Negating the nuclear threat

As the terrifying prospect of nuclear conflict looms over the horizon, it is time to put an end to these supremely destructive weapons before they put an end to us.

Lean Ka-Min

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THE Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) calls them ‘the most dangerous invention the world has ever seen’. To the writer Arundhati Roy, they are ‘the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made’. The Boston Globe sees them as ‘the most clear and present danger to humankind’.

Just how big a danger nuclear weapons pose was demonstrated so devastatingly in August 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the US atomic bombings are estimated to have killed up to over 200,000 people and left a horrific legacy of long-term side-effects from radiation exposure.

Almost eight decades on, as tensions flare between major powers and conflict rages in Ukraine and West Asia, the threat of atomic apocalypse is a very real one. ‘The nuclear shadow that loomed over humanity last century has returned with a vengeance,’ United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned in February. ‘The nuclear risk is higher than at any moment since the depths of the cold war.’

And any nuclear assault this time round is set to be far more destructive. According to the US-based UCS, just one US nuclear-armed submarine carries warheads packing seven times the power of all the bombs dropped in World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Japan. The US usually has 10 of these submarines at sea at any one time. The most powerful weapon in the US nuclear arsenal, the B83 gravity bomb, is over 80 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb.

Apart from the lives that would be immediately lost, a nuclear strike will also have cataclysmic longer-run impacts. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimate that a ‘nuclear war using as few as 100 weapons anywhere in the world would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than two billion people would be in jeopardy from mass starvation’. The death toll from a full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia could amount to five billion in the space of two years.

Still, the quest to develop even deadlier arms continues feverishly apace. The US and Russia, which together already hold about 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, are both seeking to ‘modernise’ their armouries amid frayed relations. The US plans to spend some $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years, as flagged by UCS, to maintain and replace its entire nuclear arsenal with new weapons, including nuclear-armed bombers, missiles and submarines. Further, the potential application of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted decision making, to nuclear command and control systems only adds to the dangerously high stakes. Given today’s troubled geopolitical scene, a full-blown nuclear arms race could be on the cards, in what would be an exceedingly macabre version of keeping up with the Joneses.

All this immense firepower is concentrated in the hands of just nine countries: Russia, the US, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea. Of the global stockpile of some 12,700 nuclear weapons, the US holds about 5,400, 1,744 of which are deployed and ready to be delivered, according to UCS. Around half of the deployed weapons are kept on ‘hair-trigger alert’: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) can be launched in a couple of minutes, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) within 15 minutes. The president, who has sole authority in the US to order a nuclear strike, is not required to consult anyone before doing so. The Russian nuclear arsenal, meanwhile, comprises around 6,000 warheads, 1,584 of which are deployed.

The nuclear powers argue that these weapons are needed as deterrence: no enemy state would wage a nuclear attack against you, knowing that it would only invite an equally or more destructive retaliatory assault. Maintaining the ability to retaliate quickly before one’s own weapons are destroyed (‘use them or lose them’) is why hair-trigger alerts are seen as necessary. Yet it is this very capacity to strike at short notice that poses such great risk – the fate of humankind can be sealed in a matter of minutes based on one single decision made in conditions of extreme pressure. A false alarm, miscommunication or technical fault could all lead to the pressing of the doomsday button.

There have in fact been a number of close calls to catastrophe over the years. For example, on 5 October 1960, as documented on the UCS website, the US began preparing for a retaliatory strike under hair-trigger alert protocol after the radar system reported dozens of Soviet nuclear missiles headed for the country. What was deemed to be warheads coming over the horizon turned out to be the rising moon, which had unexpectedly reflected radar waves back to the radar.

As a form of deterrence, therefore, possession of nuclear arms does not meet its supposed objective – it makes us less, not more, safe. However, some nuclear advocates contend that these weapons can be employed in a preemptive strike to wipe out an adversary’s own nuclear arsenal before it can be used; this, they say, is the only way to win a nuclear war. But given the indiscriminate, all-encompassing destructive power of nuclear bombs, any such ‘victory’ would come with the most terrible of tolls in human lives – a price that must never be paid.

Nuclear war is thus perhaps best seen as ‘a strange game’ in which ‘the only winning move is not to play’, as the 1983 American movie WarGames put it. Why then do countries continue to ‘play’, and ‘play’ so intently? The answer in large part, as it so often is, is money.

