Thinking the thinkable

Despite countries amassing huge atomic arsenals, one reason deterrence has worked since the end of World War II, according to proponents, is that all-out nuclear war is so unthinkable. 

Yet, with no end in sight to fighting in Ukraine and West Asia, a new Cold War that pits US vs Russia and China, and the second coming of an erratic American president, have all made nuclear conflict thinkable in 2025 and beyond.

Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and last month fired a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile at the Dnipro. And it has put into orbit a new prototype satellite that can knock out other satellites with a nuclear explosion in space. 

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netyanyahu have reportedly spoken about a joint strike on Iranian nuclear installations. North Korea has been testing long range missiles for its nuclear warheads. Tensions remain high between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

These dangers come on top of signs of accelerated climate breakdown with weather extremes, record-breaking heat, and rapid melting of polar icecaps and Himalayan glaciers.

‘The world-ending potential of nuclear weapons looms over populations around the world,’ writes Cameron Vega in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. ‘Climate change is a slower-moving catastrophe, but it openly threatens every community.’

The Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock was reset to 90 seconds before midnight (from 100 seconds) in January this year due to ‘ominous trends that continue to point the world toward global catastrophe’. The minute hand on the Doomsday Clock has been reset 25 times since 1947, and it is most likely be brought forward to less than a minute in 2025.  

Both climate breakdown and nuclear war are human induced, but while one is heating up the planet the smoke and dust from explosions of the other will cool it. Either way, both threats are inextricably linked. 

Even the tactical use of battlefield nuclear weapons would have a climate impact. And climate-induced disasters, crop failures, water shortage, mass migration and ensuing socio-political unrest could spark wars that go nuclear. This is without even considering the long term effect of radioactive fallout on land, water and sea.

Research at Rutgers University recently projected that even a one-week nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would cause the collapse of food systems worldwide, killing 2 billion people from starvation. Prevailing winds would carry the fallout to the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau, irradiating glaciers that feed into all of Asia’s main rivers.

An all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia would cause a nuclear winter lasting more than 15 years, the study showed, unleashing a global famine that would kill 5 billion people. 

Anti-nuclear activists now challenge the security paradigm based on nuclear deterrence, and have instead pushed for a ban on nuclear weapons. At a meeting on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations in New York last December, members declared that the doctrine of deterrence used by nuclear-armed states and their allies was a threat to human security and an obstacle to nuclear disarmament.

The meeting heard that deterrence is an unproven gamble and based on the implicit threat to use nuclear weapons which itself is playing brinkmanship with nuclear annihilation.

“Deterrence is unacceptable,” stated Melissa Parke of ICAN ((International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons). “It is based on the threat to wage nuclear war which would kill millions outright and lead to a nuclear winter and mass starvation that would kill billions of people.” 

ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its activism against the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of atomic weapons, and its work to push the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 

It has been 50 years since the discussions on a draft of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was first held in Geneva. The NPT entered into force in 1970, and has the membership of 191 States, with mandatory obligations on disarmament and non-proliferation. 

However, these commitments are now threatened by a new Cold War and increased global tensions. Nine nuclear weapon states have total stockpiles of 14,500 warheads, many of them on missiles ready to be launched. Three countries in Nepal’s immediate neighbourhood (China, India, Pakistan) have nuclear weapons, and they do not share good relations.

Of the five regions around the world that have declared themselves nuclear weapons free, three are in Asia: Central Asia, Mongolia and the South Pacific. The United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific (UNRCPD) is located in Kathmandu and helps countries to meet disarmament goals.

A report titled Nuclear Famine by the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War sounds a sobering alarm: even a limited nuclear war using only 100 weapons anywhere in the world would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production, and put 2 billion people at risk of starvation.

Coincidentally, 2 billion is also the number of people who would be affected by the melting of glaciers in the mountains of High Asia, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Given the twin global threats, climate activism now has to go hand-in-hand with the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. 

Kunda Dixit

This Editorial is brought to you by Nepali Times, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.