Nuclear peace: mankind’s most dangerous bluff?

The results were unlike anything witnessed in human history.

Three days later, another B-29 carrying a bomb equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT headed for Kokura. More than 100,000 people were killed instantly, and later from disgusting burns and radiation sickness.

Besides, the fact that Japanese cities could now be destroyed by a single plane carrying a single bomb might well shock the Japanese government into surrendering. Pres. Harry Truman was not exaggerating when he threatened Japan with “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth”.

Doves fly over the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in western Japan on Thursday during a memorial ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic?

With the West and Russian Federation building a nuclear capability of “mutually assured destruction”, the NPT controlled the situation and managed some disarmament to a point where today a global nuclear war between the super powers seems highly unlikely, even given current hard relations between Russian Federation and the West. That same slogan of hope should be applied toward getting to a world free of nuclear weapons. The costs of failure are too high. So we need to think of more sustainable solutions. In the face of recalcitrant nuclear-armed states claiming a unique right to cling determinedly to their weapons of terror, concluding a ban treaty is the most practical next step the rest of the world can take. It is worth remembering that the four states that gave up nuclear weapons up until now – South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus – could not be called fully, or sometimes even partially, democratic at the time of their decision.

(Image courtesy of Michael Shermer; from page 66 of The Moral Arc, reprinted with permission of the author.). If our second-strike capability did not promise to wreak horrific death and destruction on aggressors-effects similar to those seen at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the deterrence that saves us from such tragedies would be more likely to fail. After all, by very conservative estimates, 135,000 people died from the atomic blasts-most of them civilians, the victims of the intentional targeting of cities. But with nuclear weapons, no such recall effort is afoot and no software “patch” will eliminate the risk. “We must make sure that this never happens again”. A prototype was exploded at Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, detonated by Australian nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton.

However, this energy burst on the scene with several bangs 70 years ago and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is still an ever present danger today. Hiroshima and Nagasaki teach “how horrific nuclear war is”.

My major concern is the possibility that nuclear weapons grade viable material is acquired by non-state actors, most likely a group such as ISIL, and fashioned into an “improvised nuclear device” (IND). For exactly the same reasons, the proponents of the humanitarian initiative argue that nuclear weapons must also be outlawed. Taboos are effective psychological mechanisms for deterring all sorts of human behaviors, and they worked well in keeping poison gas from being used in World War II.

These include atomic weapons, as well chemical and biological weapons. He said, “It’s insane that 25 years after the Cold War, we still have these thousands of nuclear warheads ready to go at a moment’s notice”.

There is much work to be done; the threat of nuclear war is still with us.

There are dozens of such scenarios that are played out in search of what we might call-in the spirit of creative acronyms so common in this field-a minimally unsafe pathway to zero (MIDPAZ).

The negotiations with Iran should serve as an example to the existing nine nuclear weapon states.

But despite going on to seal a new treaty with Moscow to reduce deployed nuclear weapons, his progress has stalled and the US is spending billions upgrading its nuclear arsenal.