. In response, the Kremlin accused the government in Kyiv of planning its own provocation. Concern has run high since last month’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam triggered catastrophic flooding and drained a reservoir used for the plant’s cooling system. The UN’s atomic watchdog agency, which has said it’s seen no evidence of explosives, is seeking fresh access to rooftops of reactors and other parts of the complex, IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said.
The tripolar nuclear age could put human survival at risk. But some experts cite a number of three-body lessons from nature — starting with Newton’s — that illuminate the issue and suggest possible ways forward.
Physicists have long explored how phenomena in groups of three can sow chaos. A new three-body problem, they warn, could lead to not only global races for new armaments but also thermonuclear war. . If achieved, the rise would represent a fivefold increase from the “minimum deterrent” that Beijing possessed for more than a half-century and would make it a nuclear peer of Moscow and Washington.
Dr. Newman calls the tripolar state “much less resilient” than the bipolar standoff. Even so, three-body theorists see a number of ways that the unthinkable might be avoided.
For instance, Dr. Krepinevich, in a Foreign Affairs article last year, argued that Moscow could fade into economic and strategic insignificance, leaving a strong Beijing and Washington to “navigate their way to a new bipolar equilibrium.” The armed revolt over the weekend in Russia drives home not only Moscow’s weakness but the threat of new instability in an atomic superpower.
On a different note, Siegfried S. Hecker , a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, argued that Washington should aim to deal with the rival superpowers as separate entities.
“I don’t see Russia and China getting together” on atomic strategies, he said. “I see it as two bipolars.” As the Ukraine war rages and Washington has little interaction with Moscow…
“…the safety of these weapons is a persistent worry for Washington. U.S. intelligence agencies said in their 2023 Annual Threat assessment that ‘Russia’s nuclear material security … remains a concern despite improvements to material protection, control, and accounting at Russia’s nuclear sites since the 1990s.'”
The Wagner mercenary group’s march on Moscow has revived an old fear in Washington: What happens to Russia’s nuclear stockpile in the event of domestic upheaval?
An agreement on Saturday by Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to order his fighters back to their camps quelled immediate worries of major conflict inside Russia. But the episode signaled that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grasp on power is weakening.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned there is a “serious danger” of NATO being drawn further into the Ukraine war if members of the alliance continue to supply military weaponry to Kyiv.
…“This is a serious danger of further drawing NATO into this military conflict,” he added.
During his speech to the forum, Putin also suggested Russia’s large number of nuclear weapons would “guarantee” its security – noting that Russia had more such weapons than NATO countries.
Russia has a total stockpile of around 6,250 nuclear warheads as of January 2021, according to the Arms Control Association. The US has more than 5,500 while two other NATO member states, Britain and France, have about 220 and 290 nuclear warheads, respectively.
“Nuclear weapons are created to guarantee our security in the broader sense and the existence of the Russian state,” Putin said.
“But first of all, there is no need and secondly the very fact of talking about it reduces the possibility of the threshold for using these weapons being reduced.”
In its report “Wasted: 2022 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons shows in 2022, the year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nine nuclear-armed states spent $82.9 billion on their nuclear weapons, more than $157,000 per minute, an overall increase of $2.5 billion from 2021.
Nine countries spent $82.9 billion on nuclear weapons, of which the private sector earned at least $29 billion in 2022. The United States spent more than all of the other nuclear armed states combined, $43.7 billion. Russia spent 22% of what the U.S. did, at $9.6 billion, and China spent just over a quarter of the U.S. total, at $11.7 billion.
This is the fourth annual report documenting massive investments in global nuclear weapons spending. Through an ever-changing and challenging security environment, from security threats of climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nuclear weapons spending has steadily increased, with no resulting measurable improvement on the security environment. If anything, the situation is getting worse.
As companies throw money at lobbyists and researchers to assert the continued relevance and value of nuclear weapons, the record shows the inutility of weapons of mass destruction to address modern security challenges — and the legitimate fear, backed by peer-reviewed scientific evidence, that they can end global civilisation as we know it.
“We must do everything to prevent Putin’s plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus…It directly violates our constitutional non-nuclear status and would secure Russia’s control over Belarus for years ahead. And it would further threaten the security of Ukraine and all of Europe,” — exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
(CNN)—Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an on-camera interview released Sunday on the state-run Russia 1 channel.
During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.”
“It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”
“We can begin uncovering this route to a safer, saner world when we recognize that a great many people and governments cling to nuclear weapons because of their desire for national security. After all, it has been and remains a dangerous world, and for thousands of years nations (and before the existence of nations, rival territories) have protected themselves from aggression by wielding military might….
But what if global governance were strengthened to the extent that it could provide national security? ”
Some of the 800 members of Women Strike for Peace who marched at United Nations headquarters in Manhattan to demand UN mediation of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
It should come as no surprise that the world is currently facing an existential nuclear danger. In fact, it has been caught up in that danger since 1945, when atomic bombs were used to annihilate the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, however, the danger of a nuclear holocaust is probably greater than in the past. There are now nine nuclear powers―the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea―and they are currently engaged in a new nuclear arms race, building ever more efficient weapons of mass destruction. The latest entry in their nuclear scramble, the hypersonic missile, travels at more than five times the speed of sound and is adept at evading missile defense systems.
Physicists have long explored how phenomena in groups of three can sow chaos. A new three-body problem, they warn, could lead to not only global races for new armaments but also thermonuclear war. . If achieved, the rise would represent a fivefold increase from the “minimum deterrent” that Beijing possessed for more than a half-century and would make it a nuclear peer of Moscow and Washington.
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(CNN)—Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun.