My sister has been watching a Cold War series on TV and we were reminiscing about these days. She was 10 during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and I was in sixth year at Aberdeen Grammar. Jeannie remembers that our parents were in a state of fear, but at the time she did not know what was going on. She was hardly alone. I am astonished to realise on reflection that I myself knew only a little. There was a radio in our Bedford Road flat but the news usually got switched off by our father after the headlines and it may indeed have been deliberately left quiet in those days. My awakening came on during a school games session at Rubislaw, probably on Wednesday 17th October. On that day pal Willie Burt cheerfully predicted that this was the day the bombs would fall and then he filled me in. I blanked it out as much as possible but the terror was threaded through my dreams.
Then the insane stand-off of the early eighties when parenthood forced me to face the reality of the threat more squarely, though the response was largely limited to middle-of-the night half-arsed planning for emergency evacuation, sleeping bags, rations etc., tied to a kind of paralysis. Fortunately there were others who responded actively and responsibly, in the large demonstrations in the US and Europe, at Greenham Common, and in small grass-roots groups all over. Their good work did have its effect, not least in provoking films like The Day After and Threads which did so much in spreading awareness of the potential horror, even nudging Ronald Reagan towards a measure of reality so that he and Gorbachev could reach a (tragically temporary) realisation that nuclear weapons not only had to be gotten rid of, but that it could be done. And so, by a modest margin, we edged away from the brink.
And now they tell us, very plausibly, that the present risk of nuclear war is as grave as in 1962 and the early eighties. We have an escalating threat and counter-threat pattern, which has now gone as far as first-stage preparations for resurrecting live nuclear weapon testing by Russia, China and the US, plus the virtual collapse of arms control measures, the modernisation of weapon systems and the emergence of ever more unhinged leaders with access to doomsday arsenals. And there can be no doubt about the horrific and catastrophic reality of nuclear conflict. Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War – A Scenario said “ . . it doesn’t take but one weapon to set off a chain reaction to unleash the current (US) arsenal, which is forward deployed in launch-on-warning positions and could be fired in as little as a minute—15 minutes for the submarines. There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill an estimated 5 billion people.” There is only a single target for nuclear weapons – humanity itself.
Existential threats are threats to the future of the human race and nuclear war is right up there with climate and bio-diversity collapse. These twin horrors should be high on the election agenda. There is talk about “managing” the risks of nuclear war, but that is a very dodgy word in its implication of a process in some kind of rational control. Moving the petrol can a little bit further away from the open fire is not managing the risk, it’s at best a temporary emergency step that might give us a breathing space. Getting rid of nuclear weapons is ultimately the only rational response to the risk they pose.
This is why all candidates in this election should be asked whether they will, if elected, sign the ICAN Parliamentary Pledge in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
This is a red line issue for progressing nuclear disarmament, for in Scotland at least, we will have the choice of a candidate who is unambiguous about the route to nuclear weapons elimination.
Go to our People and Parliament page to see all the candidates. More information and model letter at this link.