Brian Rudman: Talkfest will do little to make world safer

The US and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons on alert. These missiles are aimed at the ocean, in case of an accidental launch. Photo / APN

After 25 years of New Zealand on the naughty stool for saying no thanks to United States nuclear weapons, a US president has decided we mightn't have been so wicked after all.

President Barack Obama has invited Prime Minister John Key to this week's anti-nuke love-in as some sort of poster boy for the cause, and to add a bit of respectability to the circus.

Presumably it's in recognition of David Lange's brave, if quixotic, stand against nuclear US warship visits in the mid-1980s and the resolve of New Zealand governments since, to stand firm despite US bullying.

Mr Lange's deputy at the time, Sir Geoffrey Palmer told the Dominion Post last week that the invite was "vindication" of New Zealand's pioneering stance.

He said it was now "desirable" that US Navy ship visits recommenced, although only if they don't breach our legislation banning nuclear-powered or armed, warships.

It's up to them really. Personally, I've never thought warship visits from anywhere as being particularly desirable. But the ball has always been in the US's court.

Their warships were never banned by us. Now, as in 1985, the only thing stopping them sailing into the Hauraki Gulf is a nostalgic attachment to their own Cold War policy of "neither confirming nor denying" any warship is "nuclear".

Whether the US warships will come anytime soon, and just how dovish Mr Obama really is, should come clearer after what an Atlantic Monthly columnist calls the White House's "Nuclear Madness Month", comes to an end.

This week's Nuclear Security Summit is about trying to prevent terrorists and criminals and other freelancers getting their hands on any so-called "loose" bomb-grade plutonium and uranium.

It comes hot on the heels of last week's publication of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review establishing US nuclear policy and strategy for the next five to 10 years, and the bilateral agreement between Russia and the US limiting the number of nuclear missiles the two main Cold War protagonists can continue to have aimed, primed and ready to fire at each other.

It's when you get down to the details that you realise how half-hearted all this anti-nuclear talk from Mr Obama and his old enemies really is.

And how, when it comes to endangering the world, it's still the legitimate nuclear-armed governments we have most to worry about.

In last Sunday's Washington Post, historian David Hoffman noted that at the height of the Cold War, there were more than 60,000 nuclear weapons on alert.

Just one act of madness - or even accident - and the world could have been obliterated. Hoffman says the numbers have dropped to 23,000, of which 95 per cent are still in Russian and American hands.

A few days ago, President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals to 1550 nuclear warheads each by 2017.

According to Hoffman, this agreement doesn't include upwards of 10,000 smaller battlefield nuclear weapons and weapons awaiting destruction.

If the US and Russia - now friends - persist with the now irrelevant Cold War concept of deterrence, how many nuclear weapons would they need to scare each other?

Hoffman quotes a paper by three US Air Force "thinkers" that "America's security can rest easily" on maintaining a deterrence strike force of only 311 nuclear weapons, "dispersed among missile silos, submarines and airplanes".

They point out that China has a minimum deterrence strategy involving 400 warheads, half of those deployed.

Yet the US Nuclear Posture Review and the treaty signed with the Russians sets a ceiling five times greater.

It makes humbug out of the opening words of the posture review summary document which grandly announces it is pursuing the President's agenda "for reducing nuclear dangers and pursuing the peace and security of the world without nuclear weapons, including concrete steps we can and should take now".

One of the quickest and simplest ways of making the world safer without reducing the US and Russian arsenals would be to turn their "on alert" missiles off. Pull the plug out of the wall. Take them off instant alert.

Today, the US and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons ready for launching in a few minutes.

In acknowledgement of the possibility of errors, these "on alert" missiles are aimed at the mid-ocean.

Which means if someone in charge of the red button gets drunk, goes mad, or simply slips, and the unthinkable happens, the fish in the mid-Atlantic Ocean will be the immediate victims.

Robert McNamara, who died last year, was US Secretary of Defence at the time of the Cuban missile crisis when the two Cold War foes brought the world to the brink of armageddon.

He counselled caution then and went much further when writing in Foreign Policy magazine in 2005. He called on the United States "to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool".

He called "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous".

He called it "bizarre as to be beyond belief" that for 40 years, on any given day, "the President is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world".

He said "to declare war requires an Act of Congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minute's deliberation by the President and his advisers".

His minimum reform would be to "remove all strategic nuclear weapons from 'hair-trigger' alert". Nuclear weapons "indiscriminately blast, burn and irradiate with a speed and finality that are almost incomprehensible.

This is exactly what countries like the United States and Russia, with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, continue to threaten every minute of every day in this new 21st century".

President Obama doesn't need a talkfest of world leaders to implement Mr McNamara's proposal. Like his power to launch a nuclear weapon, it just needs personal resolve.