Nuclear weapons go on the table
at research symposium
By Sally Acharya

(From American Weekly, Dec. 5, 2006)
1 of 2 pages
There was a brief time, in the 1990s, when fear of nuclear weapons seemed to be fading as surely as photos of Hiroshima and old “Ban the Bomb” T-shirts. The Cold War was over, and while at least 20,000 nuclear weapons still existed and experts were hardly lulled into complacency, the headlines had vanished.

“Two years ago, nobody thought about it,” says Natalie Van Arman, SIS ’07. “To this generation of students, it was completely foreign, because we’re post–Cold War. We never heard people talk about it. But now, everybody’s worrying.”

This fall’s nuclear test by North Korea, concerns about Iran, and the tension between nuclear powers India and Pakistan have thrust the issue of nuclear weapons back into the public eye.

It was in this context that the School of International Service’s journal of international affairs, Swords and Ploughshares, brought together an ambitious lineup of eight nuclear experts for a daylong symposium called “Deconstructing Nuclear Weapons.”

This was the first time the student-edited, peer-reviewed journal put together such a comprehensive symposium. The topic was chosen partly in hopes of sparking research across disciplinary boundaries that could, at some point, find its way into the selective journal, which is a venue for research papers by graduate students and recent graduates.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons in a post–Cold War world “represents one of the most difficult issues with which we’ve needed to grapple,” said graduate student Matthew Nuzzo, editor of Swords and Ploughshares. “We’re seeing things happening in the international sphere that are outgrowths of events that took place many, many years ago when we decided that certain countries will be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and nobody else. We’re now dealing with the fallout from that.”

“Many people think we don’t have nuclear weapons anymore, or if we do, we’re not on high alert status. That’s not true,” Robert Nelson, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the audience. “We can still kill half a billion people in 30 minutes.”

Far from disappearing, a major expansion of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex is in the works. The growth is part of a program to replace components of warheads in spite of the fact, Nelson said, that the components to be replaced are actually the most reliable parts of the weapons, and good for at least another half century.

The result of replacing old but well-tested parts with new designs is likely to result in pressure to break the testing moratorium, because the military would not want to rely on weapons with untested parts. Yet there is no military or scientific reason to expand the arsenal, Nelson said. “Who really wants the RRW (Reliable Replacement Warhead program)? The labs. In many regards this is an argument about money, and a bureaucracy that doesn’t want to change.”

Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University has studied the culture of nuclear scientists at the weapons labs as an anthropologist. Both among scientists and the media, he has found a widely shared belief that the United States would never use the weapons, but that they might be used first by “those crazy people in the Third World.”

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