In today’s world there are estimated 5,000 nuclear warheads in the United States arsenal alone. One out of three warheads is past their “expected” life expectancy and as time goes on pose extreme environmental issues as to where to put them as they are rotated out of the arsenal. Not to mention that the delivery systems may be brittle due to rusted decay, corrosion, and other maladies of age. There is even a plan to upgrade them so they may be kept in service. When they were first developed they were built under the adage that the other side would be MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to get into a nuclear exchange. That was the “Cold War” mentality, in today’s world there are people that don’t care about MAD they will willing walk into a center of a major population center with a suitcase or a van or a truck depending on the reports of how compact nuclear material can be delivered and obliterate a city of millions as well as themselves.

It is time not to just reign in the spread of nuclear weapons to entities that do not have them but also it is time to get the existing nuclear “powers” to stop using nuclear weapons as some form of deterrent to being attacked by an enemy. The world is no longer in a divide between the ideologies of Communism and Free Enterprise/Democracy it is now small factions of zealots that would prefer to die for their views than to coexist among people of diverse and divergent points of view. By having these weapons and the stockpiled raw materials to make more we invite our next major attack to not be planes flying through buildings, or gas in the subway, or truck bombs at busy intersections but a single fanatical cell to detonate a nuclear package without warning nor care to the repercussions of their actions.

The terrorists need not be of the nation of Islam, they can just as easily be from Zionists, Christians, splinter groups with nationalist agendas, and the list grows. The world with all the technology that has shrunk the world at the same time has fed the concept of intolerance for other points of view. It is time that humanity look inwardly to the fact that no matter what belief system we have we live at this point in time on only one orb travelling in space.

That orb is already so fragile we don’t need the threat of nuclear attacks to intensify the steady march to environmental suicide.