So What's the Plan?

Yesterday Boston Globe weekly columnist James Carroll♠ stepped into the nuclear weapons swamp.

Building on the recent death of former Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara, and using the imagery from Moby Dick, Mr Carroll talked about nuclear weapons and how they are our obsession.  After condemning President Obama for timidity in Moscow, he ends up his column with this paragraph:

The president is responsible for his choices, but something else is at work. That the timid nuclear agreement he achieved in Moscow last week, protecting thousands of nukes for years, was nevertheless denounced as sell-out shows the problem. The great white whale of American militarism thrashes on. Robert McNamara, in his long agony, was the prophet of our unfinished task.

OK, so I get it.  Mr Carroll doesn't like nuclear weapons.

The problem with Mr Carroll's approach is that he condemns nuclear weapons but doesn't put forward a plan to make them go away.  He doesn't answer the hard questions.  Those hard questions turn on the fact that in a world where the big boys have hundreds of nuclear weapons having one or two may be of value for deterrence purposes or defensive purposes, but doesn't offer an offensive edge.  However, when we "eliminate" the nuclear arsenals, having one or two nuclear weapons makes a big difference.  Here are some questions that need answering before we go to the "zero" option:

• What do we do to verify that one or more of the current nuclear powers♥ doesn't hide five or ten?
• How do we bring along the aspiring nuclear powers?♦
• How do we know that there aren't some stray bombs out there with some nation unknown or some transnational group?♣
• How do we prevent someone from making new, albeit crude, nuclear devices?  Especially considering that there are all those nuclear power plants out there.

We can talk about enforcement and nuclear power plant security, but look at how timid we were about backing up UN inspectors WRT Iraq and what a mess it was once someone actually did.

We need some serious thinking about this.  While it might be nice to remove the nuclear overhang, it is not going to be easy and it could lead us into places we would rather not be.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I think I have asked this before, but can't The Boston Globe afford to add Mr Carroll to their EMail roster?  Can't Mr Carroll move into the late 20th Century and allow readers to send him EMails?
♥  The US, Russia, Great Britain, France, China (mainland), India, Pakistan and Israel.
♦  That would include North Korea and Iran and perhaps others. Once there was Libya and South Korea and South Africa.  Brazil thought about it, as did Japan.
♣  Did all the nuclear weapons left over from the demise of the Soviet Union really get policed up?