The Smaller, ‘Usable’ Nuclear Weapons Delusion

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/opinion/the-smaller-usable-nuclear-weapons-delusion.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Race Escalates for Latest Class of Nuclear Arms” (front page, April 17):

The danger of a new nuclear arms race is amplified by the dangerous delusion that smaller weapons are somehow more “usable.”

Recent studies have shown that even a very limited nuclear war involving less than 0.5 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenals would cause catastrophic worldwide climate disruption and a global “nuclear famine” that could put up to two billion people at risk.

There have been at least five episodes since 1979 when either Moscow or Washington prepared to launch nuclear war in the mistaken belief that it was already under attack by the other side. We dodged those bullets because of great good luck, not because mutually assured destruction “worked.”

Nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to humanity; we will be free of this threat only when we eliminate them — not modernize them and not miniaturize them, but totally eliminate them.

LYNN RINGENBERG

President

Physicians for Social Responsibility

Washington

To the Editor:

It is erroneous and even ironic to suggest that the strategic nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction has “worked.”

MAD doctrine carries a certain force of internal, if twisted, logic. But 70 years is an eye-blink in the larger scheme of things, and nuclear weapons are better thought of as just the first entry in a new class of multiple, rapidly emerging technologies with lethal applications that can destroy humanity and the earth.

The use of any technology to deter is shortsighted and can’t hold up over the long run. The deeper and perhaps insoluble logical quandary is control of technologies in general. And this in turn resolves into the dubious, double-edged and unpalatable prospect of comprehensive control of human behavior.

MARK A. RYAN

Arlington, Va.

The writer, a historian, is the author of “Chinese Attitudes Toward Nuclear Weapons.”