We Will Never Give Up Our Nukes

A draft of a U.N. treaty to ban all nuclear weapons is about to be voted on. It has the support of 132 nations and is very likely to pass, at which point the United States will soon once again be in technical violation of a major international agreement, as it long has been with regard to the International Treaty banning land mines.

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North Korea's violation of similar international agreements is at the crux of the international consensus against allowing the country to have a nuclear program in the first place.

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The problem with this argument is that from the point of view of many non-nuclear countries, the United States itself, along with other nuclear club countries (particularly Russia), has been in continuing violation of the original nuclear non-proliferation treaty, as drafted in 1968.

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Israel, India and Pakistan were three of just four U.N. member states to originally refuse to sign the treaty. North Korea, meanwhile, pulled out of the treaty in 2003.

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One of the reasons the NPT was long seen as successful is that over the decades, it did inspire the main actors – particularly the United States and Russia – to move toward disarmament. Through a variety of programs, nuclear stockpiles have been drastically diminished, down to about 14,900 warheads worldwide, or two-thirds less than their high point in the mid-Eighties.

  Rolling Stone

Still a whole lot more than will ever be used.

The most recent news in the U.S., of course, is that both of our major political parties have supported a massive, trillion-dollar "modernization" program that would significantly enhance rather than reduce existing stockpiles.

This slowing of the disarmament movement began during Barack Obama's last term, coinciding with the collapse of relations between the U.S. and Russia.

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[T]he two countries who maintain about 90 percent of the world's warheads have stopped talking about nuclear reduction, and the rest of the world – which was promised disarmament – has noticed, leading to protest moves like this new treaty ban.

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A lack of dialogue on the nuclear front between Russia and America is an extremely negative development, given that our two countries have nearly blown up the planet by accident multiple times, in underreported incidents.

The most serious of these was probably 1983, when a Soviet satellite mistakenly detected the launch of five American minuteman missiles headed toward Russia. Only the high-stress judgment of a 44-year-old Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov prevented a massive counter-launch and the probable deaths of millions.

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Trump is not likely candidate to make any sort of move to put nuclear disarmament back on track. On more than one occasion he's talked about using nuclear weapons approvingly, like it's a realistic option. In the giant catalogue of evidence that he's nuts, his views on nukes are on page one of the first chapter – the very craziest thing about him.

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...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.