Ditch the nukes.

• Position: US nuclear weapons - Editorial

In the 1920s, as the automobile age moved into high gear in the United States, humorist Robert Benchley pondered the question of how to cope with what would surely soon be a glut of used cars. He concluded, after considering various possibilities, that it might be best to stuff the obsolete jalopies with nuts and candy and distribute them as party favors.

Today, we face an even more serious problem: what to do with the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal, and how to justify producing still more of them now that the Cold War is over. Some of the proposed solutions are even sillier than Benchley's, and not nearly as funny.

Some nuclear-weapons scientists warn, for example, that there's a good chance a huge comet--like the one that recently collided with Jupiter--might hit our planet within the next 100,000 years or so. That means, says Gregory Canavan, who helps build nuclear bombs at the Government's Los Alamos National Laboratory, that in terms of the human life span (rounding it off to a century), there's one chance in one thousand that any of us will be killed by a comet. But not to worry: As soon as we spot a comet heading toward Earth, Canavan counsels, we can send a nuclear warhead toward it. The idea is to detonate the bomb in the vicinity of the comet, so that the radiation nudges it into a new, safer path.

"You won't find NASA talking openly about this," Thomas Mallon writes in the right-wing American Spectator, "but as we emerge from the age of Mutually Assured Destruction, it may be level-headed to keep a bomb or two around, like one of those remaining vials of smallpox virus."

Predictably, some members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have already voiced support for that ratioale to keep the nuclear weapons complex going.

Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan and Caltech scientist Steve Ostrow, writing in the latest number of Issues in Science and Technology, note that "the possibility of utilizing nuclear weapons to save the Earth has--unsurprisingly--proved attractive to some elements of the defense establishment at a time of declining budgets and changing missions." But, they add, it's an idea that is "bound to raise serious anxieties worldwide."

It's not the only idea of that kind. While Gregory Canavan and some of his Los Alamos colleagues push nuclear warheads as the weapons of choice against comets or asteroids headed for Earth, other bombmakers invoke more conventional arguments for perpetuating the arms race even if the United States is now running all by itself. At a recent conference on nuclear nonproliferation, Kathleen Bailey of the Government's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory insisted that the end of the Cold War has not obviated the need for maintaining a U.S. nuclear deterrent.

According to Keay Davidson's account in the San Francisco Examiner, Bailey cited "the instability of Russian society, plagued by nationalism, severe inflation, insurgencies, and crime" as a circumstance that might revive or intensify a Russian nuclear threat, though it wasn't clear how U.S. weapons might avert it.

"I'm not saying the Cold War isn't over.... but there are still problems to be resolved," Bailey told conferees from seventeen nations. And, to be sure, one of those problems is to find an excuse to keep facilities like Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore in business. The labs currently fall under the jurisdiction of the...