John Launer: Nuclear war—it’s time to face up to the risks

As a child I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union came within days or possibly hours of all-out global nuclear war. Since then, I’ve expected that nuclear weapons would be used one day but assumed that this might be between two smaller nuclear powers, possibly in Asia. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, however, a nuclear war starting in Europe seems more probable. Organisations tracking the risk of nuclear war, including the Pugwash conferences and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, regard this risk as greater now than ever.12

In the past year or two, the rhetoric around nuclear weapons has changed frighteningly. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, has explicitly threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons (with as much as 10 times the explosive power of each of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or “strategic” ones, which are several thousand times as destructive and are designed to destroy entire cities. The US national security adviser has warned that Russia would face “catastrophic consequences” as a result. Meanwhile, media pundits debate these threats as if they were a video game. All of this is grotesquely dangerous when the use of a single weapon could lead in minutes to an escalation causing mass annihilation.

Many defence analysts now believe that the doctrine of mutual deterrence is ineffective and dangerous.3 The monitoring systems for detecting an incoming nuclear attack on either side, along with the launch procedures for a retaliation, are obsolete and unreliable.4 They depend on instant decision making by one or two politicians who might be deranged, a few military operatives who have been known to be drugged or drunk on duty, and hypersonic trajectories that cannot be reversed.

Previous near misses that might have triggered a huge nuclear retaliation have been well documented. These include a false alarm due to a defective computer chip, leading to an erroneous signal that Russia had launched more than 2000 missiles against the US. The use of a few hundred nuclear weapons would be sufficient to kill most of the world’s population. The two major nuclear powers now possess around 13 000 weapons between them.

As well as ignoring the fragile thread on which our survival depends, bellicose threats and intellectual debates serve to distract everyone from the hideous realities involved. Nuclear war would entail immediate evaporation for relatively few people but death for millions more through blast injuries or having their skin and flesh burned away. Survivors would die from radiation sickness in days or weeks, or later from infrastructure collapse leading to exposure.5 Most—possibly all—of the world’s population would succumb to starvation from global crop failure.6

Doctors should help to dispel the fog of ignorance surrounding the immediate risks to humanity and should join organisations actively campaigning for nuclear de-escalation through the United Nations. These include Medact, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons. Denial, avoidance, or fatalism won’t make these terrifying risks go away; political action may. It is the world’s most urgent priority.