10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
EVEN AFTER DEEP CUTS, NUKES DETER – AND THE CUTS PREVENT
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| EVEN AFTER DEEP CUTS, NUKES DETER – AND THE CUTS PREVENT NUCLEAR WINTER. Carl Sagan Professor of Astronomy @ Cornell University, ʻ83] Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe Some Policy Implications Foreign Affairs Vol. 62, No. 2 (Winter, 1983), pp. 257- 292 National security is not a zero sum game. Strategic insecurity of one adversary almost always means strategic insecurity for the other. Conventional pre-1945 wisdom, no matter how deeply felt, is not an adequate guide in an age of apocalyptic weapons. If we are content with world inventories above the threshold, we are saying that it is safe to trust the fate of our global civilization and perhaps our species to all leaders, civilian and military, of all present and future nuclear powers and to the command and control efficiency and technical reliability in those nations now and in the indefinite future. For myself, I would far rather have a world in which the climatic catastrophe cannot happen, independent of the vicissitudes of leaders, institutions and machines. This seems tome elementary planetary hygiene, as well as elementary patriotism. Something like a thousand warheads (or a few hundred megatons) is of the same order as the arsenals that were publically announced in the sands as an unmistakable strategic deterrent, and as sufficient to destroy either the United States or the Society Union irrecoverably Considerably smaller arsenals would, with present improvement inaccuracy and reliability, probably suffice. Thus it is possible to contemplate a world in which the global strategic arsenals are below threshold, where mutual deterrence is in effect enough to discourage the use of those surviving warheads, and wherein the unhappy event that some warheads are detonated, there is little likelihood of the climatic catastrophe. Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
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