Photograph Source: Enrique Cornejo – CC BY-SA 3.0 CZ

In his book The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War, published in 1984, Carl Sagan (with his co-authors, biologists Paul R. Ehrlich and Donald Kennedy and astronomer and atmospheric physicist Walter Orr Roberts) warned of the unimaginable devastation that would ensue from a nuclear war. Sagan and his team reviewed dozens of nuclear war scenarios, presenting an analysis that predicted “nuclear winter,” a dramatic worldwide cooling event following a nuclear war. Sagan rigorously detailed “the impact of the huge amount of dust and smoke generated by nuclear blasts and the resulting fires,” describing a rapid plunge in global temperatures that would lead to catastrophic crop failures and resultant food shortages. Even a “limited” nuclear war “could cause hundreds of millions or billions of humans worldwide to starve to death,” as these crop failures combine with broader ecosystem destruction, the breakdown of human support of agricultural systems, and the collapse of food transportation and distribution infrastructure. As Khrushchev once remarked, “The living would envy the dead.”

Today’s nuclear weapons release an inconceivable amount of destructive energy; it is almost impossible to overstate their power. The detonation of a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is capable of generating heat several times that of the center of the Sun, with temperatures reaching 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. Today’s thermonuclear weapons use fission bombs like those used against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to generate the extreme heat necessary to create a secondary fusion reaction, which yields a blast many orders of magnitude more powerful. Not all countries that currently possess nuclear weapons have successfully developed such second-generation thermonuclear weapons, the creation of which is difficult and expensive. As Sagan noted in the book, the yield of nuclear weapons has been underestimated consistently since the very first explosion, the test code-named Trinity, on July 16, 1945. The blast that came from “Gadget,” the nickname of the bomb itself, was equal to more than 20,000 tons of TNT—about four times stronger than scientists working on the Manhattan Project had expected. The Castle Bravo test of March 1, 1954 produced an explosive force almost three times the pre-test estimate, equaling an incredible 15 million tons of TNT, or about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Like the Castle Bravo test, the Castle Romeo experiment was part of the Operation Castle series of tests that took place near the Marshall Islands in March and April of 1954; also like Castle Bravo, the Castle Romeo bomb, nicknamed “Runt,” produced a larger than expected explosive yield, with a blast equal to 11 million tons of TNT, against a prediction of about 4 million tons of TNT. As the power of the bombs themselves has increased, so have the means of delivery improved over time. Already in 1984, Sagan noted that the distinction between strategic and tactical weapons had become increasingly artificial, as both types of weapons could be “delivered by land-based missiles, sea-based missiles, and aircraft, and by intermediate-range as well as intercontinental delivery systems.” Today, the Federation of American Scientists estimates that as of early 2024, “nine countries possessed roughly 12,121 warheads.” Though this number represents a significant reduction from the approximately 70,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War arms race, it is still more than enough to present an existential risk.

Due to the criminal irresponsibility of American leaders and decades of diplomatic malpractice in Washington, nuclear war is now perilously close—much closer than most Americans of any political persuasion or party generally understand. U.S. relations with Russia are worse than they have been at any point since the Cold War, and, Washington propaganda notwithstanding, the predominant factor in this breakdown of diplomacy is persistent enlargement of the NATO military bloc in the post-Soviet era. As many others have already pointed out, papers declassified by the U.S. government clearly confirm that this consistent push eastward toward Russia’s borders was a repudiation of a long and explicit series of assurances made by U.S. government officials. The documents demonstrate that “subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.” The evidence could not be more clear and unambiguous: the United States promised repeatedly that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Current U.S. gaslighting about its broken promises—facilitated as usual by the Western corporate media—is perfectly consistent with its general approach to relations with other sovereign states: any U.S. promise, even its treaty obligations, can be ignored or discarded freely without reasons or consequences, because the United States sees itself as running the world. Today, NATO mission creep has now even expanded to the Pacific region, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand attending July’s NATO summit in Washington. The Declaration issued at the summit specifically identifies the Indo-Pacific as a region of importance to NATO, despite the organization’s founding documents limiting its geographical scope to Europe and North America.

