It’s been a gloomy week on this blog, I’ll be the first to admit, having already written about COVID-19 and plagues of locusts. So I thought I’d round off a cheery week with another post about nuclear weapons.

In summary, I believe the world is likely to get more not less nuclear weapons with a new country going nuclear about once a decade. Several of these states will have cult-leader like paranoia and so the hesitation in using them will at some point be crossed. Nuclear weapons are morally unjustified and cannot be supported.

Despite efforts to call for de-armament, I do not believe that any nation that currently possesses nuclear weapons will give them up. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still do what is necessary and join the campaign for their abolition though. Sign up here.

There are lots of ways this could go wrong and the results are catastrophic the least of which is having to survive on mushrooms. The US has nuclear weapons in southern Turkey which is an area on the edge of multi-national conflict and proxy wars being fought in Syria.

One of those nations is Iran which is likely, as you read this, pushing it’s nuclear capabilities while everyone else is stressing about coronavirus. That’s what happens. For anyone who spends too much time on Google Earth then look for craters like this somewhere in the Iranian wilderness in about three years.

Why bother writing all this? Well, the coronavirus bad as it might be won’t be the end of the world but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an end at all.

But really it illustrates the fact that just as you and I struggle to do the important things when faced with urgent things so do nations. The urgent issue is this pandemic. The greater risk is the one we’ve been living with but muddling on by without dealing with for 70 years. Where in that time the risk has only grown and the number of nations has grown. The same sort of approach seems to be the one adopted on climate change too.

We are a species that operates always in crisis. We wait until things are in crisis and that forces action and forces resolution. It’s a high-risk strategy but it can be effective but it does also mean that we’re not doing the things we need to be doing to avert the crisis in the first place. As with climate change so with nuclear weapons.

Anyway, as a Christian, I am convinced that we must seek to do our best to do what is right no matter the circumstances and to do so with the hope of a better world. We will, as CS Lewis said, keep calm and carry on.