Current events are heating up. Getting kind of unstable. Maybe glowing unsettlingly.
If you can’t see what I’m getting at, I’m talking about radioactivity. We live in a time where many major countries in the world have nuclear weapons. United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel all control some nuclear weaponry, but Russia and the US share 93 per cent of all nuclear warheads. The nuclear arms race that started heating up in the 1950s has continued until now.
In recent news, nuclear weapons have been used for posturing and threats. US and North Korean leaders boast on the internet about their “nuclear buttons.” North Korea has performed multiple tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could be used to attack the US with nuclear weapons. Iran signed a deal with the US to stop producing nuclear weapons, but each side says the other isn’t holding up their side of the deal. And the multiple countries who have nuclear weapons won’t give them up, because it’s hard to set an example and be the first guy to drop your weapons when all the other players in this lowkey Mexican Standoff have their weapons drawn on your head.
This arms race has been going on since nuclear weapons were first invented. The US was the first country to develop nuclear weapons, in the 1940s-50s. Soon after, the US and Russia were stuck in a nuclear arms race that eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Russia was placing weapons in Cuba and both countries were growing tenser and tenser. Miscommunications happened, secret and less-secret communications happened, and the countries got closer and closer to war.
The Cuban Missile Crisis intensified to the point that the US wasn’t sure Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) would stop nuclear war anymore. Children were doing duck-and-cover drills in schools, hiding under desks in preparation for a bomb. In an NPR interview, Marta Maria Darby remembers being told to cover her head and get under the desk, and thinking, “Really? This is going to prevent a bomb from destroying us?” She only remembers these drills happening as a last-ditch fear reflex during the week at the end of October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis really started to heat up. Overall, civilian life went on as usual during the crisis: people were worried about nuclear war, but what could they do? Aside from participating in drills, not much. But militarily, things were getting scary.
US destroyers were enforcing a quarantine around Cuba, dropping depth charges on Russian submarines, and nearly goaded the Soviets into firing nuclear torpedoes that would have had the same explosive force as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. NATO-sanctioned B-52 bombers were constantly ready on airborne alert to fly to Russia and drop nuclear bombs on Moscow.
The 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb” is a dark comedy that plays out a scenario of a rogue general who gives an order for the B-52s on standby to drop nukes on Russia. He’s a conspiracy nut, and there’s a notice before the movie that the “US Air Force says this definitely could not occur,” but in truth, it could have. The B-52 pilots were completely in independent control of their missiles, so if they’d chosen to, they could have bombed Russia preemptively. And once headed toward Russia, it would be nigh on impossible to avert complete nuclear destruction. “Dr. Strangelove” ends in a series of mushroom clouds as a woman’s voice sings a nostalgic song.
However, obviously, the 1962 missile crisis didn’t end with mushroom clouds. On the 26th of October, US government officials were hunkered in a bunker, Soviet officials were presumably much the same, and we were at the point of nuclear war. Finally, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev wrote to each other and said something that amounted to “Hey, maybe we could… Not destroy the world. Sound good?”
After that, tensions slowly decreased. Weapons were eventually taken out of Cuba. The US and Russia were still in a Cold War of nuclear armament for a couple of decades, but a crisis of this magnitude didn’t happen again.
Flash forward to the current day. Nuclear arms races continue, now between everyone from the US to North Korea to possibly ISIS. Nuclear tensions are rising, as various countries test and boast about nuclear weapons. On January 14th, a warning of an incoming ballistic missile was sent out on text alert to Hawaii, and later revealed to be a false alarm. It caused mass panic before the all-clear was sent out. This alert of a strike was especially believable in our current situation of nuclear tension. We’re not at Cuban Missile Crisis levels of crisis, but the Doomsday Clock is set at two minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock is a “clock” in that it’s a set of criteria used as a metaphor for how close the world is to being destroyed (“midnight”). It’s put out by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, calculated based on how many nuclear weapons and how much international tension there is in the world, among other factors. The Doomsday Clock is currently closer than it has ever been to midnight.
This doesn’t mean we’re about to head into nuclear war. Don’t start looking into luxury apartments in old ICBM silos yet (though that is an option if you’re interested). It is a sobering thought, though: once, the world was hours away from nuclear war. Now, we’re reaching a point where there are so many nuclear weapons possessed by so many countries that it’s only a matter of time before something happens. There’s no reason to let it get to the point that mutually assured destruction is the only thing holding us back from a nuclear World War III.
If countries won’t disarm, maybe one solution is to make it harder to launch nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, a professor at Harvard Law School named Roger Fisher had an idea. To make sure the President of the US wouldn’t give the order to launch nuclear weapons lightly, the nuclear launch codes would be compressed and implanted next to the heart of a volunteer from the Navy. This person would then follow the president around, and instead of a briefcase filled with launch codes, he would carry a briefcase with a butcher’s knife inside. If the President decided a launch was necessary, he would first have to ask for the knife, hack the aide to death, and get the launch codes out of his dead body. This would make sure the President realized what he was doing had deadly repercussions, and make sure he had truly determined this was the only option.
Unsurprisingly, no major government of the world has adopted this as a policy. They fear it would skew the President’s judgement; that viscerally reminding the President that launching these weapons puts blood on his hands would make him hesitant to launch. And yes, it would. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have any nuclear weapons, because no one would want the power to cause such destruction. But in the world we live in now, we have nuclear weapons, and they hang over us as a reminder not to use them, since they’re too terrible. It’s a fragile paradox that only lasts until somebody pushes a launch button.
further reading:
https://www.npr.org/2012/10/22/163395079/childhood-memories-of-the-cuban-missile-crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-missile-crisis-russian-roulette