Dear HCN,
I read your Roundup on
Cold War tourism in South Dakota with apprehension (HCN, 2/14/00:
From missile silo to theme park) because you could come away with
the idea that the Cold War is over. When I reread the article at 2
a.m., I realized this could be someone’s idea of the perfect
solution: Put the Bomb in a museum; people will think it is history
– dead.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The missile that will be on display is the obsolete Minuteman II.
What about the Minuteman III or MX? Aren’t these weapons and others
like the Trident submarine, any one of which carries more explosive
force than all that used in WWII, currently soaking up our tax
dollars?
JFK’s “ace in the hole” missile defense
system certainly defined the Cold War in such incidents as the
Cuban Missile Crisis of “63, but it was at the same time a public
relations disaster in its “consumer appeal.” People believed in the
necessity of this mighty weapon (even though they never voted for
it) and were at the same time justifiably terrified of
it.
So, the Bomb has since assumed a much lower,
if not completely flat, public profile. This is no accident. We’ve
been hearing about the demolition and cleanup of the Rocky Flats
Nuclear Weapons plant as if we’re out of the business of making
those pesky nukes. Yet our nuclear arsenal today would make
President Kennedy’s “ace in the hole” look like a
shotgun.
JFK’s missiles numbered in the hundreds;
today, seven nations possess a total of some 15,000 nuclear
warheads. We have about 6,500, and yes, poor, fractured, diminished
Russia has about 7,000. (As Russia has reduced her conventional
forces, she has relied even more on her nuclear forces, with a
dubious Early Warning System.)
Furthermore, about
2,500 of ours and 3,000 of theirs are on “hair trigger” alert. This
means nuclear missiles can be launched in a matter of minutes,
before Congress could convene and before you would dive down into
your 1960s fall-out shelter that wouldn’t do you any good,
anyway.
Any one of these nuclear missiles carries
a payload easily 20 times that which leveled Hiroshima. And with
the Senate’s sound defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last
fall, it looks like they are here to stay. Why should nations like
India, Pakistan and China renounce nuclear weapons if we are only
maintaining and modernizing ours? As for Russia, they have said
that if we pursue our Missile Defense System (Star Wars), it will
be simpler and cheaper for them to expand their system to target
all our missile defense sites. It has been said that you do not
enhance your own security by diminishing that of an
opponent.
President Clinton’s FY2000
discretionary budget included $281 billion for defense, a $20
billion increase over last year. The good news is the next largest
category is education. The bad news is that it is only $36 billion.
Could this be why 28 million Americans are too dumb to pick out the
United States on a world map? Is it of any assurance that those who
will be picking out our foreign nuclear targets are at least smart
enough to pick them out on a map?
Not only are
nukes still in our budget, but we are actually spending more
(adjusted for inflation) per year, than we were during the Cold
War. Until these hot, gushing billions are cut off, you can’t tell
me this Cold War is over.
Jim
Bock
Boulder,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Cold War is over, but missiles remain.
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