Yossi Mekelberg
During a week in which Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded a visit to North Korea with the signing of a mutual defense pact between Moscow and Pyongyang that is likely to make the latter’s military nuclear program even more brazen, I happened to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first city to be hit by an atomic bomb.
It left me extremely moved but also contemplative about why on earth we still possess nuclear weapons. On Aug. 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city, instantly killing at least 70,000 people. By the end of the year, the death toll had reached 140,000. The bomb vaporized people almost a kilometer from ground zero, and burned the exposed skin of people kilometers away as a result of the intense infrared energy that was unleashed.
Catastrophic fires ravaged a circular area with a radius of more than 3 km, as the city literally burned to the ground. The results would be similar three days later when the US bombed a second Japanese city, Nagasaki, this time causing 100,000 deaths directly attributable to the initial blast.
The horrific effects of the bombs on the Japanese people and their environment continued to be felt for many years, including premature deaths, lifelong trauma, and a significant links between radiation exposure and major congenital defects, malformations, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths.
All this leaves no room for doubt about the dangerous futility of humanity’s toying with nuclear proliferation. Worse, we have learned the wrong lessons from the fact that, despite the presence of huge arsenals of nuclear missiles with sophisticated delivery systems, these weapons with the power to destroy humanity have, thankfully, never been employed again.
When, in the late 1940s, the US lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union joined the nuclear arms race, a fairly stable state of deterrence was established between the two superpowers and their allies. Since then, six other countries have become confirmed nuclear military powers: China, the UK, France, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel is also widely believed to possess such a capability.
We can perhaps learn the lessons of history but we can never, even remotely, assume that they will never repeat themselves. During the bipolar superpower system of the Cold War era, both the US and the Soviet Union understood that the use of their nuclear capabilities would be irrational and could only result in mutual assured destruction (or MAD), and so an extremely high level of deterrence was established.
Neither side ever pushed the button, so to speak, but that is not to say the superpowers did not teeter on the brink of cataclysm, even if ultimately they managed to remain one step clear of the nuclear abyss. For two weeks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Moscow and Washington came very close to launching nuclear missiles at one another, before common sense prevailed.
Can anyone guarantee that a world with nuclear weapons is truly a safe one? A world that is inherently unstable, as is the current state of international affairs, in which most countries in possession of nuclear weapons suffer from unreliable political systems, with leaders who are increasingly authoritarian and have scant respect for accountability and transparency?
The very concept of deterrence, and especially nuclear deterrence, represents a very pessimistic view of human nature. Perceptually and practically, it dictates that we live in a state of peace — or, more accurately, that we decide not to go to war with one another — not because it is the right thing to do or out of concern about the immorality that accompanies war, and not even because it might serve our interests as individuals or societies.
Deterrence means that we avoid wars mainly because we fear their consequences, and the fear of nuclear annihilation is our ultimate source of dread. Our fears and predictions of global extinction have prevailed for thousands of years and have yet to be banished.
In recent times, experiments in collective security guided by international law, such as the UN, or globalization as a prevailing paradigm of worldwide cooperation have at best achieved only partial success.
Similarly, the model provided by the EU, which represents a direct challenge to the adversarial concept of the security dilemma and its inevitable outcome in the form of the arms race, is facing severe challenges and has yet to be emulated in other parts of the world.
Meanwhile, wars and conflicts persist and continue to claim hundreds of thousands of lives every year. And nuclear weapons are the ultimate tool of force which, if unleashed, could annihilate humanity altogether.
There is a stark contrast between the social contract that prevails in societies in which law, common values, and behavioral norms regulate relations between people and where trust and mutual respect are pillars of society, and the element of anarchy that continues to prevail in international affairs, in which a concept scholars call the “realist” approach still rules supreme. This approach views war as a mechanism to ensure stability, and the pursuit of gains by force as part and parcel of the kind of world affairs in which nuclear weapons have been a component for decades.
For a brief moment, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, nuclear disarmament seemed to be the ultimate outcome in a world with no more big power rivalry, and consequently the reduction in nuclear arsenals would be substantial.
This is no longer the case. According to the annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the nine nuclear-armed states continue to modernize their nuclear weapon stockpiles as they deepen their reliance on deterrence.
In a separate report, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons calculated that these countries spent a combined total of $91.4 billion on their nuclear arsenals in 2023. Meanwhile, Iran is regarded as being a “nuclear threshold” state. A world of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence is not a safer world but an accident waiting to happen, whether technically or politically.
After nearly 80 years of a nuclear era during which the bomb has not been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we should not be lulled into a false sense of security and assume it will never be used.
In recent years a number of negative precedents have been set, including a permanent member of the UN Security Council invading a neighboring country without provocation and threatening to use nuclear weaponry in the process.
This, and the very existence in the world of about 12,100 nuclear warheads, should deeply concern all of us. After all, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world witnessed the horror that “only” two such weapons could unleash when launched, ultimately, on the orders of one person alone.
