President George W. Bush's State of the Union remarks labeling Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an axis of evil quickly circled the globe and re-ignited fears of a more aggressive brand of U.S. unilateralism.
"Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap." In honor of the anniversary of the debut of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", the Non-Proliferation Project provides some choice quotes from this dark masterpiece.
Rhetoric and missile tests may be flying, but for many Indians nuclear war seems a remote prospect. At the height of tensions between India and Pakistan, people in the bustling city of Bangalore, India's answer to California's Silicon Valley, had decided that they were far more concerned about the dismal state of the IT economy than they were concerned about nuclear Armageddon. Fear of nuclear war in this South Indian city is conspicuous in its absence.
The Bush administration has decided to support plans to dispose of excess weapons-usable plutonium by burning it in nuclear reactors as mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. This support comes after a year-long review and is a welcome development in efforts to secure, control and dispose of nuclear materials in the United States and in Russia. The U.S. program is part of a bilateral agreement signed with Russia, with each country committed to eliminate 34 tons of plutonium. Nevertheless, a very important question still remains: What will be done with the rest of the excess U.S. plutonium?
The Nuclear Posture Review unveiled by the Bush administration in early January continues to reduce the nuclear force from its current levels, down from their high point of some 15,000 deployed strategic warheads in 1987. The review, however, retains the basic concepts that defined the cold war nuclear arsenal and abandons plans for deeper, irreversible reductions envisioned by previous administrations.
The fierce partisan political warfare that has characterized Washington policy issues since the mid-1990s has now thankfully subsided. All hope that the new spirit will last beyond the current crisis. But principled disagreements on key issues remain, particularly on missile defense. There is no bipartisan consensus.
The United States and Russian Federation reached an important arms control milestone on December 5 when both sides completed reductions in the strategic nuclear arsenals to 6,000 accountable weapons each, as required under the START I Treaty. These reductions are a massive reduction from the size of the nuclear arsenals both countries deployed when the agreement was signed in 1991, and demonstrate the value of negotiated, verified arms reduction agreements in U.S. security policy.