We are arguably in a much more dangerous position than we were in the Soviet era, when there were at least open and active lines of communication between American presidents and their Soviet counterparts. The U.S. has consistently shown itself as an untrustworthy and dishonest actor in its foreign relations, reneging on its commitments to Russia, most recently with regard to Ukraine. Ukraine has become a symbol of the dangers of American duplicity, its people paying a heavy price for Washington’s decision to meddle in its domestic affairs and push it into an unwinnable war with Russia. Russian battlefield forces have vastly outnumbered their Ukrainian opponents, and while confirming the number dead with certainty during an ongoing war is impossible, the military and civilian death toll has been extremely high—likely much higher than either Ukraine or the United States has been willing to admit. By the time of the invasion in February of 2022, the conflict had already been ongoing for 8 years, as thousands of people in the east of Ukraine sought to separate from Ukraine and join Russia. Tensions boiled over, with an armed conflict beginning in 2014 after the U.S. conspired to remove Viktor Yanukovich as Ukraine’s president. In a now-infamous leaked phone call, Victoria Nuland, who was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the time, spoke with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on their preferences for the makeup of the new Ukrainian government—all while the country still had a duly-elected president. After the successful removal of Yanukovich and the installation of a pro-Western government riddled with right-wing nationalists (frequently unabashed Nazis, which was widely reported in major media outlets before they agreed to pretend that Ukraine’s Nazi problem was a figment of the Russian imagination), the U.S. turned Ukraine into its key base of operations against Russia. Earlier this year, even the New York Times acknowledged that the CIA has been conducting anti-Russian operations out of Ukraine for many years, including supporting paramilitary groups and helping to organize the assassinations of Russian leaders.

Yet even after February of 2022, there was hope for peace. In March of that year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had reiterated his openness to a negotiated settlement to the conflict. Earlier, in December of 2021, he had stated in no uncertain terms that direct, in-person conversations with Putin would be necessary to ending the conflict. There had also been talks in Paris in January of 2022, and there was a high level of optimism for fruitful negotiations on a ceasefire. Ukraine remained open to neutrality at that point, which is consistent with a permanent commitment to neutrality that was explicit in its 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty.^[1] Ukrainian neutrality and its nuclear weapons-free status were further memorialized in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. The general terms on the table during the negotiations of March 2022, which were mediated by the Turkish, were an affirmation of Ukraine’s neutral status, a Russian move back to the borders in place before its 2022 invasion, and an opening of further talks on the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas. In an interview earlier this month, Victoria Nuland suggested that the U.S. and the British disrupted the talks and scuttled a possible peace deal. Whatever one thinks of Russia, the United States has repeatedly made it clear that injecting itself to disrupt these talks was in no way an effort to help the people of Ukraine—quite to the contrary, its goal was and is to bleed Russia using Ukrainian bodies, and it has indeed cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. U.S. support of the Ukrainian government has also conveniently meant that tens of billions of dollars have been funneled to American weapons manufacturers (as of this writing, United States aid to Ukraine since 2022 totaled about $175 billion). The Ukrainian government’s alliance with the United States has cost actual Ukrainian people dearly. According to a CIA report published earlier this month, Ukraine has the lowest birth rate and the highest death rate in the world. The report notes that “[t]he birth rate this year has decreased by 1.5 times compared to pre-invasion levels: 87,655 children in 2024, compared to 132,595 in 2021.” These data represents the deepening of a crisis that began in 2013, according to the country’s Ministry of Health, which reports that “[f]ertility rates in Ukraine have been falling by about 7% per year since 2013.” Indeed, with friends like the United States, Ukraine doesn’t need enemies. Importantly, none of this has anything to do with one’s assessment of Russia. Putin’s Russia has an abysmal record of domestic political repression, human rights abuses, censorship and attacks on journalists, and torture. In United States-Russia relations, there is no good guy. Without a thoughtful and nuanced understanding of the interests and key security concerns of both, further escalations are virtually guaranteed, aggravating the risk of an exchange of nuclear weapons.

