For years it has been clear that the greatest threat to the survival of humanity is climate change. No more. The specter of a baked planet is horrific, but over recent months another threat has become even more frighteningly real: nuclear war.
This danger has been growing for years, but war in Ukraine has made it more acute. Russia has signaled that it may consider using nuclear weapons if that is the only way to avoid losing the war. Ukraine’s NATO allies, also nuclear-armed, are in an equally combative mood. Add to that the possibility of war over Taiwan, plus the wild card of North Korea, and you have the makings of a perfect nuclear storm.
Russian military units are being trained in the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, and Russia has launched a satellite that American analysts fear could be a prototype for an orbiting nuclear platform. Both China and the United States are engaged in major “modernization” of their nuclear arsenals. Some of Donald Trump’s supporters are hoping that if he is elected president, he will resume nuclear weapons tests, which the United States and other nations halted more than 30 years ago.
Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of NATO, recently suggested that the alliance is putting more nuclear missiles on alert. “I will not go into the operational details of how many nuclear warheads should be in the operational inventory and how many should be in storage,” he said, “but we must consult on these issues, and that is exactly what we are doing.”
While leaders of nuclear-armed nations are in no mood for compromise, several leaders of smaller countries have sounded alarms. “We are approaching a global conflagration,” President Gustavo Petro of Colombia asserted last month. President Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia told an interviewer that “we are getting close to a real disaster. . . . I cannot say a third world war, but that big confrontation, I believe we are not far from it.”
The last time the world faced the prospect of imminent nuclear war was during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It was averted because leaders on both sides understood the danger. “Mr. President, we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war,” Nikita Khruschev wrote to John F. Kennedy at the height of the crisis. “If there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot.”
Such wisdom is sorely lacking at the top of world governments today. Victory-or-death rhetoric has displaced diplomacy. Few in Russia, China, or the United States speak of peace and what must be done to achieve it. The only peace they seek is the one that follows total victory — a concept that loses meaning when war is nuclear.
Although Ukraine is the flashpoint most likely to set off nuclear war, it is hardly the only one. The possibility of an accidental launch caused by false reports of enemy attack is considerable. So is a sudden strike by a rogue power.
In a terrifying new book called “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” the investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen considers how this might happen. She imagines that the North Korean leader, angry at new provocations, launches three nuclear missiles toward the United States. One is a dud, a second hits the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California and triggers a meltdown, and the third vaporizes Washington. The United States responds with a nuclear counterbarrage. Some of those missiles pass over Russian airspace. Russian forces detect them, fear their country is the target, and launch a full-scale attack on the United States.
Under US law, no one may veto a decision by the president to launch nuclear weapons. Decisions by a head of state in Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang would probably be just as hard to countermand. Daniel Holz, a physicist who works with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, made the obvious observation: “It’s insane that one person can destroy civilization in 30 minutes.”
Given this stark reality, why are major world leaders more focused on defeating adversaries than preventing nuclear catastrophe? One reason is that nuclear war is almost unimaginable; what we have never experienced seems diffuse and faraway. Another is that leaders in Russia, the United States, and other nuclear-armed nations may consider their war aims so vital that they must be pursued regardless of risk.
Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense during the Cuban missile crisis, spent his last years warning that nuclear war had become probable and “it will result in the death of nations.” Half a century later, another former secretary of defense, William Perry, not only repeats that message but laments that “most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”
Geopolitics, like all politics, presents painful choices. Often the best options are highly unpalatable. Nuclear war, however, is beyond unpalatable. Preventing it should be an urgent goal for world leaders and the people they govern.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
