AT MORE than a dozen “missile alert facilities’’ in caverns below the exquisite landscape of the northern Rockies, teams of young men and women spend 24-hour shifts in steel-and-concrete bunkers. They are highly disciplined military officers, but they are also prisoners to the past, condemned to carry out an earth-shattering mission that makes absolutely no sense in the 21st century.
They are missile launch crews, standing ready to send up to 450 ICBMs at targets in Russia, where, in equivalent bunkers, young Russians stand ready to do the same thing to targets here. Missile control officers are members of elite military units, yet they are also figures of the outmoded absurd. The context of what I am calling their imprisonment was laid out last week by the Globe’s Bryan Bender in an important article on America’s current nuclear arsenal.
“The US-Soviet standoff that gave rise to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is over,’’ an arms control expert told Bender, “but the policies developed to justify their possession and potential use remain largely the same.’’ It is well known that the United States and Russian nuclear arsenals still count thousands of warheads, and President Obama has made their reduction a priority. Moscow and Washington are completing negotiations on a treaty to get the totals down below 2,000 on each side in the short term, aiming at further reductions to the 1,000-warhead range. After years of nuclear inertia, arms reduction is back on the political agenda.
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