De-alert Nuclear Weapons

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

De-alert Nuclear Weapons

The Berlin Wall was the most striking edifice of the Cold War and the raison d'etre for the colossal Russian and American nuclear arsenals (well over 50,000 weapons at the height of the confrontation). Ironically, although a decade has gone by since the fall of the wall and the end of the Cold War, the weapons remain. According to one estimate there are still over 13,000 strategic nuclear weapons in the inventories of Moscow and Washington. Indeed, so untenable is the present scenario that new voices, including those of former Cold Warriors, are calling for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. Paul Nitze, a member of the hawkish Reagan administration recently stated in the Washington Post that "the simplest and most direct answer to the problems of nuclear weapons has always been their complete elimination… it is the presence of nuclear weapons that threaten our existence."

While the proposed Nuclear Weapons Convention provides a well thought out route for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, this journey is unlikely to be completed overnight. Meanwhile, over 5,000 weapons remain on "hair-trigger" alert — ready to be launched within 15 minutes. Even with the best command and control and safety systems in place (though this may not be the case in Russia), these are 5,000 accidents waiting to happen.

This alarming situation has led to the realization that the only way to prevent these accidents is to de-alert the nuclear forces as soon as possible. One manifestation of this concern is the creation of a new alliance and the launch of a new campaign titled "Back from the Brink" which aims to make de-alerting an issue in the 2000 US presidential campaign. The campaign's website (www.dealert.org) provides convincing argument both in favour of de-alerting nuclear arsenals and also informs how this can be achieved. Highlighting the former issue is crucial to create the necessary ground for future leaders to build a national consensus in favour of de-alerting nuclear forces. However, the latter issue (of how de-alerting would actually work in practice) also needs to be seriously addressed by all the relevant parties — the policy makers, the armed forces, the weapons laboratories, and arms control and disarmament negotiators.

Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu,

MacArthur Fellow, St. Antony's College, Oxford

Some Ways to De-alert Nuclear Weapons

Store warheads separately from their delivery systems (this requires secure storage areas and containers; complete de-alerting of all warheads by this method may therefore take some time);

Pin open the switches used to fire missile motors;

Remove the pneumatic mechanisms that open missile silo covers;

Remove the guidance systems of missiles;

Cover land-based missile silos with large mounds of dirt that would have to be removed before a missile could be fired;

Remove the tritium bottles from warheads;

Insert an explosion-neutralizing wire in the hollow core of the plutonium "pit," making it physically impossible for the weapon to explode.

Sources: "Back from the Brink" Campaign (www.dealert.org) and Federation of American Scientists, Public Interest Report, March/April 1998