The Threat of Nuclear War: 1962 and Now

Tomorrow is the first day of October, and it was in October 1962 that the world came closest to being engulfed in nuclear war. But currently there is threat of nuclear war once again. Let’s consider the similarities and differences between the ominous threat then and now. 

The Cuban missile crisis occurred on October 16~29, 1962. What do you remember about that fateful time? Well, if you are not at least 65 years old, you don’t have any memories of it. But it was a scary time for June and me as we were in our mid-20s then.

In September 1962, I started my doctoral studies at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and our family of four was living some 50 miles away at Ekron, Ky., where I was pastor of the Baptist church in that small town.

At that time, we didn’t have CNN or other 24/7 television news to keep us informed—in fact, we didn’t even have a television set in our home. But we kept up by the daily newspaper and radio.

In the narrow daily spaces of her five-year diary, June mentioned the crisis in Cuba on three days in a row. She wrote, “The U.S. has put a quarantine on Cuba” (10/22); “The Cuba situation is very serious” (10/23); “Our Cuban situation is so bad” (10/Oct. 24).

To cut down on driving time and to give me more time for study, on Tuesday and Thursday nights I stayed in seminary campus housing. On the morning of Thursday, Oct. 25, I went to Louisville as usual—and it was probably that afternoon when I thought seriously about going back home.

If there was going to be a nuclear attack, which seemed to be a distinct possibility, I certainly wanted to be with my family.

Fortunately, both President Kennedy and USSR Premier Khrushchev made domestically unpopular decisions and averted nuclear war. What a tremendous relief that was!*

“My Cuban Missile Crisis” is chapter 12 of Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine (2017). He is seven years older than I, so that notable book was published when he was 86. (His leaked Pentagon Papers was published in 1971, when he was 40.)

Ellsberg finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, but he was already working for the RAND Corporation and was a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House. As such, he was closely involved in discussions directly related to the Cuban missile crisis.

In “Cuba, The Real Story,” his 13^th chapter, Ellsberg states, “The fact is that on Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of events was in motion that might have come close to ending civilization” (p. 194).

The situation in Ukraine now is not nearly as dire as it was in Cuba in 1962, mainly because Russian President Putin has threatened only to use tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic ones such as the ones central to the threat 60 years ago.

(Strategic nuclear weapons are roughly ten times more powerful than tactical ones, and it is only the former that are designed to produce “mutually assured destruction,” with the ironic acronym MAD.)

Yet, way leads on to way and there is no telling what damage might result—in Ukraine, in Europe, and even in the whole world—from even minimal use of tactical nuclear warheads.

Last week during a televised address, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine.

Then on Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that U.S. officials have communicated to the Russians that there will be "catastrophic consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine."

A big question now is whether Putin will be willing to lose face the way Khrushchev did in 1963.**

Let’s hope and pray he will.

_____

* For factual information about the nuclear threat in 1962, I highly recommend “The Cuban Missile Crisis Explained in 20 Minutes,” an informative YouTube video.)

** In an interview with Norman Cousins in 1963, Khrushchev said, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?” (cited by Ellsberg on p. 212).

Note: The words at the end are probably those of Danish poet Piet Hein (1905~96), although there are sites on the internet that say they are from his distant ancestor, the Dutch admiral Piet Pieterszoon Hein (1577~1629), which I think is highly unlikely.

What about Nuclear Energy?

Tomorrow, August 6, is the 77^th anniversary of the first time a nuclear weapon was used in warfare. That morning at approximately 8:15 a.m. (local time), a U.S. Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

As I have made several posts regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki three days later (see here, for example), this article is mostly about the later use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 

President Eisenhower made a significant “Atoms for Peace” address to the United Nations in December 1953, eight years after the nuclear destruction of the two Japanese cities. That began a period of high hope that nuclear energy could be used for the great benefit of the human race.**

From the beginning, however, the U.S. President’s proposal was partly propaganda and an excuse for building additional nuclear weapons for national security. That led to the Cold War era, and during Eisenhower’s time in office, the number of U.S. nuclear weapons rose from 1,005 to 20,000.

