Can we imagine a world without nuclear weapons?

Can we imagine a world without nuclear weapons?

During a week when Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded his visit to North Korea with the signing of a mutual defense pact between Moscow and Pyongyang, which risks making the latter's military nuclear program even more brazen, I I had the opportunity to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first city to be hit by an atomic bomb.
It left me extremely emotional, but also thoughtful about why we still have nuclear weapons. On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city, instantly killing at least 70,000 people. By the end of the year, the death toll reached 140,000. The bomb vaporized people nearly a kilometer from ground zero and burned the exposed skin of people miles away due to the intense infrared energy released.
Catastrophic fires ravage a circular area more than 3 km in radius, with the city literally reduced to ashes. The results would be similar three days later, when the United States bombed a second Japanese city, Nagasaki, this time causing 100,000 deaths directly attributable to the initial explosion.
The horrific effects of the bombs on the Japanese population and their environment continued to be felt for many years, including premature deaths, lifelong trauma, and significant links between radiation exposure and major birth defects, malformations, stillbirths and neonatal deaths.
All this leaves no doubt about the dangerous futility of nuclear proliferation. Worse still, we have learned the wrong lessons from the fact that, despite the presence of huge arsenals of nuclear missiles with sophisticated delivery systems, these weapons capable of destroying humanity have fortunately never been used again.
When the United States lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the late 1940s and the Soviet Union joined the nuclear arms race, a relatively stable state of deterrence was established between the two superpowers and their allies. Since then, six other countries have become confirmed nuclear military powers: China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel is also believed to have such a capability.
We may learn lessons from history, but we can never even remotely assume that they will never be repeated. During the Cold War era, the United States and the Soviet Union understood that the use of their nuclear capabilities would be irrational and could only result in mutual assured destruction (or MAD). An extremely high level of deterrence has therefore been established.
Neither side ever pushed the button, so to speak, but that doesn't mean the superpowers didn't come close to cataclysm, even if they ultimately managed to stay one step from the nuclear abyss. For two weeks during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Moscow and Washington came very close to launching nuclear missiles at each other, before common sense prevailed.
Can we guarantee that a world with nuclear weapons is truly safe? An inherently unstable world, as is the case in international affairs today, in which most nuclear-armed countries suffer from unreliable political systems, led by increasingly authoritarian leaders with little respect for the principles of accountability and transparency?
The very concept of deterrence, and especially nuclear deterrence, reflects a very pessimistic view of human nature. On a perceptual and practical level, it requires us to live in peace—or, more precisely, to decide not to go to war with each other—not because it is the right thing to do, or out of fear of the immorality that accompanies war, or even because it might serve our interests as individuals or societies.

We may be able to learn lessons from history, but we can never, even remotely, assume that they will never be repeated.

Yossi Mekelberg

Deterrence means that we avoid wars primarily because we fear their consequences, and the fear of nuclear annihilation is our main source of anxiety. Our fears and predictions of global extinction have been prevalent for thousands of years and have still not been allayed.
In recent times, experiments in collective security guided by international law, such as that of the UN, or globalization as the dominant paradigm of global cooperation have, at best, achieved only partial success.
Similarly, the model proposed by the EU, which represents a direct challenge to the conflictual concept of the security dilemma and its inevitable outcome in the form of the arms race, faces serious challenges and has not yet been imitated in other parts of the world.
Meanwhile, wars and conflicts persist and continue to claim hundreds of thousands of lives each year. And nuclear weapons are the ultimate tool of force that, if used, could completely wipe out humanity.
There is a stark contrast between the social contract that prevails in societies in which law, shared values, and norms of behavior govern relationships between people and where trust and mutual respect are the pillars of society, and the element of anarchy that continues to prevail in international affairs, in which a concept that scholars call the “realist” approach still reigns supreme. This approach views war as a mechanism for ensuring stability and the pursuit of gains by force as an integral part of the kind of global affairs in which nuclear weapons have been a component for decades.
For a brief moment in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, nuclear disarmament seemed the ultimate outcome of a world without great-power rivalry, and therefore reductions in nuclear arsenals would be substantial.
This is no longer the case. According to the annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the nine nuclear-weapon states continue to modernize their nuclear weapons stockpiles while strengthening their reliance on deterrence.
In a separate report, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons calculated that these countries spent a combined total of $91.4 billion on their nuclear arsenals in 2023. At the same time, Iran is considered a state at the “nuclear threshold”.
A world of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence is not a safer world, but an accident waiting to happen, whether technical or political.
After nearly 80 years of a nuclear era in which the bomb has not been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we should not be lulled into a false sense of security and assume that it will never be used.
In recent years, a number of negative precedents have been set, including the invasion of a neighboring country by a permanent member of the UN Security Council without provocation and the threat of using nuclear weapons in the process.
This fact, as well as the very existence of approximately 12,100 nuclear warheads in the world, should concern us all deeply. After all, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world witnessed the horror that “only” two such weapons could unleash when launched, ultimately, on the orders of a single person.

• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and research associate in the Middle East and North Africa program at the international affairs think tank Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg

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