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Nuclear weapons have been used twice in war, both times by the United States against Japan near the end of World War II. Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have been detonated over two thousand times for testing and demonstration. The only countries known to have detonated nuclear weapons, or possess them, are United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and possibly Israel. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons aims to reduce the Spread of Nuclear Weapons, but it’s effectiveness has been questioned, and political tensions remained high in the 1970s and 1980s.

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"Is a world rid of nuclear weapons possible? Or is it just a naive fantasy? At a time when fears of nuclear warfare are higher than they've been in decades, proponents of nuclear dissuasion have been chided this year by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or . We are in Geneva today, with the Campaign's Executive Director, Beatrice Fihn. Thank you for being with us."

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"Thank you for having me."
"The risks are very real"
Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"So, the issue of nuclear warfare, nuclear threat is more than ever in the news. We've just seen US President Trump take a very harsh stance on the Iran nuclear deal, after his standoff with Kim Jong Un, and the nuclear developments in North Korea. So, how real would you say are the risks today, bearing in mind that nuclear dissuasion, has been working for years. So why not now?"

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"Well I think the risks are very real. Every day, nuclear armed submarines are patrolling around our seas. You have silos where nuclear missiles are pointing at certain targets. And I think that we just managed to forget about it a little bit for quite a few decades. I think the developments in North Korea, the election of Donald Trump as the US President has really put a focus on the fact that these are individual people with the power to destroy the world."
"Donald Trump: a moron"
Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"You did call Donald Trump a moron on Twitter, paraphrasing Rex Tillerson. Do you mean to say that morons in the 21st century are making nuclear deterrence irrelevant?"

Donald Trump is a moron.
- Beatrice Fihn (@BeaFihn) 4 octobre 2017

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"Threatening to indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians, as a method of protecting ourselves, is no longer relevant, it's a stupid idea. Nuclear weapons don't make us safe. We can't win a nuclear war. Threatening to totally destroy a whole country, developing nuclear arsenals, wanting to increase the number of nuclear weapons, yes, it's moronic."
"Good" vs. "bad" nuclear States?
Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"There are quite a few nuclear states, although they are a minority. So what about the "other" nuclear states: France, the UK, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, though the latter has never admitted or denied it had nuclear weapons. Are there "good" nuclear States and "bad" nuclear States?"

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"Well, that's the thing: I think there aren't. I think all countries that rely on weapons of mass destruction for protection, that threaten to cause such painful... first of all death and destruction to many, but also extremely painful consequences for those who survive, it's unspeakable suffering, nuclear weapons. And it's not something that countries that believe in humanitarian law, human rights, democracy, should threaten to use."

Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"The Non-Proliferation Treaty has not prevented the nuclear states from investing heavily in nuclear weapons in recent years. There are about 15.000 warheads in the world today. To have an idea could you tell us how deadly could just one of those be?"
"Nuclear weapons cannot be contained in time or space"
Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"I think there's obviously a lot of different types of nuclear weapons, and it depends a little bit on where and how populated the area is. But there's a huge blast that will knock out everything, and have long term consequences. We see in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people are still suffering from the consequences. The environment is poisoned. We've seen at the nuclear test sites all around the world that women have difficulties giving birth, there's a higher degree of cancers. It's really a weapon that cannot be contained in time - it englobes all the generations - or space. The radiations spread with winds to other areas that are not involved in this conflict. If there was a nuclear war in North Korea for example, that would impact China, Japan, South Korea, with the radiation.

"And right now, the United States and all the other nuclear armed states have this as well - I'm just taking the United States as an example - they have a nuclear armed submarine. It contains the explosive power of seven World War Twos. And 60 million people died in WWII. And they have 10 of these submarines patrolling the world all the time. So the explosive power of seventy World War Twos is patrolling."
Can the UN ban make a difference?
Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"ICAN's work has been central in the negotiations that led to the Nuclear Ban Treaty adopted last July at the UN. It's legally binding for the states who sign up to it. The problem is it's not binding for those who don't, and they are precisely the nuclear weapons states. We've seen France, the UK and the US declaring they'd have nothing to do with it already. NATO is against it. How do you get around that?"

