Eighty years ago today, the first of two atomic bombs was used in anger. Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were vaporised. The Japanese could understand how a thousand-plane B-29 raids could kill one hundred thousand Japanese living in Tokyo or Nagoya in a single night. But it took a second B-29 and a second bomb to shock and awe Japan into abandoning its insistence on suicidal resistance and surrender unconditionally to the Allies.
Then came the H-bomb and thermonuclear weapons. The explosive power of nuclear weapons is measured in thousands of tons of TNT equivalents or kilotons (KT). Thermonuclear weapons are measured in million ton equivalents of TNT (MT). While at one time it was feasible to consider the tactical use of nuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons present an existential threat not to a city but to society in general. The reason for restraint is evident: for the first time in history, no winners and only losers would emerge from a thermonuclear war. Thus, since 1945, no nuclear weapon has been used in combat, war or as a “demonstration” shot in a crisis. And those possessing these weapons have not spread to many dozens as was once feared. Today, there are ten nuclear-weapon states-the US, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and of course, Russia.
The reason for restraint is evident: for the first time in history, no winners and only losers would emerge from a thermonuclear war.
Questions of nuclear safety and security, proliferation, and terrorists or others seeking to do grave harm remain as pertinent as they were since these hugely destructive weapons were invented. American, Chinese and Russian leaders once agreed that these weapons can never be used and that no one would win a catastrophic war. Yet, Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised the spectre of nuclear weapons use in the Ukraine War should the US, NATO or other states intervene.
Was Putin serious? Was his threat just a bluff or a signal about the importance of the Ukraine war to him and even to Russia? Since NATO was not going to intervene, the answer is obvious. Still, war games have obviously played with he use of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, including having some “detonated” where no damage was done, over the ocean or in desolate land masses, to shock and awe the enemy. Some fear that North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jung Il, is so irrational that, in a crisis deemed existential, he could easily fire off a nuclear weapon. Suppose in 1950, had Kim been alive and in charge and had a nuclear weapon-possibly obtained from the Soviet Union, which tested its first in 1949- would he have used it after the US landing at Inchon, Seoul’s seaport, sent the North Korean army fleeing northwards towards the Yalu River and the border with China?
If one reviewed the history of nuclear weapons accidents and near misses in the US and the USSR/Russia, it would not be pleasant reading. And too often, the US is not sufficiently knowledgeable about the state of other nuclear powers. During the Bush ’43 administration, the threat of Pakistani extremists stealing nuclear weapons was taken very seriously. Ironically, while Pakistan had only a small fraction of the US inventory of nuclear weapons, its warheads were better controlled in some ways than America’s, as security and depended on a three-key system for use once a higher authority gave the order, rather than the US’s two-key system.
For the Cold War, the doctrine of MAD-Mutual Assured Destruction-prevailed as US doctrine. The thesis was that after absorbing an enemy’s first strike, the retaliatory attack would kill enough people and destroy enough of the economy to make war unwinnable. The acronym, to some, had a double meaning that included insanity.
For the bulk of the past eighty years, it was the US-Soviet/Russian nuclear balance that was crucial. The analogy of two scorpions in a bottle represented MAD. With China dramatically increasing its inventory of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, are there now three scorpions in the same bottle? And how do the other nuclear states play in this?
After ending the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US returned its strategic focus to the current challenges of today: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in this reincarnation of Bush ’43’s infamous axis of evil. In this shift in thinking, no issue has greater urgency and need than ensuring that these weapons of true mass destruction will never be detonated in anger or, possibly worse, by accident, precipitating a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.
The writer is a senior advisor at Washington, DC’s Atlantic Council and a published author. He can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman.