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The case for abolishing nuclear weapons
From Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, Henry Holt & Company, Inc., New York, 1998, p. 9.
Nuclear weapons are distinguished above all by their unparalleled destructive power. Their singularity, from a moral point of view, lies in the fact that the use of just a few would carry the user beyond every historical benchmark of indiscriminate mass slaughter. Is it necessary, fifty-three years after Hiroshima, to rehearse the basic facts? Suffice it to recall the old rule of thumb that one bomb can destroy one city. A large nuclear weapon today may possess a thousand times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima-far more than enough to annihilate any city on earth. A single Trident II submarine has the capacity to deliver nearly two hundred warheads, which could lay waste any nation, giving another rule of thumb: one boat, one nation. The use of a mere dozen nuclear weapons against, say, the dozen largest cities of the Untied States, Russia, or China, causing tens of millions of deaths, would be a human catastrophe without parallel. The use of a few hundred nuclear weapons, not to speak of a thousand, would raise these already incomprehensible losses by an order of magnitude, leaving the imagination in the dust. Because so few weapons can kill so many people, even far-reaching disarmament proposals would leave us implicated in plans for unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The sole measure that could have freed us from this burden was abolition. But abolition, as long as the Cold War lasted, was ruled out…
The experience of our [twentieth] century taught us that genocide was the worst of all crimes, but a nuclear "priesthood" taught us that to threaten it, and even to carry it out, not only was justifiable but was our inescapable duty. Every scruple in the human conscience declared that we must never risk extinguishing our species-the supreme crime against humanity, and the only crime greater than genocide-but solemn doctrine declared that it was essential to threaten this act. All thoughts that led toward other conclusions had to go unthought-and unacted upon. These were the truly "unthinkable" thoughts of the Cold War period…
Today, the terms of the nuclear predicament have been altered fundamentally. The barrier of impossibility has fallen. The Soviet Union has unexpectedly-almost magically-cleared itself out of the way. Gone is the murderous, implacable hostility between global rivals… What distinguishes our moment is that, for the first time since the invention of the weapons, it is entirely reasonable to believe that the goal actually can be reached. The opportunity for action that has now opened up is, above all else, an opportunity to heal our fractured selves. It is an opportunity to end the forced cohabitation with horror, the shotgun wedding with final absurdity-to snap out of the trance of the Cord War, annul the suicide pact dictated by the doctrine of deterrence, and take the step that alone can free us from nuclear danger and corruption-namely, the abolition of nuclear weapons.
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