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"We see with other weapons like chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions that once they are prohibited, and even if not all states sign up to it initially, a stigma grows around these weapons. This treaty is meant to help that. But I think this is also a tool for starting campaigning nationally, such as divestments from nuclear weapons producers. This treaty prohibits assistance with developing nuclear weapons. And therefore we think we can go to banks for example and say: 'If you're based in a country, that has signed this treaty, you shouldn't be able to invest money in producing nuclear weapons.'

"I think that can be a very strong incentive as well. Nuclear weapons are hugely expensive. And governments like the UK or France have to decide, 'Are we going to put this on a weapon that we can't use, that only kills civilians? Or are we going to put it on what actually protects us from 21st century threats, like terrorism, climate change, organised crime, that kind of thing?'"
War is lucrative
Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"But in the end doesn't it all come down to the fact that war is lucrative, the weapons industry is lucrative? For states, for companies, for banks. Banks have invested some 500 billion dollars in nuclear weapons between 2013 and 2016. So in the face of that, how do you make nuclear disarmament bankable really?"

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"It's definitely a challenge in the entire weapons field. But I also think that there are opportunities to capitalize on this. For example, just a few years after the cluster munitions convention that prohibits cluster bombs was entered into force, the United States did not participate in the negotiations, or sign the treaty, but just last year, the last American company that produced cluster munitions pulled out of that production and cited the growing international stigma and the divestment campaigns. Banks had withheld capital from this company because of that. And I think it was quite interesting to see that these companies do respond to these kind of processes. And the money that pays for this is our tax money, so I think we have to also demand that our money goes to other things. We need a huge push. And I hope this Nobel Peace Prize for our campaign can inspire people to act. In the end, I believe in democracy. I believe that if people demand it, it will change."

Valérie Gauriat, euronews:

"Beatrice Fihn, thank you very much."

Beatrice Fihn, ICAN:

"Thank you very much."

We did it! #nuclearban pic.twitter.com/6EDNYXcLw3
- ICAN (@nuclearban) 7 juillet 2017

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"Nuclear weapons don't make us safe" - ICAN

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"Is a world rid of nuclear weapons possible? Or is it just a naive fantasy? At a time when fears of nuclear warfare are higher than they've been in decades, proponents of nuclear dissuasion have been chided this year by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or .

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Nuclear weapons are the most destructive weapons on the planet. Pound for pound, they are the most lethal weapons ever created. However, the destructive power of these weapons has been vastly exaggerated - albeit for good reasons.

'The chances that a nuclear bomb would mean ' the end of the world ' are vanishingly small'

Public fear of nuclear weapons being used in anger, whether by terrorists or nuclear-armed nations, has risen once again thanks to the current political climate between states such as the US and Russia and the various nuclear tests conducted by North Korea.

But when we talk about nuclear weapons, it's easy to get carried away. As the historian Spencer Weart once argued: "You say 'nuclear bomb' and everybody immediately thinks of the end of the world." Yet the means necessary to produce a nuclear bomb, let alone set one off, remain incredibly complex - and while the damage that would be done if someone did in fact detonate one might be very serious indeed, the chances that it would mean "the end of the world" are vanishingly small.

Mythbusting in Arkansas

In his 2013 book Command and Control, the author Eric Schlosser tried to scare us into perpetual fear of nuclear weapons by recounting stories of near misses and accidents involving nuclear weapons. One such event, the 1980 Damascus incident, saw a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile explode at its remote Arkansas launch facility after a maintenance crew accidentally ruptured its fuel tank.

The weapon would have caused destruction across 0.2 per cent of the state

Although the warhead involved in the incident didn't detonate, Schlosser claims that "if it had, much of Arkansas would be gone".

