Russian President Vladimir Putin recently threatened to use nuclear weapons against NATO members that deploy forces to Ukraine in his annual State of the Nation address. The more than two-hour-long speech contained one of Putin’s most explicit nuclear warnings yet against the West.
Putin’s comments were in reference to French President Emmanuel Macron suggesting that NATO should not rule out deploying foreign troops to Ukraine. The Russian President added that “tragic consequences” would occur if foreign troops were to become involved in the war.
According to the Financial Times, leaked Russian classified intelligence has revealed that Russia’s threshold for using tactical nuclear weapons is lower than previously stated publicly.
Putin is not the only world leader to have threatened to use nukes. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un often threatens nuclear strikes against the US and South Korea.
Along with conventional nuclear warheads that can be put on an intercontinental ballistic missile meant to destroy cities, many countries like Russia and the US boast of having tactical nuclear weapons, which are designed to be used on the battlefield.
Tactical nuclear weapons, though smaller in size, can still release far more energy than the weapons that the United States dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hence, those threatening to use nukes, should know that these are not fire crackers. These are weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which will spare no one.
The threat of a nuclear war has been hanging on the world’s head for the last 60 years. The world’s nuclear powers have more than 12,000 nuclear warheads. These weapons can kill millions directly and, through their impact on agriculture, likely have the potential to kill billions.
Nuclear weapons killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people when the United States used them against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The world has come close to nuclear conflict more than a dozen times since.
Both in the scale of the devastation they can cause is massive. They are unlike any other weapons. A single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people. The use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate, causing widespread famine.
A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city and kill most of its people. Several nuclear explosions over modern cities would kill tens of millions of people. Casualties from a major nuclear war between the US and Russia would reach hundreds of millions.
Instead of threatening to use nukes, the nuclear powers led by the US, Russia and others should destroy their weapons stockpile.
It takes around 10 seconds for the fireball from a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size. A nuclear explosion releases vast amounts of energy in the form of blast, heat and radiation. An enormous shock wave reaches speeds of many hundreds of kilometres an hour. The blast kills people close to ground zero, and causes lung injuries, ear damage and internal bleeding further away.
People sustain injuries from collapsing buildings and flying objects. Thermal radiation is so intense that almost everything close to ground zero is vaporized. The extreme heat causes severe burns and ignites fires over a large area, which coalesce into a giant firestorm. Even people in underground shelters face likely death due to a lack of oxygen and carbon monoxide poisoning.
In the long-term, nuclear weapons produce ionizing radiation, which kills or sickens those exposed, contaminates the environment, and has long-term health consequences, including cancer and genetic damage. Their widespread use in atmospheric testing has caused grave long-term consequences.
Physicians project that some 2.4 million people worldwide will eventually die from cancers due to atmospheric nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1980.
The use of less than one percent of the nuclear weapons in the world could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine in the long-term. The detonation of thousands of nuclear weapons could result in a nuclear winter, which would destroy our fragile ecosystem.
Nuclear war would mean a climate disruption with devastating consequences. The world would fall under a nuclear winter, be subject to a deadly global famine and exacerbated effects of global warming. The socio-economic impacts would also be terrible, with developing countries and marginalised groups the ones that will suffer the most.
Since we have the example of Japan in front of us, it is rather shocking that countries still aspire to increase their nuclear weapons arsenal. It is high time the world leaders stop being reckless. It is difficult to understand why there is a need for WMDs when conventional weapons are enough to cause immense damage, as we can see in the case of Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflict. Is talking of peace very difficult?
