Tuesday 16 January 2018

Remembering The Cold War Lessons

As a Cold-War kid of the 70's and 80's, a decent part of my childhood was spent under the threat of a nuclear war breaking out at any point and if the Doomsday Clock is anything to go by, we shouldn't have too long to wait for one now.
Since 1991 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed to subside, the Doomsday Clock shifted to 17 minutes to midnight and the talk was of nuclear de-escalation with the Soviets and Americans running down their nuclear stockpiles.
Somewhere between 1991 and today we seem to have lost our way and their is now a proliferation of desks with big red buttons on them and we have World Leaders threatening each other with nuclear war and an American President talking up the use of small nuclear missiles.
Only two nuclear weapons have ever been used in warfare, the first killed 166,000 in Hiroshima and the second 80,000 in Nagasaki giving a total of 246,000 lives wiped out in seconds and chillingly, today's nuclear weapons are over 3,000 times as powerful as those two bombs.
The Tsar bomb that Russia tested on Mityushikha Bay in 1961, released the nuclear energy of 3,333 Hiroshima bombs that levelled the city and caused widespread devastation.
With some unstable countries having a nuclear arsenal and some very unstable leaders in charge of the nuclear button, we seemed to have sleepwalked into another MAD situation but even that threat likely won't stop it.
We had what the nightmare of a nuclear War would look like drilled into us as kids, the millions of people vaporised in less than a second, buildings toppling on people faster than they can react and everyone slowly dying of cancer is scary but it seems people have forgotten that in a nuclear war, nobody wins, we all lose.  
Before nations spend billions they can ill-afford building bigger and better bombs, they need to consider that launching a nuclear missile will not go unanswered and guarantee that whatever devastation you wreak on your enemy, the same will be wreaked on you with weapons thousands of times more powerful then the ones that flattened entire cities and killed a quarter of a million people in under a second 70 years ago and that should be as eye-opening as it gets.

5 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Falling on a bruise said...

CND is still very much going so nuclear is still on the left's agenda but global warming is a present and growing danger affecting us now while a nuclear war is still only a possibility.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Falling on a bruise said...

What WILL happen against what MIGHT happen. The chances of deaths due to a nuclear war are negligible while climate change is killing people now and will only get worse over the next 100 years.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.