The world’s nuclear threats
Leaders and delegates from 56 nations and organizations are making their way to Washington to attend the annual Nuclear Security Summit that kicks off Thursday.
The gathering comes with urgency as the world deals with ongoing threats.
CCTV America’s Jim Spellman reports.
For nearly 70 years the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has used its Doomsday Clock to chart how close humanity is to self-destruction from a nuclear attack or another man-made catastrophe.
Over the years the symbolic clock has moved with world events. In 1953 as the Cold War ramped up the clock struck two minutes to midnight. In 1991 as the Soviet Union crumbled the clock swung the other way, hitting 17 minutes to midnight.
There are signs of hope: the global nuclear arsenal has been dramatically reduced. Today there are some 10,000 nuclear warheads in the world, way down from the 64,000 in 1986. And last year’s nuclear deal moved Iran away from developing an atomic arsenal.
But dangerous threats remain, and new threats have emerged.
There have been dozens of incidents in the last five years where nuclear material has been lost or stolen, material that could be used in a so-called ‘Dirty Bomb’ – far less deadly than a nuclear weapon, but still dangerous.
Millennials are active in the anti-nuke movement.
“Nuclear weapons are an outdated and antiquated way to even address warfare, in general. So when you use that as a base, we’re just throwing money away on toys, basically toys for war,” Owen Black, an anti-nuclear activist, said.
Some experts find these attitudes a little scary. They said a generation that takes this threat less seriously could make the world more dangerous.
“They view this as a solved problem or a problem their parents and grandparents should have solved. It doesn’t have the salience or the immediacy to them that say climate change might,” John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said.
Though the global atomic arsenal has been reduced over the last 30 years, worldwide spending on nuclear weapons exceeds $1 trillion per decade.
Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on the international conference on nuclear security
For more on international conference on nuclear security, CCTV America’s Mike Walter spoke to Samantha Pitts-Kiefer. She’s director of the Global Nuclear Policy Program.
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