Why You Should Worry About Pakistans Nukes
May 19, 2009 by national
Filed under World Report
Few who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 will forget the fear and apprehension they felt. The world stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust as U.S. ships imposed a blockade to force Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief as the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba, but all agreed a cataclysmic nuclear war had been only narrowly averted. Of the lessons that came from this episode, the one that stands out is that never again should the United States be put in a position where its cities are so close to nuclear destruction. Many assumed that lesson had been learned as decades of arms control, détente, and the end of the Cold War seemingly removed the specter of nuclear attack from our collective consciousness.
Well, just when you thought it was safe not to worry about nuclear annihilation, a new crisis has emerged that actually poses a greater threat of an American city being obliterated by a nuclear weapon than anything that occurred during the Cold War: As Pakistan becomes engulfed in chaos, there is a real chance that its nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of extremists determined to kill as many Americans as they can. Although the public has yet to pay much attention to what is happening in Pakistan and there is nowhere near the level of hysteria that gripped the United States nearly 50 years ago, the prospect of a nuclear weapon from Pakistan exploding on American soil is much higher than a Soviet attack from Cuba ever was. If anything can make one nostalgic for the bad old days of the Cold War, what is happening in Pakistan today is surely it.
It helps to first look back at the Cold War to see why the current nuclear threat from Pakistan is so much worse. To be sure, during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union each had some 10,000 nuclear warheads ready to strike each other. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could prevent the other from launching a devastating attack, nor could either country defend itself once a strike had been launched. The conflict between communism and capitalism, a series of regional confrontations, and the natural competition between the two strongest states in a bipolar system all threatened to turn the Cold War hot. And yet, a superpower nuclear war never happened. The reason the Soviet Union and the United States never came to nuclear blows is crystal clear: Deterrence worked. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States recognized that launching a nuclear attack would be suicidal, and neither leadership embraced death for their countries or themselves.
