The world can’t keep playing nuclear roulette.
The fighting between India and Pakistan this week poses a threat to all of humanity. It is the latest outbreak of violence between these two countries which have fought four wars since they became independent in the 1940’s.
Whether this latest round of fighting will escalate to another full scale war is still not clear.
But the stakes could not be higher. Each country has approximately 170 nuclear weapons, and escalation to nuclear war is a real possibility. Indian conventional forces are much larger than Pakistan’s. This imbalance has prompted Pakistan to state explicitly that, if Indian conventional forces invade, Pakistan will use battlefield nuclear weapons.
And in response, India has stated explicitly that if Pakistan uses nuclear weapons on the battlefield, it will retaliate against Pakistani cities.
The direct effects of a nuclear war in South Asia would be catastrophic for the people of the sub-continent. Depending on the number of nuclear weapons that are ultimately used, the death toll from the explosions, fires and radiation could top 100 million people in the first week.
But the devastation would spread far beyond South Asia. The fires from the burning cities of both countries would loft enormous amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and dropping temperatures across the globe. The resulting climate disruption would cut food production and trigger a worldwide famine.
A landmark study by Lili Xia and her colleagues, published in the journal Nature/Food in August 2022, showed that, depending on the number and size of the weapons used, the global death toll would be in the hundreds of millions.
In the worst scenario that the study examined, two billion people, one quarter of humanity, would starve in the first two years after the war.
Here in the U.S., thousands of miles from the scene of the war, 130 million would die. The study only calculated the death toll for the first two years after the war. The famine would continue beyond that, and we don’t know the ultimate death toll.
This is not the plot of a grade B movie. It is the risk we are running today as events unfold in real time. The world may dodge the nuclear bullet again, as it has on several occasions already. But we cannot continue to play nuclear roulette and expect to avoid disaster indefinitely.
Fortunately, we don’t have to. Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature. We have built them with our own hands and we know how to take them apart. All that is lacking is the political will to do so.
The United States needs to acknowledge that, far from making us safe, nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to our safety, and indeed, our survival. We need to do whatever we can to assure their elimination worldwide.
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern has introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives, H. Res. 317, calling on the U.S. to commence negotiations with the other eight nuclear armed states for a verifiable agreement to eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to an agreed upon timeline.
The resolution is part of the national Back from the Brink campaign. It does not call for the U.S. to disarm unilaterally, but rather for the U.S. to provide leadership in an effort to achieve universal nuclear disarmament. U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal joined McGovern in co-sponsoring a similar resolution in the last Congress, and hopefully he will do so again this year.
State Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, has introduced a similar resolution in the Massachusetts Legislature, S. 1649, which explicitly calls for all members of the state’s Congressional delegation to co-sponsor H. Res. 317. The Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security needs to approve this resolution now so that it can move to the floor for a vote by the full state Senate.
Time is not on our side. We have ignored the danger of nuclear war far too long. We have before us, literally, the choice of life or death. It is time to choose life.
Ira Helfand, M.D., is past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.