Nuclear threat for breakfast

It’s a lovely sunny day as I write this column but my mood is a bit subdued. I’ve just logged on to the computer and the first news item of the day that flashed in front of my eyes was: This is exactly how a nuclear war could kill you. Now normally I take little notice of these kind of dire warnings that appear almost daily. If it isn’t obesity that’s going to bring about your demise, it’s global warming.

I can honestly say I’m not fat (well, if you don’t count my waistline) and we know all the scaremongering about climate change is a load of hogwash because Donald Trump has told us so – and would Trump lie?

But the reason I’m taking this warning of a nuclear holocaust more seriously is the fact that only a couple of days ago the United States announced it was pulling out of an arms-limitation treaty with Russia.

Apparently, the US president made this announcement on the advice of his hawkish national security adviser John Bolton – he’s the chap whose top lip is decorated with a dead polecat.

Bolton is renowned for his sound and rational advice. Earlier this year he was the brains behind the US pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran, when everyone else said the Iranians were complying with the terms of the agreement.

The US’s withdrawal from that deal has severely compromised the whole transaction and caused consternation among the US’s key allies.

So why has Trump announced that the US is planning to pull out of a three-decades-old Cold War arms treaty known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF).

As with the Iran deal, Bolton is claiming that the signatories, in this case Russia, are cheating. White House hardliners allege the Russians are violating the treaty with the development and deployment of a ground-launched cruise missile.

This may be so, but most experts agree that withdrawing from the deal will just play into the Russians’ hands, enabling them to rapidly expand their ground-based nuclear arsenal. It would be far better to pursue diplomatic options to ensure Russia complied with the treaty.

But as one critic of the US decision put it, ‘‘this shows how John Bolton, Trump’s disaster of a national security adviser, is trying to destroy nuclear stability between the US and Russia’’.

Hence my dismay in being alerted this morning by a news item about how we could all die in a nuclear conflict.

Alexandra Bell, a nuclear expert at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, is reported in the article as saying: ‘‘All it takes is just one strike to conceivably kill hundreds of thousands of people within minutes and perhaps millions more in the following weeks, months and years.’’

The article chillingly goes on to predict how a nuclear holocaust could start. If President Trump were to fall out of love with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he could order a nuclear strike at any time because he has complete authority over the launching process. In other words, he could devastate the lives of millions of people on the Korean peninsula in the time it takes to write one of his infamous tweets.

I’m old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the world held its collective breath as the US and Russia faced off over the Soviets’ ballistic missile deployment on the Caribbean island.

There was a 13-day military and political standoff that threatened an all-out nuclear war and was probably the closest the world has come to Armageddon. It was averted only when the Russians and the Americans agreed to mutually remove weapons considered to be provocatively threatening to their borders. John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were the leaders who used common sense and political flexibility to pull the world back from the brink of destruction.

I wish I had faith that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin could be similarly wise.