Transcribed from:

The Boston Globe, Thursday, May 23, 2002

Arms Control, Orwell Style

Letter to the editor by:

Jack Shannahan Retired Vice Admiral US Navy

Talk about arms control, George Orwell style: The United States is on the verge of signing an “arms reduction” treaty allowing the United States and Russia to wait until 2012 to reduce their nuclear arsenal to about 2,000 nuclear weapons, which is still enough to destroy the planet as we know it. And it appears that all these weapons will still be on hair trigger alert.

Furthermore, in a provision that would make a snake charmer proud, neither country is actually required to destroy the warheads that it withdraws from its arsenal. So they are available for a renewed arms race if the political winds shift.

To make matters worse, there’s no apparent stipulation in the treaty to monitor how the deactivated warheads are stored. Thus they could well be easier to steal and pose a greater risk than they do now. And Americans are supposed to be cheering about this treaty? Let’s hope the Senate has the sense not to ratify such a meaningless document.

[I disagree with the Admirals sentiment that this document is meaningless. This document when implemented will have the effect of making Russia's nuclear arsenal easier to transport as they will seperate the nuclear warhead from the missile for storage. The warhead will fit in a van where as the entire missile would be near impossible to transport. This will also place Russian nukes on a lower security priority as the Russians certainly wouldn't allow an extremist group to breach a silo and launch a nuclear weapon with a return address on Russian soil, though if a nuc were to disappear from storage there would be no tracing its roots to Russia when it was detonated in a U.S. harbor. This document far from being meaningless is a direct and inexcusable assault against genuine security risks to the U.S. populace. If the senate were to ratify this treaty they would be assuring near term nuclear devastation on U.S. citizens by radical elements that the U.S. government created through policy and even financed.>>Dan Kelley]