22-07-2025
Eighty years after Hiroshima, is the world any safer from nuclear war?
AS THE 80th anniversary of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rolls around next month, it is worth asking how safe is the world from another nuclear war. The aftermath of the US strike on Iran's putative nuclear weapons facilities in June seems to have engendered a belief that the world has somehow stepped back from the brink.
Indeed, some even expect that Washington will now summon up its courage and decisively act against North Korea, never mind that Pyongyang has defence treaties with both China and Russia. The thinking seems to be that an Iran-like bombing raid would leave the world's nuclear arsenals in safe hands, however that notion of safety is construed.
So perhaps this is a good moment to recount the times the world has come to the brink of all-out nuclear war – with all that it means for life on Earth. Everyone remembers the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Moscow had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Kennedy administration wanted the missiles withdrawn and ordered a naval blockade. As manoeuvres began, Soviet officers misinterpreted non-lethal depth charges from American surface ships as the onset of war. The Soviet submarine commander was about to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American aircraft carrier. But he needed the permission of a political officer, Captain Vasily Arkhipov, who judged the situation correctly and refused to give that permission. He thus saved both the US and the then Soviet Union from total devastation.
On another occasion, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, Stanislav Petrov, was on duty on Sep 26, 1983, when the early-warning satellite system he was monitoring detected what appeared to be five approaching US nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. He thought about it and reasoned that if the US really wanted all-out nuclear war, Washington would deploy more than just five missiles. He treated it as a false alarm, and the critical moment passed without incident.
More pertinent to the North Korea situation was when President Richard Nixon ordered a nuclear strike against Pyongyang. In 1969, a few months into the first Nixon administration, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung's forces shot down an EC-121 spy plane over the Sea of Japan. Nixon had been drinking that evening and, as a book by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan notes, he was drunk when he heard the news. He ordered nuclear retaliation. Fortunately, his faithful sidekick Henry Kissinger was at hand and persuaded the military commanders to wait until Nixon sobered up before executing his order. Again, the moment passed without incident.
The situation in North Korea now is vastly different from that in the Nixon era. The Kim dynasty has a nuclear arsenal of its own, with missiles that can strike the US mainland directly. Of course, Washington can flatten North Korea. But the US stands to lose Yokosuka, Okinawa, Guam and Honolulu, if not Anchorage, Seattle and Los Angeles. This prospect is likely to concentrate a few minds in the Trump administration.
If anything, the recent US strikes against Iran have fundamentally changed how the Kims are likely to deal with Washington: nuclear weapons are not a bargaining chip to be traded away in return for some US assurance. And anyone who thinks Pyongyang's treaty allies, China and Russia, will both sit on their hands while the Trump administration drops bunker busters without consequence, is surely indulging in heroic assumptions.
