Reasons. Some propose de-alerting primarily as a safety measure to guard against accidental launch and to provide political and military leaders sufficient time to decide whether to use nuclear weapons in moments of crisis. Others share the safety objective but also advocate de-alerting as a step toward de-activation and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. As such de-alerting is an interim measure on the road to total abolition.

Advocates. During the last ten years advocacy of de-alerting has come from a variety of sources: civil sector, military leaders, religious organizations, study groups and international commissions. We summarize their recommendations below and provide linkage to full statements and reports.

Why not? If such a diverse group supports de-alerting nuclear weapons, why hasn't it happened. In an article quoted below, Bruce Blair, Harold A. Feiveson, and Frank N. von Hippel provide the answer. They indicate:

De-alerting will not be possible, however, as long as the United States Strategic Command and the Russian Federation's Strategic Rocket Force believe that they must be prepared to launch a counterattack against the entire structure of the other country's nuclear forces within a few minutes of detection of an incoming attack.

Experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences say something similar. They write:

If nuclear forces of both sides are maintained at lower levels of combat readiness, there is no need to have large quantities of warheads and delivery vehicles, which are maintained out of the fear that a large portion of the arsenal could be destroyed in a preventive surprise strike by the adversary.

In short, adherence to the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction, still in place in the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review and in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty of 2002, is a primary roadblock to de-alerting.

Back from the Brink, a campaign to take nuclear weapons off high-alert status, is comprised of over 40 national arms control and disarmament organizations and hundreds of local and regional groups. Ira Shorr serves as director. Back from the Brink has available organizing resources and a variety of fact sheets and other information sources, including:

· A briefing book, Short Fuse to Catastrophe: The Case for Taking Nuclear Weapons Off Hair-trigger Alert

· Timeline to Catastrophe, a graphic presentation of what it means to have nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

· Questions and Answers about De-alerting Nuclear Weapons

Bruce G. Blair, Ph. D is president of the Center for Defense Information. He is America's foremost authority on de-alerting nuclear weapons. From his service in the U.S. Air Force as a Minuteman ICBM launch control officer, he gained first-hand knowledge of nuclear weapons. In thirteen years as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, he conducted studies and wrote reports about different aspects of strategic nuclear weapons.

In a 1995 Brookings paper, Global Zero Alert for Nuclear Forces, Dr. Blair analyzed the unstable nuclear posture of both Russia and the United States and the specter of nuclear anarchy in the former Soviet Union. He noted:

Taking all nuclear weapons off alert so that none remain poised for immediate launch is the ounce of prevention for nuclear anarchy in its many forms.

Dr. Blair joined with Harold A. Feiveson, Ph.D. and Frank N. von Hippel ,Ph.D., both from Princeton University, in an article on "Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert" [linkage to be supplied] that appeared in the November 1997 issue of Scientific American. They laid out "a prescription for change" that specified a sequence for reducing the alert level for categories of nuclear weapons systems. They concluded:

This blueprint for taking U.S. and Russian nuclear forces off alert would substantially diminish the ability of either country to mount a first strike. Thus, it would eliminate both sthe capacity and rationale for keeping missiles ready to fire on warning. Leaders would have to wait out any alarm of an attack before deciding how to respond, drastically reducing the risk of a mistaken or unauthorized launch.

Blair, Feiveson, and von Hippel returned to this subject in 1998 in an article entitled "De-alerting Russian and American Nuclear Missiles" published in Newsletter No. 38 of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. Having talked with both American and Russian nuclear planners and heard their objections to de-alerting, they laid out a scenario designed to meet these concerns. In outline their plan was as follows:

But the three scholars warned:

De-alerting will not be possible, however, as long as the United States Strategic Command and the Russian Federation's Strategic Rocket Force believe that they must be prepared to launch a counterattack against the entire structure of the other country's nuclear forces within a few minutes of detection of an incoming attack.

On September 6, 2001 Bruce Blair spoke at a Capitol Hill news conference on "The Decay of Russia's Early Warning Satellite System". He indicated:

Taking nuclear missiles off of hair-trigger alert in Russia would greatly reduce the risks of their mistaken launch on false warning or their unauthorized launch. De-alerting would lengthen the decision time available to leaders and buy a large margin of safety against a failure of control that could trigger an unintended nuclear exchange. In order to motivate Russia to de-alert its nuclear forces, the United States must relax its own nuclear posture

Currently, the United States projects a constant threat of the sudden decimation of the Russian arsenal, a threat that keeps Russia on hair-trigger alert. By standing down the most lethal weapons in the U.S. arsenal, such as the MX Peacekeeper force, Russia would gain confidence in the survivability of its arsenal, confidence that would allow it to reciprocate by de-alerting its own arsenal.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, offered his views on nuclear weapons in a speech on May 23, 2000 at the National Press Club. He stated:

America should rethink the requirements for nuclear deterrence in a new security environment. The premises of Cold War nuclear targeting should no longer dictate the size of our arsenal. . . . We should not keep weapons that our military planners do not need. These unneeded weapons are the expensive relics of dead conflicts. And they do nothing to make us more secure.

