Nunn’s nuclear nightmare scenario

Some moments in the “Cold” War of the latter half of the 20th century were far more chilling than all but a few Americans ever knew.

The Cold War has been over for almost 30 years. The threat of nuclear destruction is not, as Georgia’s longtime former U.S. senator and defense specialist Sam Nunn has spent much of his post-political career trying to tell us.

Last week Nunn, a founding member of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, and Clinton administration defense secretary William Perry brought that message to the University of Georgia as part of the annual UGA Charter Lecture series. Nunn was on hand in person, Perry via a web link from his office 3,000 miles away at Stanford University. But according to a report in the Athens Banner Herald, they told the same scary story: The danger of somebody actually using nuclear weapons — something that hasn’t happened since the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II — is more imminent now than at any time since.

Though the Cold War threat of thermonuclear annihilation might be diminished, the list of countries with nuclear weapons now stands at nine, with Iran and North Korea the ominous clouds on the horizon. There is also the threat of regional nuclear conflict between perennial enemies like Indian and Pakistan, a relationship Perry called the “poster child” for post-Cold War nuclear brinksmanship.

Still, Nunn told the UGA audience, it’s not necessarily governments — even rogue regimes in Tehran or Pyongyang — that pose the greatest threat: “The thing I worry about a great deal is that we’re in a new era where states no longer have the monopoly on nuclear weapons or material or knowledge.”

That means, of course, ISIS or other terrorist outfits getting nuclear material for “dirty bombs” that would be effective not so much in terms of body counts as in contaminating whole metropolitan areas and disrupting whole economies: “The abandonment of a city would be a thing to behold,” Nunn said.

The best defense against such a scenario, Nunn and Perry told the audience (and Nunn has spoken and written about this repeatedly in recent years) is for the world’s nuclear powers to rise above even their bitterest political differences — Perry alluded specifically to the destabilizing effect of Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty — and cooperate to secure their nuclear arsenals and weapons-grade nuclear materials.

“Russia and the United States have 90 percent of the nuclear weapons,” Nunn said in Athens. “We have an obligation to work together. This is vital. This is existential.”

Perry revealed that there had been at least three nuclear false alarms in the U.S. during the Cold War, and at least two in the Soviet Union, not counting the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The two thermonuclear powers, Perry said, avoided disaster “as much by good luck as by good management.”

Counting on luck, of course, is not a sound nuclear defense tactic.

This story was originally published May 2, 2016 at 6:27 PM with the headline "Nunn’s nuclear nightmare scenario."