Just when Donald Trump’s plans
for securing the country behind an anti-foreign-terrorist wall had you feeling safe and sound, here come UNLV and the National Atomic Testing Museum to burst your bubble with “21 st Century Global Nuclear Challenges.” The panel discussion, set for 5:30-8:30 on Wednesday, May 25, will feature three former directors of U.S. nuclear security laboratories, Siegfried Hecker, Robert Kuckuck and Paul Robinson, discussing the continent-sized headaches their present day counterparts have to deal with.
Desert Companion got Robinson, who was director of Sandia National Laboratories and President Ronald Reagan’s appointee to the nuclear testing talks in Geneva, Switzerland, on the phone to get a taste of the promising panel’s planned talk. What he said didn’t disappoint.
Out of your 50 years of high-level work in this field, what did you choose to focus on for the panel discussion?
I will open talking about the Cold War. People used to ask me, “Hasn’t the U.S. won the Cold War?” And I’d say, “Not really.” What happened, I think, is the Soviet Union declared bankruptcy and we’re watching the restructuring take place, and it’s taking a long time. Once Russia got the oil wealth, which has thankfully retreated in the last couple years, they started building up armaments of every type.
Can you give me an example?
Well, if you haven’t kept up with it lately, a few of them are fairly scary. We don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it’s sure been great propaganda: While an event involving nuclear weapons that Putin was participating was airing on Russian TV, someone happened to flash their camera on the books lying on the tables. … And one of them showed the picture and gave the basic purpose of a very, very high yield — higher than anything we or they conceived of before — robotic drone submarine. What it’s supposed to do is, once they release it from underneath submarines either out in the Atlantic or Pacific, they would not send it all the way to shore, but leave it far enough out so that there would be tsunamis that would not only destroy huge areas of cities and, obviously, submarine headquarters on the coast and things like that, but also leave heavy radiation fallout all over the area. And we’ve only known about that for a little over a month.
The Cold War is with us once again. How else do you interpret the behavior of Russia — harassing U.S. ships, planes, etcetera, all in international waters, claiming that’s their area of concern so that’s why they’re doing it? And the Chinese, today, seem identical.
So, I guess you’d say the chances for global nuclear disarmament aren’t too great?
Slim to none, at the moment. … Peace through strength was the foundation of everything Reagan did. The protection of people is very important, and the U.S. Constitution makes sure that everybody has the right to protect themselves if they need to. We arm our law enforcement rather handily to try and keep someone out of control from doing harm. When we escalate to the counter-terrorism force, the National Guard can be called in, and they’re very well armed. And the U.S. military has always invested heavily in making sure our forces have the best arms, including nuclear weapons. All of this seems natural when looked at in context. The one reason — and the only reason — that we keep nuclear weapons and try to deter with them is to try to protect lives.
RSVP for this event at Molly.Marks@unlv.edu
