We must abolish nuclear weapons now
The insanity of stockpiling nuclear weapons has become abundantly clear, now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, making a statement that being a nuclear weapons-holding country affords him the opportunity to use those nuclear weapons. “There will be no winners”, he’s stated.
He’s right about that. Once a nuclear weapon is detonated, the snowballing effect among the super powers will know no bounds.
With multiple hundreds of nuclear weapons poised at the borders of Russia and China and waiting in submarines in waters off their borders and hundreds more aimed at the U.S., the chance of a full-scale nuclear war, even by accident, is a looming, imminent and global threat.
Once the nuclear bombs start falling, even if just a few hundred, the immediate deaths of many hundreds of thousands will be followed by an atmospheric nuclear winter that will result in the failure of worldwide agriculture, resulting in a global famine that will end all of humanity and even life on earth.
Studies have shown that if just 300 of the 1,500 strategic weapons that the Russians or the U.S. deploy at this moment — if just 300 of these weapons were detonated over cities in the United States or Russia, 75 million to 100 million people would die in the first halfhour. As much as 150 million tons of soot would be put into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun, dropping temperatures across the planet an average of 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
The entire economic structure of the countries would be destroyed. Everything that the population depends on to maintain itself — the internet, the electric grid, food distribution systems, hospitals, banks — it would all be gone. And under these conditions, the ecosystems which have evolved in the last 10,000 years would collapse, food production would stop and the vast majority of the human race would starve to death.
This is not hyperbole. It is wellknown. What possible policy agenda is worth that kind of risk?
It is well past time to abolish nuclear weapons. The U.S., as well as China and Russia, has a nuclear policy that allows for “first strike” use. This is insanity.
Official U.S. policy still promulgates the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, the principle of deterrence founded on the notion that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack such that both the attacker and the defender would be annihilated. How does this make sense? And how do we continue to allow our leaders to continue racing headlong down this path?
At least 86 countries have signed on to The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which prohibits states parties from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, acquiring, possessing or stockpiling nuclear weapons. This international treaty went into force on Jan. 21, 2021. Of course, none of the nuclear-weapons-bearing countries have signed on.
Every government that now possesses nuclear weapons claims that they deter attacks by their threat of catastrophic retaliation. The myth of nuclear deterrence continues to hold sway, despite the fact that the U.S. has been at war in multiple countries since the beginning of the Cold War (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria and many others). Having nuclear weapons did not deter these wars. And nuclear weapons did not deter 9/11.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 — when the world came closer to nuclear war than at any other time — is not testimony to the effectiveness of deterrence: the crisis occurred because of nuclear weapons. It is more likely that we have been spared nuclear war not because of deterrence but in spite of it.
The only way to make sure that nuclear weapons are not used is to make sure that there are no such weapons. There is certainly no reason to think that the presence of nuclear weapons will prevent their use. Please contact your legislators. We must turn this around. The time is now.