节省金钱并拯救世界

As the United States struggles to deal with budget problems, as the U.S. Air Force deals with boredom, poor morale, drug use, and cheating on certification exams by their personnel entrusted with control of nuclear missiles, we have a solution that will save money as well as make the world a much safer place – get rid of most of our nuclear weapons immediately. A recent纽约时间s社论指出，仅需更新美国阿森纳的一小部分重力炸弹，这将花费10,000,000,000美元。美国政府没有关于维持其核武库的总体成本的数据，但各种来源估计，取决于预算中包含哪些核与核与核有关的任务，估计未来十年的成本在1500亿至6400亿美元之间。

Nuclear weapons are useless. They would never be used on purpose by the major powers, but could be used by accident. Some countries might use them in a moment of panic, or in response to imagined threats and insults, or in a fit of religious hysteria. The arsenals of nuclear weapons states set a bad example for the world, encouraging proliferation. And they could kill us all.

The direct casualties from just three weapons of the size used on Hiroshima, exploding on U.S. cities, perhaps by North Korea or Iran in coming decades, would cause more casualties than the U.S. experienced in World War II. Even worse, our recent work shows that a nuclear war between any two countries each using only 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, a modest fraction of what India and Pakistan now possess, could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history.

30年前，包括我们在内的美国和俄罗斯科学家一起发现了核冬天。We found that the stratospheric smoke originating from fires ignited by nuclear explosions in cities and industrial areas would be so dense that it would block out the Sun, making it cold, dark, and dry at Earth’s surface, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year. There would be winter conditions even in the summer. And our recent work using modern computers and simulation models not only has validated the early work, but shows that the smoke would last for more than a decade.

The scary thing is that this could still happen today. Even the reduced arsenals that will remain in 2017 after the New START treaty, about 4000 between the U.S. and Russia, threaten the world with nuclear winter. The world as we know it could end any day as a result of an accidental nuclear war between the United States and Russia. With temperatures plunging below freezing, crops would die and massive starvation could kill most of humanity.

这两个国家不仅威胁着自己的公民，而且威胁着整个世界的核武库是不道德的。现在，世界已将核武器的数量减少到约10,000。与其他七个核国家（100至200武器）相符的直接将美国和俄罗斯的水平降低到水平，将保持其威慑力，但阻止事故或误解威胁着世界末日。

核冬季的讨论帮助结束了30年前美国与苏联之间的核军备竞赛。在1985年2月12日的一次采访中纽约时间S总统罗纳德·里根（Ronald Reagan）说：“许多知名的科学家告诉我们，这样的战争可能不会赢得任何人的胜利，因为我们会像我们所知道的那样消灭地球。而且，如果您回想起……自然灾害 - 上个世纪，即1800年代，……火山 - 我们看到天气发生了变化，以至于7月在许多温带国家中有雪。他们称这是没有夏天的那一年。现在，如果一个火山能够做到这一点，我们在谈论整个核交换，这是科学家一直在谈论的核冬天？这是可能的 …。”米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫（Mikhail Gorbachev）在2000 Salon.com接受马克·赫特斯加德（Mark Hertsgaard）的采访中解释说：“俄罗斯和美国科学家制作的模型表明，核战争将导致核战争对地球上的所有生命极具破坏性；在这种情况下，对我们，荣誉和道德的人的了解是一种巨大的刺激。”现在是时候再次从科学研究中学到我们对自己造成的危险的科学研究，并迅速采取行动消除这种危险。我们有消除这种威胁的方法，但是我们必须意识到核武器不仅是更大的炸弹，而且可以造成环境灾难。

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world has come to a nuclear war between the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the United States. Hawks in the U.S. government advocated an attack on the nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba by the Soviet Union, but President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were able to work out a deal involving the U.S. removing missiles from Turkey if the Soviet Union would remove theirs from Cuba. It was not only a horrific nuclear war that was averted, but also a global climate catastrophe that could have resulted in starvation of most of humanity. There have been many other incidents where luck and last minute actions prevented the start of using nuclear weapons. The only way to be sure we do not annihilate the human population is to destroy the weapons.

很明显,美国和俄罗斯必须证明领先ership on these issues, for the good of the planet and to set an example for other current and potential nuclear states. The only way to avoid a global climatic catastrophe would be to reduce each arsenal well below new START levels. What level of devastation constitutes effective deterrence – one city destroyed? Ten? One answer is clear: there are too many nuclear weapons in the world, by as much as a factor of 1000, for anyone, anywhere in the world to be safe from their potential effects.

Our latest work, using calculations of how crops grow under different weather conditions, shows that a billion people could be at risk of starvation from just the cooling from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Upon learning of these results, Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev said, “I am convinced that nuclear weapons must be abolished. Their use in a military conflict is unthinkable; using them to achieve political objectives is immoral. Over 25 years ago, President Ronald Reagan and I ended our summit meeting in Geneva with a joint statement that ‘Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,’ and this new study underscores in stunning and disturbing detail why this is the case.”

美国政府的政策是完全的l elimination of nuclear weapons, but with no specific timetable. As President Obama said in Prague four years ago, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. … In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. … As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

现在是时候快速减少我们的核武库了。他们的成本对于任何建立他们的国家都是巨大的。它们不能被使用，他们的持续存在使世界变得更加危险。

艾伦·罗伯克（Alan Robock）is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

欧文·布莱恩·图恩（Owen Brian Toon）is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.