In addition, the United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status - another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation. Preparation for quick launch - within minutes after warning of an attack - was the rule during the era of superpower rivalry. But today, for two nations at peace, keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch. So, as president, I will ask for an assessment of what we can safely do to lower the alert status of our forces.

President George W. Bush, however, has not followed through on this campaign commitment. The Nuclear Posture Review, completed in January 2002, makes no provision for de-alerting. The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, signed by President Bush and Russian President Putin, in May 2002, provides for reduction of actively deployed strategic warheads to 1,700-2,200 by December 2012. In a sense that could be considered "de-alerting" those taken out of service. However, in the meantime they remain on high-alert until deactivated. Under present arrangements the United States will retain between 1,500 and 2,000 warheads on high-alert after 2012.

As an ambassador in the U.S. Foreign Service, Jonathan Dean was an arms control negotiator on European security. He is now an advisor on global security issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists. His 1998 article, "De-alerting: A Moved Toward Disarmament" in the newsletter of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, explores the relationship between de-alerting and disarmament.

Ambassador Dean believes that substantial de-alerting would involve considerable time-consuming negotiation. He writes:

A large-scale de-alerting programme of parallel action by two or more NWS [nuclear weapon states] would require six or more . . . steps:

• agreement not to increase the number of deployed warheads;
• complete data exchange;
• agreement on how many deployed delivery systems and warheads each party has, how many will be de-alerted and how many will remain operational;
• agreement on how de-alerting will be carried out;
• far-reaching de-alerting requires participation of all five NWS;
• as with the deep-cuts programme [which he outlined], a specific part of the nuclear forces of participants might be left deployed to deter cheating and breakout; and
• verification.

Ambassador Dean notes that many of these steps are similar to what is required in the negotiation of an agreement for deep cuts in the nuclear arsenal. Therefore, a de-alerting agreement would reduce the time required for achieving a deep cuts agreement.

With a Ph.D in physics, Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland. He is the author of numerous books and reports on nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and other energy and environmental issues.

In "De-alerting: A 'Jump Start' for Nuclear Disarmament?", a1998 article in the newsletter of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Dr, Makhijani outlines ways to achieve de-alerting, as follows:

Dr. Makhijani concludes:

The longest-term de-alerting approaches slide into disarmament measures. They include dismantlement of warheads and storage of all weapons-usable fissile materials under IAEA safeguards or in non-weapons usable forms. These measures will take one or more decades, depending on the technologies chosen to implement them. These measures would be considered part of a de-alerting process if the facilities to reconstitute nuclear arsenals are maintained. They would be part of nuclear disarmament if the warhead and associated materials production and processing facilities are also dismantled.

A former U.S. senator, Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization working to reduce the risk of use and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In his congressional career Senator Nunn served as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In a speech entitled "Toward a New Security Framework" given at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on October 3, 2001, Senator Nunn proposed an integrated approach for dealing with weapons of mass destruction, including measures for arms reduction, de-alerting, non-proliferation, security for nuclear material, and defense. On de-alerting he was particularly concerned about the short time that President Bush and President Putin have to respond to a possible nuclear attack. He noted:

The events of September 11 gave President Bush very little time to make a very difficult decision -- whether to give orders to shoot down a commercial jetliner, filled with passengers. Our current nuclear posture in the U.S. and Russia could provide even less time for each President to decide on a nuclear launch that could destroy our nations.

I suggest that the two Presidents issue an order directing their military leaders, in joint consultation and collaboration, to devise operational changes in the nuclear forces of both nations that would reduce toward zero the risk of accidental launch or miscalculation and provide increased launch decision time for each President. Such an order should emphasize that it is the intention of the U.S. and Russia to "stand down" their nuclear forces to the maximum extent practical consistent with the security interests of each country. They could start immediately with those weapons systems that are to be eliminated under the START II Treaty.

The Republican Party Platform adopted at the 2000 Republican National Convention contained the following provision:

The United States should work with other nuclear nations to remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status -- another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation. -- to reduce the risks of accidental or unauthorized launch.

