Abstract
During last year's presidential election, President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry–two men who rarely saw eye-to-eye on anything–both agreed that nuclear proliferation is the most serious threat confronting the United States. Yet, according to a recent poll, 55 percent of the public “rarely” or “never” worry about a nuclear attack. Other polls indicate that people are more worried about the threat of biological and chemical weapons–and in one case, even tornadoes–than they are about nuclear weapons.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between the nature of the threats that confront us and the public's perception of them. Perhaps that's not so surprising, given the post-9/11 mindset that arbitrarily lumps together nuclear, chemical, radiological, and biological threats as “weapons of mass destruction”–despite vastly disproportionate differences in their destructive potential. In this environment, nuclear weapons are often devalued as anachronistic, almost nostalgic Cold War relics.
In his cover story for this issue of the Bulletin, assistant editor Josh Schollmeyer finds that contemporary Hollywood films reflect and reinforce this zeitgeist (p. 42). Cold War-era films such as Fail-Safe and On the Beach conveyed the cataclysmic power of nuclear weapons; today, we've entered the era of the friendly, functional cinematic nukes that rescue civilization from asteroids and alien invasion. And, although the United States and Russia still target thousands of nuclear warheads at one another, inviting the risk of accidental conflict, Schollmeyer notes that nukes have “morphed into a ‘localized threat’–not something that can lay waste to a continent, but to a single city unlucky enough to be targeted by terrorists.” Indeed, the cinematic thriller Sum of All Fears offered theatergoers a sanitized nuclear terrorist attack, with little mention of the thousands of people who would have been incinerated, let alone those who would perish from radioactive fallout.
Such fantasies are not limited to Hollywood. Some in Washington were apparently under the impression that the U.S. government's proposed Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator–designed to destroy buried, hardened targets–would burrow so deep and be of such low yield that radioactive fallout would be contained. In March, Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, set the record straight when he told Congress, “I really must apologize for my lack of precision if we in the administration have suggested that it was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all fallout…. I don't believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true.”
Anyone who still thinks otherwise would do well to consult this issue's Center Spread (p. 34). Using software from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Thomas Cochran and Matthew McKinzie of the Natural Resources Defense Council were able to predict casualties in the event that such weapons would ever be used against a single target in North Korea. Not only would casualty rates be high, but winds would carry the fallout over the Sea of Japan, covering much of southeastern North Korea and parts of South Korea with radiation.
So much for the friendly nuke.
Mark Strauss