But that's not quite the case. The nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead on the Titan II missile had a blast radius of 10km, or an area of about 315km². The state of Arkansas spreads over 133,733km², meaning the weapon would have caused destruction across 0.2 per centof the state. That would naturally have been a terrible outcome, but certainly not the catastrophe that Schlosser evokes.

Overdoing it

Claims exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons have become commonplace, especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In the early War on Terror years, Richard Lugar, a former US senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that terrorists armed with nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the Western way of life. What he failed to explain is how.

It is by no means certain that a single nuclear detonation (or even several) would do away with our current way of life. Indeed, we're still here despite having nuked our own planet more than 2,000 times - a tally expressed beautifully in this video by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto).

While the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty forced nuclear tests underground, around 500 of all the nuclear weapons detonated were unleashed in the Earth's atmosphere. This includes the world's largest ever nuclear detonation, the 57-megaton bomb known as Tsar Bomba, detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30 1961.

'We have nuked the planet more than 2,000 times '

Tsar Bomba was more than 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That is immense destructive power - but as one physicist explained, it's only "one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane".

What about a 'nuclear winter'

The Damascus incident proved how incredibly hard it is to set off a nuclear bomb and the limited effect that would have come from just one warhead detonating. Despite this, some scientists have controversially argued that an even limited all-out nuclear war might lead to a so-called nuclear winter, since the smoke and debris created by very large bombs could block out the sun's rays for a considerable amount of time.

To inflict such ecological societal annihilation with weapons alone, we would have to detonate hundreds if not thousands of thermonuclear devices in a short time. Even in such extreme conditions, the area actually devastated by the bombs would be limited: for example, 2,000 one-megaton explosions with a destructive radius of five miles each would directly destroy less than 5 per cent of the territory of the US.

Of course, if the effects of nuclear weapons have been greatly exaggerated, there is a very good reason: since these weapons are indeed extremely dangerous, any posturing and exaggerating which intensifies our fear of them makes us less likely to use them. But it's important, however, to understand why people have come to fear these weapons the way we do.

After all, nuclear weapons are here to stay; they can't be "un-invented". If we want to live with them and mitigate the very real risks they pose, we must be honest about what those risks really are. Overegging them to frighten ourselves more than we need to keeps nobody safe.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The threat of nuclear weapons is not as bad as scientists make out

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by Mattias Eken, a PhD Candidate in Modern History at the University of St Andrews Nuclear weapons are the most destructive weapons on the planet. Pound for pound, they are the most lethal weapons ever created. However, the destructive power of these weapons has been vastly exaggerated - albeit for good reasons.

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The conventional wisdom that nuclear weapons keep their possessors safe, though it may be widespread, is neither true nor rooted in wisdom. The fact is that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for any country to possess - let alone use - and that the U.S. and other countries have been playing nuclear roulette with them for nearly seven decades.

Nuclear weapons have come close to being detonated by accident or design on numerous occasions during the nuclear age. U.S. and Russian leaders have come close to "retaliating" to false warnings of nuclear attack on several occasions, acts which would have set in motion full-scale nuclear wars. Planes carrying nuclear weapons have had mid-air collisions and crashes that have released their bombs. It is far more likely that the world has benefited by great good fortune than it is that the weapons have kept us safe.

Nuclear deterrence is only a hypothesis about human behavior. It is a hypothesis that requires all leaders playing the deadly-serious nuclear game to behave rationally at all times, and we know that all leaders do not act rationally under all circumstances. Do we really want to gamble that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un will always behave rationally? But this may be said about many, perhaps all, leaders of nuclear-armed states. Here, for example, is a conversation recorded in the White House on April 25, 1972, between President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger:

Nixon: How many did we kill in Laos?

Kissinger: In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen [thousand] ...

Nixon: See, the attack in the North [Vietnam] that we have in mind ... power plants, whatever's left - POL [petroleum], the docks ... And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no ... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? ... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Chrissakes.

