The Age of Radiance (61 page)

The entire point of missile defense for the continental United States is nonsensical for the same reason that was never given to President Reagan: the nation is already well enough secured by everything else in the Department of Defense’s arsenal. Any incoming missiles would easily be identified, and their source would then suffer a military retaliation unparalleled since Nagasaki. Lieutenant General Robert Gard directly made this point: “What country is suicidal enough to launch a weapon of mass destruction on a long-range missile when it leaves a trail of where it came from?” We don’t need to add billions in research to the tens of billions already sluicing through the Pentagon for a concept that hasn’t worked in two decades on a problem that we have already solved. But the bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, goes on, apparently unstoppable. Under Reagan, missile defense was annually budgeted at $2–$4 billion. Twenty years on with nothing to show for it, under Bush and Obama, that figure has more than doubled, to $8–$9 billion.

On December 8, 1991, in a hunting lodge outside Brest, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The lodge didn’t have a Xerox machine, so to make copies they had to fax the agreement back and forth. The Soviets still had 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads, 822 in bombers, 6,623 in ballistic missiles, and 2,760 in torpedoes and cruise missiles, and the United States still had its tremendous nuclear arsenal aimed at a Soviet Union, which no longer existed. The arms race, which could’ve been strangled in its crib by the right attitudes of Secretary of State James Byrnes and which could’ve been stopped nearly two decades ago if Ed Teller had been more honest in his glowing forecasts, continues . . . even though one side of the race has folded its tents and slipped away.

Today America continues to spend $55 billion a year on atomic weapons that have never and will never be used. Cutting this arsenal in half would save $80 billion over the next ten years, and even then the Pentagon would have fourteen times as many warheads as the nearest competitor, China. Congressman Barney Frank asked the DoD to pick one of the three methods
they had of atomic-striking the Soviet Union—ICBMs, bombers, or submarines—and eliminate it, to save around $10 billion a year. The Department of Defense refused, insisting it must keep the tripartite weapons system, for which there is no enemy. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

Over the past decade, Republican secretaries of state Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, Democrat secretary of defense William J. Perry, and Democrat senator Sam Nunn have joined physicist Sidney D. Drell to promote an abolition of all nuclear weapons, period. Shultz was at the table in Iceland when Reagan backed away from the Zero Option to safeguard Star Wars, and Shultz has regretted Reagan’s choice ever since. In 1991, Nunn worked with the Pentagon and the Department of Energy to secure the nuclear weapons left behind by the collapsed USSR. One problem is that the Soviets were so lax in their waste disposal that the surrounding territory is nearly luminous. Dosimeters carried by American staff looking for sequestered nuclear arms have been set off by woodpiles, deer, and fish.

During that period, a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service defector revealed in his debriefing that as of 1991, at least one Russian oligarch had his own Bomb at an exurban Moscow dacha. When the spy said he thought this sounded suspicious, the “businessman” said,
“Do not be so naive. With economic conditions the way they are in Russia today, anyone with enough money can buy a nuclear bomb. It’s no big deal really.”

Without the iron hand of the Kremlin in place, the West had a new worry—that terrorists might realize easy access to nuclear materials from the collapsed empire and manufacture “dirty” bombs—which was then used as an excuse for a new arms race in order to retaliate. But dirty-bomb-wielding terrorists would require about a hundred pounds of HEU (highly enriched uranium) at minimum 90 percent U-235 (which is traceable and in short supply; nuclear reactors run on 4 percent HEU), a sophisticated workforce, and the ability to keep the two fifty-pound sets of fuel away from each other, or they might spontaneously chain-react before being delivered to their target. As for buying nuclear weapons from a rogue state, analyst Matthew Bunn explained,
“A dictator or oligarch bent on maintaining power is highly unlikely to take the immense risk of transferring such a devastating capability to terrorists they cannot control, given the ever-present possibility that the material would be traced back to its origin.” The worst terrorist attack in history was engineered with box cutters and a few weeks of flying lessons. Dirty bombs are a myth and an absurdity.

I
n the end, the biggest victims of the Cold War arms race turned out to be American and Soviet citizens. After Nevada’s underground nuclear tests ended in 1992—though the US Congress never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the agreement was followed in practice—the Department of Energy measured the worst of the region’s water at millions of picocuries per liter (the federal peak for human consumption? Twenty picocuries). In 1979, the
New England Journal of Medicine
found a rise in leukemia mortality in local children born between 1951 and 1958, and a 1997 National Cancer Institute report found that Nevada Test Site explosions had left 5.5 exabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 across nearly the whole of the continental United States from 1952 to 1957, enough to produce somewhere between ten thousand and seventy-five thousand cases of childhood thyroid cancer. Women’s breasts and ovaries are unusually susceptible to radiation cancers—the misogyny of the 1950s CDC come to bitter truth. Today, an American’s health is more likely to be impaired by the leftover pollution of those tests than any other form of radiation except suntanning, an especially galling bit of news since, as the world has never suffered a nuclear attack since Nagasaki, the vast majority of those tests were essentially pointless.

