Gorbachev is right… nuclear weapons not useful in modern world

FORMER Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s call for a reduction in the world’s nuclear arsenals must be taken seriously.

The road to nuclear disarmament is not a four-lane highway to Utopia, where distance from the goals is marked on roadside sign s in terms of weapons destroyed. It is a crooked and highly path-dependent trail weaving its way past many dangers.

Nuclear weapons are instruments capable of massive annihilation, and can be considered instruments of power and prestige only in cultures that are numb to the potential consequences of such technologies of death or that go beyond such numbness to affirm and glorify the wanton destructiveness these represent.

Nuclear weapons present humankind with an immense challenge, one far greater than most people understand. These weapons are omnicidal… they go beyond suicide and genocide to omnicide – the death of all.

In a cataclysmic strike, resulting in the destruction of present life forms on the planet, these weapons would also obliterate the past and the future, destroying both human memory and possibility.

Some 2 000 of the US and Russian nuclear weapons remain on high alert, ready to be launched on warning in the event of a perceived attack, within a decision window for each president of four to eight minutes.

Nuclear disarmament is in vogue again. Relinquished in the “dustbin of history” after the Cold War and especially during the regime of (former US) president (Donald) Trump, it has risen like a phoenix to become one of the most pivotal concerns of the contemporary world.

Nuclear weapons were born out of fear, nurtured in fear and sustained in fear. They are dinosaurs, an evolutionary dead end. The trend in warfare today is toward smaller, smarter, more effective precision-guided weapons. Nuclear weapons are extremely dangerous and not very useful. FAROUK ARAIE | Johannesburg.