Wednesday marks the 80th birthday of the time the US employs the very first nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by the bombing of Nagasaki three days later on 9 August, but despite almost a century of lessons learned, nuclear warfare still remains an important threat.
Heinrichs explained that not only Moscow and Beijing continue to develop new nuclear capacities and delivery systems, but they are increasingly working together in direct opposition against the West, and more emphatically, the US
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An aerial photo of Hiroshima, Japan, shortly after the atomic bomb “Little Boy” was dropped in 1945. (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images)
“It is a much more complex nuclear threat to which the United States even had to contend with during the Cold War, where we just had one nuclear pear -opponent in the Soviet Union,” she said. “In that respect it is a serious problem, especially when both China and Russia invest in nuclear capacities and at the same time have revanchist goals.”
Despite the well -known immense destruction that would be accompanied by an atomic war between two nuclear countries, the concern has grown that the threat of Nuclear War is increasing.
The bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – who jointly killed around 200,000 people, excluding the dozens of thousands that later died of radiation poisoning and cancer – are attributed to the Second World War.
But the bombs did more than put an end to the deadliest war in human history – they forever changed the military doctrine, led to a nuclear arms race and confirmed the concept of deterrence by the theory of mutually insured destruction.
Earlier this year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists pulled the “Doomsday Clock” with one second forward – it closer to “Midnight”, or atomary collapse than ever before.
In January, the Council of Scientists and Security Officers who are responsible for the 78-year-old clock, It is used to measure the threat level of nuclear warfare, said that moving the clock to 89 seconds to midnight “indicates that the world is running at a run of an unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping Shake Hands during a meeting in Beijing on October 18, 2023. (Sergei Guneyev/Pool/AFP via Getty images)
Despite the escalated nuclear threats coming from Noord -Korea and international concern about the Iranian nuclear program, the threat level largely amounted to the three largest players in the nuclear arena: Russia, the US and China.
The increased level of threat was attributed to the refusal of Russia to meet international nuclear treaties in the midst of the continuous escalating war in Ukraine and his hostile opposition against NATO countries, as well as the insistence of China to expand his nuclear arsenal.
But the Bulletin, which was founded in 1945 by scientists from the Manhattan project to inform the public about the dangers of atomic warfare, also said that the US plays a role in the increased nuclear threat level.
“The US has taken its role as a voice of caution. It seems to be inclined to expand nuclear arsenal and to adopt an attitude that strengthens the belief that ‘limited’ use of nuclear weapons can be managed,” the Bulletin said. “Such misplaced trust could make us stumble in a nuclear war.”
But Heinrichs prevented the “alarmistic” message and argued that deterrence remains very real protection against nuclear warfare, even when Russia increasingly threatens Western countries with atomic use.
“I think it’s a serious threat. I don’t think it’s inevitable that we stare a kind of nuclear armageddon,” she said.
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A Yars intercontinental ballistic rocket is launched from an air field during military exercises in Russia on February 19, 2022. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)
Heinrichs argued that the most important threat is not the number of nuclear nuclear heads that have a nation, but in how they are in danger of using their capacities.
“I think when there is a threat of nuclear use, this is because opponents, in particular authoritarian countries, in particular Russia, are in danger of using nuclear weapons to invade another country. And that is where the greatest risk of deterioration failure,” she said. “It’s not because of the huge number of nuclear weapons.”
Heinrichs said that Russia is lowering the nuclear threshold by threatening to use nuclear weapons in a movement to force Western countries to capitulate their requirements, as in the case of catching territory in Ukraine and trying to refuse the NATO access.
Instead, she argued that the US and his allies should improve their deterrence by not only staying informed of their capacities, but to expand their nuclear reach in regions such as the Indo-Pacific.
A rocket launches on December 9, 2020 from the Plesetsk facility in the northwest of Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)
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“The answer is not to be so afraid of it or alerted that you capitulate, because you will only conceive more nuclear coercion if you do that,” she said. “The answer is to carefully communicate carefully with the Russians that they will not succeed due to nuclear coercion, that the United States also have credible answer options.
“We also have nuclear weapons, and we have credible and proportional answers, and so they shouldn’t take that path,” said Heinrichs. “That is how we retain nuclear peace. That is how we scare the conflict. And so we ensure that a nuclear weapon is not used.”
