"5 Myths About the Bomb and Us"

"5 Myths About the Bomb and Us"
By Jeffrey Lewis, The Washington Post, December 2, 2007.

Do you know the following things?

• According to administration statements, the United States in 2012 will still have 5,000-6,000 nuclear weapons, with about a third of those remaining on Cold War levels of alert.
• The administration plans to deploy 2,200 strategic warheads on alert in 2012.
• In October, an Army unit experienced "an unexplained and accidental launch" of a Patriot missile-defense interceptor during training.
• On Aug. 30 six nuclear weapons were accidentally flown from North Dakota to Louisiana illustrating that safeguards, even for handling nuclear weapons, can and do fail.
• Russia keeps several thousand tactical nuclear weapons in the field.
• "The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) requires each party to provide the other side with information about its strategic forces, open some facilities to inspection and refrain from interfering with satellites and other means of verifying compliance. The Bush administration has complained that the verification process requires "cumbersome" paperwork. But the inconvenience of complying with START would be dwarfed by the task of collecting the information about Russia's arsenal without active Russian cooperation."

Without comment! JAD