But Eisenhower’s seminal speech also led to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957, which was set up as the world’s “Atoms for Peace” organization within the United Nations—and as their website shows, it is still quite active.

There have been three major reasons for widespread opposition to the development of nuclear energy.

1) The fear of nuclear weapons being used again in warfare, perhaps by a rogue nation or by terrorists. This was long my main reason for opposing the further development of nuclear energy. I wrote an anti-nuclear article 30~40 years ago for a local publication in Japan.

2) The possibility of accidents. Indeed, there have been three major nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island (Penn.) in March 1979, Chernobyl (Ukraine) in April 1986 (the world’s biggest nuclear accident), and Fukushima (Japan) in March 2011.

The first of those caused a dramatic shift in the enthusiasm for the development of nuclear power in the U.S. Large anti-nuclear demonstrations were held in Washington, D.C., in May 1979, and then in New York City that December.

This is an issue that must be carefully considered, and, indeed, in Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters (2022), Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian at Harvard,

holds that the inevitability of accidents is one of several reasons to encourage nuclear power to drift into disuse, rather than give it a new role in the fight against climate change (from the June 25 issue of The Economist).

3) The high cost of building nuclear reactors and disposing of waste materials. According to this website, “the minimum cost per megawatt hour to build a new nuclear plant is $112, compared to $46 for utility-scale solar . . . and $30 for wind.”

And then, disposal of nuclear waste is a major challenge, both in terms of methods and cost.

So, what about now? In recent years, because of increased awareness of the seriousness of global warming, there has again been a growing movement favoring the use of nuclear energy.

The Russian war on Ukraine this year has also once again increased the appeal of the development and use of nuclear power, especially in Europe. Countries that were phasing out nuclear reactors are now postponing those plans.

In Japan, twenty-one nuclear reactors were decommissioned after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, but now ten of those reactors have been restarted and plans are in place for more restarts in the years ahead.

It seems to me that in spite of the risks (and the cost), the industrial countries of the world must make plans immediately for the increased construction of nuclear reactors for the energy needs of the world.

True, destructive nuclear accidents are possible, but more widespread destruction of the world as we know it is quite certain if global warming is not controlled. Nuclear energy is one of our best hopes for significantly slowing the crisis of global warming.

What do you think?

_____

** “How The Atom Changed The World” is an informative 55-minute video (available here on YouTube) regarding the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes; it begins with Eisenhower’s emphasis on Atoms for Peace and deals with the pros and cons of nuclear energy up through 2021.

++ Some of you may be interested in exploring this link to “Nuclear Prayer Day” tomorrow (Aug. 6); it is especially to pray for a world free of nuclear weapons. 

Hopes for the Biden Presidency

Barring unforeseen events, at noon today, January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden will be sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. My first hope for the Biden presidency is that it will, indeed, begin with an inauguration unblemished by violence and bloodshed. 

Here are some of my main hopes for the Biden presidency.  

* Bringing the covid-19 pandemic under control

The first daunting challenge the Biden administration faces is the ongoing and even worsening covid-19 pandemic. There have now been over 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. Bringing this tragic disease under control must be a top priority for the new President and his administration.

On Jan. 14, Biden announced a massive, $1.9 trillion plan for combatting the pandemic and the economic problems caused by it. Dubbed the “American Rescue Plan,” that bold proposal was soon panned by some GOP politicians and will face much opposition. But I truly hope the Biden administration’s anti-covid efforts will be successful.

* Working to combat global warming

My first blog post of 2020 was about climate change, which I contended was the greatest challenge of the new decade. The last four years have seen a significant weakening of the government’s efforts to confront the global warming crisis.

The new President needs to lead the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Agreement, as he has promised to do. He also needs to restore many of the EPA regulations gutted by the Trump administration. This work is not for his own political benefit in the coming four years, but for the benefit of future generations.

* Supporting control of nuclear weapons

In addition to rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, the Biden administration needs to show support for the U.N.’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which goes into effect just two days from now, on January 22.

