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Contemplating the Unimaginable Costs of a Nuclear War

If you are on the road to annihilation—get off.

SCHEERPOST, By Andrea Mazzarino / TomDispatch October 1, 2023

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 5,428nuclear 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…………………………………………….

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………………………………………………………………………..

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. …………………………………………………………………

The question we at the Costs of War Project return to endlessly is: How do you measure the indirect effects of war? What kind of “security” — if any — has prevailed in the era following the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

A Very Small Margin of Error

Of all our preconceptions about nuclear weapons, what’s probably the most destructive is the unstated assumption that they are the sole alternative to a more constant state of conventional warfare. There are, of course, conflict-resolution options that don’t involve violence at all, including diplomacy, the use of targeted intelligence, and anti-poverty programs the likes of which the United Nations and its affiliated human rights and humanitarian organizations promote. Conventional warfare exacts staggering opportunity costs and only makes it harder for leaders to pursue such routes.

Yet the sole type of conflict that could foreclose all alternatives whatsoever is, of course, nuclear war. It could vaporize the very skeleton of civilization — infrastructure, communications, government, and of course people in staggering numbers — all potentially in a matter of minutes, or less time than it takes you to read this piece.

These days, however, we in the U.S. seldom talk about the ever-present possibility of nuclear annihilation by, for instance, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), warhead-bearing projectiles capable of traveling thousands of miles (of which the U.S. and Russia have about 400 each). 

Scenarios that would place us all on the brink of nuclear annihilation could involve an all-too-human mix of everyday mistakes, incompetence, and heightened emotions. Consider, for instance, the possibility that a simple accident might detonate a warhead before it even leaves the ground, killing untold numbers of people…………………………………………………………………………………………………..  https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/01/contemplating-the-unimaginable-costs-of-a-nuclear-war/

October 2, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment