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President Barack Obama’s trip to Asia next week will be anchored by a stop in Hiroshima, where he will focus on its dark nuclear past.
But Obama’s visit comes at a moment when U.S. and Asian officials fear the region is entering a newly dangerous atomic future, threatening Obama’s vow to roll back the spread of nuclear arms and possibly touching off an Asian nuclear arms race.
North Korea is expanding its nuclear arsenal and upgrading its ballistic missiles. China is growing and modernizing its stockpile. Most strikingly, Pentagon planners worry that Japan and South Korea might explore developing nuclear arms of their own for the first time—promoted in part by the recent conclusion by U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies that North Korea’s bizarre regime can now mount a small nuclear warhead on missiles capable of striking Japan and South Korea.
On May 18, 1974, India surprised the world by conducting a “peaceful nuclear explosion” or PNE that was actually a part of a nuclear weapons program. Because India was not a member of the United Nations Security Council, there was a strong international backlash.
You can learn more about the aftermath of Operation Smiling Buddha and why India wanted nuclear weapons at the link.
In 1982, Paul Nitze had his “walk in the woods” with the Soviet Ambassador, Yuliy Kvitinsky, during which they were able to outline possible concessions which President Ronald Reagan and USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev could discuss later in the year.
While the Walk in the Woods negotiations never held, they gave other countries hope that the Cold War would soon thaw, and they laid the groundwork for the later Reykjavik Summit.
How much is too much? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has drastically reduced its stockpile of nuclear weapons from a high of more than 30,000 warheads in the mid-1960s to little more than 5,000 today. Still, that’s more than enough to terminate humanity.
In the third installment of their multi-part series for the PBSNewsHour, Pulitzer Center grantees Dan Sagalyn and Jamie McIntyre look at the thinking behind America’s nuclear triad—a strategic set-up that relies on aircraft, submarines and land-based missiles to strike an adversary—and the Pentagon’s plans for a trillion dollar upgrade of its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades.
Military commanders and administration officials say nuclear weapons are used every day to deter a nuclear attack against the U.S. and that the current stockpile needs to be replaced and modernized—the B-52H bombers being flown today are older than the crews that fly them. But two leading critics, formerdefense secretary William Perry and retired Gen. James Cartwright, say one leg of the triad—land-based nuclear tipped missiles—should be scrapped because it poses almost as much of threat to the U.S. as it does to an enemy.
If you are a teacher, and you would like to use the NewsHourreporting in your classroom, click here for a lesson designed by our education team. Or you can use the Lesson Builder to design your own, drawing from our growing archive of reporting on nuclear security. It’s easy to use—and it’s free.
ELECTION FEVER
The U.S. isn’t the only country in the throes of a cantankerous election season. Iran went to the polls on Friday to elect members of the 290-person parliament and the 88-man Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that will ultimately choose the next Supreme Leader. Early returns show the moderates doing well, but final results have not yet been released.
In a dispatch for Vice News, Pulitzer Center grantee Reese Erlich notes that about one third of Iran’s 55 million eligible voters are under 30. “They tend to vote for reform-minded candidates, and a large youth turnout could steer Iran further away from the strict conservatives.”
The election pits reformists and centrists against the so-called Principlists who oppose reform-minded President Hassan Rouhani and distrust his openings to the West. One analyst in Tehran said the Principlists bore some resemblance to Donald Trump. “They speak their mind,” he told Reese. “They don’t worry about being politically correct. [They] cater to people’s fears.”
THE FATE OF THE PLANET
In a blunt Q&A with Pulitzer Center grantee Justin Catanoso, Harvard climate scientist Naomi Oreskes said the recent Paris climate agreement was a positive step, but expressed frustration that the Obama administration has not done more to curb greenhouse gas emissions in this country.
“Obama claims to have an energy and climate policy. But he doesn’t. He has an energy policy. When he announced a long time ago that he was going to have an ‘all of the above’ strategy, that was an energy policy, not an energy and climate policy. If the United States is just worried about energy then we can frack for gas and oil, we can burn coal,” she told Justin in an interview that appears in Mongabay. “If we are worried about energy and climate, it’s a very different picture.”
Justin asked Oreskes if she was pessimistic about the fate of the planet: “It’s more like I feel sad,” she said. “There is a kind of sadness associated with the fact that at some level, we’ve blown it. We had the opportunity 20 years ago to act on this issue before climate change was locked in. We knew what to do 20 years ago.”
The James Bond movie Thunderball has SPECTRE stealing two H-bombs, which end up on the ocean floor in the Bahamas. Around the release of Thunderball, a B-52 bomber crashed into its refueling tanker, dropping H-bombs over Spain.
While none of the bombs detonated, this caused protests both at the crash site and in front of the U.S. embassy. The U.S. had to remove 5.4 acres of soil for decontamination.
You can read more about this event where real life mirrored fiction at the link.
Iran has been dismantling parts of its nuclear program faster than many anticipated and could meet its obligations for the lifting of some sanctions as soon as January, according to some officials monitoring the agreement.
Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers includes a key target known as “implementation day.” No specific date was set when the agreement was reached last July to great fanfare.
Implementation day will arrive when international inspectors determine that Iran has taken initial steps to curb its nuclear program. In turn, Iran will get sanctions relief as promised in the deal.
Obama administration officials say the nuclear deal was front loaded, requiring Iran to take the first steps. The country must dismantle some two-thirds of its nuclear centrifuges and ship out or dilute a large portion of its enriched uranium.
Many analysts predicted this would not happen until the spring of 2016. But Iran says it plans to fulfill its part by January, and the International Atomic Energeny Agency, which is inspecting Iran’s facilities, says this is possible.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there were suddenly many new countries that had nuclear arsenals. Growing concerns over “loose nukes,” terrorism, and regional instability meant that negotiations had to happen.
The result was the Lisbon Protocol, or the agreement that the nukes in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan would either be sent back to Russia or destroyed. At the link, you can read about three U.S. FSOs who helped out with the negotiations and inspections needed to make the protocol happen.
