Nuclear proliferation is still very, very scary, as Joseph Cirincione explains in the most recent The New York Review of Books:

Jonathan Schell's The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger picks up where Rhodes leaves off, examining the essential question: What are nuclear weapons for? Invented to counter Germany, dropped on Japan, deployed against the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, Schell writes, lost any conceivable rational purpose after the end of the cold war. What nation, what threat now justifies thousands of them? Or any? After the cold war, Schell writes,

The number of nuclear weapons continued to drop, but the essential features of the mutual annihilation machine remained intact. The question of why the former Cold War rivals wanted nuclear weapons was forgotten, and their arsenals drifted into a kind of policy-free zone. Unsustained by Cold War rationales but not yet assigned any new ones, they seemed to exist for their own sakes, leaving a strong feeling that in the new era, missions would be sought for nuclear weapons rather than the other way around.

Why is this dangerous system persisting? Schell believes that the policies of the current administration are largely to blame:

The distance of Bush's policies from previous American non-proliferation policy is hard to overstate. Every previous American president in the nuclear age had relied on peaceful means to stop proliferation.... Preventive war had on occasion been proposed by presidential advisers but was always rejected.... President Bush's demotion of diplomacy and treaties across the board was as clear as his elevation of force. In decision after decision, his administration tore at the web of arms control treaties that had grown up over four decades.

Schell argues convincingly that plans by the Bush administration for new nuclear weapons and for new uses for these weapons—such as bunker-busting deep penetration bombs— swung nuclear policy sharply away from deterrence and in the direction of nuclear use. "The mission of nuclear weapons is no longer to produce stalemate with a peer," Schell writes; "it is to fight and win wars against nations with little or no ability to respond." As if to demonstrate Schell's point, four of the Republican presidential candidates discussed using nuclear weapons against Iran in a CNN debate on June 5, 2007.

Republicans, of course, are pretty scary too.

I can't think of many books I read with more obsessed attention as a teenager than Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. At Salon, Tom Engelhardt's got an interview with the man himself.

A last topic. When we grew up there was one world-destroying thing, whether you were obsessed with it or not: the bomb, the nuclear arsenals. Today, for young people, there appear to be several paths to the end of the world, ranging from the fictional to pandemics to global warming. Nuclear weapons seem to be in a jostling queue of world-destroying possibilities. What kind of a mental landscape, especially for the young, goes with such a situation do you think?

Global warming, which is a whole new way of doing ourselves in, does create a radically new context. You know, when I wrote "The Fate of the Earth," back in 1982, I said that, first and foremost, nuclear weapons were an ecological danger. It wasn't that our species could be directly wiped out by nuclear war down to the last person. That would only happen through the destruction of the underpinnings of life, through nuclear winter, radiation, ozone loss. There has been an oddity of timing, because when the nuclear weapon was invented, people didn't even use the word "environment" or "ecosphere." The environmental movement was born later.

So, in a certain sense, the greatest -- or certainly the most urgent -- ecological threat of them all was born before the context in which you could understand it. The present larger ecological crisis is that context. In other words, global warming and nuclear war are two different ways that humanity, having grown powerful through science, through production, through population growth, threatens to undo the natural underpinnings of human, and all other, life. In a certain way, I think we may be in a better position today, because of global warming, to grasp the real import of nuclear danger.

The fact that the nuclear crisis grew out of war obscured this deeper significance. In truth, nuclear weapons effected a revolution in warfare that made it impossible, at least among the greatest powers. The bomb really isn't a military thing at all.

In a sense, the nuclear dilemma is the easy crisis to solve. It does not require us to change our physical way of life; it just requires a different sort of political resolve. Technically, ridding the planet of such weapons is very feasible. We've already gotten rid of half the ones that existed at the peak of the Cold War. So, it's almost as if it's a preliminary item, something to get out of the way as we try to save the Earth from the other, newer ecological dangers that threaten our existence.