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There's an elephant in the room, but no one seems to see it. The beast risks massive death and destruction on a daily basis. It shapes how the world sees America and explains huge portions of our recent past. It eats up at least $33 billion per year of our tax dollars, and yet the average American citizen is largely ignorant of its effects on who we are as a people.
The elephant in the room is America's nuclear weapons.
Deterrence, the idea that our possession of such destructive weapons prevents other countries from attacking us, is not an exhaustive explanation of our nuclear arsenal. America has thousands of warheads and nearly as many bombers and ballistic missiles. The U.S. maintains the right to use a nuclear weapon before one is used against us (recall the "all options on the table" rhetoric of the Bush era), and many of our weapons are on high alert, ready to be delivered within a few hours.
These are not the weapons of our atomic past; the thermonuclear weapons of today are thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped during WWII. America and Russia jointly possess about 95 percent of the world's nuclear weapons.
There is a significant risk of accidents — Russia almost fired a weapon when it briefly misidentified a weather satellite launch as a U.S. first strike, British and French nuclear submarines have collided in the Atlantic and the Air Force has mistakenly flown an active warhead over the continental U.S.
Our arsenal also presents a moral dilemma — it gives us the ability to destroy millions of human beings in the blink of an eye and inflict fatal radiation poisoning on millions more. Proponents of a large arsenal claim that nuclear weapons exist to prevent their use, but there is no guarantee that an accident, miscalculation or changing geopolitical conditions won't make it so. The nuclear mission of a program called Global Strike Command is being tailored to give us the capability to preemptively strike potential adversaries anywhere in the world — a dangerous remnant of the offensive Bush doctrine.
In other words, the military is seriously considering using nuclear weapons to hit deeply buried targets and annihilate terrorist meeting places. Doing so would break the nuclear taboo that is the basis of deterrence and cause a wave of terrorist-breeding anti-Americanism.
The next time you wonder why our soldiers have insufficient body armor and why veterans from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan have insufficient health care, consider the billions of dollars spent on maintaining our exorbitant nuclear arsenal.
Eliminating just a few intercontinental ballistic missiles would provide enough money to add a new wing to the veterans' hospital in Topeka. We have overwhelming nuclear and conventional superiority — this is not a question of our security but a question of excessive nuclear focus.
Citizens can affect the size and role of their country's nuclear weapons arsenal. In the U.K., antinuclear movements have successfully constrained the expansion of its arsenal. The German public's strong antinuclear sentiments makes talk of proliferation political suicide, and places like South Africa have given up nuclear programs.
Now is a crucial time to learn about our nuclear arsenal and pressure policymakers to reduce or restrict it in meaningful ways. The Nuclear Posture Review, a report presented to Congress outlining the current state of our arsenal and recommending changes to it, is being formulated as you read this.
Negotiations between Russia and the U.S. over a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty are scheduled to conclude in December, though as it stands, our nation refuses to give up a meaningful quantity of delivery vehicles.
The nuclear arsenal is maintained and expanded in our name. As American citizens, we have an obligation to inform ourselves about the military uses of our tax dollars. The nuclear arsenal is an incredibly important feature of our national identity, and one that is almost universally ignored by the populous. Its potential to destroy civilization as we know it and the implicit legitimacy we currently give it make America's nuclear arsenal the most important elephant in the room, and one we desperately need to recognize.
-Beth Mendenhall is a senior in political science and philosophy. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.
We have weapons to defend ourselves against those who wish harm upon us. If we had no nuclear weapons to back ourselves, what would happen if a country, oh say, China, launched one at us? We are fighting terrorism for a reason. Have you people forgotten!?!? Bush is not the reason or the foundation of the development of nuclear weapons. It started way back in World War 2, if you can get your history straight.
Ungrateful citizens like you make me not want to set my life aside for your freedom. I signed my life away so that you could have your opinions and live a normal life. But what support are you showing your soldiers? Your sailors? Your countrymen? You are asking us to sit down and twiddle our thumbs and do nothing for our well-being as well as yours.
Unlike you, I refuse to stand aside and let my country be destroyed and no longer be the United States of America.
Judas Priest, look it up. It's what kept us from going into a Third World War with the Soviet Union.
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You are truly an ignorant and narrow minded individual."Maintaining a deterrant against minor powers like these would only require a tiny fraction of the current arsenal. And why should she mention them? That's not the topic. She didn't mention Israel either.
That is a huge jump in logic that would only be made by an extremely ignorant person. Drawing up first strike plans to react to possible scenarios in no way implies that the military intends to use nuclear weapons on terrorist meeting places.
It isn't the first option for me, it is there to dissuade others from attacking us or our allies. So in summary....shut up stupid!