Lethal threat stalks us
By the 1950s, just years after U.S. B-29s dropped the first atomic bombs, Americans prepared for nuclear war. They built underground shelters and stocked them with supplies. Children at school practiced duckand-cover drills. In some cities, schools issued dog tags to students, ostensibly so relatives could arrange proper burials should anyone survive a nuclear exchange.
At the same time, the U.S. led the fight to prevent more countries from barging into the nuclear club. In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy warned that “10, 15 or 20 nations” could have nuclear abilities by 1964. The “fate of the world and the future of the human race” hinged on preventing nuclear war, he said. Kennedy’s math was wrong; during those years only China joined the U.S., Soviet Union, Great Britain and France in gaining nuclear weapons. Today nine nations wield the bombs. Kennedy’s warning about nuclear annihilation is as accurate and menacing as it was when he spoke it.
Seven decades without a mushroom cloud doesn’t eliminate that specter: The spread of these incredibly lethal arms to dangerous, unpredictable governments, and eventually perhaps to terror groups, adds powerful incentive to the Singapore summit of President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea has at least 60 bombs and likely can deliver them to the U.S.
Separately, Iran, now less constrained by a nuclear pact from which the U.S. has withdrawn, may re-energize its supposedly dormant nuke program. Iran’s foes, including Saudi Arabia, threaten a crash weapons program should Tehran attempt a breakout. Terrorist leaders yearn to buy a bomb or radioactive material for a dirty bomb.
The fact that it has looms over this Trump-Kim meeting: You don’t have to agree with Trump’s hardball rhetoric to dismiss as wishful thinking the illusion of a nuclear-free world that President Barack Obama promoted. No such world can exist while humans hold the knowledge to build nuclear weapons and the intent to use them. That’s not fatalism. That’s realism.
Another thought from President Kennedy, this one in 1963: “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament.”
That threat stalks the Trump-Kim summit. It stalks Western strategy toward Iran. It stalks all of us.