I’m a graduate of the US Navy Nuclear Weapon Handling Course. A few decades ago I was even in charge of a team that might have been called upon to move a nuclear weapon from one location to another. Part of that course included learning about the effects of nuclear weapons. They’re really frightening. So when the world runs into a confrontational crisis that has a nuclear exchange as one possible outcome, however slight the possibility, I tend to worry. The current Russia-Ukraine situation is one such crisis.
My generation had drills in school to duck under a desk if there was a nuclear attack. The drill didn’t scare me, but the idea that it could happen did. I was in the US Navy when the Cuban Missile crisis took place. One day all the Navy ships in Newport, Rhode Island were in port. The next day they were all gone. Few people know that at that time the Russians did not have a fail-safe protocol to keep an errant submarine commander from using a nuclear tipped torpedo. I suspect that fewer still knew that every Soviet submarine carried at least one such weapon.
This background males me worry about the possible outcome of this current confrontation. Ukraine had nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union collapsed. All of the were returned to Russia. But in the meantime there are other countries that have joined the club; India, Pakistan, and North Korea. And Iran is knocking at the door to apply for membership. I am not pessimistic enough to think that a nuclear exchange would destroy the world, as in Nevil Shute’s novel “On the Beach”. But I am certain that even a single use, or a low level tit for tat bombing would leave the world we think we know as a far different place.
If we also consider that the people whose hands are on the firing keys, and their political masters, are often part of cultures that some people would describe as highly irrational, then the odds of such an occurrence, even by accident, go way up. During the Korean War, Communist China, then not yet a club member, pooh-poohed the idea that nuclear weapons could intimidate them. They had such a vast area and large population that they would survive a nuclear strike. Their tone change only a couple of years later when they, too, developed nuclear weapons.
Rational Wars occur when a country has political objectives that believes it cannot achieve by other methods. But when you resort to using violence and force the possible result is not so easy to determine. The actual level of destruction caused by nuclear weapons is vast enough so that the mind of a single human being has difficulty imagining it. Recovering from such devastation takes years, or decades. There’s a reason that horror movies are not my favorite form of entertainment.
Wetherhorn 