Nukes

Annamaria on Monday

Nukes are back in the news because newly installed President Biden is moving toward a five-year extension of the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia.  UN officials are calling nuclear weapons "obsolete," a word that drew my attention.  I was a baby when my country became the only nation on earth to use them.  I have lived with their threat all my life.

By the time I first learned of their existence, US bombs had been dropped on Japan.  Those attacks were being credited as the reason the US won that war.  The destruction, it was postulated, had convinced the Japanese to surrender, negating any need for an invasion of Japan and thereby saving the lives of a million Allied fighting men.

There was also talk, of course of the dreadful loss of life in Japan, which was countered at the time with reminders of the enormous cruelty of the Japanese toward the populations of countries they conquered, most notably in China. I had desperately missed my daddy while he was away fighting in the Pacific and was so happy that I got him back. My father, I eventually understood, was one of those million who might have died invading Japan.  I harbored ever afterwards a guilty relief that the bomb that destroyed so many had preserved him.

By then the threat of nukes was part of the air one breathed.  All public buildings had designated fall-out shelters.  People were digging them in their own backyards.  School children were put through drills.

A relic of that age still displayed on the stairwell of the building where I live.

I grew up, of course, completely opposed to the very existence of hideous nukes. Come the 60s and 70s, when I became a peacenik, I joined many efforts to do away with them.  The most successful of those, took place on 12 June 1982. Then President Reagan, an avowed military hawk, was in the White House. Many, many people wanted to send him a strong message.  They came from all over the US to join with New Yorkers and staged the, until then, largest peaceful protest ever to gather anywhere.

A million people showed up!  A million in Central Park!  Here is what it looked like where I was:

Ronald Reagan, who professed to be against nukes, then chose a strange way to eliminate their danger.  He shocked the world by what he called a Strategic Defence - the creation of an anti-missile system to shield the USA. Nobody ever thought that would do the trick.  What it did do was calm down the fears in enough people and, by doing so, took a lot of the steam out of the anti-nuke movement.

The current ready bottle

My husband David and I once discussed what we would do if we got word that an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead was on its way to us.  We knew that New York would be a prime target.  We also understood that, though there would be a considerable warning period, we would never be able to escape our densely populated island home in time.  We decided we would just sit on our stoop and drink champagne.  We, and now I, have kept a chilled bottle on hand ever since.  If it is drunk for some pleasant other reason, I quickly replace it.

When the Cold War ended, an opportunity arose for world powers to deal with the nuke threat.  But there was no political will anywhere to do that deed. The moment was wasted. Johnathan Schell writing in The Nation said it was, "as if people believed that a mortal illness could be dealt with by forgetting about it."

Then, during Bush 1, the first START was negotiated and signed. It does not banish nukes.  But it does control them.

President Obama negotiated and signed START 2.

Trump was too busy doing other things at the end of his term in office to pay attention to the fact that the 10-year span of  START 2 was just about up. President Biden (how I love typing those words together) is looking to rectify the omission.

There is a connection between nukes and other ills of our society.  One surfaced in 1982, pointing to the the link between the money Reagan was spending on nukes and the depth of poverty in Black communities. As in the 80s, people are now raising awareness of the connection between the economics of nukes and societal ills like race and gender inequality.

Influential people in the United States and Europe are saying that the weapons are obsolete because they are so morally reprehensible the countries that have them could never survive the shame of using them.

A nice thought, but we know that heads of state are quite capable of making morally reprehensible or just plain stupid decisions.

Dangers still exist.  No country that has nuclear capability has, thus far, been attacked by a country that does not possess them.  This makes countries that don't have them want them.  Stopping nuclear wannabes from developing them is a chancy game as we are well aware, given the news from Iran and North Korea.  Pakistan and India both have them and also have some awful mutual grievances.

And then is the lively black market in plans for making them and for the materials needed.

Attention needs to be paid.