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End Times
You Should Be Scared of Nuclear War Again
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from a Cold War-era nuclear missile treaty will put us all in renewed danger
Mutually Assured Destruction has a bad name. I mean that literally — all three of those words are terrifying. Put them together, and they mean that annihilation is kept at bay by the fact that the two main nuclear powers — the United States and Russia — have thousands of warheads on land, sea, and in the air, targeted at each other and ready to launch, should one of them decide to fire first.
But what’s scarier than Mutually Assured Destruction in a world where an estimated nine countries have nuclear weapons and others want to join the club? Pretty much nothing.
That’s why the Trump Administration’s formal withdrawal of the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Friday is so worrying. The pact, which was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, eliminated stocks of ground-based ballistic missiles capable of traveling between 500 and 5,500 km, otherwise known as tactical arms. The existence of these weapons was inherently destabilizing.
Nuclear weapons are dangerous not just because of their destructive power, but because of their speed. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) can travel between Russia and the United States — and vice versa — in around 30 minutes. This means that in the event of a suspected launch, the leaders of the targeted country would have less than the length of an average sitcom to decide whether the launch was real and how to respond. That is an insanely compressed timeframe to decide whether or not to take an action that could plausibly result in the end of human civilization.
If tactical nuclear missiles are on the board, however, that time frame is contracted even more. It’s why the United States reacted so strongly after it discovered in 1963 that Soviet advisers were placing short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, 100 miles away from the tip of Florida. The Cuban Missile Crisis that followed was likely the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear war, a fate that was avoided — or perhaps just…
