Since then familiarity with the risk has desensitised some people to the reality of it. We’ve lived now with the fear of being destroyed by nuclear weapons for over 70 years and since none have been dropped since 1945 it is tempting to conclude that maybe everything will be alright and nothing bad ever will happen. It is not hard to find people who will tell you with great confidence that all those lovely rockets frighten bad leaders so effectively that they are actually a very good way to keep the peace.
That has, however, always been a complacent and reckless way to think. We came desperately close to nuclear war over Cuba and only backed off because of a willingness of both Kennedy and Khrushchev to back away from complete disaster at the very last minute.
Any complacency now is even less well founded. We no longer have a world where only a few nations have the technology necessary to construct a nuclear bomb. The vast majority of nations can now develop a nuclear bomb any time that they choose. Most have wisely concluded that these weapons are a huge waste of national resources. The ones that haven’t don’t make comforting reading. India and Pakistan are pointing nuclear weapons at each other across a hotly disputed border at a time of steadily increasing religious bigotry in both nations. Israel possesses both a nuclear weapon and the ability to deliver it. Iran has taken its nuclear programme to the edge of realisation. Russia is ruled by a far-right nationalist. Then there is the small issue of North Korea.
There is no escaping the reality that North Korea is a very unpleasant dictatorship led by a man who is more interested in building up military might than he is in feeding his citizens. No amount of sanctions or UN resolutions is going to stop him from being determined to develop a missile that can reach the United States carrying a nuclear weapon.
There is also no escaping the reality that Donald Trump is a man who doesn’t like backing down. Instead he habitually responds to even the mildest criticism from a warm and friendly ally like Theresa May with a vitriolic attack. Every person who has ever worked closely with Donald Trump reports that he loses his temper frequently and that he likes to respond to a threat by raising the stakes and going on the offensive. Indeed it is worse than that. He enjoys taking highly provocative actions in high risk situations without properly understanding the consequences. As his actions over Jerusalem have shown.
We therefore have two very dangerous people in power either of which could easily miscalculate and go for a pre-emptive strike of some kind. Our collective safety depends on a great deal of calm calculated rational decision making by far sighted national leaders. Both North Korea and the USA are led by people who react emotionally to the smallest damage to their own pride and who may well prefer to kill millions of people rather than back down and compromise. That isn’t the end of the risk. It only takes one software error or one malicious hacker to trigger a retaliation to a screen full of non-existent missiles.
In these circumstances there are two choices of action. One is the old strategy of relying on a few cuddly democratic nations possessing enough weapons to intimidate their enemies into doing nothing. That strategy cannot possibly work as more and more nations acquire nuclear weapons.
The obvious alternative is to work on international co-operation to get rid of these weapons. The obvious starting point for that is to get a deal done between China and the US on North Korea. For once Trump did exactly the right thing in making an early state visit to China to try and sort out the issue. He did exactly the wrong thing in thinking he could lecture the Chinese and get them to control their ally.
The only thing that will work with China is to offer them a deal that leaves their own country more secure. What is needed is an assurance that the US will not seek to unite the two Koreas and that it recognises China’s leading role in North Korea. If that can be guaranteed then it is entirely possible that the Chinese government can be persuaded to rid itself of a difficult and unpredictable ally. Instead of offering a hard practical exchange of guarantees of peace and security the US President seems determined to carry on making noises about launching pre-emptive “surgical” strikes on North Korea.
The world is currently watching a gambler conducting a high risk strategy, trying to bluff one minute, threaten the next and hope that he can raise the stakes enough to get everyone else to fold their cards. Unfortunately calculating the best way of avoiding nuclear war isn’t like calculating the odds on a game of cards or a business deal. And Trump went bankrupt when he ran a casino.
It is entirely possible to thrash out a deal between China, Russia and the US to take the heat out of the North Korea situation.
That is not what Donald Trump and his team are doing. Sending warships close to the coast of China is not a great way to win their friendship. Just imagine the reaction in the US if Chinese warships arrived off their coast.
The UK could play a really important role in acting as a mediator between the US and China or the US and Russia. Instead it is spending hundreds of billions of pounds on nostalgia. Trident doesn’t make us safer. It helps Putin. He uses its existence to convince the Russian people that they are at risk and so must be led by a strong man. Trident also diverts massive resources away from both really useful things like investment in the NHS and also from sensibly cautious spending on genuine military security. The UK’s conventional armed forced are desperately short of the staff and the quality equipment they need to properly respond to the frequent humanitarian and military crises that now exist because too much of the budget is going on one single clumsy outdated weapon.
When wars approach two ways of thinking usually dominate. One is great excitement at the prospect of a fight. People who think that way preach the importance of building up weapon stocks and taking on the enemy fearlessly. Occasionally, as when dealing with the rise of fascism, that is actually the right response. More frequently, their thinking produces a horrible disaster that kills millions. As it did a hundred years ago during the completely unnecessary First World War.
The other way of thinking looks for ways to achieve realistic, messy, workable compromises that pull us back from the brink. Just at the moment we need a lot of people pressing very hard for that particular option to be followed. Because we have two genuine psychopaths with their fingers on some very powerful weapons. How could that possibly go wrong?