Nuclear Bombs Down, Risk The Same

TAMPA - At the height of the Cold War in the mid-1960s, the United States bristled with more than 32,000 nuclear weapons, many armed and ready to fire at hundreds of cities in the Soviet Union.

The Russians pointed their own formidable arsenal at us, a reminder of the worst-case scenario: the mutually assured destruction of both countries.

Today, the two former rivals are reducing the size of their stockpiles, although experts say half as many warheads is no less threatening. Add to the mix China, Pakistan, Israel, France and the other members of the nuke club, and the collective firepower could cripple, if not end, civilization.

Last month, the White House announced "a significant reduction in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile" by about 50 percent by 2012. If such a plan goes through, the number of active warheads would shrink from about 10,000 to 5,400.

On the surface, experts say, this is good news. But uncertainty hides behind the rhetoric, as do serious questions: What will happen to the weapons taken out of service, and what is the yield - destructive power - of the weapons that remain ready for battle?

Maybe the most important question of all is why we need 5,400 nuclear warheads when we are no longer at odds with the former Soviet Union.

"That's a question about a matrix nobody knows much about," said Hans M. Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C. "It's an interpretation of vague guidance that comes out of White House."

Even if the United States takes roughly half its nuclear warheads out of service during the next four years, they won't soon be dismantled or destroyed, experts say. Such work happens in one place only: The Plantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant in Texas, which currently is extending the life of existing weapons, not eliminating them. Those weapons proposed to be "cut" will instead be stored on the shelf.

"They aren't necessarily being destroyed," Kristensen said by telephone. "They will still remain at the bases where they were in the first place. And you have to remember what's to be cut are warheads in reserve, not warheads taken off deployed forces, off the tips of missiles."

The Bush administration said the plan is to reduce the arsenal to about one-quarter of the size it was in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolving. But even with those cuts, the stockpile will be large by post-Cold War standards. According to the federation:

The U.S. arsenal would still be four times the combined number of nuclear weapons of all the world's nuclear states, excluding Russia.

By 2012, the stockpile would be 10 times its size in 1950, when the United States decided to contain the Soviet Union.

At least 2,200 warheads would remain operational, with 850 armed and ready to be delivered and detonated.

The number of weapons is less important than the size of their yield, experts say. The two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were each 20 kilotons, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. By comparison, a typical missile-launched nuclear warhead today is about 170 kilotons, and others can pack a 1,000-kiloton punch.

"So we are talking about incredible power in these weapons," said Stephen Young, a global security analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science policy group in Washington.

The Union calls nuclear weapons the "gravest and most immediate threat to human civilization" and the U.S. policy "outdated, dangerous and misguided." The continuing nuclear standoff between the United States and former Soviet Union, the scientists say, means "a real risk of an accidental or unauthorized attack, or a deliberate attack in response to a false warning. Such an attack could destroy the United States as a functioning society."

Reducing the cache of weapons is critical to a safer world, Young said, but at some point the United States will keep a large part of its armament. Detonating just one over a city, he said, would change the world overnight.

"I can't see the need to have thousands of warheads," Young said. "It took only two nuclear weapons to end World War II."