Both candidates in the 2004 presidential campaign agreed that nuclear proliferation was the most important issue facing the United States. Including George W. Bush, whose administration put John Bolton in charge on nonproliferation.
This article puts the problem in the context of the long-term implications of Hiroshima: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Second-tier powers join arms race / Experts fear global spread of small nukes by James Sterngold San Francisco Chronicle 08/01/05.
The opening paragraphs give a good glimpse of the effects of war, especially when it drags on for years:
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, was to change the course of history, but as Harold Agnew witnessed the flash that is estimated to have killed more than 100,000 people, he thought of just one thing -- destroying the enemy.
Agnew, then a frightened 24-year-old physicist flying in a plane alongside the Enola Gay bomber, was in charge of measuring the yield of a blast that burned hotter than the sun. He had helped design the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, N.M. But for all the impact this unique new weapon would have on science, military planning and geopolitical rivalries, Agnew, now 84, said he and his colleagues saw the bomb in simpler terms, as an instrument of their anger at Japan for launching the war, and as a way of stopping the war.
"We all wanted to crush the Japanese," Agnew, who became director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1970s, said in an interview. "My only concern was winning the war. To say we were embittered would have been an understatement."
Our Potemkin press corps usually pays little attention to this (except when the Bush team was using it as an excuse to invade Iraq). But experts on proliferation and terrorism see a high probability right now of a nuclear weapon of some sort being used in a terrorist attack:
"The likelihood of a single attack in a single city is greater than ever, not the massive attacks we imagined in the Cold War," said Graham Allison, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a senior Defense Department official in the Clinton administration.
Eugene Habiger, a retired Air Force general who during the 1990s led the U.S. Strategic Command, the military arm that prepares for and would manage a nuclear war, said a bomb would not even have to be used accurately.
"It would have a horrific impact by any measure," said Habiger, now a member of the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an international nongovernmental group that is working to reduce nuclear stockpiles. "You might only kill 5,000 people or so, but you would change the society, the politics, the economics of the United States of America. That's what I call the greatest threat in the 21st century.
"It's no longer about large military forces fighting head to head," Habiger added. "It's what I call asymmetric warfare."
And Sterngold provides a framework for understanding the current threat:
Three factors generally make the new arms race slowly taking shape more troubling than the Cold War version, experts said.
-- First, only a tiny number of industrialized countries had the technological means to build warheads during the Cold War. Today, eight states possess the weapons, with North Korea possibly the ninth. But there are now dozens of countries that have developed the basic capability to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, the key to producing warheads. ...
-- Second, with the dissemination of nuclear know-how to countries from Pakistan to Sweden to Brazil, shadowy nuclear technology rings have taken shape, making once forbidden equipment and expertise far more widely available to terrorists and other groups, as well as nations. ...
-- The third and perhaps most troubling aspect of the new arms race is the presence of terrorist groups like al Qaeda that are not bound by the discipline of self-preservation, which helped restrain the Soviets and the United States, as well as China, which has its own small nuclear arsenal, during the Cold War.
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