(New Beginnings, No. 32)
Rockets on the loose
‘On the morning of 9 November 1979, US Air Force Minuteman missile crews were warned that a massive Soviet missile attack was en route to destroy US nuclear forces and the command structure. They prepared to launch their missiles, unaware that a training tape mistakenly loaded onto the USA’s early warning system computers had generated the false alarm. Six minutes passed before confirmation was received that there was no Soviet attack.
On 3 June 1980, a similar alert indicated an attack by 200 Soviet missiles against the US. A faulty computer chip was the cause.
On 26 September 1983, a Soviet early warning satellite spotted what seemed like the hot exhaust gases from a launch of US missiles from a base in the US mid-West. What it had actually detected was the sun.
On 25 January 1995, the launch, off the coast of Norway, of a research rocket investigating the Aurora Borealis was mistaken by Russia for a Trident missile launch from a US submarine. The Russian defensive system went on nuclear alert. Only two minutes remained for a “launch on warning” decision to be taken, when it was realized that the rocket’s trajectory was taking it away from Russia into the Norwegian Sea. The Norwegian government, in accordance with agreed international practice, had previously notified the Russian Foreign Ministry of the intended missile launch, but that ministry had failed to inform its Defence Ministry.
‘The Pentagon has acknowledged there have been 32 such incidents in the three decades from 1950’. These are like the above incidents, or when planes carrying nuclear warheads crashed. Other nuclear countries have likely had similar incidents, but without disclosing them.
Nuclear weapons
‘Up to the mid-1990’s, when arms reduction measures really began to kick in, as a result of the end of the Cold War, the four nuclear powers had built more than 137,000 nuclear warheads for use in an “end-game” conflict’. ‘By January 2000, total numbers among these four nations had declined to 35,810… still more than enough to destroy human civilisation many times over’. These were to be launched from planes, missiles, submarines, artillery shells, and in land- and sea- mines.’
Part of the reason for developing them is national pride: if our enemies have nuclear weapons we must have them, too. So, India and Pakistan, despite their great poverty, spend huge money on them. The former Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, said in the Seventies that Pakistanis would live on grass if that was what it took to get them. In 2002, when nuclear war threatened between India and Pakistan, an Indian army general said his country could afford to lose twenty-five million people.
The nuclear club comprises the US, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Countries which have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems include Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil and, soon perhaps, Iran. South Africa is believed to have had the atom bomb but to have destroyed it.
“Dirty” bombs
There are also so-called “dirty” bombs. ‘There is no need to master the complex physics of nuclear chain reaction. Merely wrap radioactive waste material around a conventional high explosive. Large quantities of both are not necessary. Hide the device within a high-profile target to achieve maximum effect’. ‘Dirty bomb incidents should therefore be expected’. In 2000, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported 63 known cases of trafficking of radioactive sources such as plutonium. ‘There seems little doubt that the business is increasing every year’. With 438 nuclear power stations and another 651 used for research purposes the potential is real. In Russia, many storage sites of strategic materials, nuclear and otherwise, are under-maintained and guarded, and staffed by scientists paid as little as £75 a month.
Chemical Weapons
Elsewhere, ‘there are approaching 500,000 tons of abandoned chemical munitions on the seabed, and the chances of a disaster increase, slowly, inexorably, every year as the process of decay continues’. The North Channel, between Ireland and Scotland, is one such site, the Straits of Gibraltar, another. The US used a chemical weapon of mass destruction – Agent Orange – in the Viet-Nam war; its effects are still felt today in, for example, the births of deformed children.
Biological Weapons
‘Biological weapons are… cheap to produce and deploy. A United Nations report in 1969 estimated the cost of such an offensive against a civilian population at $1 per square kilometre for biological agents, $600 for chemical weapons to cover the same area; $800 for nuclear warheads, and $2,000 for conventional armaments’. Biological weapons are known as the “Poor Man’s Atomic Bomb”.
Despite having signed conventions against biological weapons, Russia is believe to hold, on an island in the Aral Sea, enough anthrax spores to kill the population of the world several times over.
One of the consequences of a biological attack could be ‘lasting changes of an unpredictable nature in the human environment’. Such an attack would be silent – no explosions; it could take place from thousands of miles away, e.g. by injecting exported food with bacteria; it could go undetected for days while it spread among the population. You don’t need advanced technology to spread them. And they are easily concealed: ‘Facilities that could produce biological weapons may quite legally manufacture vitamins, antibiotics, vaccines, or even the innocent breakfast yoghurt. The equipment is essentially the same’. ‘Some of the toxins that can be used as biological agents have entirely peaceful uses…’ Some are found naturally, such as botulism, one of the deadliest known poisons.
Looking Ahead
‘The First World War was chemical; the Second World War was nuclear, and… Third World War… will be biological’. (William Stewart, a UK government microbiologist and chief scientific adviser to the British government in 2001.)
(Drawn mainly from Robert Hutchinson, Weapons of Mass Destruction: the no-nonsense guide to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons today, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 2003. All quotations are from it.)