Nuclear weapons the biggest threat to our security

12 March 2015

While little can compete for national attention and outpouring of sentiment with the landings at Gallipoli a century ago, two events in the closing days of last century’s second conflagration could legitimately claim a far greater significance, for they warned of humanity’s capacity to self-destruct.

They were the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, 1945. Despite the sense of euphoria that, within days, the war in the Pacific was finally over (due much more to Russia’s declaration of war against Japan on 9 August than to the atomic bombs, according to a number of scholars), there was a dark sense that the world had entered a new and even more perilous era where warfare knew no limits.

Condemnation of the attacks, from many quarters, was swift. From the survivors however, the message that emerged was a simple plea: Never again. Their experiences have been told and re-told for seventy years, and yet still the world retains around 16,300 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine nations, with thousands of those in the US and Russia being on high alert still.

One of the very few certainties we have is that unless they are abolished, one or more (probably many more) will be used again. To quote the 1996 Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, whose report remains a stark warning still, ‘The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or be decision – defies credibility.’

However in this bleak landscape there is a fundamental shift occurring. Many governments are listening with fresh clarity to the words ‘never again’, and there have opened up the strongest signs in several decades that nuclear disarmament is possible.

Over the past two years there has been a series of three government conferences – in Norway in 2013, in Mexico in February 2014, and in Austria in December 2014, the latter attracting 158 governments - examining the catastrophic humanitarian impacts of any use of nuclear weapons.

The human suffering and sheer destruction caused by a single nuclear weapons attack is on a scale far beyond any capacity to respond. In addition, new evidence has been presented that even a nuclear war involving a very small fraction of the world’s arsenals would result in the atmospheric accumulation of so much particulate matter from burning cities that there would be reduced sunlight, agricultural

AUSTRALIA

Nuclear weapons the biggest threat to our security

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