The current crisis should refocus attention on a subject that has receded almost completely from public and geopolitical discourse – total and universal nuclear disarmament. Such sage words have lately been forgotten. And the way to make sure it never starts is to abolish the dangerous costly nuclear stockpiles which imprison mankind”. Gen Omar Bradley said “the way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. Warning that “we know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living”. President Eisenhower warned there “aren’t enough bulldozers to scrap the bodies off the street in the case of a nuclear war”. Such a cavalier outlook was probably what prompted French statesman Georges Clemenceau to observe that war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men, although retired veterans too have provided sober assessments. The short answer is no one – the quality of life of those who survive the more than ten thousand nukes that could be released will be so poor that life will not be worth living.īut nonchalance about nuclear war goes back to the Cold War when a certain American general is said to have joked that in the end, “if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!”. Ukraine is the flashpoint.Īlthough both sides mouth the mantra that a nuclear war can never be won and, therefore, never be fought, there are plenty of papers, calculations, and scenarios about who could survive in the event of an all-out Armageddon. A resurgent Russia now wants to stop and roll that back. But with the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Russia, Washington was emboldened to deploy nukes more aggressively in Europe via Nato. Eventually both sides withdrew their nuclear missiles and the crisis passed. It is back to 1962, when Washington and Moscow went eyeball to eyeball over placement of nuclear weapons near each other in what came to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Union bringing nukes to Cuba in response to the US deploying them in Turkey. Strategic circles believe America has no effective protection – for now – against Russia’s hypersonic missiles, which is what appears to have emboldened Putin to march into Ukraine, boasting that he has superior missile technology. Which in fact is what appears to have prompted Vladimir Putin to throw down the nuclear gauntlet over Ukraine. There’s always a danger that a country calculates that it has faster or superior nukes, and bully you. Besides, going nuclear is a slippery slope.
When it did give up nukes in 1991, Ukraine was just five years out of the Chernobyl disaster, and denuclearising seemed to be the wise thing to do.
Many Ukrainians are lamenting that if they had not given up nuclear weapons they inherited when the Soviet Union broke up, they would not be facing such a situation.īut all that is in the realm of what American call “woulda coulda shoulda”. Both issues - the terrifying prospect of a WWII and the growing feeling among small nations that only a nuclear capability can save them from the depredations of big countries - are being debated today.