Center for Defense Information on Bent Spear in August

Loose Nukes Right Here At Home

By: Victoria Samson

Thursday, November 15, 2007

A common nightmare scenario for the arms control community is a nuclear weapon gone AWOL. This doesn't require a whole lot of imagination for it to be feasible, either — all you need is the breakdown of nuclear command and control for a brief moment, long enough for a device to go missing.

Of course, the countries typically used as examples of this threat are Russia or Pakistan, not the United States. We have over six decades of well-tested command and control that has multiple redundancies to ensure that no nuclear weapon will be unaccounted for. Right? Right.

And yet it was the United States that suffered an incident known as a “Bent Spear” on Aug. 29-30. As part of an effort by the Air Force to decommission 400 Advanced Cruise Missiles, air crews managed to accidentally load a B-52 bomber leaving Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles, something that procedures should have prevented from occurring. Of course, in this case, “should” is the operative word, as the missiles were not discovered as the plane sat overnight in Minot and then flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

While there was not any danger of the missiles going off, this incident is unnerving for several reasons. First and foremost, the whereabouts of six nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal were unknown for a day and a half. That is completely unacceptable. Second, the reason the Air Force stopped flying nuclear weapons over U.S. territory back in the 1960s was that there were too many accidents. We are lucky that nothing untoward happened to the B-52 in question.

On a final note, there is one aspect of this incident that is rarely mentioned. As long as the United States relies upon nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent, other countries will do so as well. And if we can suffer this sort of erosion in the security procedures surrounding our nuclear weapons, they can too.

Next time, it might not be a friendly aircrew from our own country discovering the loose nukes; next time, we could find out the hard way that nuclear weapons are missing.

— Victoria Samson is a research analyst for the Center for Defense Information.

End the nuclear threat, says Greenpeace

Nastya, from Belarus was only three years old when she was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus and lungs. According to local doctors the region has seen a huge increase in childhood cancer cases since the Chernobyl disaster.

Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, to shutdown existing plants.

We need an energy system that can fight climate change, based on renewable energy and energy efficiency. Nuclear power already delivers less energy globally than renewable energy, and the share will continue to decrease in the coming years.

Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars, create tens of thousands of tons of lethal high-level radioactive waste, contribute to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and result in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade or so, and, perhaps most significantly, squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change solutions.

The Nuclear Age began in July 1945 when the US tested their first nuclear bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico. A few years later, in 1953, President Eisenhower launched his "Atoms for Peace" Programme at the United Nations amid a wave of unbridled atomic optimism.

But as we know there is nothing "peaceful" about all things nuclear. More than half a century after Eisenhower's speech the planet is left with the legacy of nuclear waste. This legacy is beginning to be recognised for what it truly is.

In November 2000 the world recognized nuclear power as a dirty, dangerous and unnecessary technology by refusing to give it greenhouse gas credits during the UN Climate Change talks in the Hague. Nuclear power was dealt a further blow when a UN Sustainable Development Conference refused to label nuclear a sustainable technology in April 2001.

The risks from nuclear energy are real, inherent and long-lasting

Safety: No reactor in the world is inherently safe. All operational reactors have inherent safety flaws, which cannot be eliminated by safety upgrading. Highly radioactive spent fuel is requires constant cooling; if this fails, it could lead to a catastrophic release of radioactivity. Reactors are highly vulnerable to deliberate acts of sabotage, including terrorist attack. There are several scenarios – aside from a crash of an airplane into a reactor – which could lead to a major accident.

Waste: From the moment uranium is mined nuclear waste on a massive scale is produced. There is no secure risk free way to store nuclear waste. No country in the world has a solution for its high-level waste that stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The the threat from nuclear waste will remain for millennia. The least damaging option at this current time is for waste to be stored above ground, in dry storage at the site of origin, but this option also presents major challenges and the threats.

Weapons proliferation: The possession of nuclear weapons by the US, Russia, France, the UK and China has encouraged the further proliferation of nuclear technology and materials. Every state that has a nuclear power capability, has the means to obtain nuclear material usable in a nuclear weapon. which means that the 44 nuclear power states, could become 44 nuclear weapons states. Many nations which have active commercial nuclear power programs, began their research with two objectives – electricity generation and the option to develop nuclear weapons. These included: Switzerland, Germany, Sweden as well as India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Also nuclear programs based on reprocessing plutonium from spent fuel have dramatically increased the risk of proliferation as the creation of more plutonium, means more nuclear waste which in turn means more materials available for the creation of dirty bombs.

Enlarge Image

Nuclear power - a dangerous dinosaur

A short history of Nuclear power - from the promises of cheap endless power in the 1950's to the realities of pollution, dumping, cancer and expensive energy with too many dangers of today. Find out why nuclear power has no future.

• Quicktime
• Real Player
• Windows Media Player