Nuclear fallout

India threatens to restart a global arms race

In the 1980s, arms control loomed large on the psychic landscape. It was the object of passionate public interest. It played in pop culture. (Remember the movie War Games or the chilling TV docudrama The Day After?) It was a regular topic in presidential debates. But as time has passed, interest has faded.

This week we were reminded that the nuclear threat did not die with the Cold War.

On Monday, Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced that his country had just set off three nuclear explosives at a remote northwestern test site. On Wednesday, despite overwhelming international criticism, they brazenly set off two more. The weapons tests, intended to whip up support for Vajpayee's new Hindu nationalist government, has frightening implications. The most immediate concern is Pakistan, already locked in a bitter political and military competition with India, and thought to be capable of building its own nuclear weapons. As the Phoenix went to press, Pakistan appeared to be making preparations for a test to demonstrate this ability.

But the dominoes do not stop there. To the north, China feels keenly threatened. Will it, too, resume testing nuclear devices? It already has a disturbingly large -- and threatening -- military force near the Indian frontier. Across the Chinese border sits Russia, chronically unstable and deeply troubled by the recent decision to expand NATO. The de facto global ban on testing could entirely unravel; the blasts in the Pokharan desert could herald a new arms race -- this time including a wide array of regimes with international inferiority complexes and scores to settle. Think Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein.

During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was essentially a two-player game: East versus West. But as more nations gain an atomic option, regional conflicts become more dangerous. South Asia is not the only place where this is the case: the Korean peninsula and the Mideast are the most obvious examples. In such a world, the stuff of thrillers -- an atomic blast in Jerusalem, a nuclear war ignited by Kashmir rebels -- becomes very real.

Remember that wars can start by accident. Weapons of mass destruction only up the ante: the increasingly high-tech battlefield means that leaders have very little time to decide whether to use their arsenal or risk losing it. In 1995, the often alcohol-saturated Russian president Boris Yeltsin was told that Russia was under nuclear attack, and that he had eight minutes until impact. With the nuclear briefcase in Yeltsin's lap, the Russians eventually realized that the "missile" was in fact a Norwegian scientific satellite. But imagine if this incident had come at a time of real political crisis. Or imagine the same scenario in a smaller country -- say, Pakistan -- that has even more reason to fear an attack, and whose military has no experience controlling nuclear weapons.

Perhaps even more frightening is the very real possibility that terrorists will be able to steal what they need to build a weapon of their own. By far the most difficult part of building a simple nuclear device is making the enriched uranium at its core. The former Soviet Union is littered with poorly secured weapons-grade uranium. (Senator Richard Lugar tried to make this an issue in his fizzled presidential campaign.) The threat has prompted radical action. In 1994, the US military conducted Operation Sapphire, spiriting a half-ton of uranium from a crumbling installation in Kazakhstan and bringing it to facilities here. More recently, there was a similar operation in the republic of Georgia. But we can't possibly hope to secure all the material in this manner.

Indeed, this is bound to be one of the great questions of the next century: how to protect society as technology gives individuals ever more power to destroy it. The threat of global holocaust has always been driven, fundamentally, by technological innovation. As he stood watching the world's first atomic blast at the Trinity test site in the Nevada desert, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer says he recalled the words of the god Vishnu in the ancient Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The end of the Cold War has given us a false sense of security. The world is closer to a nuclear holocaust than most realize. Anyone who doubts this need only scan the headlines of the last few days. We need to press candidates running for Congress -- and the presidency -- to take action.

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