Introduction: It’s time to protest again against nuclear war
The threat of nuclear war has been with humanity for too long. We have survived so far through luck and brinkmanship, but the old, limited safeguards that kept the Cold War cool are long gone. Nuclear powers are becoming more numerous and less cautious. We have condemned another generation to live on a planet that is one grave act of arrogance or human error away from being destroyed without demanding any action from our leaders. That must change.
In the latest New York Times Opinion series, At the Brink, we look at the reality of nuclear weapons today. It is the culmination of almost a year of reporting and investigation. We plan to explore where the current dangers lie in the next arms race and what can be done to make the world a safer place again.
WJ Hennigan, the lead author of the project, begins that discussion today by laying out what is at stake if a single nuclear weapon were used, as well as revealing for the first time details about how close US officials thought the world came to breaking the nuclear taboo. decades long.
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened in his 2024 annual address that more direct Western intervention in Ukraine could lead to a nuclear conflict. However, an assessment by US intelligence services suggests that the world may have been much closer to the brink of a nuclear launch more than a year earlier, during the first year of Putin’s invasion.
This is the first account of the Biden administration’s efforts to avoid that fate and, if they had failed, how they hoped to contain the catastrophic consequences. Hennigan explores what happened during that tense period, what officials thought, what they did, and how they face a volatile future.
The last major arms treaty between the United States and Russia will expire in two years. However, amid growing global instability and shifting geopolitics, world leaders are not turning to diplomacy. Instead, they have responded by building more technologically advanced weapons. Recent information about Russia’s development of a space nuclear weapon is the latest reminder of the enormous power these weapons continue to exert over our lives.
There is no precedent for the complexity of today’s nuclear age. The bipolarity of the Cold War has given way to competition between great powers with many more emerging actors. With Donald Trump likely to return to the presidency, Iran advancing its nuclear development and China on track to stock its arsenal with 1,000 warheads by 2030, German and South Korean officials have wondered aloud whether they should have their own nuclear weapons. as well as important voices in Poland, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
The latest generation of nuclear technology can still cause unspeakable devastation. One day, artificial intelligence could automate warfare without human intervention. No one can predict with certainty whether deterrence will work in these dynamics, or even what strategic stability will look like. A new commitment will be necessary for what could be years of diplomatic talks to establish new terms of engagement.
In recent months, some colleagues have asked me why I want to raise awareness about nuclear arms control when the world faces so many other challenges: climate change, growing authoritarianism and economic inequality, as well as the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Middle East.
Part of the answer is that both active conflicts would be much more catastrophic if nuclear weapons were introduced into them. Consider the threat Putin issued at the end of February: “We also have weapons that can attack targets on your territory,” the Russian leader said during his annual speech. “Don’t you understand?”
The other answer is found in our recent history. When people around the world began to understand the nuclear danger of that time in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, an electorate demanded and achieved change.
Fear of mutual annihilation last century prompted governments to work together to create a set of global agreements to reduce risk. Their efforts helped end atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, which, in certain cases, had poisoned people and the environment. Adversarial nations began talking to each other and, in doing so, helped prevent accidental use. Arsenals were reduced. A large majority of nations agreed to never build such weapons in the first place if the nations that had them worked in good faith toward their abolition. That promise was not fulfilled.
In 1982, a million people gathered in Central Park to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons in the world. More recently, some isolated voices have attempted to sound the alarm (Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said last year that “the biggest thing facing humanity is nuclear proliferation”), but such activism is generally inconceivable. nowadays. The growing threat of nuclear weapons is simply not part of the public conversation and the world is less safe.
Today the nuclear safety network is worn out. The good news is that it can be redone. American leadership demands that Washington muster international support for this mission, but it also demands that it lead by example. There are several steps the US president could take without the support of a Congress that is unlikely to cooperate.
As a first step, the United States could push for the revitalization and establishment, with Russia and China, respectively, of joint information and crisis control centers to ensure that misunderstandings and escalation of the situation do not occur. Those hotlines have become practically inactive. The United States could also abandon the strategy of launching its nuclear weapons based solely on a warning about the launch by an adversary, thereby reducing the possibility that the United States would initiate a nuclear war due to an accident, human or mechanical failure, or a simple misunderstanding. The United States could insist on strong controls for artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launch processes.
Democracy rarely prevents war, but can eventually serve as a brake on it. The use of nuclear weapons has always been the exception: no scenario offers enough time for voters to decide whether or not to use a nuclear weapon. Therefore, citizens must exercise their influence long before the country finds itself in such a situation.
We must not allow the next generation to inherit a world more dangerous than the one we were given.
#threat #nuclear #weapons #increasing