It is under-appreciated in American civic discourse today how many senior military leaders—many of whom still held to the now quaint-seeming view that civilians should not be the targets of weapons of mass destruction—opposed the use of nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II. From the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 until his death in 1969, Dwight Eisenhower never stopped being troubled by the horrific act of terror. In his memoir Mandate for Change, first published in the fateful year of 1963, Eisenhower recounts a conversation he had in 1945, in Germany, with then-Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In apprising General Eisenhower of the plan to use an atomic bomb on Japan, Stimson was “apparently expecting a vigorous assent,” but Eisenhower recalls “a feeling of depression.” He writes,

I voiced to [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

Eisenhower goes on to note that Stimson was “deeply perturbed” and instantly and “almost angrily” countered Eisenhower’s points. In an interview with Newsweek, also in ‘63, Eisenhower discussed that meeting with Stimson, saying, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Though we don’t hear much about it these days, when chauvinism and detachment from reality go uncontested in the imperial core, Eisenhower was of course not alone in this opinion. William D. Leahy was also famously critical of the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting his condemnation of these crimes in the strongest, clearest possible terms. Leahy retired as Fleet Admiral and was the most senior officer in the United States Navy from 1937 to 1937, later holding titles including Governor of Puerto Rico, Ambassador to France, and the first person to chair meetings of the newly formed Joint Chiefs of Staff (first formed in 1942 and formalized by law in 1947). Like Eisenhower, Leahy was of an older generation of American military men less comfortable with atrocities directed at innocent noncombatants. As his biographer Henry H. Adams put it, Leahy “belonged to an earlier age, when the phrase ‘officer and gentleman’ was no mere cliché.” It is no exaggeration to say that Leahy was disgusted by the use of nuclear weapons. In his 1950 book I Was There, he wrote:

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will develop it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us.

Leahy’s words remind of the difference between acknowledging war as a historical fact and giving ourselves over completely to a debased, mindless philosophy of wanton destruction and open contempt for civilian life. He laments the advent of the “new concepts of ‘total war,’” dragging us back into “cruelty toward noncombatants.” “These new and terrible instruments of uncivilized warfare represent a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man.” There is a long list of others like Eisenhower and Leahy who had been close to war and saw that the opening of this new age was gravely tragic for humanity. It seems necessary to quote at length from decorated military leaders like them because today’s chicken-hawk politicians are so hideously unembarrassed in their public ignorance. Knowing nothing of the stakes, they push and provoke, putting threats and violence in the place of diplomatic relations with other global powers, believing, as children might, that this makes the United States strong. Whatever their faults, Eisenhower and Leahy understood that the use of nuclear weapons demonstrated profound moral degeneracy and thus weakness, not the projection of global strength. The public conversation has buried their opinions, just as it has buried the old-fashioned notion that elected officials should be public servants, not cringeworthy, self-dealing, power-lusting celebrities. We talk a lot these days about opinions that are “very online,” but perhaps we ought to start talking about opinions that are very Washington, DC. Of all the bizarre notions bandied about among the political class, the single most Washington take is the unhinged idea that brinkmanship on the subject of nuclear war is a viable foreign policy position that is good for the American people—or anyone else on the planet. The hegemonic narrative that the military superiority of the United States makes us immune to the threat of nuclear weapons could end up producing the most fatal of all the many Washington miscalculations to date. Unlike the others, though, in the event of a nuclear exchange, even the upper echelons of the ruling class will not be able to guarantee their own safety or survival. There will be no safety to be found.

Sagan’s prescient warnings about the dangers of nuclear war were not well met during his life: he remarked that the conversation ensuing from those warnings was “perhaps the most controversial scientific debate I’ve been involved in.” Nuclear weapons have been used before and, as long as they exist, it is almost certain they will be used again. Nuclear disarmament is therefore the most pressing geopolitical issue of our time, particularly given escalating tensions among the world’s major nuclear powers. U.S. hawks rattling the sabers in the direction of Russia, China, and Iran seem not to understand what has been obvious for decades to anyone who knows even a little about the science of nuclear war: there can be no winner in a nuclear exchange. Any further use of nuclear weapons, in even the most “limited” or “tactical” manner is insane and suicidal. As Lewis Thomas wrote in the foreword for The Cold and the Dark, “any territory gained will be, at the end, a barren wasteland, and any ideology will vanish in the death of civilization and the permanent loss of humankind’s memory of culture.” While a more multipolar balance of global power will be important to the future of global peace and security, the global community must continue to work together in the direction of nuclear nonproliferation.

Notes.

^[1] “The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.”

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