We need to start worrying about the bomb
Late last month, the venerable Gallup company released a survey listing the most pressing concerns in the United States. Predictably topping the list were inflation and crime, followed by hunger and homelessness, the economy broadly, and the high cost of health care. Farther back were things like illegal immigration, drug use, and the environment.
Nowhere listed was the threat of nuclear war.
Similarly, a Pew survey of the nation’s top policy priorities released in February found that the economy, terrorism, money in politics, health care costs, and education led the way. Again, nuclear proliferation and nuclear war did not make it into the top 20.
Nor did the subject arise in President Biden’s policy-filled State of the Union address in February. Despite the ever-present danger of nuclear conflict on the Korean peninsula and in South Asia, and despite the not-so-veiled threats from President Vladimir Putin of Russia to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in his war on Ukraine, the main mention of “weapons” in Biden’s more than 7,000word speech was preceded by “assault,” not “nuclear.”
How is it that the most clear and present danger to humankind — a danger even more immediate than climate change and more devastating by magnitudes than mass migration, inflation, crime, or terrorism — is so completely out of sight and mind for the vast majority of Americans?
Credit The New York Times, then, for forcefully addressing the dangers of nuclear war in a package of editorials last month. Titled “At the Brink,” the editorials starkly depict the shocking speed with which entire cities would be turned into smoldering, radioactive ruins in the event of nuclear warfare. The horror would be unimaginable. The impact would last generations. And all of it is eminently feasible with only a fraction of the weapons that already exist in the world.
There are glimmers of hope that the Times is not alone in sounding the alarm. The Oscar-winning film “Oppenheimer” has helped raise awareness, as has Annie Jacobsen’s book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” a fictionalized account of a nuclear exchange spinning out of control that is based on extensive interviews with military officials, nuclear strategists, and disaster responders. One of those officials, the former head of STRATCOM, the Pentagon command that oversees nuclear weapons, told her “that the world could end in the next couple of hours.”
“Nuclear War” has reportedly been optioned for a film to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, of Dune fame. We can only hope that it is every bit as nerve-rattling as the 1983 film, “The Day After,” which debuted a year after 1 million people gathered in New York City’s Central Park to call for nuclear disarmament.
Those days of protest are long gone. First the United States and Soviet Union negotiated massive reductions in their nuclear stockpiles, then the Soviet Union collapsed. Fears of nuclear holocaust faded like the dying embers of Moscow’s empire.
And yet: Even if there are fewer weapons today, more countries have them, making the possibility of regional nuclear conflicts involving, say, India and Pakistan, or North Korea and South Korea, very real. Moreover, fewer weapons do not equate to reduced lethality. The world still has more than enough bombs to destroy itself several times over.
At the same time, China is expanding its stockpile aggressively, though it remains well behind Russia and the United States, which have more than 5,000 warheads each. Russia meanwhile has continued developing so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons that, though less powerful than the largest of bombs, could still wreck a city. And Iran remains perilously close to having enough enriched uranium to build its first bomb.
“The nuclear shadow that loomed over humanity last century has returned with a vengeance,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in February. “The nuclear risk is higher than at any moment since the depths of the Cold War.”
The problem is too big and too complex for simple solutions. But the next president could start by urging Russia to return to the negotiating table and extend the last of the world’s nuclear treaties, the New START Treaty. The treaty, which sets limits on the number of strategic weapons the two countries can deploy, is set to expire in 2026 and Putin has shown little inclination to extend it.
The Times recommended considering several additional measures, including: renouncing the use of nuclear weapons based solely on reports of an adversary’s nuclear attack on the United States; reconsidering the president’s unilateral authority to use nuclear force; stringently limiting the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear launch processes; and improving communications with Russia and China, lest misinformation or disinformation send the world spiraling toward an apocalyptic crisis. These all seem worth robust debate.
They are just a start, though. The United States could also lower, or at least avoid raising, the temperature on global tensions by not doing “anything stupid,” argues Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Bad ideas — some of them being kicked around in Congress now — include building more and bigger weapons or pledging to deploy weapons closer to our adversaries. Neither, he contends, will deter our adversaries from building more weapons, and so Biden and Donald Trump would do well to avoid tough nuclear talk on the campaign trail.
“These aren’t sexy things you can sell to the public,” Kristensen said. “But it’s what we need. Because we’re walking in the desert right now.”
But the American public should arguably play the most important role, by demanding attention to the threat of nuclear war with the same vigor it demands, rightfully, action on climate change. That kind of mass movement four decades ago probably helped push the consummate cold warrior, Ronald Reagan, to negotiate major arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It isn’t crazy to think the same could happen again with a President Biden — or even Trump.
What would be crazy is ignoring a threat that is so plainly in front of us. Consider the words of the late Daniel Ellsberg, who before he became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers was a nuclear planner for the military.
In 2017, he called all-out thermonuclear war “a catastrophe waiting to happen” and “an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization” on a scale “infinitely greater” than the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, Hurricane Katrina, and other massive disasters.
“No policies in human history,” he wrote, “have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane.”
How is it that the most clear and present danger to humankind — a danger even more immediate than climate change and more devastating by magnitudes than mass migration, inflation, crime, or terrorism — is so completely out of sight and mind for the vast majority of Americans?