The shadows of a nuclear Armageddon loom large over the world

IN 1946, the US began its nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Seventy-five years after testing began, the fallout continues to wreak havoc.

Nuclear weapons present the world with several deadly paradoxes. The most destructive military instruments devised, they have remained unused for decades despite the constant warfare since their debut in Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 70 years ago.

Nevertheless, unused in battle and often declared to be unusable, they dominate strategic thought and ensure that military questions preoccupy the nuclear powers more persistently than ever before in peacetime.

All the world’s nuclear powers are rehearsing nuclear chess by trading nuclear insults. The shadow of nuclear Armageddon looms over their fragile lines of control.

Since Japan was subjected to nuclear warfare, world leaders have had the wisdom to avoid another nuclear war.

There is a frightening real risk that mankind has not witnessed its last nuclear war. We live in the shadows of a new and deadly war. Many sober observers believe the world is closer to nuclear war now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Brinkmanship between the nuclear antagonists is a shared risk of war in which each side pushes the other towards the brink of disaster or war even closer, in order to force the other side to capitulate at the last second.

No nation will survive a strategic nuclear exchange. The only way to survive nuclear roulette is to put down the atomic gun.

The constellation of global events makes nuclear war virtually inevitable. In the aftermath, the living will envy the dead.

Hundreds of computer nuclear simulations reveal that every major city on the globe will be incinerated. Dense poisonous radioactive debris will encircle the whole of Asia, southern Russia, the entire Middle East and major parts of Europe.

Admirals and generals in nuclear countries falsely believe that they will emerge victorious in a nuclear conflict. This deadly myth is embedded in their respective nuclear doctrines. Their first and second strike capabilities are fatally flawed; they will not survive the nuclear holocaust that will follow.

All nuclear powers must stop playing nuclear chess and atomic roulette.

FAROUK ARAIE | Johannesburg