The war in Ukraine shows the urgency of nuclear arms control
“It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us,” wrote 16 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in an open letter in March that has since been signed by more than a million people. Decades after the end of the cold war and mere months after the U.S., Russia and other members of the United Nations Security Council agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the specter of nuclear apocalypse again looms over humankind.
If the prospect of nuclear war does not terrify you, it should. If either Russia or NATO used shorter-range “tactical” nuclear weapons in a European conflict, researchers at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security concluded in a 2019 analysis, it could rapidly escalate into a thermonuclear war that would kill or injure more than 90 million people within a few hours. Further, the one treaty constraining the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the U.S. will expire in 2026.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, held that neither superpower could initiate an attack without itself facing annihilation. But in 2002 the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty and began to build a missile defense system, destabilizing this uneasy balance and sparking a new arms race. In 2019 then president Donald Trump went further, abandoning the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
There is reason for hope: much of the rest of the world has been doggedly pursuing arms control. Almost all nations signed multilateral conventions that came into force in 1975 and 1997, banning biological and chemical weapons, respectively. These agreements may be hard to enforce, but they confirm that the global community deems the use of such weapons morally repugnant.
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