8 Scientific American, June 2022
SCIENCE AGENDA
OPINION AND ANALYSIS FROM
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S BOARD OF EDITORS
Illustration by Martin Gee“It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us,” wrote
16 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in an open letter in March that
has since been signed by more than a million people. Decades af-
ter the end of the cold war and mere months after the U.S., Russia
and other members of the United Nations Security Council agreed
that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the
specter of nuclear apocalypse again looms over humankind.
Western powers contemplating intervention in the war in
Ukraine “must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the
consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire his-
tory,” President Vladimir Putin warned in a not so veiled threat of
nuclear retaliation on February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
Days later he raised the alert levels of Russian nuclear forces.
If the prospect of nuclear war does not terrify you, it should. If
either Russia or NATO used shorter-range “tactical” nuclear weap-
ons in a European conflict, researchers at Princeton University’s
Program on Science and Global Security concluded in a 2019 anal-
ysis, it could rapidly escalate into a thermonuclear war that would
kill or injure more than 90 million people within a few hours. Fur-
ther, the one treaty constraining the nuclear arsenals of Russia and
the U.S. will expire in 2026. The extreme level of distrust between
the adversaries makes it hard for them to negotiate; nevertheless,
they must urgently strive to reduce the nuclear threat.
The crisis in Ukraine could provide an impetus. In 1962 the U.S.
and the Soviet Union narrowly averted nuclear war over the de-
ployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The terrifyingly close call
sparked an era of arms control. Ten years later the U.S. and the So-
viet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, con-
straining the development of defensive shields against incoming
missiles, and also agreed to limit the numbers of intercontinental
and other ballistic missiles. Another agreement in 1987 banned in-
termediate-range nuclear weapons, and the Strategic Arms Reduc-
tion Treaty (START) of 1991 forced significant reductions in U.S.
and Soviet nuclear arsenals. These treaties created “guardrails,”
says Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, without which
“one side or the other could go over the nuclear cliff.”
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, held
that neither superpower could initiate an attack without itself fac-
ing annihilation. But in 2002 the U.S. withdrew from the ABM
Treaty and began to build a missile defense system, destabilizing
this uneasy balance and sparking a new arms race. In 2019 then
president Donald Trump went further, abandoning the Interme-
diate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
These eliminations leave the New Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty, or New START, negotiated by former presidents Barack
Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, as the only constraint on
the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons. Negotiations for renew-
ing and possibly expanding the agreement were scheduled to be-
gin this year; these talks have now been suspended. But if New
START is allowed to lapse, a new arms race will begin. If then un-
regulated nuclear warheads were combined with other unregu-
lated technologies, such as hypersonic or autonomous weapons,
the consequences would be unimaginable.
There is reason for hope: much of the rest of the world has been
doggedly pursuing arms control. Almost all nations signed multi-
lateral conventions that came into force in 1975 and 1997, banning
biological and chemical weapons, respectively. These agreements
may be hard to enforce, but they confirm that the global commu-
nity deems the use of such weapons morally repugnant.
The U.N.’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, ad-
vanced by civil society in partnership with nonnuclear states, came
into force in January 2021. It aspires to “completely eliminate” nu-
clear weapons. None of the nuclear-weapons states signed on. But
the U.S. and Russia are both signatories of the Nuclear Nonprolif-
eration Treaty of 1970, in which nations without nuclear weapons
agreed to never acquire them; in exchange, they got access to peace-
ful nuclear technology and, crucially, a promise from nuclear-
armed nations to eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.
Elimination admittedly seems elusive. Still, the U.S. could im-
mediately make the world a safer place by pledging to never be
the first to use nuclear weapons. And as difficult as it may be, the
U.S. must strive to resume negotiations with Russia to reduce the
danger of nuclear warfare. We have lived long enough with this
grotesque cold war relic.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
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Nuclear arms control is more urgent
now than ever
By the Editors