Nuclear Weapons Overview
Nuclear weapons are a liability in an increasingly dangerous world. Twenty years after the end of the cold war and there are still more than 20,000 nuclear weapons worldwide. Not only do they not protect us from current threats like terrorism, but there is enormous risk for accidents or for them to fall into the wrong hands.
The only purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter other nations from using these weapons against us or our allies. We can accomplish that with far fewer nuclear weapons.
We must set a new, safer direction for U.S. nuclear weapons policy. The United States should remove its weapons from hair-trigger alert, which allows them to be launched within a matter of minutes, and seek to limit its total number of nuclear warheads, including those in storage, to 1,000.
- Open Letter to President Obama on Nuclear Weapons
- Act Now: Urge President Obama to set a new, safer direction for U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
Nuclear weapons remain the gravest and most immediate threat to human civilization. Fifteen years after the end of the cold war, there are still some 25,000 nuclear weapons worldwide (the vast majority of which are in the U.S. and Russian arsenals). In late 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, and thus became the most recent nation to cross the nuclear threshold. If the world remains on its current path, more nations will follow. Eventually, terrorists will get the bomb.
Current U.S. nuclear weapons policy is outdated, dangerous, and misguided. The United States maintains several thousand warheads on alert, able to be launched within a matter of minutes once the decision is made. The only conceivable purpose for the United States to maintain this many nuclear warheads on alert is to target Russian warheads. As a consequence, many of Russia's warheads also remain on alert, giving rise to a real risk of an accidental or unauthorized attack, or a deliberate attack in response to a false warning. Such an attack could destroy the United States as a functioning society.
Since 2001, the United States has asserted that it has the right to use nuclear weapons preemptively against nations that do not possess nuclear weapons, ironically providing a strong motivation for such nations to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent to a U.S. attack. Furthermore, the Bush administration is proposing an ambitious plan to replace the entire U.S. arsenal with a new generation of nuclear weapons and revitalize the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex.
The United States can—and must—lead the world in a different direction. Increasingly, this is being recognized by prominent foreign policy experts from both political parties. In a January 4, 2007, Wall Street Journal op-ed, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George Shultz wrote, "We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal." The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has held this position since 1969, when the organization was founded due in part to concern in the scientific community about the threat of nuclear weapons and the dangers posed by U.S. nuclear weapons policies.
UCS continues to call for a fundamental reassessment of the role, purpose, and future of nuclear weapons and U.S. nuclear weapons policy. We promote U.S. policies that will lead to a world free of nuclear weapons and diminish the chance that existing weapons will be used. We are working to stimulate a broad, bipartisan national discussion and generate a political consensus for bold new U.S. leadership and policies.
