I grew up during the Cold War and, as a child, had nightmares of nuclear war. As the Cold War wound down and the nuclear powers agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, I thought that I could relax a bit. Now there are people on both sides of the Earth who would like to restart the Cold War.
When the Cold War ended, Ukraine had Soviet nuclear missiles. They decided that they did not want to be a nuclear power and sent the missile to Russia to be dismantled. They obtained a treaty signed by the U.S., the UK, and Russia that Ukraine would be defended by the other signatories of the treaty if threatened by a nuclear power. Just last year, China signed a similar treaty with Ukraine.
Due to the current situation with Russia on the verge of annexing Crimea, some Ukraine officials have said that it might be desirable for Ukraine to obtain nuclear weapons to protect itself. It is an interesting question of how far the U.S., the UK or China would be willing to go to protect Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Recently a news anchor in Russia who appears on the network that is essentially a propaganda wing of the current Russian government said that Russia was the only country that could reduced the United States to radioactive ash in a matter of hours. Recently, a Russian general appeared on Russian TV with an animation showing Russian missiles attacking the U.S. Another Russian General said that there is an automatic system in place that could fire Russian missiles from silos and submarines even if the Russian government had been destroyed in a nuclear attack. Chinese generals have also been talking about nuclear war with the U.S. China has been accusing Japan of planning to create nuclear weapons.
The Unites States and Russia both have around fifteen hundred nuclear missiles aimed at each other. There are protocols in place to launch those missiles within minutes in case of war. There are estimates that the explosion of around a hundred nuclear warheads may be sufficient to cause a nuclear winter that would end human civilization. In a nuclear war, no one wins.
We are now in the most tense international situation with Russia since we experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1973. During that crisis a Soviet ship had navigational problems and crossed the red line created by the U.S. A U.S. naval captain had orders to fire on any Russian ship that crossed that line. If the captain had fired, it might have started a nuclear war. He hesitated long enough to verify that the Russian ship had strayed off course. The fate of the world rested with one man. There have been other close calls during the years of the Cold War.
There are those voices in the U.S. that say that we should take a hard line with Russians over Crimea and even consider military options. I am really afraid that if we do anything like that, we could be on a slippery slope to nuclear war and the end of human civilization. The chancellor of Germany recently said, after talking to Putin, that he was out of touch with reality. If there is any truth to this, the world is entering a very dangerous time.
FEMA-estimated primary counterforce targets for Russian ICBMs. The resulting fall-out is indicated with the darkest considered as "lethal" to relatively fall-out free yellow zones:
