Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Could Putin still trigger nuclear war?

The world is facing the prospect of its first nuclear attack since the US Air Force dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Yet that horror arouses little fear or outrage. The possibility that a cornered Putin will use ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons to punish Ukraine for humiliating the Kremlin remains a nightmare most can live with.

Paranoia about nuclear conflict haunted the Cold War of the 20th century. Today our tolerance of the intolerable appears higher. The vast mass of people don’t care to think about it. Policy elites believe that no one who looks at Ukraine with seriousness and compassion believes that they have done all they can do to avert it.

And so we belittle threats that terrified our parents and grandparents. Anti-nuclear demonstrators do not disturb the crowds queuing to pay their respects to the late Queen. Fears of radiation clouds do not panic the European public. We comfort ourselves with talk of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons that sound nasty, no doubt about it, but manageable.

Sensible generals say there is no such thing as ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. There are just nuclear weapons. The Russian ‘tactical’ weapons that could hit Ukraine are ‘delivered’ by cruise missiles fired from submarines and ships, or from land-based missile launchers. (While we are on the subject of euphemisms, what a genteel understatement ‘delivered’ is. It makes weapons of mass destruction sound like pizzas.)

The bombs they carry have about 10 kilotons of destructive power. To grasp the devastation 10 kilotons can cause, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons. It killed about 70,000 people, injured another 70,000 and levelled the city for 12 square kilometres around the blast site.

We cannot rule out the chance that nuclear terror will return. Neither can we do much to stop it returning.

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