We must renew focus on nuclear threat

Having just elected Barack Obama as president, it is crucial that he now focus on one more of the most dangerous issues facing not only our country, but the entire world.

President Obama will have at his immediate command more than a thousand nuclear weapons to be fired if and when he deems necessary.

Nobody know the exact number because there has been no transparency.

We do know that the United States and Russia signed a treaty in 2002 to limit their operational nuclear weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, at the end of his first term.

Even that number is kept vague within a range of 500 weapons. And no citizen has any idea how many additional nuclear weapons are kept in our reserve stock pile. The public estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000.

Too many of us may be content there is no transparency. We do not want to know that at any moment our president could unleash hundreds of weapons, any one of which could obliterate any city like Chicago - vaporizing it at its center, destroying the rest by blast and fire, and contaminating its environs with lethal nuclear fall out perhaps for hundreds of miles.

Perhaps this is why so little effort was made during our recently ended political campaign to demand accountability on this issue.

There was a time not long ago when public concern on this issue was huge.

In 1982, there were 5,000 disarmament groups in the U.S.A. supporting a nuclear freeze.

In that year, 700,000 people assembled in Central Park to protest our government's policy on nuclear weapons - the largest political rally ever held in our country to this day.

This issue has not gone away in the intervening 26 years. The danger continues and has increased.

The need for transparency and accountability remains crucial. Yet it has disappeared from our political process.

I pray that the day will not come when we shall live (and die) to regret it.

James E. Will

Elk Grove Village