Nearly 30 years ago, at a time of heightened Cold War tensions, Jonathan Schell wrote The Fate of the Earth, a seminal book about the immediate and long-term effects of a full-scale nuclear war, arguing that avoiding annihilation was more than a matter of arms reductions. The book, originally published as a series of articles in The New Yorker, was a major factor in rejuvenating the anti-nuclear movement. Since 1998, Schell has been a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute. He writes:
Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country's nuclear forces.
It will give the administration's answer to the key questions: What nuclear forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the United States propose to do with them? On April 8 the United States and Russia will sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. Also in early April, President Obama will hold a Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-four other nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.
The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will meet the mounting perils of the new situation. What's needed for success, I will suggest, is a revival precisely of the discredited art of nuclear strategic thinking, which may, with suitable adjustments, yet have something to offer us. Strategy, military thinkers have long told us, is the art of marrying up tactical means with broad political ends. That is exactly what is most sorely missing in nuclear policy today. Certainly, no mere piecemeal examination will suffice. A comprehensive approach is needed. ...
If one ineluctable truth of Year 65 of the bomb is that the sources of nuclear danger are destined to be global, another is that the world's existing arsenals are likewise indivisibly global. They are joined in a kind of unity of hostility. Each nuclear nation (Israel, which has no nuclear adversary, may be the odd man out) cites the arsenal of another or others as the rationale for possessing its own, in multiple chains that link them together into a network of threats and counterthreats. For example, in one such chain, Pakistan fears India, which fears China, which fears Russia, which fears the United States. This network of terror and counterterror underscores another truth of the nuclear age: every possessor of the bomb, by its very existence, teaches possible proliferators a pair of lessons that are the prime (if not the only) motives for proliferation. First, you will be living in a nuclear-armed world; second, if you want to be protected in that world you must have nuclear arms yourself. (In addition, it has of course occurred to many countries, especially North Korea and Iran, that nuclear weapons could deter overwhelming conventional power such as that possessed by the United States.) From national points of view, each arsenal is distinct, but from a global proliferation point of view they are a joint inducement for the further spread of nuclear arms.
The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can't be stopped unless possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field. In this respect, too, the nuclear dilemma has become indivisibly global.
This is a truth, however, that the world's nine nuclear powers do not like to acknowledge, because it has an implication they are reluctant to accept, which is that if they want to be safe from nuclear danger they must commit themselves to surrendering their own nuclear arms.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
What's the upside of global warming? Why, once the ice is gone from Greenland, it will open up whole new regions for oil exploration.
Joern Skov Nielsen, deputy director of Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, said Thursday that there might be more oil in his country than the entire past production of the North Sea. That would be about 50 billion barrels. Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Husky Energy last year received licenses for exploration, which will be made easier by the melting of Greenland’s ice.
By the time we've burned all the oil in Greenland, Antarctica is bound to be ice-free. Just imagine all the resources we'll find down there!