The looming prospect of nuclear war

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/11/2024 (327 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Perhaps I spend too much time thinking about nuclear war. It is true that, in general, I carry with me a level of anxiety some might describe as pathological. I often envision scenarios where we receive word of a pending strike, and so I bundle up my family with a car full of supplies and flee to some sanctuary in the woods where we might survive the fallout. It’s almost therapeutic to imagine such contingency plans.

What I try not to think about is how those plans are utterly delusional.

One person who thinks about nuclear war likely more often and certainly more rationally than I do is Annie Jacobsen. She is the author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book that is the result of years of interviews with scientists, military officials and other experts. Jacobsen paints a picture that suggests it is the lack of anxiety surrounding nukes which is truly pathological.

Let us start with the numbers.

Most of us have compartmentalized that the global nuclear stockpile of about 12,000 is enough to destroy the world many times over, as if it’s a fun bit of trivia. We are less cognizant of how near such destruction looms, in the numbers of “ready to launch” warheads. In this, America has 1,770 and Russia has 1,674, which means these can be launched at a moment’s notice on their irreversible path to targets they can reach in under an hour. And lest anyone believe that nuclear war will be less of a concern after U.S. president-elect Donald Trump makes nice with Vladimir Putin, remember that China, Trump’s preferred adversary, also has 500 nuclear weapons and the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world.

Here we should address the elephant in the room. No, I am not writing this entirely because of Trump’s incoming presidency. Though that is a concern, since his response to potential nuclear war with North Korea was “I’ve got a bigger button.” And that was Trump in his more coherent and less combative form.

But beyond Trump, the entire global stage is increasingly filled with brinkmanship, as Biden decides the one thing he can do for America on his way out the door is approve the use of long-range missiles in Ukraine. It seems entirely possible that this thirst for war won’t be sated until the unthinkable occurs.

Let’s think about it though, shall we? Because modern thermonuclear weapons pack a much larger punch than the 15 kilotons dropped on Hiroshima. Approximately 1,000 times more powerful. In fact, they use an atomic bomb just for the fuse.

So what does a thermonuclear blast entail? Firstly, everything within a mile of the blast site is essentially instantly melted, if not fully vapourized, in a flash of pure, white fire. Then comes the shock wave, which will level any structure for three miles in every direction as if they were dominoes. And there is the iconic mushroom cloud, but what you may not realize is that mushroom clouds act as a vacuum, sucking both human and non-human debris alike miles into the sky.

Perhaps it seems cold to describe humans as debris, but that is what a nuclear blast renders us — a smouldering pile of carbon, indistinguishable from the molten raw materials of buildings, cars and trees that get sucked into the sky along with us. In a busy metropolitan area, there could be as many as a million people pulled to this fate.

They might be the lucky ones, because then come the megafires, which could encompass as much as 400 square miles (642 square kilometres). It is impossible to conceive of firefighting in such an aftermath.

Though the ramifications deserves many more words of description than I have to spare here, there is also nuclear winter, where the atmosphere is filled with so much soot that it blocks out the sun. Leading to such drastic temperature drops that Canada would likely not see above freezing temperatures again for at least six years. To say nothing of the omnipresent radioactivity, which would last much longer.

As Nikita Kruschev once said, the survivors would envy the dead.

Bleak as this picture is, we have been flirting with such disaster for the better part of a century, and we have come close. Like the time when the American navy was dropping charges on a Russian sub, trying to force it to surface, unaware that it was a nuclear sub with clearance to launch on such a provocation.

Only the cool temperament of a Russian naval officer saved us from nuclear war that day.

That’s not the only story either. So where are the brakes on this train? Well, one-time nuclear weapon enthusiast Ronald Reagan had a change of heart after seeing a movie on the subject called The Day After. It inspired Reagan to reach out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and begin the process of whittling the stockpile from 70,000 down to what we have today. So it can be done.

But maybe the problem is we don’t think about nuclear war enough.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.