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Save This PageAt the height of the Cold War in the mid-1960s, the United States bristled with more than 32,000 nuclear weapons, many armed and ready to fire at hundreds of cities in the Soviet Union.
The Russians pointed their own formidable arsenal at us, a reminder of the worst-case scenario: the mutually assured destruction of both countries.
Today, the former rivals have smaller stockpiles -- the United States has about 10,000 weapons, while Russia's arsenal is 14,000 warheads. But experts say half as many warheads is no less threatening.
Add to the mix China, Pakistan, Israel, France and the other members of the nuke club, and the collective firepower could cripple, if not end, civilization.
The White House recently announced plans for "a significant reduction in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile," by about 50 percent by 2012. If such a plan goes through, the number of warheads would shrink to 5,400.
On the surface, experts say, this is good news. But uncertainty hides behind the rhetoric, as do serious questions: What will happen to the weapons taken out of service, and what is the yield -- destructive power -- of the weapons that remain ready for battle?
Maybe the most important question of all is why we need 5,400 nuclear warheads when we are no longer locked in conflict with the former Soviet Union.
"That's a question about a matrix nobody knows much about," said Hans M. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "It's an interpretation of vague guidance that comes out of the White House."
Even if the U.S. takes roughly half its nuclear warheads out of service during the next four years, they won't soon be destroyed, experts say. Such work happens in one place only: The Plantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant in Texas, which currently is extending the life of existing weapons, not eliminating them. Those weapons proposed to be cut will instead be stored on the shelf.
"They aren't necessarily being destroyed," Kristensen said. "They will still remain at the bases where they were in the first place. And you have to remember, what's to be cut are warheads in reserve, not warheads taken off deployed forces, off the tips of missiles."
The Bush administration said the plan is to reduce the arsenal to about one-quarter of the size it was in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolving. But even with those cuts, the stockpile will be large. According to the federation:
The number of weapons is less important than the size of their yield, experts say. The two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were each 20 kilotons, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. By comparison, a typical missile-launched nuclear warhead today is about 170 kilotons, and others can pack a 1,000-kiloton punch.
"So we are talking about incredible power in these weapons," said Stephen Young, a global security analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science policy group in Washington.
The group calls nuclear weapons the "gravest and most immediate threat to human civilization" and the U.S. policy "outdated, dangerous and misguided." The continuing nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia, the scientists say, means "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."
Reducing the cache of weapons is critical to a safer world, Young said. Detonating just one over a city, he said, would change the world overnight.
"I can't see the need to have thousands of warheads," Young said. "It took only two nuclear weapons to end World War II."
Kurt Loft is a staff writer for The Tampa Tribune in Florida