The possession of nuclear weapons models behavior that other countries will see fit to emulate. If the most powerful nation on Earth insists that it "needs" nuclear weapons, why wouldn't every country "need" them? If the rationale is "because they deter nuclear attack," then we should give nuclear weapons to everyone and thereby ensure the peace.

The truth is that each new country that develops a nuclear arsenal adds to-not reduces-the global threat. Since the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force in 1970, four additional countries have developed nuclear arsenals: Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. More countries may well join them, responding to the continued nuclear posturing of the original five nuclear-armed countries: U.S., Russia, UK, France and China.

An additional impetus to nuclear proliferation is the failure of the original nuclear weapon states to fulfill their obligations under the NPT to pursue negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament. The Marshall Islands, a small Pacific island country, has brought lawsuits against all the nuclear "Goliaths" to hold them to account for breaches of their nuclear disarmament obligations under the NPT and/or customary international law.

Conventional wisdom also has it that the more powerful the nuclear arsenal, the safer are its possessors. But this is not true for two reasons. First, a country that possesses nuclear weapons will be targeted by nuclear weapons. Second, the use of a powerful nuclear arsenal could thrust the globe into a new ice age and thus be suicidal for the attacking country, even without retaliation.

It is commonly believed that nuclear weapons "ended the war in Japan" and saved (American) lives during World War II. That, too, is a myth. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, published in 1946, concluded that, even without the atomic bombs, and even without the Soviet Union entering the war in the Pacific, the fighting would have ended in 1945 without an Allied invasion of Japan. Japan had put out feelers to surrender, and the U.S. had broken Japan's secret codes and knew about its desire to surrender, but we went ahead and bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki anyway. Admiral William D. Leahy, the highest ranking member of the U.S. military at the time, wrote in his memoir that the atomic bomb "was of no material assistance" against Japan, because the Japanese were already defeated. He went on to say that, in being the first to use the bomb, the U.S. "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."

Nuclear weapons not only do not keep their possessors safe, but the secrecy and consolidation of power they require undermine democracy, and have been a major reason for consolidation of power in the executive branch of government and the creation of an "imperial presidency" in the U.S. Further, these weapons and their delivery systems have drained trillions of dollars in resources from meeting basic social needs. In addition, the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be illegal under international law and the possession of these instruments of mass annihilation undermines the very fabric of international law. Finally, there is no moral justification for threatening the populations of cities, countries, continents and, in fact, the whole planet. The development and possession of nuclear arsenals has made us bad stewards of the planet and its various forms of life, including human life, now and in the future.

There is another, painfully obvious, way that nuclear weapons jeopardize our safety: Through the middle of the last decade, the U.S. had spent $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. The annual figure now is $50 to $60 billion for the U.S. and $100 billion for all nuclear-weapons states. That $100 billion a year is a figure roughly equivalent to the cost of achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Which investment would make the world a safer place?

Nuclear weapons are relics of the Cold War. What possible scenario would require any country to keep hundreds, or even thousands, of nuclear weapons, ready to fire on a few moments' notice? It's time to wake up, shake off our apathy and ignorance, challenge conventional wisdom, and take a stand for a nuclear weapons-free planet now, before it's too late. The U.S., as the most powerful country on the planet and the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, should lead the way in convening these negotiations.
David Krieger is a founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and has served as its president since 1982. He is the author of many books and articles that challenge the conventional wisdom that nuclear weapons keep us safe. Find out more at www.wagingpeace.org and www.nuclearzero.org.
This article was originally published by The Moon Magazine.

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The conventional wisdom that nuclear weapons keep their possessors safe, though it may be widespread, is neither true nor rooted in wisdom. The fact is that nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for any country to possess - let alone use - and that the U.S.

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Nuclear weapons do not make the world a safer place. They bring on fear, destruction, and death upon everyone in the world.