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Here's something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in "duck and cover" drills, diving under our desks to protect ourselves from a possible nuclear attack on New York City. (You might, of course, ask how protective our modest-sized metal-and-wooden desks would have been, if our city had indeed experienced a worse-than-Hiroshima event.) We kids were also urged to consider the advice of Bert the Turtle, a character in a cartoon we were shown at school. After all, he "never got hurt because he knew just what we all must do: he ducked and covered!" In those years, New York was, in fact, filled with public "fallout shelters" and I still remember the yellow symbol for them that you could see as you walked the streets of the city.
Similarly, popular culture was then remarkably saturated with fantasies of nuclear annihilation. If you doubt me, just get a copy of Walter Miller, Jr.'s 1959 near-world-ending novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (still a striking read today) or check out that earliest of mutant nuclear monster movies, Them!, about giant irradiated ants let loose in Los Angeles. And so it went in those years when it came to imagining the possibility of a world-ending nuclear event.
And yet consider this the irony of all ironies: for most of the 1950s, while the United States could have delivered a devastating nuclear Armageddon to the Soviet Union and the rest of the then-communist world, the Russians, though they had indeed developed atomic weapons, didn't yet have the ability to deliver them here by plane or missile. Hence, the fears that the Soviets might somehow smuggle a bomb into the country. Hence also, the particular terror when the Soviets placed such weaponry in Cuba in 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis commenced.
Today, as TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino reminds us, not just two but nine countries are nuclear-armed and the possibility of a nuclear war has increased accordingly. In addition, we now know that even a conflict in which the U.S. played no part could create a "nuclear winter" that would devastate this country, too. And yet, despite the recent hit movie Oppenheimer, nuclear fears and fantasies are now largely in absentia. Bert, it seems, ducked, covered, and never came up again. So, I think it's particularly useful at this moment for Mazzarino to remind us that, 78 years after those two nuclear bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's a small miracle that another such weapon hasn't again been used in war and that, whatever the other dangers on this planet, we should never take our eyes off the nuclear one. Tom
At the Brink?
Contemplating the Unimaginable Costs of a Nuclear War
Despite Russian hints about the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine, consider it strange amid other world-endangering possibilities how little attention nuclear destruction gets anymore. And that's despite the fact that there are now nine (yes, nine!) nuclear powers on this planet, ranging from the United States, Russia, and China to Israel and North Korea.
Still, at some point in your life, you've probably heard about the theory of "nuclear deterrence" embraced by so many in our military and those of other major powers globally. The idea is that nuclear weapons actually keep us all "safe" by their mere presence in the hands of those powers. According to such thinking, their existence restrains the leaders of such countries from directly making war on each other for fear of setting off a world-ending nuclear conflict. And in that context, yes, the U.S. military spends tens of billions of dollars annually on the upkeep of some 5,428 nuclear weapons of every sort and their delivery systems to keep us safe. Worse yet, it plans to "invest" upwards of two trillion dollars more "modernizing" that arsenal in the coming decades.
As a retired military officer's spouse steeped in exactly this line of thinking, there were times when I did indeed find it at least somewhat compelling. It's true, after all, that since the U.S. used two nuclear bombs to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, taking hundreds of thousands of lives in those blasts and their aftermath, and Japan surrendered, ending World War II, the absolute number of deaths in armed conflict globally has decreased. Nonetheless, over the last decade, when I listened to people I knew (and didn't know) extolling nuclear deterrence at military get-togethers and in the popular press, I couldn't help thinking that our capacity to threaten, torment, and kill one another has not exactly abated in that same 78-year period.
To take just the most obvious recent example, nuclear weapons no more prevented Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine than they had stopped the U.S. invasion of Iraq (based, in fact, on the false claim that autocrat Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction). Nor have they recently stopped the U.S. from sending close to $50 billion and counting in weaponry and ammunition, not to speak of training and intelligence technology, to Ukraine in response. And count on one thing: some of what our country has provided will impact Ukrainians for generations to come, including depleted uranium tank shells and cluster munitions, those bundles of bomblets banned by more than 100 countries because of their indiscriminate tendency to go off years later, often killing innocent civilians.
In an era marked by so many advances in healthcare, green energy, and food production, which would seem to offer other ways of helping stabilize weak states we fear, the U.S. has progressively expanded its military involvement to some 85 countries globally. There, our soldiers and contractors occupy bases, train local forces, run prisons and intelligence operations, fly drones, and sometimes fight alongside local armies, often in settings with far laxer human rights standards than ours.
Today's unmanned drones also make it possible to wreak violence without having to witness the consequences. But make no mistake, in recent years, the world has seen an increase in the incidence of violent events like politically motivated armed conflict between warring factions and politically motivated assaults on civilians, as well as violent protests and mob attacks. In other words, nuclear weapons have not deterred the sorts of violence that keep many of us up at night and can cause measurable health problems.
The Proliferation of Violence
In these decades, the lack of deterrence of violence itself, even if not the nuclear version of it, has been profound. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has made it all too clear that suffering from armed conflict extends far beyond the battlefield and generations into the future. If we are going to say something about "deterrence," then we need to be clear on what we're deterring. After all, thanks to just this century's conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, our project has estimated that 4.5-4.7 million people have died from bullets, bombs, improvised explosive devices, drone missiles, and other versions of war's violence, as well as from disease, accidents, and various side effects and aftereffects of such conflicts (not to mention suicide).
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