The Bipartisan Atom: A new nuclear arms and energy race is full speed ahead, thanks to both sides of the aisle.

• Author: Meyer, Alfred

The war in Ukraine reminds us of the ever-present threat to life on Earth posed by nuclear weapons. Particularly troubling is the possibility of a catastrophic release of radioactive material at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine, which is running low on water to cool its reactors and spent fuel rods after the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River was destroyed on June 6.

The United States and Russia possess 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons, with about 900 of them maintained in each country on "hair-trigger alert," aimed at the hearts of the other country's cities.

The United States signed and ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970. Article VI of the treaty states: "Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

Today, however, instead of getting rid of nuclear weapons, the United States is currently rebuilding our nuclear weapons complex in order to modify and redesign old weapons into more usable ones with different capabilities. These programs are driving a new international nuclear arms race.

Nuclear deterrence is a so-called national security strategy in which one country threatens to obliterate another country with nuclear weapons as a way of getting the other country to bend to its will. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger famously plotted how they could appear crazy enough so that other world leaders would believe they would actually use nuclear weapons. Is this really a path to a sound and sane national security strategy?

Marketing has a long history with the nuclear enterprise, dating back to 1944, when General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, formed a public relations committee composed of leading media professionals. Knowing that the use of atomic bombs would draw worldwide attention and curiosity to a top-secret program, the committee was created to package information in a way that was favorable to the U.S. government. The goal was to satisfy legitimate public curiosity, while simultaneously keeping key technical and scientific knowledge secret.

The importance of the quest for public support and acceptance of the nuclear enterprise is demonstrated by the fact that on August...