We Should Be Zeroes

This past weekend, I attended the Reaching Zero student summit at Yale. There, over 300 of us--mostly college and high-school students--gathered to hear from the world’s leading authorities on the subject of nuclear weapons. Their goal is to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2030. Heady stuff explained by an amazing collection of people--from the U.N.’s Hans Blix to the CIA’s Valeria Plame Wilson. I took notes like a banshee and made myself a goal--to process the experience in the form of an article. Below is my first attempt to make sense of an amazing weekend experience.


No offense, Vladmir Putin, but Moscow is, like, so yesterday. Which makes it all the more baffling to realize that we’ve still got nuclear weapons aimed at that city. Actually, the U.S. still has 200 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, each aimed at a specific city. All leftovers from the Cold War . . .which ended in 1991.

So, when did leftovers become so popular?

Apparently, no one got the memo that, in today’s world, nuclear weapons make lousy deterrents. After all, how do you deter radical, non-state groups or individuals? Even a big, old nuclear weapon can’t help you do that.

And yet, there are over 20,000 nuclear warheads in the world today, about half of which are owned by the U.S. and Russia. And these things are not cheap to keep. Since the 1940s, the United States has spent about $7 trillion on its nuclear weapons, including $8 billion a year spent on Cold-War cleanup. That’s about $60 billion dollars a year. For weapons we have no intention of using.

I know some doves who would say we could have spent that $60 billion a year on education and the environment. And I’m pretty sure I could find some hawks who wouldn’t mind having $60 billion a year to upgrade our military’s conventional weapons and equipment.

If the U.S. reduced its nuclear stockpile by 80 percent, the U.S. would still have nearly 500 warheads, far more than the 300 the Military’s Air War College says we need to get by.

Despite a push from Congress to replace its fleet of Trident nuclear submarines, I bet some people in the Navy secretly hope we won’t. Why? Because replacing the Tridents would take decades and eat up 75 percent of the Navy’s budget. Seventy-five percent of their budget. For years and years and years and years.

Just maybe, then, there is a silver lining to this global economic crisis we find ourselves in. While few of us Plain Janes have thought of nuclear weapons in a while, most every Joe Blow around has thought about his pocketbook. So maybe our countries’ shrinking pocketbooks offer the world the perfect chance to just say no to nuclear weapons. After all, they are expensive. They are ineffective.

And they are, like, so yesterday.