Saving the World By Stopping the Pentagon's Programs

Maybe there was a delay in his computerized voice system. Or maybe Stephen Hawking wanted a dramatic pause equal to the power of the words. Whatever the case, a long ten seconds passed between the Cambridge mathematician's roundup of the twin perils hanging over mankind like a double-bladed guillotine -- nuclear weapons and climate change -- and the following sentence, which would have been chilling even if they weren't uttered in the robot voice of the wheelchair-bound genius:

"It is now five minutes to midnight."

Thus ended Hawking's opening statement at Wednesday's simultaneous Washington/London press conference convened by the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The presser announced a two-minute advance of the Doomsday Clock's minute hand, its 18th movement since 1947. That was the year the Cold War turned mutually atomic, and scientists at the University of Chicago hatched the clock as a way to remind humanity how close it was to destroying itself in a spasm of nuclear firepower. Since then, the clock has gotten as close as two minutes to midnight (1953) and as far away as 17 (1991).

The optimism of the "17 minutes" years faded fast. By 1995, it was obvious the nuclear powers felt no urgency in making the most of what Jonathan Schell called the "gift of time." The United States and Russia kept their still massive arsenals cocked on hair-triggers. Global military spending hovered at Cold War levels. Concerns grew over leakage of the post-Soviet nuclear stockpile. Bin Laden. India. Pakistan.

Then the Bush administration rode into town waving blueprints for space weapons, missile defenses, tactical nukes, and dark new doctrines. They trashed arms control treaties like so many bongs left on State Department desks by previous administrations.

The 9/11 attacks opened up a window of fire to consider and address the mounting dangers of this "second nuclear age," which does not supplant but merely compounds the dangers of the first. It was an opportunity lost. The national security debate was soon defined by saber-rattling, fear-mongering, and the blasts of war. There it remains today. Iraq is the "most crucial" issue facing the new Congress according to Jack Murtha, chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee.

Maybe. But as the 18 Nobel Laureates at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists remind us, there are other national security fronts that require urgent tending to. High-profile hearings on Iraq should not be held at the exclusion of hearings initiating a nuclear debate long overdue. In the last 15 years, public concern over and knowledge about nuclear issues has faded, despite the ascendance of an abstract, fatalistic and generally uninformed panic over nuclear terrorism.

But this is no time for forgetting, or for fatalism. There are hard policy levers that impact the probability of both nuclear terrorism and the still extant possibility of full-scale nuclear war. The new Congress must grasp this and rain legislative hellfire down on a raft of Strangelovean policies and programs currently in place or seeking funding. This means canceling some weapons while submitting them to fierce public inspection and ridicule, and boosting funds for and explaining the importance of nonproliferation programs that actually enhance national security.

The 110th can't save the world. Real progress will take new executive leadership and arduous diplomacy to reopen and deepen the U.S.-Russia disarmament process, and to close the Non-Proliferation Treaty loophole that allows countries to enrich and reprocess their own nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes. In the meantime, Congress can begin raising awareness of nuclear issues. It can kill or stall destabilizing nuclear-related programs where they can, retarding administration and Pentagon efforts to create a world of more nukes at home through obscene levels of defense spending, and less nukes abroad through the application of mindless, counterproductive and hypocritical force.