The Nuclear Age: The Next Chapter

Abstract

Nuclear weapons? I thought we got rid of those when the Cold War ended, the man said plaintively. Amazement was my initial reaction to the talk radio caller. But after hearing it several times, the gap between nuclear reality and public perceptions became disturbingly clear. With the evaporation of the daily existential terror of superpower Armageddon, the lingering knowledge of the presence of thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert had gone into the black hole of foreign policy in the American psyche. The indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II (START II)-all seem to suggest that the world community has taken the tentative first steps toward renouncing nuclear weapons as instruments of warfare. For the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there is not a single Russian missile pointed at America's children, is one of Bill Clinton's favorite sound bites. And that sense of diminished danger has spread widely. The Pew Research Center recently asked 10 categories of opinion leaders to identify the preeminent threat to world stability. Only two categories, security experts and Capitol Hill policy staffers, cited nuclear proliferation as the number one problem. But ironically, the likelihood of nuclear use--either in a regional conflict or by terrorists-is probably greater now than in the bipolar