Nuclear warfare

2023 - 1 - 5

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Image courtesy of "TIME"

She's Spent a Decade Fighting to Ban Nuclear Weapons. The ... (TIME)

In an exclusive interview, Nobel laureate Beatrice Fihn says we have to build a bigger movement for nuclear disarmament.

[high schoolers getting the city of Winnipeg](https://cela.ca/media-release-city-of-winnipeg-says-yes-to-the-nuclear-ban/) to vote in favor of the TPNW—has been a deliberate strategy on her part. “It’s been a pretty wild ride and we’ve done a lot of great things, but I felt both that ICAN could do with a new person leading it, with new energy, creativity, ideas, and that I would need to not be at the center of attention for a bit.” “You’ve got to have a realistic option—to be able to say to those in government: these are the things that you can do to at least get off this very dangerous path we’re on right now,” she says. Nuclear weapons, Fihn says, are “pretty simple: big bomb goes boom.” What she wants to talk about is what happens afterward: the radiation, the firestorms; the cancers, the miscarriages, the stillborn babies; the collapse of health and food systems. When the Nobel Prize recognized ICAN, [the Economist ](https://www.economist.com/international/2017/10/06/this-years-nobel-peace-prize-rewards-a-nice-but-pointless-idea)called the notion of banning nuclear weapons “a nice but pointless idea.” “I never want to lie to them, but I want to make sure it’s manageable for a child,” she says. “I was worried that it would be too much,” she says, “and it’s been really hard, but I’m proud that I dared to take the job.” From Geneva, she has spent years trying to build a broad coalition of students, artists, lawyers, doctors, environmental activists, and racial-justice activists. Warnings that the world would eventually have dozens of nuclear-armed states have not come to pass, and the global tally of nuclear weapons has gone from more than 60,000 in 1986 to less than 10,000 today, almost all of which are held by the U.S. [Vladimir Putin’s threats](https://time.com/6215610/putin-nuclear-weapons-threat/) have [ reminded the world that nuclear war](https://time.com/6222898/vladimir-putin-nuclear-weapons-threats/) is not just a Cold War–era concern. [2019 poll](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/06/75-years-after-hiroshima-bombing-here-are-4-things-know-about-nuclear-disarmament-efforts/) of U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and a group of diplomats from several NATO countries [held a press conference](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/world/americas/un-nuclear-weapons-talks.html) outside the General Assembly to protest the talks. [announced](https://www.icanw.org/beatrice_fihn_to_step_down_as_ican_executive_director) in November that she would step down as ICAN’s executive director at the end of January, she plans to remain involved and is optimistic about this moment, pointing to progress made after crises in the [1960s](https://time.com/5899754/jfk-decisionmaking-cuban-missile-crisis/) and [1980s](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-1983-military-drill-that-nearly-sparked-nuclear-war-with-the-soviets-180979980/) when the world came to the brink of nuclear war.

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Image courtesy of "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"

Cold War estimates of deaths in nuclear conflict (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

Apprehension about Russia's war against Ukraine has produced speculation about the possibility of limited Russian nuclear strikes against targets in that ...

In recent years, with tensions increasing and the future of Ukraine and Taiwan in dispute, risks have risen again. It was not until the late 1980s, when the Cold War was winding down, that the White House and Pentagon officials [induced target planners](https://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Cause-Convention-Transformative-Years/dp/1478751738) to produce attack options that could reduce deaths and destruction. [Presidential Directive 59](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/20308-national-security-archive-doc-23-william-e-odom) and [National Security Decision Directive 13](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/20309-national-security-archive-doc-24-national), respectively). According to the report, in 1964 the Soviets could kill 48 million Americans in a preemptive attack; by 1968, with greater numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles in place, they would be able to kill 91 million. According to numbers drawn from the war plan, a full-force attack on the Soviet Union’s major cities, government control centers, and nuclear threat targets would kill some 50 percent of its total population—some 108 million out of its then-population of 217 million. By 1960, war planning was centralized at the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, located at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. For that worst case, a failure of deterrence in which war was imminent and civilian authorities were ready to authorize nuclear weapons use, military officials developed plans to use these weapons—either in retaliation or preemptively—to destroy the adversary’s key military and industrial installations. [huge numbers of fatalities](https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/nowhere-to-hide-how-a-nuclear-war-would-kill-you-and-almost-everyone-else/#post-heading) and injuries in addition to the losses produced by climactic impacts. It would completely destroy “command facilities” in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang and kill 71 million people at once; 30 days later, a total of 196 million people would be dead (out of a population of 952 million people in the bloc). Estimates made during the late 1940s [projected](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28609-document-1-report-ad-hoc-committee-joint-chiefs-staff-evaluation-effect-soviet-war-e) millions of deaths from atomic bombings. As the Cold War developed, and atomic weapons became a bigger part of the US arsenal, military planners and civilian authorities began preparing for the possibility of a confrontation. With the war in Ukraine once again raising the prospect of a nuclear war, accurate estimates of such a war’s human impacts are more important than ever.

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