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| 5/24 |
| 2006/4/6-7 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:42715 Activity:moderate |
4/6 Another violator of Nuclear NPT... Let's bring this topic to the
Security Concil and impose economic sanction... wait... how to impose
economic sanction upon ourselves?
http://tinyurl.com/j6dfn (LA Times)
\- i dont think the analysis in this FA article is good, but there are
some interesting facts in it: http://csua.org/u/fgi ... and it is
generating some waves. i think that gaidar fellow in his comments
raises the reasonable matter of "why should the us expect cooper-
ation on iraq if the us is switching to a warfighting rather than
deterrance stance." [it is possible the casualness of the argument
is because it is in foreign affairs. i note the footnote a "more
detailed article" in the forthcoming issue of IS, which may be
better, but i doubt it]. --psb
\_ this is why I don't believe in NNPT. Without any sort of
check and balance, USA *WILL* use nuclear weapon at their
free will.
\_ The USA had nukes long before anyone else. We had the rest
of the world on it's knees, the only healthy economy, an
incredible industrial base, unmatched military might, bases
all over the world, an incredible logistics system and what
did the evil Americans do? We rebuilt the world.
\- the us promoted free trade, the us loaned people money
[and set up the BW institutions], the us provided a
giant market ... "the us rebuilt the world" is like
ALGOR inventing the internet.
\_ Don't let history hit your ass on your way out the
door. The US actively built and provided money to
rebuild the world. And even if your version was the
only thing the US did that's still infinitely far from
what any and every other country in the history of the
world has or would have done in a similar position.
\- I think you've made the point you are a clown
quite nicely, e.g. "the us had nukes long before
anyone else" etc.
Thanks for helping to make my point.
\_ They're going to modernize our nuclear arsenal, and with it they'll
build a satellite controlled system to control and guide these
missiles. THe system will of course be decentralized, and they'll
call it SkyNet. |
| 5/24 |
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| tinyurl.com/j6dfn -> www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nuke6apr06,0,523560,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines From the Los Angeles Times US Rolls Out Nuclear Plan The administration's proposal would modernize the nation's complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs. By Ralph Vartabedian Times Staff Writer April 6, 2006 The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity. The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War. Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe. Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack. But the administration blueprint is facing sharp criticism, both from those who say it does not move fast enough to consolidate plutonium stores and from those who say restarting bomb production would encourage aspiring nuclear powers across the globe to develop weapons. The plan was outlined to Congress on Wednesday by Thomas D'Agostino, head of nuclear weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department. Though the weapons proposal would restore the capacity to make new bombs, D'Agostino said it was part of a larger effort to accelerate the dismantling of aging bombs left from the Cold War. D'Agostino acknowledged in an interview that the administration was walking a fine line by modernizing the US nuclear weapons program while assuring other nations that it was not seeking a new arms race. The credibility of the contention rests on the US intent to sharply reduce its inventory of weapons. The administration is also quickly moving ahead with a new nuclear bomb program known as the "reliable replacement warhead," which began last year. Originally described as an effort to update existing weapons and make them more reliable, it has been broadened and now includes the potential for new bomb designs. Weapons labs currently are engaged in a design competition. The US built its last nuclear weapon in 1989 and last tested a weapon underground in 1992. Since the Cold War, the nation has had massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons to deter potential attacks. By contrast, it would increasingly rely on the capability to build future bombs for deterrence, D'Agostino said. The blueprint calls for a modern complex to design a new nuclear bomb and have it ready in less than four years, allowing the nation to respond to changing military requirements. Similar proposals in the past, such as for a nuclear bomb to attack underground bunkers, provoked concern that they undermined US policy to stop nuclear proliferation. The impetus for the plan is a growing belief that efforts to maintain older nuclear bombs and keep up a large nuclear weapons industrial complex are technically and financially unsustainable. Last year, a task force led by San Diego physicist David Overskei recommended that the Energy Department consolidate the system of eight existing weapons complexes into one site. Overskei said Wednesday that the cost of security alone for the current infrastructure of plants over the next two decades was roughly $25 billion. Peter Stockton, a former Energy Department security consultant who is now an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, criticized the plutonium consolidation plan in House testimony, saying it would delay the difficult work too far into the future. Stockton added in an interview that the plutonium transfer at Livermore could be accomplished in a few months. Until now, Livermore lab officials have sharply disagreed with the idea of removing plutonium from their site, saying it was essential to their work. On Wednesday, a lab spokesman said the issue was "far less controversial" and the "decision rests in Washington." The Bush plan, described at a hearing of the strategic subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, would consolidate much of the weapons capacity, but not as completely or quickly as outside critics would like. The overall plan would not be fully implemented until 2030. A crucial part of restarting US nuclear bomb production involves so-called plutonium pits, hollow spheres surrounded by high explosives. The pits start nuclear fission and trigger the nuclear fusion in a bomb. The plutonium pits were built at the Energy Department's former Rocky Flats site near Denver until the weapons plant was shut down in 1989 after it was found to have violated environmental regulations. In recent years, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has tried to start limited production of plutonium pits and hopes to build a certified pit that will enter the so-called war reserve next year. Los Alamos would be producing about 30 to 50 pits per year by 2012, but the Energy Department said that was not enough to sustain the US nuclear deterrent. In his testimony, D'Agostino estimated plutonium pits would last 45 to 60 years, after which they would be unreliable and might result in an explosion smaller than intended. Critics outside the government sharply dispute that conclusion, saying there is no evidence that pits degrade over time and that the nation can keep an adequate nuclear deterrent by maintaining its existing weapons. |
