Eighty years after Hiroshima, is the world any safer from nuclear war?

AS THE 80th anniversary of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rolls around next month, it is worth asking how safe is the world from another nuclear war. The aftermath of the US strike on Iran’s putative nuclear weapons facilities in June seems to have engendered a belief that the world has somehow stepped back from the brink.

Indeed, some even expect that Washington will now summon up its courage and decisively act against North Korea, never mind that Pyongyang has defence treaties with both China and Russia. The thinking seems to be that an Iran-like bombing raid would leave the world’s nuclear arsenals in safe hands, however that notion of safety is construed.

So perhaps this is a good moment to recount the times the world has come to the brink of all-out nuclear war – with all that it means for life on Earth. Everyone remembers the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Moscow had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Kennedy administration wanted the missiles withdrawn and ordered a naval blockade. As manoeuvres began, Soviet officers misinterpreted non-lethal depth charges from American surface ships as the onset of war. The Soviet submarine commander was about to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American aircraft carrier. But he needed the permission of a political officer, Captain Vasily Arkhipov, who judged the situation correctly and refused to give that permission. He thus saved both the US and the then Soviet Union from total devastation.