Last weekend I attended a conference in New York at the historic Riverside Church devoted to nuclear disarmament. Almost simultaneously the US for the first time in history announced the number of nuclear weapons it possesses: 5,113 (with thousands more awaiting "decommissioning).
I want to talk about the conference, but first, a word about why we should be concerned that in spite of moves toward disarmament, we still possess over 5,000 nukes. Keep in mind that Russia probably has an equal number, as do as many as 10 other nations...and possibly some terrorist groups.
What would be the result if an atomic bomb the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima was exploded in Louisville...on the Clark Memorial Bride, lets say.
The explosion would essentially destroy downtown Louisville and downtown Jeffersonville, taking out businesses, hospitals, government centers and the central police departments in both cities. If the bomb exploded during the week and in business hours, perhaps 25-50,000 people would be killed outright. Thousands more would be sickened and killed downwind by the resulting radioactive fallout.
But what if a one megaton bomb bomb were exploded in the same spot? This is, I believe, an average size for a weapon in the US and Russian arsenals.
The heat and blast effects would completely destroy or badly damage everything in the Metro Louisville area out to the Waterson Expressway. Hundreds of thousands of people would die instantly. The blast would wipe out everything we think of as civilization: nearly all of our schools, hospitals, police and fire stations, government offices, libraries, stores, restaurants. Most of the city would become what I have heard cynically referred to as a highly radioactive "self lighting parking lot" for a century or more. Jeffersonville, New Albany and Clarksville along with all of their citizens, would simply cease to exist.
Now some information about the conference I attended.
The conference was entitled "International Conference for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World.'
Over a thousand people attended, and large numbers of attendees came from outside the US: Japan, Australia, Scandinavia and over 200 from France.
The mood was powerful and engaging. There were workshops on a variety of topics that would help participants understand the impact of nuclear weapons, hear about initiatives currently underway to limit and even eliminate all nuclear weapons, and most importantly, discover ways that we as individuals can do something about the nuclear "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads.
There were discussions, film presentations, dances and music. The plenary sessions drew hundreds of conference participants and featured noted leaders from the anti-nuclear weapons movement.
The Saturday night plenary featured Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, and Tadatoshi Akiba, the Mayor of Hiroshima (who also heads the Mayors for Peace program).
The Secretary General received a standing ovation when he told the audience that the first item on his agenda the day he took office was nuclear disarmament. He went on to invoke the memory of the famous sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html delivered one year (to the day )before he was assassinated. In that speech Dr. King went against the wishes of other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement and announced his fervent opposition to the Viet Nam War.
Mayor Akiba affirmed the efforts of the thousands of Mayors for Peace http://www.mayorsforpeace.org/english/index.html to achieve total nuclear disarmament by the year 2020.
He invoked another sermon delivered by Dr. King.
This second sermon was delivered less than a week before Dr. King died. In that talk http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution/ Dr. King called for nuclear disarmament and stated unequivocally that the choice facing the world today is not between violence and nonviolence, but rather between nonviolence and nonexistence.
The impact of his words brought into focus for me what had touched me most deeply at the conference: the stories of human suffering related by hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) from a variety of different parts of the world.
There were the devastating stories of individuals who had experienced the very real holocaust of flames and radiation that took the lives of nearly a half-million people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the years that followed.
I heard the tale of a poor Japanese fisherman who barely survived a black rain of nuclear fallout after a hydrogen bomb test on the Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
On the closing afternoon of the conference I listened to a woman my own age tell the crushing details of what it was like as a child to grow up in Utah, downwind from a site where the US tested atomic weapons in the atmosphere in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. She told of her own withering round of atomic-related illnesses and the premature deaths of close relatives who had eaten, drunk, and breathed the residue left behind by the atomic tests.
Then I read about our "disarmament." And I thought about what would happen in Louisville if we were the victims of an atomic attack. Here's the story. What do you think?
US says it has 5,113 nuclear warheads
By ANNE GEARAN, AP National Security Writer Anne Gearan, Ap National Security Writer
Tue May 4, 1:08 am ET
WASHINGTON – The United States has 5,113 nuclear warheads in its stockpile and "several thousand" more retired warheads awaiting the junkpile, the Pentagon said Monday in an unprecedented accounting of a secretive arsenal born in the Cold War and now shrinking rapidly.
The Obama administration disclosed the size of its atomic stockpile going back to 1962 as part of a campaign to get other nuclear nations to be more forthcoming, and to improve its bargaining position against the prospect of a nuclear Iran.
"We think it is in our national security interest to be as transparent as we can be about the nuclear program of the United States," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters at the United Nations, where she addressed a conference on containing the spread of atomic weapons.
The U.S. has previously regarded such details as top secret.
The figure includes both "strategic," or long-range weapons, and those intended for use at shorter range.
The Pentagon said the stockpile of 5,113 as of September 2009 represents a 75 percent reduction since 1989.
A rough count of deployed and reserve warheads has been known for years, so the Pentagon figures do not tell nuclear experts much they don't already know.
Hans Kristensen, director of Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said his organization had already put the number at around 5,100 by reviewing budget estimates and other documents.
The import of the announcement is the precedent it sets, Kristensen said.
"The important part is that the U.S. is no longer going to keep other countries in the dark," he said.
Clinton said the disclosure of numbers the general public has never seen "builds confidence" that the Obama administration is serious about stopping the spread of atomic weapons and reducing their numbers.
But the administration is not revealing everything.
The Pentagon figure released Monday includes deployed weapons, which are those more or less ready to launch, and reserve weapons. It does not include thousands of warheads that have been disabled or all but dismantled. Those weapons could, in theory, be reconstituted, or their nuclear material repurposed.
Estimates of the total U.S. arsenal range from slightly more than 8,000 to above 9,000, but the Pentagon will not give a precise number.
Whether to reveal the full total, including those thousands of nearly dead warheads, was debated within the Obama administration. Keeping those weapons out of the figure released Monday represented a partial concession to intelligence agency officials and others who argued national security could be harmed by laying the entire nuclear arsenal bare.
A senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the overall total is still classified, did not dispute the rough estimates developed by independent analysts.
Exposure of once-classified totals for U.S. deployed and reserve nuclear weapons is intended to nudge nations such as China, which has revealed little about its nuclear stockpile.
"You can't get anywhere toward disarmament unless you're going to be transparent about how many weapons you have," said Sharon Squassoni, a nuclear policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Russia and the United States have previously disclosed the size of their stockpiles of deployed strategic weapons, and France and Britain have released similar information. All have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is the subject of the U.N. review that began Monday.
The U.S. revelations are calculated to improve Washington's bargaining power with Iran's allies and friends for the drive to head off what the West charges is a covert Iranian program to build a bomb.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamadinejad spoke ahead of Clinton at the conference, denouncing U.S. efforts to pressure his regime to abandon its nuclear program.
The U.N. conference will try to close loopholes in the internationally recognized rules against the spread of weapons technology.
Independent analysts estimate the total world stockpile of nuclear warheads at more than 22,000.
The Federation of American Scientists estimates that nearly 8,000 of those warheads are operational, with about 2,000 U.S. and Russian warheads ready for use on short notice.
The United States and Russia burnished their credentials for insisting that other countries forgo atomic weapons by agreeing last month to a new strategic arms reduction treaty.
The New START treaty sets a limit of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads for each side, down from 2,200 under a 2002 deal. The pact re-establishes anti-cheating procedures that provide the most comprehensive and substantial arms control agreement since the original 1991 START treaty.
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