The Missile (Disarmament) Crisis

Leonard C. Bruno/<a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98506956/">Library of Congress</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last Saturday, an engineering malfunction at F. E. Warren Air Force base in Wyoming caused 50 US intercontinental ballistic missiles to go offline for 45 minutes. The ICBMs—one ninth of the US nuclear arsenal—were temporarily disconnected from the launch control centers at the base. Officials were quick to point out that it would still have been possible to launch the ICBMs from a command plane in a high alert scenario. But even if the reality of the failure wasn’t that bad, it’s implications for US nuclear policy might be.

Currently awaiting the Senate’s consent is the new START treaty, which would reduce US and Russian nuclear arsenals by 30 percent. Signed by Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last April, the treaty has received widespread backing: “The support for new START by our entire military leadership, our intelligence community, six former secretaries of state, five former secretaries of defense, three former national security advisers, and seven former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command is an extraordinary endorsement of why this treaty needs to be passed,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters earlier this month. Ratifying the treaty would be a significant step toward nuclear disarmament. But a central argument for the new START treaty has been that because US nuclear stockpiles and launch systems are so well-maintained and reliable, the country could still pursue an effective deterrence strategy with fewer weapons. The mishap at Warren, along with several others in recent history, undermines this assumption.

In August 2006, the US mistakenly fulfilled an order from Taiwan for helicopter batteries with four classified nuclear-weapon fuses. A year later, six “hot” nuclear missiles were accidentally flown across the US from North Dakota to Louisiana. This missing nuclear weapons went undetected for 36 hours (“I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing,” a retired Air Force general commented to the Washington Post). The incidents led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to oust Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne in 2008. Gates called the oversights “a degradation of the authority, standards of excellence and technical competence within the nation’s ICBM force.”

According to John Noonan of the Weekly Standard, who originally broke the story on Twitter, an unnamed Senate staffer said that he thinks Saturday’s missile malfunction has killed the START treaty in the Senate. The staffer went on to say that the treaty might not even make it to the Senate floor before the midterm elections. With conservatives expected to gain seats in November, passage of the treaty, and progress toward nuclear disarmament, may be in jeopardy—leaving the country’s nuclear future all the more uncertain. On the one hand critics of the treaty have a point: These recent nuclear mistakes imply that our arsenal is more at risk of failure than it should be. But is the argument, then, that because our nuclear weapons are prone to malfunction and poor management, we need more of them? That seems like a strange piece of Cold War logic.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate