Abstract
Nuclear weapons give rise to excessive secrecy, and history has proven that the first casualty of excessive secrecy is sound government policy. In his seminal study Atomic Audit, analyst Stephen I. Schwartz revealed how a lack of transparency gave the United States free rein to spend more than $5 trillion between 1945 and 1996 to acquire a nuclear arsenal that we know today was far larger than necessary.
Thanks to recently declassified documents, this issue of the Bulletin provides unique access to how such ill-fated decisions were made. David Coleman of the University of Virginia's Presidential Recordings Program presents never-before published transcripts of a secret meeting between President John F. Kennedy and his advisers just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis (see p. 40). The Pentagon already had more than 27,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled, yet it wanted more. Why was it, JFK wanted to know, that the United States needed such a huge arsenal, when a handful of nuclear weapons in Cuba would have been enough to deter him? Despite these misgivings, Kennedy approved most of the increases. The tendency to err on the side of too much rather than too little has long proven irresistible to policy makers.
the side of too much nuclear firepower rather than too little has long proven irresistible.
Also in this issue, Avner Cohen of the University of Maryland and William Burr of the National Security Archive rely on newly declassified documents to recount the inside story of how the Nixon administration grappled with the implications of a nuclear-armed Israel (p. 22). Key officials in the White House were alarmed by the development, not least because they saw it as a threat to the nascent Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). President Richard Nixon's decisions would form the basis for the U.S.-Israeli policy of “don't ask, don't tell” that Cohen and Burr argue is now a burdensome anomaly: “Such ideas as a nuclear-free Middle East, or even the inclusion of Israel in an updated NPT regime, cannot even be discussed properly.”
Proper discussion would also go a long way toward dealing with the dilemma of where the United States will dispose of its 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste. As MIT's Allison Macfarlane explains, plans to store this waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, have become mired in endless lawsuits and debates over predictive assessments (p. 46). In the future, Macfarlane recommends following the example of other countries that involve citizens in affected municipalities from the get-go. “This consultative approach is in stark contrast to the U.S. ‘decide, announce, defend’ policy,” she writes. Given that a portion of this waste is a legacy of America's bloated nuclear weapons program, a workable solution would offer a rare opportunity to make amends for past mistakes.