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Next November marks 40 years since the US president Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. The statement was striking – not least because their militaries were pouring billions into preparing for an unwinnable conflict.
A year later, at Reykjavik, the two came tantalisingly close to eliminating nuclear weapons entirely. That historic chance slipped away over Reagan’s insistence on his unproven “Star Wars” missile defence system. The moment passed, but its lesson endures: disarmament demands courage – and compromise.
The summit proved a turning point in the cold war. Arms control brought down the number of nuclear weapons held by the two countries from 60,000 to roughly 11,000 today. The most recent new strategic arms reduction treaty (New Start), signed in 2010, capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each. In retrospect, that was a false dawn in nuclear diplomacy. Since George W Bush withdrew the US from the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Moscow in 2002, the risk of a return to an all-out arms race has grown.
On 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will once again hold the keys to a planet-ending arsenal. Mr Trump’s capricious personality sheds new light on an old question: how much of the terrible responsibility to inflict large-scale nuclear destruction should be invested in a single person? He has called the transfer of authority “a very sobering moment” and “very, very scary”. Reassuring words – until one remembers that he also reportedly wondered: “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?” Presidential sole authority rightly ensures civilian control over nuclear weapons. But why concentrate such power in just one civilian’s hands?
Close to apocalypse
Without bold action, New Start, the last safeguard of nuclear arms moderation, will expire in February 2026. Mr Trump admires strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has recklessly threatened nuclear strikes and hinted at restarting tests during the Ukraine war. But it would be a catastrophic mistake if the pair decided not to exercise self-restraint. It would mean that for the first time in more than 50 years, the US and Russia – holders of 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons – could begin an unconstrained arms race. That dismal decision would send a message to other states, notably China, further encouraging their buildup of nuclear stockpiles.
Deterrence is not the only way to think about nuclear weapons. For decades, a conflict involving them has been a byword for Armageddon. The fearful legacy of “the bomb” can be felt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the testing grounds still contaminated by nuclear fallout decades later. Such sentiment led to Barack Obama, in 2009, advocating a hopeful vision of a nuclear-free world. His speech inspired a coalition of activists, diplomats and developing nations determined to force a global reckoning. Their resistance to the conventional wisdom that nuclear disarmament is unrealistic bore fruit with the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, adopted by 122 countries at the UN in 2017. Its message: the only way to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again is to do away with them entirely.
The treaty, championed by the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was a triumph over superpower diplomacy that had long hindered reviews of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Nuclear-armed states are sceptical, if not scornful. But their resistance does not diminish the importance of the 2017 UN vote. It represents not only a moral and legal challenge to the status quo but a reminder that much of the world doesn’t accept the logic of mutually assured destruction. This sentiment was amplified this year when Nihon Hidankyo, Japan’s atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors group, won the Nobel peace prize for efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.
Eight decades after its first test, the nuclear bomb remains – its purpose long obsolete, its danger ever present. Built to defeat Hitler, dropped to end Japan’s imperial ambitions and multiplied to outlast the cold war, nuclear weapons have outlived every rationale for their existence. Arsenals have shrunk, but not enough. The world’s stockpile remains dangerously large, and efforts to reduce it further appear stalled. This against a geopolitical backdrop of nuclear proliferation, a multipolar and ideologically diverse UN, and the American desire for global pre-eminence. Little wonder that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest ever to apocalypse.
A shared responsibility
In 2019, Gorbachev warned, with good reason, that nuclear deterrence keeps the world “in constant jeopardy”. It is obvious that as long as these weapons exist, the risk of nuclear war cannot be erased. The question is no longer why the bomb remains, but whether humanity can survive it for another 80 years.
This December, UN members voted 144-3 to establish an independent scientific panel on the effects of nuclear war. Shamefully, Britain was among the naysayers. Imagination has already outpaced fact. In her book Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson describes how humanity could end in 72 minutes after a North Korean “bolt from the blue” attack sparks a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. She writes of thousands of warheads raining down on America, Europe, Russia and parts of Asia, obliterating cities, incinerating human life and leaving billions stripped of life, light and hope. Streets turn molten, winds flatten the land and those who endure suffer wounds so terrible that they no longer look – or act – human.
Ms Jacobson’s point is that this apocalyptic vision is the logical conclusion of the world’s current nuclear doctrines. Those that do emerge into the desolation discover what the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned decades ago: “The survivors will envy the dead.” The devastation is total, offering a future that no one could bear to live through.
Amid historic lows in US-Russian relations, one truth remains: a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Leaders in Moscow and Washington should reaffirm this in the run-up to negotiating significant arsenal reductions as well as real limits on strategic missile defences. Such a statement, simple but profound, would remind the world that Mr Trump and Mr Putin recognise their shared responsibility to prevent global catastrophe. This will not be easy: rising nationalism, geopolitical rivalry and mutual mistrust between the countries – especially over Ukraine – loom large over disarmament efforts. But try they must. However bitter their disagreements, Washington and Moscow owe it to humanity to talk about – and act on – avoiding the unthinkable.
