Nukes Remain a Present Danger

Viewing the news of the past week or so--let's face it, any week but especially recently--it's easy to lose any faith in human civilization and its ability to avoid killing itself.  We have one big victory to remember, which is that we managed to avoid nuclear holocaust in the decades of its greatest danger, and nations engaged in successful treaties to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, and their hair-trigger status.

But the nuclear threat is not consigned to history.  It is still here.  And in some ways the dangers have increased. A generation or two have grown up without the nuclear threat being prominently mentioned, believing it to be historical, not present, and often not understanding the great difference between bombs and thermonuclear bombs.  Admittedly, non-nuclear bombs have grown in destructive power, but there are still very much less devastating in their total effects.  This is true of the so-called tactical or smaller nuclear weapons.  They are of a different order.

This unfamiliarity may make things more dangerous.  Treaties have slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, but such weapons still exist and are still spreading.    Chances would seem to increase that one will be used.  The lack of live alarm about nuclear weapons probably made it easier both for Russia to violate a nuclear arms treaty (while suggesting it might withdraw from the treaty completely) and for the media to treat the U.S. charge that this happened as a fairly minor one day story.

There are fewer nuclear weapons actively pointed at targets in the U.S. or the former Soviet Union now, but that's not the same as none.  Some believe the chances of accidental launch are even greater today.  We're also learning how many times we came very close to ending the known world in a few hours, or of a horrible accident that would have wiped out millions and contaminated areas the size of US states.

Eric Schlosser's book on the many brushes with apocalypse we had and didn't know it is brilliantly reviewed by the great Louis Menand in the New Yorker.  He passes on a sampling of the incidents, which includes one as recent as 1995, in which Russian president Boris Yeltsin had minutes to decide whether to trigger a nuclear retaliation for what the military were certain was an incoming missile attack.  It wasn't, it was a weather satellite launched from Norway, which the Russians had been notified about but that information didn't get to the right people.  This was only one of many such incidents.

There's been news about poor training and dangerous sloppiness recently in  US missile launching facilities.  There have been revelations about how sloppy and inept the systems were and perhaps still are in the UK and how dangerous the launch system may have been in Russia and still may be.

Out of sight and out of mind does not mean out of the range of possibilities.  Doctor Strangelove is not dead.  President Obama made progress towards new treaties with the goal of a nuclear-free world.  We aren't there yet, and we may be going backwards instead.

Those of us who lived through the Cold War may find our thoughts turning to the reality of nuclear weapons in August, the month in 1945 that two atomic bombs dropped on cities in Japan.  So far they are the only two nuclear bombs to be used as weapons.  That's almost amazing.  But it's hardly a guarantee they will be the last, especially as the memory fades, and as new generations have little knowledge of the dimensions of this threat.

So any millennials who somehow stumbled onto this post, go back and google nuclear war and nuclear weapons.  The threats are not just in the past.  They are in your world and your future.