Too many nukes, too little rational behavior
War is a game of chicken, and the NATO powers are rightly refusing to push Mr. Putin into a situation where he will consider the nuclear option as the only one left on the table to win his war against Ukraine (“Nuclear nonproliferation: another casualty of war between Ukraine and Russia,” March 25).
If they declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine, they don’t know whether
Mr. Putin will lose his head and do the unimaginable, drop a nuclear bomb on Ukraine, risking lives in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe by radiation fallout.
Right now, the United Nations seems to have little power over Russia to bring this unnecessary and unprovoked war to a settlement. Russia, with an economy smaller than that of the state of Texas, is a member of the elite United Nations Security Council. All the members of the Security Council are nuclear states. Smaller powers see this special status the nuclear states have awarded themselves, and, of course, they’re jealous and they want nuclear weapons themselves, to rival with those of the bigger powers. Proof positive of this is Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, which has been testing intercontinental ballistic missiles the capacity to carry nuclear warheads when global eyes are off its activities.
Mr. Putin’s Russia not only sold oil and gas to the world before the sanctions, it also sold nuclear proliferation technologies to rogue states like Iran.
The U.S. will spend $634 billion to modernize its nuclear arsenal over the next 10 years. It is in rivalry with China and Russia, which are said to be modernizing their nuclear arsenal at a fast clip. Nuclear non-proliferation is not only out of reach because of smaller powers that aspire to nuclear weapons but because current nuclear powers like India and Pakistan and Israel are not signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and because bigger nuclear powers like the U.S. are busy polishing up their intercontinental ballistic missiles and their submarine launched ballistic missiles, production systems and warheads.
There seems to be no end in sight for this destructive inanity.
— Usha Nellore, Bel Air