By Tom Kirvan
Globally, it’s a very exclusive club that counts nine nations, including one whose populace might as well be living in the Dark Ages.
In terms of landmass, the club members range from the largest in the world (6.6 million square miles) to one of the smallest (8,019 square miles), defying the age-old standard that size matters.
Population wise, the club sports the two most populous nations in the world (1.43 billion and 1.38 billion) as well as one ranking (at 8.6 million) with the likes of New York City.
The rush to join the club began in earnest after World War II, which came to a merciful end on September 2, 1945 when aboard a U.S. Navy ship anchored in Tokyo Bay peace was officially proclaimed.
Before long, the one founding member of the club would be joined by four others – several by surreptitious means – over the span of two decades, setting the stage for four more to join from 1974 to 2006.
The club, not surprisingly, includes the United States, its standard-bearer. Other members, in terms of succession, are Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea – with Iran eagerly waiting in the wings.
Collectively, they comprise the so-called Nuclear Club, possessing an estimated 16,000 nuclear weapons, some 4,300 of which are said to be deployed with operational forces, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
By all accounts, the club also has five auxiliary members in the form of Turkey, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, nations that to varying degrees serve as host sites for nuclear weaponry on behalf of NATO.
How to keep the club from expanding further has been a particularly nettlesome problem for the past 20 years, as several rogue nations and global terrorist groups have threatened to develop or somehow acquire nuclear weaponry to advance their political and military agendas.
Stopping the spread, of course, is just part of a much larger problem, one that revolves around Russia’s continued threats to turn its invasion of Ukraine into a seismic nuclear event should conventional military means fall short of their objectives. In recent months, the nuclear threat has been coupled with just-as-deadly promises to introduce chemical weapons onto the Ukrainian battlefield in yet another terrifying tactic employed by Vladimir Putin.
For all of Putin’s evil and ill intentions, he may well be remembered not as the man who restored Russia to its former glory, but instead as the spark who lit the flame under the long dormant anti-nuclear movement, which for years has been the proverbial voice in the wilderness, sounding alarm bells that have gone unanswered.
For those who lived through the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the recent nuclear saber-rattling by Putin evokes fears of the darkest days of the Cold War era between the two superpowers.
Yet, the crisis we are now facing is not just about Putin. It stems from the development of nuclear weaponry near the end of World War II some 80 years ago.
That is when our reckoning with the devastating impact of weapons of mass destruction really began, as perhaps best illustrated by a comment from famed physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb” who is the focus of a recently released movie.
Back then, after witnessing the first detonation of a nuclear weapon at Los Alamos, N.M. test site in July 1945, Oppenheimer reportedly proclaimed, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” borrowing a phrase from a piece of Hindu scripture.
It would be followed less than a month later by a somber reflection from General Douglas MacArthur, who according to an aide was “appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster” that pulverized the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an enormous loss of life.
Suddenly, planet Earth had entered the nuclear age, triggering the very real possibility that mankind possessed the power to destroy itself.
In a sense, we have returned to that doorstep again, as the world’s nuclear powers periodically dangle the possibility of using such weaponry to bring current military conflicts to a horrifying end. The very thought of that happening seemed especially remote because of the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) concept, a doctrine of reciprocal deterrence resting on the principle that each power would be able to inflict unacceptable damage on the other in retaliation for a nuclear attack.
But the doctrine only works if the weapons are safely secured and are in the hands of sensible people, which given the likes of a cornered dictator or an unfit political leader makes that a very dubious proposition.
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