The U.S. and the other nations with nuclear weapons have not yet signed the TPNW. But in addition to global warming, the widespread presence of nuclear weapons in the world poses a serious threat to the well-being of all people now and in the future. I hope that will change during the Biden presidency.

* Working for a society with greater economic and racial equality

There is much that needs to be done to overcome the societal structures that favor wealthy people at the expense of the middle class and those struggling in poverty and that favor white people to the disadvantage of people of color.

The USAmerican goal has long been “liberty and justice for all.” ‘For all” means all individuals living in this country regardless of gender, race, economic status, political ideology, or religious background. I strongly hope the new administration will, indeed, lead the nation closer toward reaching this goal.

* Restoring political bipartisanship to the Capitol

In order to fulfill these hopes, there needs to be much greater bipartisanship among elected U.S. politicians. For especially the last twelve years there has been far too much polarization and lack of politicians seeking the common good.

I certainly hope President Biden can cultivate the cooperation needed for there to be good governance.

Much more needs to be said about each of the above hopes, and these are just a few of many other hopes I have for the Biden presidency.

Please note that these are not “political” hopes in support of one political party. They are hopes for the benefit of the American people and for the wider world.

What hopes do you have for the Biden presidency in place of or in addition to the matters I have listed above?

100 Seconds to Midnight

What are currently the greatest threats to the human race? Without a doubt, in my mind at least, there are three: covid-19 in the short term, nuclear weapons in the mid-range, and global warming in the more distant future.

It was mainly the latter two that in January of this year led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board to set the iconic Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, closer to “doomsday” than at any point since its creation in 1947. (Here is the link to that announcement:  https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/press-release-it-is-now-100-seconds-to-midnight/ .) 

The Threat of Covid-19

Since the new setting of the Doomsday Clock was in January, the new coronavirus pandemic was not a part of the consideration for the new setting, which had remained at two minutes before midnight since January 2018.

However, in spite of the fact that there have been nearly 750,000 deaths worldwide caused by covid-19—and who knows how many hundreds of thousands there will be before it is brought under control—it is not likely to bring about “doomsday.”

It has, however, already brought about extreme sadness for those who have lost loved ones and it threatens to make life more precarious for tens of millions of people.

For example, the upcoming edition of Foreign Affairs journal has an article titled “The Pandemic Depression: The Global Economy Will Never Be the Same.” The authors explore the massive economic contraction caused by the covid-19 pandemic that could push as many as 60 million people into extreme poverty.

But there are bigger threats to humanity.

The Threat of Nuclear Weapons

The statement issued by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on January 23 declared: “Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond.”

In this post I am writing mostly about the former, partly because of all that has been said this past week in remembrance of the 75^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

New energy is now being given to ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was passed by the United Nations in 2017. It will become a “legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination” when ratified by 50 entities.”

The three that did so last week—Ireland, Nigeria, and Niue—make 43 that have now ratified the TPNW. Of course, none of the nations possessing nuclear weapons have ratified that treaty nor, inexplicably, has Japan.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries promoting adherence to and implementation of the TPNW.

(You can find more information about that important group, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 here: https://www.icanw.org/.)

An informative Aug. 4 article about ICAN hopefully states, “The world has never been so close to abolishing nuclear weapons and there’s hope this may be achieved by the end of this year.” (See here:  https://wagingnonviolence.org/2020/08/nuclear-weapons-abolition-hiroshima-nagasaki-75th-anniversary/.)

May it be so!

The Threat of Climate Change

Short of an all-out nuclear war, the biggest threat to the long-term future of humankind is global warming. That was the subject of my first blog post this year: “Climate Crisis: The Challenge of the Decade.”

With the current pandemic raging, it seems that we are not now hearing much about the ever-increasing threat of global warming. I hope that soon the focus of our attention on the urgent matters of the present can shift to a consideration of the even more urgent matters threatening the future of the human race.

After all, “100 seconds to midnight” is a dire warning that needs to be taken far more seriously than most of us have.