The threat of a nuclear holocaust remains as high as ever as conflict continues to rage across the world, including the theatre of horrors in Gaza, and Vladimir Putin's never-ending war in Ukraine
Eventually it reaches the troposphere, higher than commercial flights. Radioactive particles then spew across everything below as fallout, raining back down on the Earth. A nuclear bomb produces ‘a witch’s brew of radioactive products, which are also entrained in the cloud’, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned decades ago. More than a million people are dead…
This story, of what the moments after a nuclear missile launch could look like, is based on facts from exclusive interviews with presidential advisers and declassified documents.
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President Joe Biden and some congressional Democrats have expressed support for establishing a nuclear declaratory policy of no first use (NFU) or “sole purpose.” Under an NFU policy, the United States pledges never to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. This functionally means the same as declaring that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter or retaliate only against
nuclear attack precluding the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to chemical, biological, cyber, or conventional attacks, regardless of their magnitude.REF
U.S. nuclear declaratory policy has consistently been one of calculated ambiguity, stating that the United States would only use nuclear weapons in “extreme circumstances,” including “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.”REF Not only have compelling arguments for adopting an NFU policy not been made, but NFU would carry real risk, including eroding deterrence against adversary aggression as well as a
Trump chaos highlights risks of sole nuclear launch authority, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/trump-chaos-highlights-risks-of-sole-nuclear-launch-authority/,
12 Jan 2021, |Ramesh Thakur, Critics of nuclear weapons have long pointed to two sets of risks. First, deterrence stability depends on all fail-safe mechanisms working every single time in every bomb-possessing country. That is an impossibly high bar for nuclear peace to hold indefinitely. Second, it also requires that rational decision-makers be in office in all the world’s nine nuclear-armed states.
In the past four years the latter risk has intensified in particular because of the personality traits of two of the nine leaders concerned, which is why US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un were described as the godfathers of the UN nuclear ban treaty. The late Bruce Blair, a former nuclear launch officer and respected anti-nuclear campaigner, said in 2016: ‘The thought of Donald Trump wi