The Nuclear Paradox
The Nuclear Paradox
By Elizabeth Maybury
60 years and some 23,000 nuclear warheads later, since the bombing of Hiroshima, the question that faces the U.S and their allies alike “is less how a nation might array its nuclear forces and more how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons from spinning out of control”. The very nuclear weapons created to deter attack and ultimately bring about peace are also the cause for ambiguity among world nations, the hole in which millions of tax payers dollars are cast, and the heart of unease felt worldwide by those who fear their amazing destructive power in the wrong hands. The national vision of peace has been misconstrued and wrapped the Americas in a paradoxical ideology of safety that has allowed us to live in “a peace that is no peace”, trapped in the middle of a world wide “Mexican Standoff”.
Even since the first atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, the knowledge of nuclear technology has been sought after by communist and terrorist hands. “Discussions of non-state nuclear terrorism among experts go back at least to the 1970s.” But even before then the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands was imminent. The paranoia of such a reality as a nuclear terrorist attack has existed as early as the late 1940s to the late 1950s in the time of the McCarthyite witch-hunts. “New York Times commented in 1981 that The Nuclear Emergency Search Team's "origins go back to the aftershocks of the Munich Olympic massacre in mid-1972. Until that time, no one in the United States Government had thought seriously about the menace of organized, international terrorism, much less nuclear terrorism.” Further investigation proved the possibility of nuclear materials such as plutonium or highly enriched uranium being attained by terrorists more and more plausible. By the Mid 1980’s Special Bulletin, a television dramatization of a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States had been aired by the NBC and "The
By Elizabeth Maybury
60 years and some 23,000 nuclear warheads later, since the bombing of Hiroshima, the question that faces the U.S and their allies alike “is less how a nation might array its nuclear forces and more how to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons from spinning out of control”. The very nuclear weapons created to deter attack and ultimately bring about peace are also the cause for ambiguity among world nations, the hole in which millions of tax payers dollars are cast, and the heart of unease felt worldwide by those who fear their amazing destructive power in the wrong hands. The national vision of peace has been misconstrued and wrapped the Americas in a paradoxical ideology of safety that has allowed us to live in “a peace that is no peace”, trapped in the middle of a world wide “Mexican Standoff”.
Even since the first atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, the knowledge of nuclear technology has been sought after by communist and terrorist hands. “Discussions of non-state nuclear terrorism among experts go back at least to the 1970s.” But even before then the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands was imminent. The paranoia of such a reality as a nuclear terrorist attack has existed as early as the late 1940s to the late 1950s in the time of the McCarthyite witch-hunts. “New York Times commented in 1981 that The Nuclear Emergency Search Team's "origins go back to the aftershocks of the Munich Olympic massacre in mid-1972. Until that time, no one in the United States Government had thought seriously about the menace of organized, international terrorism, much less nuclear terrorism.” Further investigation proved the possibility of nuclear materials such as plutonium or highly enriched uranium being attained by terrorists more and more plausible. By the Mid 1980’s Special Bulletin, a television dramatization of a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States had been aired by the NBC and "The