Fri, Jul 15, 2005 page9

• Thank goodness we're all living in a MAD world

  The specter of nuclear war has frightened people for decades, but some analysts say that many more people would have died without weapons of mass destruction

  • DPA
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  Tens of millions of people have died in armed conflicts since the end of World War II. But the figure could have been significantly higher had it not been for atomic weapons.

  So say historians and analysts when discussing the role nuclear arms have played in the atomic era that began 60 years ago on July 16, 1945, when scientists tested the first nuclear bomb at 5:29am.

  When a mushroom cloud rose above the New Mexico desert -- and weeks later two more over Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- many believed atomic weapons would prevent world wars, because the consequences would be too devastating.

  Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist and key architect of the US' nuclear weaponry who died in 1967, was troubled with that conclusion and the bombing of the two Japanese cities that brought the Japanese to surrender. He expressed his concerns in a letter to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson on Aug. 17, 1945:

  "The safety of this nation, as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power, cannot lie wholly or entirely in its scientific or technical prowess. It can only be based on making future wars impossible," he wrote.

  But since the invention of nuclear weapons and the massive buildup of armaments by the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, there has not been a conflict on the planet on the massive, global scale of World War II, which saw 55 million civilians and soldiers die.

  brink of war

  For decades the US and Soviet militaries stared each other down over Europe but hardly ever fired a shot. When US President John F. Kennedy revealed in 1962 that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, the crisis brought the two sides to the brink of war.

  But the thought of annihilation resulted in Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev resolving the dispute soberly, a resolution that historians argue might not have occurred without the presence of atomic weapons.

  "There have been no weapons of that kind of massive destruction potential to instil that level of fear in the hearts of world leaders," said Charles Ferguson, a nuclear-arms specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations based in Washington.

  Mutually assured destruction (MAD), the concept that guided Moscow and Washington through the Cold War, is also credited by analysts with preventing a conventionally fought World War III on the European continent that could have killed millions.

  "It's a MAD world," Ferguson said. "We will never know if we would have had a war with the Soviet Union if there weren't nuclear weapons. It could have been nuclear weapons that held the fire."

  The best current example of how MAD works is Pakistan and India, two bitter enemies who waged three wars in the second half of the 20th century. In 1998, both countries detonated an atomic bomb, becoming official nuclear powers.

  HYPOTHETICAL

  But critics of the MAD concept dismiss it as hypothetical at best, saying plenty of wars have been fought by nuclear powers since World War II: on the Korean peninsula, Vietnam and Afghanistan and the two wars in Iraq.

  "It's a nice hypothetical argument but does not have any bearing on reality," said Jim Riccio, a nuclear expert at Greenpeace, which wants atomic weapons abolished. "Show me the world war that you avoided."

  "We just found a different way to fight wars," he said.

  Riccio said that in some cases, like Iraq, nuclear weapons were the reason for going to war in the first place.

  "Whether it was a legitimate or illegitimate reason for going to war doesn't eviscerate the fact that we went to war over nuclear weapons," Riccio said, adding his concerns that nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran could also provoke a war.

  By the end of the Cold War in 1990, the official nuclear powers -- the US, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and China -- had accumulated 50,000 nuclear warheads. Israel is believed to have nuclear arms but has not conducted a test.

  During the 1990s, Russia and the US worked to lower their stockpiles, but there is no end in sight for ridding the world of the weapons. Although smaller in number, nuclear weapons are still deployed on ground and at sea and are ready to be launched at a moment's notice.

  The presence of the weapons poses other hazards. As with Iran and North Korea, there are worries other countries will continue their effort to acquire the weapons, and there has been growing concern the technology could end up in the hands of terrorists.

  There has been intelligence suggesting that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on several occasions tried to acquire atomic material, and the know-how and equipment can be traded on the black market, out of the reach of world leaders.

  The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Kahn, admitted last year to running a nuclear ring to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Libya has since dismantled its program, but Iran and North Korea continue to be the object of major international nonproliferation efforts.
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