These codes are the "distillation of 50 years of research" into nuclear bombs, says weapons-proliferation expert Gary Milhollin. He notes that if the codes indeed reached China, they will run on supercomputers China legally bought from the United States.

As the recent Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests prove, nuclear weapons are indeed proliferating. But some observers warn that the familiar weapons of the Cold War could still cause a cataclysm.
A decade after the Cold War ended, despite minor gestures toward retargetting, U.S. and Russian missiles can still be launched on a few minutes notice. Each side has about 2,500 strategic warheads in operational condition, says Arjun Makhijani, director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a think-tank and advocacy organization in Takoma Park, Md.

The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union has imploded, and the Red Army could not conquer Chechnya, let alone Western Europe. Yet the United States and Russia both maintain forces on high alert -- able, as they have been for decades, to "launch on warning" -- in other words, while the enemy's missiles are still in flight.

Catastrophic mistakes could occur during the 15 minutes of warning time. In 1995, Russia may have come within a few minutes of launching a nuclear counterattack after it interpreted the launch of a scientific rocket from Norway as a first strike on Moscow. Fortunately, although advance notice of the scientific launching had not reached Russian commanders, the country's nuclear controls still worked. There are conflicting reports over whether the Russian nuclear force was put on alert for a possible launching.

That close call raises a question: Would making it more difficult to launch nuclear missiles reduce the danger of accidental nuclear war?

Makhijani, who urges citizens to contact their government during national "call-in days" for de-alerting, May 13 and 14, notes that the biggest de-alerter in U.S. history was President George Bush, who removed weapons from forward bases and reduced the general alertness of strategic forces during the abortive coup in the Soviet Union in 1991.

As that action demonstrates, de-alerting may not require formal arms-control talks between the United States and Russia, which have stalled after making significant progress. Over the past decade or so, thousands of US and Russian warheads have been disassembled. Tactical weapons have been removed from Europe, nukes have been removed from surface ships, and rockets have been crushed.

Makhijani says that given the perilous condition of Russian forces, the wisdom of avoiding harassing a confused, heavily-armed adversary, is equally relevant today. With so many weapons remaining operational, he says a "world-destroying" accidental nuclear war could conceivably involve thousands of weapons.
Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, says de-alerting is a good idea that would "reduce the chance that some government employee could start World War III." But he thinks the chance of accidental war has fallen since the Cold War. Even if a lower-level Russian mistakenly detected a launch, he says, at the political level, "No one could imagine Bill Clinton with the blood of 50 million Russians on his hands."

To Makhijani, lengthening the fuse on nuclear weapons represents "a battle for pure physical survival. I believe the political leadership is not being responsible, has lost the survival instinct. De-alerting is not about disarmament, about a peaceful world -- it could be about that, but you don't have to be for peace or justice. You just have to be for survival."