On April 14th, Iran launched an attack against Israel consisting of hundreds of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. Six months later, on October 1st, Iran struck again, this time with a massive barrage in excess of 180 ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli territory. Reportedly, neither attack was particularly effective. Still, the strikes were immensely provocative and unprecedented actions, as Iran had never directly attacked Israel prior.
This raises a morbid question: Why was Iran’s aggression not met with a nuclear counterstrike?
An Israeli military official would likely respond that these attacks presented no existential threat due to Iran’s lack of nuclear capability and would never have warranted such an extreme response. In contrast, the champions of nuclear arms continue to tout their supposed ability to deter conventional threats, despite having been repeatedly proven wrong — the Iranian strikes being a case in point.
In the almost eighty years of the nuclear age, despite Cold War tensions, the Cuban Missile Crisis, multiple wars between a nuclear India and Pakistan, and numerous “close calls” and false alarms, there has been zero use of nuclear weapons in conflict beyond the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945. The postwar “nuclear taboo” remains unbroken. Arguably, the only form of deterrence nuclear weapons seem to possess is deterring their own use. Why then has the fear of nuclear war noticeably increased in the last decade?
Polling data reveals that in August 2017, 82% of Americans were worried about the possibility of nuclear war. In early March and October of 2022, the percentage dropped to 69% and 58% respectively — a lower, but still considerable, figure. It’s perfectly reasonable to be terrified by the prospect of nuclear use, or even the continued existence of the world’s nuclear arsenals, and this was obviously aggravated by the nuclear saber-rattling of Kim Jong-Un and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The probability of nuclear use by any nuclear state, however, is immensely low, and these are ultimately irrational fears. Nonetheless, a determined coterie of activists have made it their mission to exploit people’s fear of nuclear war. How do I know this? I used to belong to that cohort.
For six years, I was active in the nuclear weapons abolition movement and the anti-war movement more broadly, working with and for organizations including Peace Action, Global Zero and Physicians for Social Responsibility. I collected signatures petitioning the president to adopt a “no first use” policy, circulated pamphlets detailing the financial burden incurred by the nuclear stockpile, and organized “actions,” as they’re known in activist vernacular. I led one of the first protests in decades outside of Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, a longtime designer of guidance systems for nuclear missiles, chanting “Trident missiles have to go!” and brandishing a sign reading “nuclear weapons are instruments of mass murder.”
As time passed, the positions I endorsed became less convincing. Geopolitical realities rendered abolition a pipe dream. The cost of maintaining our nuclear arsenal was immense, but it wasn’t bankrupting the country. Above all, the nuclear abolition movement relied on mostly moral arguments and hypotheticals that couldn’t stand up to the truth of the situation: nuclear war was highly unlikely, and I was engaging in fearmongering.
I cringe now when I see that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists “Doomsday Clock” is closer to midnight than it was during the cold war, when an adjunct professor pens an op-ed claiming “the world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,” or when Noam Chomsky falsely claims nuclear warheads are likely to just “go off by accident.”
To be clear, I abhor nuclear weapons and categorically condemn their use, of which there’s no ambiguity regarding the horrific consequences. Nuclear weapons are instruments of mass murder, but they’re not the threat anti-nuclear activists make them out to be.
Russia’s suspension of participation in the New START treaty is a worrying setback. The arming of Trident missiles with tactical warheads seems less of a strategic advantage and more of a costly stunt. These are issues that warrant concern, but they’re not harbingers of the apocalypse. What should be of greater concern to the average person are the U.S. manufactured conventional weapons that are responsible for numerous civilian casualties in the ongoing Yemen civil war.
There’s also a very disturbing possible outcome of nuclear abolition. If the world’s nuclear arsenals ever cease to exist, this will almost certainly be due to some new weapon having rendered them obsolete. It would likely be something highly precise, immensely destructive, and free of the characteristics of nuclear arms that make their use unthinkable in almost every scenario. Would a nuclear weapons-free world end up being more conflict prone?
This is the sort of problem abolitionists ignore. Don’t make the same mistake as them.