Homo sapiens are an endangered species. Nuclear weapons are incompatible with our survival.

“Mutually Assured Survival” needs to replace the long obsolete and dangerous “Mutually Assured Destruction” policy of the Cold War.

A recent poll of American and Russian citizens finds that overwhelming majorities support the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons.

Conducted by Worldpublicopinion.org, the poll finds more than 73 percent of Americans seek the elimination of our entire nuclear arsenal while 64 percent support taking all nuclear weapons off “high alert.”

As usual, there is an enormous chasm between public opinion and government policy.

Although recently thwarted by Congress, the Bush administration still wants to develop new nuclear weapons under the Orwellian-titled Reliable Replacement Warhead program.

The new hydrogen bombs will be up to 1000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII and will cost $115 million, on top of the $54 billion taxpayers spend every year on our nuclear arsenal, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility. In the event of a nuclear attack, (As Dr. Helen Caldicott reminds us,) a blinding flash of destruction with no warning leads to the complete annihilation of the target. Survivors who do not perish from the initial blast will likely suffer severe burns, ruptured lungs and asphyxiation from huge firestorms and violent overpressures.

Those exposed to radiation will experience acute encephalopathic shock — brain swelling leading to vomiting, diarrhea, coma and death within 24 hours.

Experts like Caldecott remind us the world has been very close to terminal nuclear war in the past, and despite the end of the Cold War, the risks remain unacceptably high today.

A 2002 conference of Cold War-era officials in Havana revealed Russian submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov literally “saved the world” during the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Under attack from the fleet of 11 American destroyers, Arkhipov’s commander gave the order to retaliate with the submarine’s arsenal of nuclear torpedoes, thinking that a nuclear war had already started. Arkhipov disobeyed and convinced the captain not to, surface the boat and radio home — a nuclear holocaust averted.

In January 1995, the United States launched a scientific rocket off the coast of Norway. The Russians, thinking that this was from a U.S. submarine Trident missile launch, proceeded to, for the first time in history, open the computer containing launch codes for nuclear retaliation.

Literally, at the last minute, the rocket went off course and the Russians stood down. Apocalypse avoided again — or postponed — there have been numerous other close calls.

So worrying is the threat of nuclear annihilation — accidental or otherwise — that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara penned an article in Foreign Policy titled “Apocalypse Soon.”

“Current U.S. nuclear weapons policy,” McNamara warned, “is immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous. To declare war requires an act of Congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes’ deliberation by the president and his advisers.”

McNamara’s sentiments were echoed earlier this year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of Defense Henry Kissinger and former Sen. Sam Nunn.

So far, 2008 Republican candidates are very worrisome on the issue. All but one has threatened the first-strike use of nukes against Iran. A few Democratic candidates like John Edwards and Barack Obama are better, claiming nuclear proliferation as one of their main concerns.

Regardless of campaign-speak, the next president will face enormous pressures from the military-industrial and Congressional complex and the competing branches of the armed forces, where nuclear weapons research and development is intensely competitive.

These entities drive much of the U.S.’ nuclear posture, which, in turn, causes other nonnuclear and nuclear states to develop and expand their own arsenals.

All this says nothing of the threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorist groups — a threat elevated by Bush’s folly in Iraq, black market proliferation by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan and the administration’s general apathy toward securing Russia’s massive, deteriorating arsenal.

The 2008 election will be a chance to reverse the potentially catastrophic course the world — led by the United States — has embarked on. It will be an opportunity to press our leaders on this issue.

Even so, it will take daily activism for the world to be safe from nuclear annihilation. Like the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage movement and labor movements, nuclear arms abolition will require more work than showing up to vote once every four years.

The fate of us all rests in the hands of the few. We must make nuclear weapons one of our main concerns.