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Nuclear Weapons Nuclear Weapons Nick McGreivy June 2020 Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 1 / 25 Part I: Background "You have to be an incredible optimist to think that we can keep 14,000 nuclear weapons in fallible human hands and think that something terrible is not going to happen." -Joe Cirincione, Ploughshares Fund \The panic, the absolute political and economic chaos that would follow such an exchange - there's no way to prepare for that. The fact that it hasn't happened in 75 years is largely a matter of luck. The longer we go, the more likely is that our luck will run out." -Alexandra Bell, CACNP Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 2 / 25 Nuclear weapons kill people in three ways 1. Primary deaths from explosion 2. Secondary deaths from radiation 3. Tertiary deaths from climate change, nuclear winter, and mass starvation Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 3 / 25 Primary Deaths from Explosion See Nukemap, an easy-to-use website which estimates the number of primary deaths for a given explosion. Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 4 / 25 Secondary Deaths from Radiation Assumes wind is blowing east. Radiation in low doses, i.e. below 1 rem, is effectively harmless. However, radiation in high doses, above 100 rem, is extremely dangerous. 500 rem is a 50/50 chance of death. Nuclear weapons release enormous amounts of radiation. Source: BEIR-VII report on health effects of radiation. Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 5 / 25 Tertiary deaths from climate change and mass starvation After a nuclear war, smoke from the fires could cover the planet blocking out the sun and making the earth cold and dark. Although climate science is not settled on the effects of a nuclear war, our best estimates suggest that even a small limited nuclear war (most likely between India and Pakistan) would lead to rapid cooling of global temperatures and massive starvation of 1-2 billion people. A major nuclear war would lead to the death of the vast majority of the global population and the end of civilization. Hiroshima in 1945, destroyed by massive fires after the bombing. Sources: Nature Alan Robock, Professor of Environmental Sciences Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 6 / 25 How many nuclear weapons does the US have? There are about 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, the US and Russia have 90%. The US nuclear force can roughly be divided into three types of weapons, known as the \nuclear triad". These are: (1) land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), (2) submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and (3) strategic bombers carrying gravity bombs or cruise missiles. Sources: FAS, CACNP Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 7 / 25 Nuclear Triad: Land Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs The US ground-based ICBM (the Minuteman III) is a rocket launched into orbit from IBCM fields in Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. These ICBMs are kept on high-alert, ready to launch within minutes and on warning of an enemy attack. These cannot be called back once launched. Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 8 / 25 Nuclear Triad: Air Planes can either drop gravity bombs or launch jet-powered cruise missiles. Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 9 / 25 Nuclear Triad: Sea From the DOD website: \Ballistic missile submarines serve as an undetectable launch platform for submarine-launched ballistic missiles. These submarines are designed for stealth and are on constant patrol, with enough firepower on board to make just one submarine the sixth most powerful nuclear power in the world." Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 10 / 25 How much does the US spend on nuclear weapons? Today, we spend about 35 billion USD per year (and rapidly increasing) on nuclear weapons. This money goes primarily to the Department of Energy (DOE) to build the bombs and to the Department of Defense (DOD) to build the planes, submarines, and ground-based launchers. The B2 bombers and B61 gravity bombs cost more than their weight in gold. white The US is beginning a nuclear modernization effort that will cost an additional 1.2 trillion USD (1.7 trillion inflation adjusted) over the next 30 years and dramatically increase the amount of spending on nuclear weapons. Source: ACA, ACA Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 11 / 25 Why do we have a nuclear triad? According to the Department of Defense: \The purpose of the nuclear triad is to reduce the possibility that an enemy could destroy all the nation's nuclear forces in a first-strike attack by retaining a second-strike capability." This logic doesn't hold up. Nuclear submarines alone are sufficient. They are virtually undetectable and contain missiles that can strike any target around the globe, providing both effective deterrence and a second-strike capability. Nuclear Historian Stephen I. Schwartz: \But the triad as we know it was not the result of any sort of systematic plan. It simply evolved as the Air Force and the Navy built weapons in no small measure to deny the budgetary advantage to each other." Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 12 / 25 A brief history of nuclear weapons 1938: Discovery of fission by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch 1942-1946: Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear weapons 1945: Fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1952: First test of Hydrogen Bomb 1950s-1980s: Cold War, nuclear arms race between US and Russia. 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis, in which \the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale attack and invasion was the only solution." Kennedy disagreed. 1991: Fall of the Soviet Union 1990s and 2010s: massive reduction of US and Russian nuclear stockpiles after START treaty 2010: New START treaty between US and Russia 2010s-: Stagnation of arms reductions 2015-: Modernization of US arsenal 2015-: Iran Nuclear Deal limiting Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons. Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 13 / 25 Theory of Deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction Logic from the Cold War The intellectual justification for the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) came out of a series of Harvard-MIT faculty seminars from 1958-1966. They developed game-theoretic models of nuclear deterrence assuming rational decision-makers and identified three criteria for stability: A high stigma against the use of nuclear weapons compared to conventional weapons A second-strike capability, so that either actor can still retaliate against an all-out nuclear attack Prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons outside US/Soviet Union Getting this right is critical The security of civilization rests upon the theory of deterrence. Deterrence theory is a flawed theory, for many reasons. Source: The American Approach to Nuclear Arms Control: A Retrospective Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 14 / 25 Nuclear Close Calls 1960: US warning system detected dozens of Soviet missiles launched at the United States, fooled by moonrise over Norway. Fortunately the Soviet leader was in NYC at the time, which led to belief of a possible false alarm. 1961: A bomber carrying two 3 megaton bombs broke up mid-air over Goldsboro, NC. Five of the six safety mechanisms in one of the bombs failed, the single switch which did not fail is the reason we still have North Carolina. 1962: At the height of the the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2 of the 3 Soviet commanders of a Russian submarine agreed to launch a 10kt nuclear weapon at the US navy, which very likely would have triggered a massive war between the US and the Soviet union. Second-in-command Vasily Arkhipov disagreed, his decision \saved the world". 1968: Bomber carrying four nuclear bombs crashed in Greenland, contaminating area with Plutonium. 1979: A mistakenly inserted training tape led to President Carter being told he had 3-7 minutes to decide whether to retaliate. US ICBMs and bombers prepared for takeoff. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post (the plane designed to allow the U.S. president to maintain control in case of an attack) took off, without the president. After 6-7 minutes, satellite systems determined it was a false alarm. 1983: A Soviet early warning satellite showed that the United States had launched five land-based missiles at the Soviet Union during a period of high tension. Officer Stanislov Petrov, based on an intuition that the US would not fire only five missiles in an attach, disobeyed military orders and proclaimed the warning to be a false alarm. \This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack against the United States and its NATO allies, which would have resulted in an immediate and irrevocable escalation to a full-scale nuclear war." 1995: Norwegian scientific rocket on a mission to study the aurora borealis triggered Russian full alert and activation of the \nuclear football" by Russian President Boris Yeltzin. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 15 / 25 Part II: Policy \These policies have impact. You can't argue that policy matters and then see terrible policy be put into effect and think something terrible isn't going to happen." -Joe Cirincione, Ploughshares Fund \The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be. Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?" -Beatrice Fihn of ICAN, accepting the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nick McGreivy Nuclear Weapons June 2020 16 / 25 1. Presidential Sole Authority President Harry Truman, shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, decided (correctly) that the military should not have the authority to use nuclear weapons, that power was eventually placed in the president himself.
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