Activists have been fighting against nuclear weapons for decades. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it seemed that nuclear disarmament had a real chance. A number of international treaties had been signed over the decades to encourage nuclear armed nations to get rid of their nuclear weapons and to try to prevent non-nuclear nations from getting nuclear weapons. The U.S. and the Soviet Union/Russians had the biggest nuclear arsenals. Tens of thousands of warheads were built. This is a massive case of overkill because it is estimated that a hundred nuclear warheads could cause a nuclear winter and destroy human civilization.
Today, the U.S. and the Russians have about fifteen hundred warheads ready to launch and another three thousand warheads in reserve. A few other nations have a hundred or more warheads but the overall threat of nuclear war has been receding. As a matter of fact, U.S. nuclear power reactors have been running on fuel created by converted weapons-grade plutonium from Russian nukes for the last fifteen years.
President Obama wrote his senior thesis about the nuclear arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Early in his first term as President, Obama said "So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." This was a very promising sign to the anti-nuclear weapons crowd after years of the belligerence of the Bush Administration. And, Obama did move forward with the New Start Treaty that lowered the ceiling for deployed nuclear weapons to fifteen hundred warheads as mentioned above. The New Start Treaty also imposed limits on the different delivery systems that can deploy nuclear warheads.
However, the Obama State Department has been reluctant to seek ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because they are concerned that there would not be enough votes to pass it. The State Department has not been applying the pressure necessary to get Pakistan to stop building nuclear warheads. There appears to inconsistency in the Obama administration's efforts on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
Obama has just released his fiscal budget for 2015. The budget calls for more spending on design, maintenance, and production of nuclear weapons than Reagan spent in 1985 which was the historical maximum for U.S. government nuclear weapons expenditures. The budget request for nuclear weapons is seven percent bigger for 2016. Obama's Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) calls for spending an additional five hundred million dollars on nuclear warheads. Russia has recently been spending more on nuclear weapons systems.
Despite some progress in nuclear disarmament, it would appear that more money will be spent on weapons systems whose use would end human civilization. There are many more pressing needs in our country which would benefit from increased spending. Now that the U.S. and Russia are at odds over Russia's takeover of Crimea, it is even more important than ever to find a way to step back from the brink of nuclear war and get rid of these horrible weapons.
Los Alamos Study Group graph:
