A nuclear catastrophe

s the United States and North Korea hurl nuclear threats at each other, the possibility of a nuclear exchange becomes a grim reality. Any nuclear conflict in the Korean Peninsula could endanger the lives of 80 million Koreans and 130 million Japanese. There is a very real fear about the amount of destructive nuclear power ready for deployment across these conflict zones. It would be capable of destroying the world and all of humanity. Any military doctrine advocating nuclear war is sheer insanity.

It will be an unmitigated global catastrophe. Rationality will be especially hard to conserve in the early stages of a nuclear strike, where uncertainty and the need for rapid decision could dominate. That is why it seems so unlikely to experienced military leaders as well as to others that any nuclear war can ever remain limited. Nuclear weapons present the world with several deadly paradoxes. The most destructive military instruments ever devised, they have remained unused for decades despite the constant warfare since their debut in Japan over 50 years ago.

A nuclear war in Asia will be uncontrollable as it escalates to strategic level. A conflict of this magnitude could produce the greatest biological and physical disruption of this planet in its last 65 million years, a period more than 30,000 times longer than the time that has lapsed since the birth of Christ, and more than 100 times the life span of our species.

A global conflict of this nature may carry in its wake a climatic catastrophe, the nuclear winter, an event unprecedented during the tenure of humans on earth. In a study published in 2013 by The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the report estimated that 2 billion people would starve to death in the wake of a limited nuclear war involving 100 nuclear weapons. Such an event could produce 20 million fatalities, from the direct effects of the explosions, fire and localised radiation. This is more than all the deaths recorded in the First World War.

It was during the nuclear Cuban missile crisis that President John F Kennedy offered this profound statement: “In the aftermath of a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.”