The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent bombing of Afghanistan have sent shock waves throughout the world. It’s now part of our common vernacular to say, “everything has changed.” At home, our entire notion of security has been thrown into question. When anger and hatred can turn a domestic airliner into a weapon of mass destruction, we are all vulnerable.

But as we face this new war on terrorism, we must remember what did not change on Sept. 11: The greatest danger to people in the United States and throughout the world remains the threat posed by nuclear weapons.

In the fall 10 years ago, the world was also in a time of great tension and instability. The Soviet Union was breaking up and President George H.W. Bush took steps to reduce the threat of nuclear war by taking a significant number of U.S. nuclear weapons off high-alert status. In response to the president’s initiative, President Mikhail Gorbachev reciprocated by de-alerting comparable numbers of Russian nuclear weapons. But there the initiative stalled.

As President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin prepare to meet, they have a unique opportunity and a profound obligation to carry forward this process. It is sobering to note that the United States and Russia are still courting nuclear disaster. Ten years after the Bush-Gorbachev initiative, despite no longer being strategic foes, the United States and Russia still maintain thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, poised for a quick launch. This is a threat from which no missile defense system will be able to

protect us.

This process of keeping nuclear weapons on a hair-trigger means that leaders on both sides have just minutes to assess whether a warning of an attack is real or false. And while the threats we faced during the Cold War came from Soviet strength, the danger today comes more from Russia’s weakness.

For example, Russia’s troubled economy has led to the profound decay of its early warning satellite system. A fire last May that destroyed a critical facility used to control Russian warning satellites has made things even worse. Dr. Bruce Blair, President of the Center for Defense Information, has concluded that Russia has completely lost its space-based early warning capabilities. In essence, their ability to tell a false alarm from a real warning has been nearly crippled.

False alarms on both sides have already brought us to the brink of nuclear war in the past. What will happen now if there is a full scale war in the volatile neighborhood of Central Asia, a region that includes nuclear powers India, Pakistan and Russia?

Former Sen. Sam Nunn brought the point home in a speech delivered on Oct. 3: “The events of Sept. 11 gave President Bush very little time to make a very difficult decision as to whether or not to give orders to shoot down a commercial jetliner, filled with passengers. Our current nuclear posture in the United States and Russia could provide even less time for each president to decide on a nuclear launch that could destroy our nations.”

Nunn called on Presidents Bush and Putin to stand-down their nuclear forces to reduce toward zero the risk of accidental launch or miscalculation and provide increased launch decision time for each president.

In this time of great danger, we must not drift into a state of fear and paralysis, or take impulsive action that only increases the threat to our security. We must evaluate the risks and benefits of each course of action and take only those that will do the most to reduce the danger we face.

In the spirit of the courageous steps his father took to decrease the nuclear threat 10 years ago, President Bush can and should take action when he meets with President Putin in November, to remove nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert. This would signal to the world that in this volatile time, the United States is serious about preventing the use of nuclear weapons.

Peter Wilk, M.D., of Sebago, is president of Physicians for Social Responsibility/Maine. Ira Shorr is director of Back From the Brink, a campaign to take nuclear weapons off high-alert status.