Ordering a nuclear attack should not be a solo act

The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, also known as ICAN. There’s a similar organization called Global Zero with a chapter in Santa Fe.

First, I must say it would be nice if there weren’t so many of the damn things. In the mid-1980s, the world had about 65,000 nuclear weapons; it now has about 15,000. That’s a nice reduction; however, I’d hate to tell you how much hurt this could wreak upon the world. Most of these weapons are far more powerful than the two dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suspect all nine nuclear weapon states have thermonuclear (H-) bombs; the only one where there’s some uncertainty is North Korea. I know, from articles in The New York Times, the North Koreans have the material necessary to make such a weapon, lithium-6; they even have a factory to produce this material. I know no other reason to want Li-6. The other eight certainly have nukes with yields over one megaton.

I’ll write a little about what weapons experts at Los Alamos tell me regarding what they think the likelihood is of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world. Let me point out that even if we were able to eliminate all nukes, we can never eliminate the knowledge of how to make them; and to me as important, we cannot eliminate the knowledge that they have been made. At the beginning in the 1940s, e.g. the Manhattan Project, it was not certain they could be produced; knowing it is possible makes whatever easier to work on.

Friends at Los Alamos tell me they don’t believe the world will ever get to zero. But they agree we must dramatically reduce the number of them, especially those kept on the ready in the first eight countries. There always has been a dispute about how easy it should be to issue a command to launch some.

It scares me very much to listen and read the crazy statements and tweets of Donald Trump. There have recently been calls in our best publications and by other organizations — Physics Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Federation of American Scientists — that the nuclear football and the ability of the president to order an attack without any other approval must be changed.

Finally, I must mention a song sung by Joan Baez, called, “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream,” with words something like this: I dreamed I saw a mighty room; the room was filled with men. And the paper they were signing said, they’d never fight again. When the papers all were signed, and a million copies made, they all joined hands and bowed their heads, and grateful prayers were prayed. And the people in the streets below were dancing round and round; and guns and swords and uniforms, were scattered on the ground. Last night I had the strangest dream, I ever dreamed before; I dreamed the world had all agreed, to put an end to war. One more thing: Outside the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors Auditorium in Vienna, there is a case with a small metal plow and the statement that this plow was cast using steel from the nuclear weapons built by the Republic of South Africa, which they destroyed before signing the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons … “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares. …” (from the Book of Isaiah)

It scares me very much to listen and read the crazy statements and tweets of Donald Trump.

T. Douglas Reilly is a retired physicist who has spent 38 years in nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation. He lives in Los Alamos.