| csua.org/u/fgi -> www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85204/keir-a-lieber-daryl-g-press/the-rise-of-u-s-nuclear-primacy.html Email to Colleague Summary: For four decades, relations among the major nuclear powers have been shaped by their common vulnerability, a condition known as mutual assured destruction. But with the US arsenal growing rapidly while Russia's decays and China's stays small, the era of MAD is ending -- and the era of US nuclear primacy has begun. Keir A Lieber, the author of War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics Over Technology, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Daryl G Press, the author of Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Nuclear Weapons & Disarmament PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION For almost half a century, the world's most powerful nuclear states have been locked in a military stalemate known as mutual assured destruction (MAD). By the early 1960s, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union had grown so large and sophisticated that neither country could entirely destroy the other's retaliatory force by launching first, even with a surprise attack. Starting a nuclear war was therefore tantamount to committing suicide. During the Cold War, many scholars and policy analysts believed that MAD made the world relatively stable and peaceful because it induced great caution in international politics, discouraged the use of nuclear threats to resolve disputes, and generally restrained the superpowers' behavior. Critics of MAD, however, argued that it prevented not great-power war but the rolling back of the power and influence of a dangerously expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union. From that perspective, MAD prolonged the life of an evil empire. This debate may now seem like ancient history, but it is actually more relevant than ever -- because the age of MAD is nearing an end. Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live in the shadow of US nuclear primacy for many years to come. One's views on the implications of this change will depend on one's theoretical perspective. Hawks, who believe that the United States is a benevolent force in the world, will welcome the new nuclear era because they trust that US dominance in both conventional and nuclear weapons will help deter aggression by other countries. For example, as US nuclear primacy grows, China's leaders may act more cautiously on issues such as Taiwan, realizing that their vulnerable nuclear forces will not deter US intervention -- and that Chinese nuclear threats could invite a US strike on Beijing's arsenal. But doves, who oppose using nuclear threats to coerce other states and fear an emboldened and unconstrained United States, will worry. Nuclear primacy might lure Washington into more aggressive behavior, they argue, especially when combined with US dominance in so many other dimensions of national power. Finally, a third group -- owls, who worry about the possibility of inadvertent conflict -- will fret that US nuclear primacy could prompt other nuclear powers to adopt strategic postures, such as by giving control of nuclear weapons to lower-level commanders, that would make an unauthorized nuclear strike more likely -- thereby creating what strategic theorists call "crisis instability." ARSENAL OF A DEMOCRACY For 50 years, the Pentagon's war planners have structured the US nuclear arsenal according to the goal of deterring a nuclear attack on the United States and, if necessary, winning a nuclear war by launching a preemptive strike that would destroy an enemy's nuclear forces. For these purposes, the United States relies on a nuclear triad comprising strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and ballistic-missile-launching submarines (known as SSBNs). The triad reduces the odds that an enemy could destroy all US nuclear forces in a single strike, even in a surprise attack, ensuring that the United States would be able to launch a devastating response. Such retaliation would only have to be able to destroy a large enough portion of the attacker's cities and industry to deter an attack in the first place. The same nuclear triad, however, could be used in an offensive attack against an adversary's nuclear forces. Stealth bombers might slip past enemy radar, submarines could fire their missiles from near the enemy's shore and so give the enemy's leaders almost no time to respond, and highly accurate land-based missiles could destroy even hardened silos that have been reinforced against attack and other targets that require a direct hit. The ability to destroy all of an adversary's nuclear forces, eliminating the possibility of a retaliatory strike, is known as a first-strike capability, or nuclear primacy. The United States derived immense strategic benefits from its nuclear primacy during the early years of the Cold War, in terms of both crisis-bargaining advantages vis-a-vis the Soviet Union (for example, in the case of Berlin in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and planning for war against the Red Army in Europe. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe in the 1950s, the United States intended to win World War III by immediately launching a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, its Eastern European clients, and its Chinese ally. These plans were not the concoctions of midlevel Pentagon bureaucrats; they were approved by the highest level of the US government. US nuclear primacy waned in the early 1960s, as the Soviets developed the capability to carry out a retaliatory second strike. With this development came the onset of MAD Washington abandoned its strategy of a preemptive nuclear strike, but for the remainder of the Cold War, it struggled to escape MAD and reestablish its nuclear dominance. It expanded its nuclear arsenal, continuously improved the accuracy and the lethality of its weapons aimed at Soviet nuclear arms, targeted Soviet command-and-control systems, invested in missile-defense shields, sent attack submarines to trail Soviet SSBNs, and built increasingly accurate multiwarhead land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as stealth bombers and stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Equally unhappy with MAD, the Soviet Union also built a massive arsenal in the hope of gaining nuclear superiority. Neither side came close to gaining a first-strike capability, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the arms race as entirely irrational: both superpowers were well aware of the benefits of nuclear primacy, and neither was willing to risk falling behind. Since the Cold War's end, the US nuclear arsenal has significantly improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The US Navy has shifted a greater proportion of its SSBNs to the Pacific so that they can patrol near the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar network. The US Air Force has finished equipping its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are probably invisible to Russian and Chinese air-defense radar. And the air force has also enhanced the avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar. Finally, although the air force finished dismantling its highly lethal MX missiles in 2005 to comply with arms control agreements, it is significantly improving its remaining ICBMs by installing the MX's high-yield warheads and... |