In 2001 the Institute of International Economy and Foreign Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2001 published a report on "De-alerting Russian and US Nuclear Weapons: A Path to Reducing Nuclear Dangers". The authors are Alexei Georgievich Arbatov, Ph.D., General Vladimir Semyonovich Belous, Alexander Alexeevich Pikayev, Ph.D., and Vladimir Georgievich Baranovsky, Ph.D., all members of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

This Russian report spoke of the "danger which stems from maintaining excessive nuclear arsenals and from the potential of their use." Excerpts from the report are as follows:

It seems that the launch-on-warning concept, which presupposes continuous combat readiness of the most vulnerable systems, such as silo-launched ICBMs, coupled with a flawed early warning system (EWS), increases the probability of an accidental nuclear war. The most apparent way to prevent the consequences of a mistake or incorrect interpretation of EWS data is to de-alert the strategic nuclear forces and to extend the decision-making time vis-a-vis a nuclear attack.

The high alert status of nuclear weapons increases the risk of an accidental nuclear war for a number of reasons, which can be grouped as follows:

• data processing and combat command and control systems errors;
• technical faults and failures of combat systems;
• inadequate evaluation of the evolving situation by the top political and military command and erroneous decision-making; and
• erroneous or unauthorized actions as well as mental breakdowns of the attending military personnel in charge of the nuclear weapons.

If nuclear forces of both sides are maintained at lower levels of combat readiness, there is no need to have large quantities of warheads and delivery vehicles, which are maintained out of the fear that a large portion of the arsenal could be destroyed in a preventive surprise strike by the adversary.

Only if we abandon the concept of maintaining our nuclear forces on constant alert do we have a real chance of reducing the probability of an accidental nuclear war.

In January 2002 two of the authors of the Russian report, General Vladimir Belous and Dr. Alexander Pikayev, participated in a Washington, D.C. Forum on "Strategic Partners or Nuclear Targets", co-sponsored by Back from the Brink and the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carniegie Endowment for International Peace.

The New England Journal of Medicine, volume 338, number 18, April 30, 1998 contains a special report, "Accidental Nuclear War -- A Post-Cold War Assessment". The article by Lachlan Forrow, M.D. and eight co-authors noted:

• U.S. and Russian nuclear-weapon systems remain on high alert.
• This fact, combined with the aging of Russian technical systems, has recently increased the risk of an accidental nuclear attack.
• As a conservative estimate, an accidental intermediate-sized launch of weapons from a single Russian submarine would result in the deaths of 6,838,000 persons from firestorms in eight U.S. cities. Millions of other people would probably be exposed to potentially lethal radiation from fallout.
• An agreement to remove all nuclear missiles from high-alert status and eliminate the capability of a rapid launch would put an end to this threat.

The UNIDIR NewsLetter No. 38 (1998), published by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, is a special issue on "Nuclear De-alert: Taking a Step Back". Elsewhere on this web page references are made to articles in this NewsLetter by Bruce Blair et al, Jonathan Dean, and Arjun Makhijani. It also has articles related to Great Britain and South Asia and comments by General Lee Butler.

All five commissions and international bodies whose reports are reviewed on the How to Get to Zero page of this web site have offered recommendations for de-alerting the global nuclear arsenal.

Among the immediate steps recommended by Canberra Commission in 1996 were:

Taking nuclear forces off alert.
Removal of warheads from delivery vehicles.

In its 1997 report the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences called upon the United States and Russia to:

Eliminate the practice of maintaining nuclear forces on continuous alert status so that the launch sequence for nuclear weapons would require hours, days, or even weeks rather than minutes. Such a provision would have to be accompanied by reliable means of determining compliance.

Among the measures recommended in 1998 by the New Agenda Coalition was:

Abandoning present hair-trigger postures by proceeding to de-alerting and de-activating their weapons.

The Tokyo Forum (1999) offered a recommendation for:

Zero nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

Among the practical steps adopted by the 2000 NPT Review Conference was:

Concrete agreed measures to further reduce the operational status of nuclear weapons systems.

Several of the military officers presented on the Military Leaders Speak Out page of this web site have advocated de-alerting or have proposed other ways to take the deployed nuclear arsenal out of active service.

General Lee Butler , formerly commander-in-chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, was a Special Commentator in the UNIDIR NewsLetter No. 38 (1998) on "Nuclear De-alert: Taking a Step Back". He wrote:

It was my privilege (and, I believed, my responsibility as the Cold War was ending) to recommend to the President of the United States that we begin reducing the alert posture of our strategic nuclear forces beginning with long range bombers. Upon the President's direction, I gave the order to reduce bomber launch readiness in September of 1991, nearly seven years ago. At the time, I believed that it would be possible to begin the process of reducing the alert status of land-based and sea-based missiles within a matter of months. That aspiration has been rendered moot as bureaucratic inertia and political timidity have taken increasing hold of the arms control arena.

