The University of New Hampshire's Department of Political Science teams with the Union of Concerned Scientists to discuss the future of nuclear weapons in the international stage.
By Benjamin Strawbridge
Contributing Writer
November 9, 2017
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In collaboration with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and members of the University of New Hampshire’s Department of Political Science, Dr. Ira Helfand and Dr. David Wright of UCS presented a talk on the transnational significance and current volatility of nuclear weapons in the age of President Donald Trump.
The meeting, held on Monday, Nov. 6 from 7 to 9 p.m. in Room 304 of the Horton Social Science Center, took aim at the "Risks, Consequences [of nuclear weapons], and Preventing Nuclear War” in 2017 and beyond, as well as touching on the present state of international nuclear arsenals since the end of the Cold War and the dangers that lie in their current existence.
One of the biggest changes to the nuclear landscape, per Wright and Helfand’s corresponding PowerPoint presentation, has been the decrease in the volumes of such stockpiles around the globe over the span of more than three decades. In the mid ‘80s, for instance, the number of nuclear weapons between the two major superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, totaled and peaked at "more than 60,000,” according to, co-Director of the UCS Global Security Program.
Another major shift Wright noted in his segment of the talk was the dramatic change in the number of nuclear players on the global stage over the last 30 years. While the U.S. and Russia remain the two major nuclear powers on Earth, other nations have risen and fallen as current and former nuclear powers.
In one of Wright’s examples, the state of South Africa, between 1989 and 1991, purged itself of its nuclear development and, "worked with the international community to convince the world that it had gotten rid of its nuclear weapons program” when it became clear that the apartheid government’s downfall was inevitable.
In a more modern setting, the speaker highlighted the presently swift and disquieting nuclear development and testing in North Korea, which, according to the presentation, tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006 and had "most of” the world believing that it tested its first hydrogen bomb this past September.
When it came time to discussing the current administration’s plans and policy concerning nuclear weapons, Wright defined its massive scope and costs. He described the new policy as the White House’s first steps to "rebuild and enhance essentially all the legs of its nuclear arsenal,” costing an "enormous” and "tremendous” sum of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades.
Wright described this plan and expansion of nuclear power, for a country he labeled as having the "most advanced nuclear force” on Earth, as a "signal to other countries like Russia and China that maybe they should be worried about where the U.S. is headed” in terms of self-defense and the future of nuclear nonproliferation.
For his part, Helfand continued what Wright started and warned the audience of the potential dangers of any use of nuclear arsenals in any size conflict, and that the risks for nuclear conflict are at their highest levels since the ‘80s. He stressed that growing tensions between the U.S. and Russia, the U.S. and China, and India and Pakistan, as well as the sudden likeliness of an "accidental” nuclear war, just to name a few, makes the engagement in nuclear conflict "not just possible, but likely.”
Helfand also took the time to calculate the devastation that only a 0.03 percent piece of the world’s nuclear arsenal in a war. According to Helfand, a week-long direct war between Pakistan and India using only 100 bombs smaller than those used in World War II would cause numerous fires that would send 6 1/2 million pounds of soot into the atmosphere. This would lead to cooling significantly and decrease precipitation levels of both rain and snow, enough to drive international food production down by "catastrophic levels” in production of corn, rice, wheat, and other farm foods. Helfand concludes his scenario with an international famine that could kill up to 2 billion people that could mark "the end of civilization as we know it.”
Helfand said it is events and scenarios like these that, in his eyes, make the continued existence of nuclear arsenals in the U.S. and other nuclear states treacherous. In the hopes of spreading advocacy against the future expansion or use of nuclear weapons in transcontinental conflicts, Helfand spread the message that the world is at a "crossroads” when it comes to determining the fate of nuclear weapons in the global dynamic. He advised those in the audience to address their existence and fight for their removal from the world stage.
"As long as they exist, as long as there are thousands of nuclear warheads in the world, there is the danger that they will be used,” he said. "And we have to stop pretending that nothing will ever go wrong…that our good luck will continue forever.”
Many in the audience echoed similar messages of change as they commented on Monday’s talk. For New Hampshire Nuclear Weapons Working Group member and Nuclear Weapons Abolition activist Judy Elliott of Canterbury, New Hampshire, her biggest takeaway from the meeting was a "reminder” for the world at large.
"If we don’t move towards abolishing nuclear weapons, the human race is pretty much doomed," Elliot said, "because eventually we’re going to have a nuclear war that can destroy, certainly, human civilization and quite possibly life on Earth, and that’s not an exaggeration.”
Originally published in The New Hampshire in Vol. 107, No. 11, on Nov. 9, 2017.
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