Abolish the Damocles sword of nuclear arsenals

PRESIDENT elect Donald Trump will have to face reality when he is sworn in as president.

His views on nuclear weapons are scary. These weapons present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. US leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage.

John F Kennedy, seeking to break the logjam on nuclear disarmament said, “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.”

There can be no doubt the greatest threat to civilisation comes from nuclear weapons.

Mankind is confronted with the unprecedented threat of selfextinction from the massive and competitive accumulation of the most destructive weapons ever produced. Our choice is to halt the arms race or face annihilation.

Globally around 30 000 nuclear weapons, are held by various countries. More than 1 500 of them ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Each of them has a destructive power thirty times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generations. They leave us wholly without defence, expunge all hope for meaning survival. They hold in their sway the very meaning of civilisation.

Nuclear war threatens catastrophes that, although less encompassing than extinction, are still outside historical comparison. In a speech to the United Nations on September 1961, President Kennedy had the following to say: “Every man, woman and child lives under a sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

With the light of common sense we can confront the menace and rid the world of weapons on hair trigger alert that continue to haunt our dreams. FAROUK ARAIE Johannesburg.