Nonetheless, the issue of reducing further strategic nuclear weapon system postures, more commonly known as de-alerting, has taken on renewed importance thanks to the reasoned and persistent attention given to the subject by a growing coterie of individuals and organizations.

Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., in a 1998 address to the Olaf Palme Institute in Sweden outlined a series of steps that could lead to the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. Among them was:

Take thousands of nuclear warheads off of alert status.

On another occasion Admiral Carroll spoke of the tasks that must be accomplished to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons. Among them, he noted:

• we work for the de-alerting of strategic weapons
• we work for separation of warheads from delivery vehicles

Admiral Noel Gayler has developed an approach to a general nuclear settlement that removes nuclear weapons from active service. He advocates:

Let weapons be delivered to a single point, there to be dismantled, the nuclear material returned to the donors for use or disposal, and the weapons destroyed.

Admiral Stansfield Turner favors moving nuclear weapons from active deployment to a strategic reserve. He explains:

• You take a thousand warheads off of missiles in the United States today and you move them maybe 300 miles away, so they can't just go back overnight. You ask the Russians to put observers on that storage site where you've put the thousand warheads. They can count what went in, they can count if anything went out. . . .
  
  
• You don't need detailed verification procedures that take years to negotiate in a treaty. What you hope is the Russians then take a thousand off and put our observers on them. . . .
  
  
• We do another thousand, they do another thousand. I mean from today's numbers, we can be down into hundreds in a matter of, in my opinion, four or five years if we do this. And the most urgent thing for the United States today is to get the Russian nuclear arsenal off alert, get it down to as few of these as possible.
  
  
• And my ultimate objective is to get every nuclear warhead in the world in escrow so nobody can pull the trigger today, but if somebody cheats, like Saddam Hussein, and decides to threaten the world because he's got the nuclear weapons that he shouldn't, then you still have the warheads in escrow and you can bring them back.

A number of religious organizations represented on the Religious Statements page of this web site have spoken in favor of de-alerting the nuclear arsenal. They see this as way to provide safety from accidental nuclear attack and as a step toward nuclear abolition.

The General Board of American Baptist Churches, USA in its 1992 Resolution on Arms Reduction:

Calls on all nuclear powers to take all nuclear weapons off alert status.

In a letter to the Canadian prime minister Ernie Regehr, director of Project Ploughshares, an agency of the Canadian Council of Churches, indicated:

We urge the Government of Canada to advocate measures to remove nuclear weapons from alert status, to support de-mating (separating warheads from delivery systems), and in the case of tactical weapons to keep them out of the control of operational units.

In their 1998 statement to the NPT Preparatory Committee , Godfried Cardinal Danneels, president of Pax Christi International, and the Rev. Dr. Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, asked the delegates to call upon the nuclear weapon states to:

Take all nuclear forces off alert and remove warheads from delivery vehicles.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation in an "An Overview of De-alerting Nuclear Weapons" notes that:

Taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger, or 'de-alerting' the weapons, would significantly reduce the chance of nuclear disaster.

In January 2001 FCNL provided leadership for a Religious Leaders' Appeal to President Bush to De-Alert Nuclear Weapons. In this letter Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Unitarian, and Native American religious leaders stated:

Within our faith communities, policies concerning nuclear weapons raise profound questions about our moral responsibilities, the integrity of God's creation, and human destiny. These moral questions persist as long as the threat of nuclear war continues. As an interfaith community, we assert that the de-alerting of all nuclear weapons is a prudent and necessary step toward eliminating the threat of nuclear war.

The 1992 United Methodist General Conference adopted a resolution entitled "Nuclear Weapons: The Zero Option". At that time the successor to the Soviet Union was called the Commonwealth of Independent States. The General Conference indicated:

• We recommend that the United States and the Commonwealth of Independent States immediately and concurrently deactivate their entire land- and sea-based strategic arsenal. They should:
  -- bring all strategic submarines into port, remove their missiles, and take off the warheads;
  -- open all ICBM silos, take out the missiles, place them on the ground, and remove the warheads.
• We hope that Great Britain, France, and China will understand the necessity to deactivate immediately their strategic arsenal: land-, air-, and sea-based.

The 2000 United Methodist General Conference returned to this subject in a resolution on "Saying No to Deterrence" that called upon all possessors of nuclear weapons to carry out a number of actions, including:

• immediately take all nuclear weapons off alert by separating warheads from delivery vehicles and by other means .