David Brooks, correspondent
New York. It starts like this: “Well, there was a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why. You just need to know that the big one has arrived.”
The 90-second video public announcement released by the New York City government is narrated by a woman walking through empty streets who offers three steps New Yorkers must take to survive a nuclear attack: seek asylum inside a building away from windows, do not go out to reduce exposure to radioactive dust and follow official instructions released by the media.
The ad is airing right now though it seems like a relic from more than a half-century ago when such messages were common, and caused enough concern that the New York City government was forced to clarify that there is no imminent threat of nuclear attack.
This announcement comes amid growing tensions and indirect confrontations between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine, including threats of the use of nuclear weapons, and this week, with Beijing with the official visit to Taiwan this Tuesday of Nancy Pelosi, the president of the lower house of Congress, as an open act of defiance of China.
On Monday, at the opening of the Non-Proliferation Treaty evaluation conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the world “is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away.” of nuclear annihilation. [https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/02/mundo/020n1mun].
At the same time, the United States and the major nuclear powers – including Russia and China – have asserted that “a nuclear war can have no winners and should never be waged.”
But the United States, while promoting proposals for new nuclear arms reduction treaties, celebrating the fact that nuclear arsenals have been reduced by almost 90 percent since 1967 and reiterating that there are no winners in a nuclear war, is spending thousands of million dollars to modernize and even expand its arsenal.
In fact, the world nuclear arsenal -calculated at just over 13,000 weapons, with the United States and Russia, two-time world champions sharing 90 percent of the total-, is increasing for the first time since the end of the cold war, SIPRI reports. , the leading independent military weapons research center in the world, in its annual report for 2022.
For the past several years, the United States has been pushing a program to “modernize” its arsenal under both Republican and Democratic administrations – another of the few issues where there is broad bipartisan consensus. The United States will spend 634 billion dollars over 10 years between 2021 and 2030 to maintain and modernize its arsenal, an increase of 28 percent over spending in the last 10 years, calculates the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). . That is a cost much higher than that of the other nuclear powers in this area.
The Joe Biden administration continues, and in some areas has increased, every aspect of the planned spending for the nuclear arsenal that it inherited from the two previous administrations (Trump and Obama), including the development of new weapons, reports the Association of Control of Weapons [https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USNuclearModernization].
As always, he is justifying all this in the face of threats from other nuclear powers that he sees as hostile at this juncture, notably Russia and China, but also potential powers like Iran and North Korea.
“The United States believes that all nuclear-armed states have a duty to act responsibly,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the opening of the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference on Monday. He insisted that the role of US nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attacks against his country and its allies. He warned – apparently unaware that it contradicts the claim that there are no victors in a nuclear war – that “the United States would only contemplate the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies and partners.” .
It is worth remembering that, for decades, experts have repeated that there is no salvation – inside or outside buildings – from a massive nuclear attack, where countless people will die immediately and all the rest will be poisoned by radiation that will kill them. the long of the time. During the government of Jimmy Carter, classified documents were produced and only revealed until after the end of the cold war that conclude that a nuclear war will not have a winner. Years earlier, in the early 1960s, estimates of casualties from an exchange of nuclear attacks between the two superpowers pointed to 134 million US dead and 140 million Soviet dead. Civilian and military leaders all kept this math secret until after the end of the cold war. Official estimates of nuclear weapon casualties in more recent times remain classified as a state secret. [https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2022-07-14/long-classified-us-estimates-nuclear-war-casualties-during].
Thus, 77 years after the premiere of the use of atomic bombs by the United States – the only country that has used weapons of mass destruction – by dropping one on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, and another on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 causing the immediate death of more than 120,000 people and the slow death of tens of thousands more – the specter of nuclear war is not only still contemplated within the “strategic” plans of the United States and the other powers, but some calculate that the risk of a nuclear apocalypse has never been greater.
The time of the famous Doomsday Clock produced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – an organization founded by Albert Einstein and his colleagues – is set each year in January to metaphorically measure how close the world is to its end and was 100 seconds to midnight for the third year – the closest it’s ever been since it premiered 75 years ago [https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/].
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