研究生英语阅读教程Unit14.ppt

Unit Fourteen  The New Nuclear Age Questions 1. Would the world be a safe place without nuclear weapons? 2. To the author’s mind, what does deterrence depend on? 3. What idea is suggested in the article to maintain nuclear deterrence? Text ARITHMETIC is not kind to those who say the world would be a better place if the countries that had nuclear weapons threw them away. Something like 70m people were killed in the two world wars that were fought between 1914 and 1945. All save the 100,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were victims of weapons that any country can lay its hands on: gas, bullets, and shells and bombs that get their power from explosion rather than fission or fusion. In the 45years since that fearsome August no nuclear weapon has been set off in anger. And over those years the great combatants of the second world war----North Americans, Europeans, Russians and Japanese ---have among them lost fewer than 200,000 killed in battle. They lose more people in road accidents every three years. The coexistence of the near-peace of 1945-90 and the west’s nuclear arsenals is no coincidence. America’s ability to rain a cataclysm on the Soviet Union has made sure that, ever since Russia became a rough nuclear equal of America 20-25 years ago, the communist superpower has never been tempted to pull (or to threaten to pull) the unclear trigger to achieve its aims. America’s nuclear protection has also given its allies in Europe and Asia the security---and Russia the in-security---of believing that any conventional Soviet attack against them might provoke an American nuclear onslaught on the Soviet Union itself. America’s weapons have also meant that the two members of the western alliance who most raise the hair on their neighbors’ necks ---West Germany and Japan ---have never felt obliged to provide for their own security independently of the alliances to which they belong. The first nuclear age, though, is drawing