Native American miners working for the AEC from the 1940s to the 1960s in the Southwest were not informed that the dust they breathed was contaminated with radon gas, as was much of their well water. Led by Stewart Udall, a group of miners tried to sue the federal government, but their case was dismissed. Eventually, however, the long arc of the moral universe bent to justice in 1990 with the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, giving Nevada Test Site downwinders with medical proof $50,000, uranium miners $100,000, and test participants $75,000. It has been difficult, however, for the widows of Navajo miners to amass the required paperwork and receive their due.

The United States of course is not alone in polluting the world with near-worthless atomic tests. The Soviet Nevada in Kazakhstan was the Polygon, a territory that suffered 456 detonations between 1949 and 1989—twenty-five hundred Hiroshimas. The tests
“smelt . . . you know, like hair. Like hair burning. The smell came back from the earth every time it rained,” a woman living nearby said.

While Fukushima dropped an estimated 10 million curies, Chernobyl 100 million, and Three Mile Island 50, the over five hundred open-air
nuclear bomb detonations of those decades saturated the planet with 70 billion curies. The Centers for Disease Control has reported that every person born after 1951 in the continental United States has been exposed to radioactive fallout from the Nevada Test Site, that
“all organs and tissues of the body have received some radiation exposure,” and of the nearly six hundred thousand Americans dying of cancer every year, eleven thousand will die from the remnants of bomb tests.

D
uring the last years of his life, Enrico Fermi repeatedly asked the question now known as the Fermi paradox: “Where is everybody?” He was asking why, despite the great size and age of the universe, no extraterrestrial civilizations had been discovered. At times, he believed that the answer might be nuclear annihilation. Journalist Adam Gopnik:
“Spengler may have been right about the foreordained blossoming and decay of civilizations, on a far more cosmic scale than he could’ve imagined: once a society reaches to sun power, and makes nuclear weapons, it destroys itself. That’s why we feel ourselves to be alone in the universe. What we see staring at the vast night sky is not a mystery but a morgue, full of suicided civilizations.”

However dramatic and evocative these mournful thoughts might be, they are today nostalgic tailings of the fading Atomic Age, as dated as corsets. What used to be a prestigious symbol of national achievement—in 1965 French president Charles de Gaulle insisted,
“No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent”—is now taken up only by pariah states such as North Korea and Pakistan. These two, along with Israel and India, are the only countries to acquire nuclear arsenals since Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy breakthrough of July 1, 1968. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons now has 183 countries vowing to never produce or acquire atomic weapons while the five original nuclear powers—the United States, the USSR, Britain, France, and China—agreed to reduce and in time eliminate their arsenals. In 1993, South Africa gave up its atomic stockpile left over from apartheid, and in 1996, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan gave up theirs left over from the Soviet Union.

Since the NPT, every instance of a state’s going nuclear has been a defensive posture. After she was defeated by China in 1962’s Sino-Indian War over their borders, India wanted its own warheads; when Pakistan was defeated by India in Kashmir in both 1948 and 1965 and then again in Bangladesh in 1971, it wanted its own arsenal; and the constant mentioning by the neighboring politicians of Israel of how wonderful it would be to wipe that nation
from the face of the earth led to Tel Aviv’s nuclear cache. After successfully building nuclear weapons for Islamabad, Abdul Qadeer Khan—the Johnny Appleseed of rogue-state plutonium—went on to help start atomic weapons R&D for the threatened governments of Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In July 2002, the Myanmar junta told the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it was building a nuclear reactor with Russian advisers, but two Burmese exiles insisted that a parallel complex, this time with North Korean advisers, was being built to engineer bomb-worthy plutonium. In 2011, a Saudi prince/government official said his country would consider creating its own atomic weapons program if it found itself cornered by Israel’s and Iran’s, while Iran’s leaders developed a renewed surge of interest in nuclear weapons after the United States invaded Iraq, the Teheran mullahs reasoning that the Americans would never have entered Baghdad if Saddam Hussein was armed with the Bomb. To confirm that point of view, US news reports in 2012 were filled with Washington insiders discussing whether to invade Iran before it was atomic powered, yet there has never been similar televised debate about attacking nuclear-enabled North Korea. Then on April 9, 2013, after Pyongyang once again rattled its warheads, a prominent member of South Korea’s parliament insisted in Washington that it was now time for Seoul to have its own atomic defense.

The costs of going rogue in the eyes of the Non-Proliferation Treaty are severe—investigation by the IAEA, international boycotts, and censure—and some signatories have supplemented those measures with assassinations and cyberattacks. On November 29, 2011, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization director, Fereydoon Abbasi, was on his morning commute when a man on a motorcycle pulled up and attached a bomb to his car. Abbasi and his wife escaped more or less unharmed, but one of his colleagues was killed by a similar attack, as was an Iranian particle physicist in January 2010, an electronics specialist in July 2011, and a manager at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in January 2012. Teheran blamed Tel Aviv and Washington for the assassinations, as well as for the malware viruses known as Flame and Stuxnet, which were discovered in the spring of 2012 infecting Iran’s uranium enrichment computers. Flame is lithe spyware that turns on computer microphones and Skypes the recorded conversations; scans the neighborhood’s Bluetooth gadgets for names and phone numbers; and takes pictures of the computer’s screen every fifteen to sixty seconds. Stuxnet infected Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges and sped them up until they committed suicide.