Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine has reignited bellicose threats of nuclear war and the shocking global consequences that could arise out of regional conflicts. It has further underscored the inherent threat and vulnerability from atomic power not only from the reality of catastrophic accidents but as pre-deployed retaliatory weapons for mass destruction that could be targeted in conventional war. As world tensions mount, more effort must now be directed on the need to abandon both nuclear weapons and nuclear power for planetary survival.
Newsweek reports that many Ukrainians regret surrendering what was the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world following the 1991 breakup of the former Soviet Union. In response to President Obama’s concern that the Russian army backed taking of Crimea is “dangerous and destablizing", Russian television host and anchorman Dmitry Kiselyov for the state-owned Russia One channel retorted, “Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the U.S. into radioactive ash.” The Wall Street Journal rattled back, “nations that abandon their nuclear arsenals do so at their own peril.
In fact, in preparing for and waging nuclear war nobody wins, everybody loses.
Building and maintaining nuclear arsenals is economically draining the world of vital human needs resources.
Climate scientists at Rutgers University have refocused attention on their study of the global climate catastrophe with a limited exchange of 100 nuclear weapons from the thousands of thermonuclear warheads in the world’s arsenal. As first warned by famed scientist Carl Sagan, nuclear war will generate tremendous amounts of smoke from the burning cities that would absorb incoming sunlight heating the atmosphere, while the dust from ground bursts will reflect sunlight back into space. Both will prevent sunlight from penetrating the atmosphere over a prolonged period of time resulting in a global agricultural collapse. Not only do the nuclear warring nations suffer unthinkable causalities but there will be the global collateral damage from mass starvation.
Even the so-called “peaceful atom” in times of crisis as is growing out of confrontation over Crimea carries inherent catastrophic risk. Nuclear power plants are not only identified as vital infrastructure that could be targeted in a conventional war to cripple that nation’s electricity production but radiological weapons capable of widespread land and resource contamination that will disregard borders.
There is one rational position remaining, abandon nuclear weapons and nuclear power. As militaries mobilize along many borders now, most recently Cuba has voiced the call for the global elimination of nuclear arsenals that “threaten the survival of our species.” The elimination of nuclear arsenals fundamentally begins with the elimination of nuclear weapon building blocks themselves, enriched uranium and plutonium, as generated in nuclear power plants.