The late Pentagon Papers whistleblower and former high-level nuclear analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in a 2018 interview, maintained: ‘You would not have these arsenals, in the US or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernising these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.’

Consider the case of the US, where decisions on funding federal government spending, including on ‘defence’, are made by Congress. According to the researchers Hekmat Aboukhater and William D. Hartung writing in TomDispatch, ICBM contractors have made financial contributions to 505 of the 535 lawmakers across both Congressional chambers (the House of Representatives and the Senate) this year; some received hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the past four election cycles, companies involved in production of the Sentinel ICBM – the centrepiece of the modernisation of the US nuclear arsenal – have donated over $3 million to senators from four states that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel programme.

Besides political financing, nuclear weapons firms also engage in lobbying. In any given year, say Aboukhater and Hartung, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists in the US, well more than one for every member of Congress. ICBM contractors spent some $226 million on 275 lobbyists in the last four election cycles. ‘The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk,’ Aboukhater and Hartung warn.

Weapons built to satisfy corporate interests even though they can end the world as we know it, are weapons that should be eliminated. And a path towards this goal has already been blazed. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) bans the use, possession, testing, development and transfer of these weapons under international law. Adopted at the United Nations in 2017 and having entered into force in January 2021, the agreement currently has 70 member countries although they do not include the nine nuclear-armed states, which are therefore not legally bound by its provisions. The overwhelming majority of the membership are developing countries, many of which have long championed the cause of nuclear disarmament.

Building on the TPNW as its foundation, this struggle for a nuclear-free world can be won. As Melissa Parke, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), notes: ‘Despite sceptics saying nuclear-armed states will not eliminate their nuclear weapons, it has happened before so it can happen again. South Africa got rid of its nuclear arms and is now one of the leading TPNW countries. Other states, including Brazil, Sweden, and Switzerland, had programs to develop nuclear weapons that they decided would not bring them security and abandoned them.’

Turning away from nuclear weapons is indeed an imperative, but it’s an imperative that does not go far enough for many, who call for nothing less than nuclear abolition. ‘A nuclear abolition framework,’ explains US anti-nuclear activist Jasmine Owens, ‘goes beyond the … goal of eliminating nuclear weapons; it strives to upend the systems of oppression that support and are supported by nuclear weapons. Nuclear abolitionists understand nuclear weapons to be related to other oppressive systems – such as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy – that reinforce each other at the expense of life on Earth…

‘The nuclear abolition movement enables organisers to highlight how the elimination of nuclear weapons can help dismantle other oppressive systems. A nuclear abolition framework doesn’t discount or eliminate all other work to curb or completely eradicate the nuclear threat, but it calls for formulating and promoting arms control and disarmament policies that seek to radically transform the world we live in.’ 

The need for such transformation is brought into even sharper focus as we approach the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings next year. The change should usher in a world delivered from the spectre of nuclear armageddon, with the colossal sums now devoted to instruments of mass death freed up for the life-affirming aims of healthcare, education and poverty eradication. In this world, no longer would its inhabitants be trapped within the terrifying confines of that ‘strange game’ which  threatens  to  checkmate  us all.                                                

Lean Ka-Min is editor of Third World Resurgence.

Sources

Hekmat Aboukhater and William D. Hartung, ‘World-Ending Maneuvers?: Inside the Nuclear-Weapons Lobby Today’, TomDispatch, 7 August 2024, https://tomdispatch.com/world-ending-maneuvers/

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, ‘Nuclear Famine: climate effects of regional nuclear war’, https://www.ippnw.org/programs/nuclear-weapons-abolition/nuclear-famine-climate-effects-of-regional-nuclear-war

Jasmine Owens, ‘The false equivalency of nuclear disarmament and nuclear abolition’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11 July 2024, https://thebulletin.org/2024/07/the-false-equivalency-of-nuclear-disarmament-and-nuclear-abolition/

Melissa Parke, ‘The UN Nuclear Ban Treaty Is How We Will Avoid a Nuclear War’, Newsweek, 5 December 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/un-nuclear-ban-treaty-how-we-will-avoid-nuclear-war-opinion-1849661

Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘Nuclear Weapons’, https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons

*Third World Resurgence No. 360, 2024/3, pp 13-15