If you tell people that the cost of failure is world destruction and then fail, then they are left with either the psychologically insupportable prospect of constant dread or the impression that you were exaggerating the stakes. Neither response inspires action.

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World p. 142 by Dorian Lynskey¹

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Those who justify the use of nuclear weapons often say it hastened the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War. This is contentious. But if you believe one war ended with their use, then why not believe their use could also end another war, this one taking place just five years later in Korea. Certainly General Douglas MacArthur believed that and argued for it. Facing a defeat instead of his promised victory, MacArthur asked President Truman for discretionary authority to use atomic bombs. His targets included some not just in Korea but also China.

He argued that the US should threaten the use of nuclear weapons and bomb China itself unless the Communist forces in Korea laid down their arms. MacArthur was not alone in this: Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, was also in favour of a pre-emptive strike.

How the fall of Pyongyang brought the world to the brink of crisis

It was President Truman who authorized the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if he’d taken that step once maybe he’d do it again.

Less than a decade later and again the world was on the edge of another nuclear crisis, this time in Cuba. The world came extremely close to nuclear war.

On 27 October, ‘Black Saturday’, the abyss was inches away. When the US Navy used depth charges to deter the Russian submarine B-59, it didn’t know that the sub was armed with a nuclear torpedo, nor that it was too deep to communicate with the surface. For all its commander, Valentin Savitsky, knew, the war had already started. Savitsky wanted to fire back, which could easily have been the first domino in a full-scale nuclear war, but the task force commander, Vasili Arkhipov, was on board and talked Savitsky down, correctly arguing that the depth charges were a warning rather than an attack. When declassified Soviet documents revealed the full story in 2002, the director of the National Security Archive concluded that ‘a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.’

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (p. 165) by Dorian Lynskey

Just four years after that the world avoided a nuclear calamity when the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain. In what can only be described as gross institutional incompetence this was the 10th accident involving aircraft carrying atomic weapons in just 20 years!

All the while bigger and more nuclear bombs were being built and some insane plans were hatched.

In the 1980s we barely avoided nuclear war.

In 1983, the Soviet early warning system thought it had detected a US nuclear first strike. Fortunately the commander on duty, Petrov, had a hunch it was a false alarm and kept quiet instead of escalating. (He was punished for not filling in the forms properly — cf. my blogs on incentives in bureaucracies!)

Catastrophic thinking on nuclear weapons

And if war had broken out in 1983 or perhaps today. It might go something like this:

And today things are, if anything worse. Will Israel attack Iran’s nuclear facilities? (turns out the answer was Yes on June 13th) Is a nuclear war between India & Pakistan a case of when not if? (also this).

Then there is the cowardly and disastrous response of the US to the Russia & Ukraine war. First they handcuffed Ukraine, then they betrayed them. The Budapest Memorandum is worth less than the paper it was written on and that is a huge problem. Here is Marco Rubio back when he used to talk sense.

There are now several new factors that all governments charged with defence must take into account.

1. Possessing nuclear weapons & threatening their use will prevent outside interference (Russia)
2. Giving up nuclear weapons will never happen again (Ukraine)
3. Third party promises of protection can not be trusted (Budapest Memorandum and who knows maybe even NATO)
4. Therefore if you face a hostile neighbour your safest course of action is your own nuclear deterrent.

For a long time many countries have not developed their own nuclear deterrent because they trusted the American government to protect them. That was the deal they made: You cover us with your nuclear umbrella and we won’t build our own. But who can trust the Yanks now? No one knows. Which is why South Korea is thinking how it can develop nuclear weapons. As is Japan. And now you can add Poland to that list. I’d bet the idea is no longer unthinkable in Germany. And we already know that Saudi Arabia and Turkey would change their ideas if Iran ever gets the bomb. And if you were Taiwan, what would you do? Keep trusting America to come to your defence?

Humanity has ridden our luck from false alarms, accidents, local spats and genuine international crises. And then there are the nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, The more countries that have nuclear weapons the greater the risk. It is unlikely that we will ride our luck forever. Which is why as Trevin Wax says, The World as We Know It Hangs by a Thread.

We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know how close we may be to the next catastrophe. But we do know this: God upholds all things. He restrains evil more than we can fathom. He continues to give us breaths, each one undeserved. And he has promised that, even in the darkest moments, he will bring good out of evil.

I agree with Wax but I think he pulled his punch. Since 2017 I have been writing pretty consistently on the threat and problem of nuclear weapons. My contention is that although there is little to no hope of governments that have nuclear weapons giving them up, Christians need to be clearly, loudly and determinedly against them. There is no justice, no morality and no justification for their use. We need a new Baruch plan and we need to support campaigning organisations like ICAN. This is futile but necessary resistance.

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