The threat of nuclear war is still very real and with tensions around the world, the way they are right now the possibility of one is most likely since the height of the cold war. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions between China and the West over Taiwan and sovereignty in the Sea of Japan, North Korea’s missile development as well as continued threats that Iran may soon become a nuclear power are all contributing to the doomsday climate. It is so bad that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its “Doomsday Clock” up 90 seconds back in January.
The clock measures the symbolic amount of time left before the world actually falls into nuclear war.
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If you are old enough to remember the 1980s, it’s feeling kind of like that again. In 1983 a shocking and harrowing made for television movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war aired in America. “The Day After” was set in a State of Kansas ravaged by radioactive waste after a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union destroyed all the major cities in the country. Survivors set up a base of operations around a hospital in a rural area. But they all knew that it was just a matter of time before the radiation killed them all and there was nothing left.
It also seemed that at one point every other movie or book about the future assumed that it would be in some way a post-apocalyptic one.
But the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the world breathed easier with the expectation that nuclear weapons would become a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, they still exist and still pose a threat. And should Iran succeed in its efforts to develop nuclear capabilities it could provide small atomic devices to its terrorist proxies like the Lebanon-based Hezbollah that could be used anywhere in the world. And if Iran’s ally North Korea succeeds at developing more high-speed long-range missiles it could threaten nuclear war all by itself.
This is why successive Israeli governments, led by both the right and left, both Yair Lapid and Benjamin Netanyahu, have been warning the world about the threat posed by Iran.
According to the BMJ, a journal published by the British Medical Association, “Current nuclear arms control and non-proliferation efforts are inadequate to protect the world’s population against the threat of nuclear war by design, error, or miscalculation.”
“Any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic for humanity,” it said, explaining that even a “limited” nuclear war involving only 250 of the 13 000 nuclear weapons in the world could kill 120 million people outright and cause global climate disruption leading to a nuclear famine, putting two billion people at risk.
“The danger is great and growing,” it added. “The nuclear armed states must eliminate their nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us.”
So, as the world rightly concerns itself with the problems caused by climate change, that is not the only threat to our very existence we need to be concerned with.
