Nuclear Insanity is here to Stay
Nuclear Bombs
Gigantic threats to human existence are in the form of nuclear warheads
attached to short and long range missiles.
All economic and environmental threats become insignificant when you
consider the apocalypse that would be created by the use of atomic and hydrogen
bombs. In 2017, Helfand et al expressed their increasing concern about the
threat of war using nuclear weapons. ” After the end of the Cold War, the
intense military rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States/North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was replaced by a much more cooperative
relationship, and fears of war between the nuclear superpowers faded.
Unfortunately, relations between Russia and the United States/NATO have
deteriorated dramatically since then. In the Syrian and Ukrainian wars, the two
have supported opposing sides, raising the possibility of open military conflict
and fears that such conflict could escalate to nuclear war. Speaking in January,
when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its Doomsday Clock
would remain at 3 minutes to midnight, former US Secretary of Defense William
Perry stated, "The danger of a nuclear catastrophe today, in my judgment, is
greater that it was during the Cold War...and yet our policies simply do not
reflect those dangers." His assessment was echoed 2 months later by Igor Ivanov,
Russian Foreign Minister from 1998 to 2004. Speaking in Brussels on March 18
2016, Ivanov warned that "The risk of confrontation with the use of nuclear
weapons in Europe is higher than in the 1980s."
At the onset of 2015, the agreements to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons were clearly at risk.
A new York Times editorial epitomized the risk:" There’s much more to the deeply troubled Russian-American relationship than Ukraine. Under the radar, tensions have also been brewing over compliance with a number of arms control treaties that for decades have been vital to keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers and setting an example for other countries.
"Washington accuses Moscow of violating at least five of these agreements. A failure to resolve the impasse could have extremely dangerous consequences for the post-Cold War order, since even 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the two sides together possess more than 10,000 nuclear weapons, more than 90 percent of what exists in the world. The most serious dispute centers on the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which bans both sides from deploying ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of between 300 and 3,400 miles that carry nuclear or conventional warheads. These were among the weapons America once stationed in Europe to demonstrate a commitment to its allies and deter the Soviets from aggression.
Under the treaty, signed by President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, America destroyed 846 missiles and the Soviets, 1,846 missiles. Both sides had come to see the systems as unacceptably risky to their own forces since they would only have 10 to 15 minutes warning of an attack compared to twice that in attacks involving long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles."
As President Barack Obama considered options prepared by the Pentagon for the future size and composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission – chaired by former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General (Ret.) James E. Cartwright – issued a report calling for the U.S. and Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenals 80% to 900 total weapons each. This bold step would pave the way to bringing other nuclear weapons countries into the first multilateral nuclear arms negotiations in history.
Global Zero’s Cartwright and Blair wrote in a New York Times a 2016 editorial: “Throughout the nuclear age, presidents have allowed their senior commanders to plan for the first use of nuclear weapons.
"Contingency plans were drawn to initiate first strikes to repel an invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union, defeat China and North Korea, take out chemical and biological weapons and conduct other missions. After the end of the Cold War, which coincided with revolutionary advances in our nonnuclear military capacities, the range of these missions steadily narrowed to the point where nuclear weapons today no longer serve any purpose beyond deterring the first use of such weapons by our adversaries. Our nonnuclear strength, including economic and diplomatic power, our alliances, our conventional and cyber weaponry and our technological advantages, constitute a global military juggernaut unmatched in history. The United States simply does not need nuclear weapons to defend its own and its allies’ vital interests, as long as our adversaries refrain from their use. Using nuclear weapons first against Russia and China would endanger our and our allies’ very survival by encouraging full-scale retaliation. Any first use against lesser threats, such as countries or terrorist groups with chemical and biological weapons, would be gratuitous; there are alternative means of countering those threats. Such use against North Korea would be likely to result in the blanketing of Japan and possibly South Korea with deadly radioactive fallout.”
By 2017 three leaders of important countries declared their intention to renew and strengthen their nuclear bomb capabilities. May in the UK, Trump in the USA and Putin in Russia have made boastful claims and admitted they were willing to launch a first strike with nuclear weapons. The extremely dangerous nuclear insanity is again in the forefront of world affairs. China carefully extends its control over adjacent waters and forges alliances world wide. China has nuclear weapons but does not boast.
I will renew my conviction that leaders who show signs
of nuclear insanity be arrested and moved to a special institution for the
politically insane.
Doomsday
My early life was dominated by three horrific preoccupations; the holocaust,
the hydrogen bomb and the destruction of animals and their natural environments
all over planet earth. By age ten, I knew in theory how to construct both
fission and fusion bombs and knew how destructive they were. I would study civil
defense maps showing the extent of destruction from hydrogen bombs of different
strengths exploded above Canadian and US cities. Later, I took courses in
nuclear physics and the medical management of radiation sickness. For many
years, I belonged to organizations that protested the development of more
nuclear bombs. If you asked me in 1970, I would have told you that I had little
confidence in modern civilization and wanted to live away from urban centers and
the madness prevalent in the world. For me, the natural world of coastal British
Columbia was sane, rational and enduring. Here, I felt part of an ancient
natural order that would continue even if humans departed. I could ignore, at
least for awhile, the folly of self-destructive humans.
As a young man I was always reassured to know that Albert Einstein existed
and joined millions of educated others in admiration of his intellect. In a
review of Einstein's impact on human awareness, Brian Greene wrote:" Albert
Einstein once said that there are only two things that might be infinite: the
universe and human stupidity. And, he confessed, he wasn't sure about the
universe. When we hear that, we chuckle. Or at least we smile. We do not take
offense. The reason is that the name “Einstein” conjures an image of a
warm-hearted, avuncular sage of an earlier era. We see the good-natured,
wild-haired scientific genius whose iconic portraits—riding a bike, sticking out
his tongue, staring at us with those penetrating eyes—are emblazoned in our
collective cultural memory. Einstein has come to symbolize the purity an power
of intellectual exploration."
Einstein revealed the stunning relationship of mass to energy in the famous
formula, E=MC². The speed of light, C, is a large number so that a small amount
of annihilated mass produces a large amount of energy. This equation explains
the prodigious energy production of our sun and other stars. Einstein did not
imagine man-made devices that suddenly convert mass to energy, creating gigantic
explosions. The discovery of the neutron chain reaction in radioactive materials
such as purified uranium suggested the possibility of a nuclear bomb. A
physicist friend, Leo Szilard, had patented an atomic bomb design in 1934. He
feared that Germany might construct nuclear weapons and encouraged Einstein to
sign a letter to US President Roosevelt, warning him.
A second Einstein-Szilard letter was sent in March 1940 and led to the
Manhattan Project in 1942, designed to produce nuclear bombs based on the
fission of purified, radioactive uranium. Scientists from all over the US were
recruited to purify bomb-grade uranium and to work out the details of a
denotation system under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The
scientists had been highly motivated to end the destruction inflicted on the
world by Germany and Japan. Their work lead to the sustained proliferation of
nuclear weapons in the US, Russia and six other countries. The US tested at
least 1100 nuclear weapons and continues to maintain the second-largest
stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world. Sensible humans were alarmed by the
persistent belligerence of the US and the Soviet Union and sought to limit or
abolish nuclear weapons. I called this Nuclear Weapon Insanity and proposed an
international institution for the politically insane that could arrest and
contain politicians voting for nuclear weapons. In 2018 there is an increasingly
urgent need for such an institution.
