WorldView:Most military artefacts have an indefinable life-span. As we have no way of knowing when the first human was slashed to death, nor when the last one will succumb to such injuries, it is impossible to define the life-span of the sword, writes Tony Kinsella
Nuclear weapons are an exception. Their practical military life began on July 16th, 1945, when the US detonated the world's first fission weapon, or atomic bomb, in New Mexico and followed three weeks later with the only atomic attacks our planet has known, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The practical military life of the atomic bomb ended three years later when the first Soviet nuclear test ended the US monopoly. No military strategist would ever subsequently develop a credible strategy for the use of nuclear weapons. The best was the infamous nuclear stalemate known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or Mad, during the cold war.
These early bombs were in the 20 kiloton range, the equivalent of detonating 20,000 tonnes of conventional explosives. Their effect, as with all subsequent nukes, lay in their explosive power and nuclear fireball, rather than in their radioactive fallout.
The shockwave from an air-detonated weapon kills people, smashes buildings, and ruptures fuel tanks, on a massively greater scale, but in exactly the same way as conventional bombs. The incandescent flash carbonises people, ignites wreckage and fuel, creating a fire storm. The mushroom cloud often associated with nuclear explosions is produced by any big explosion. Although radiation causes gruesome deaths and illnesses, it is a secondary element. US incendiary air raids on Japanese cities killed more civilians than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The US tested the first thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, in 1952. The first Soviet test, of a weapon designed by Andrei Sakharov, followed in 1953.
Thermonuclear weapons use a Hiroshima-type atomic bomb to trigger nuclear fusion. This mimicking of the sun's nuclear power can yield an explosion the equivalent of 100,000,000 (100 megatons) of conventional explosive, or 5,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The most powerful in today's arsenals is the US nine megaton B-53.
The UK (1952), France (1960), and China (1964), all joined the nuclear, and eventually the thermonuclear, club. Throughout this cold war arms race, no one participant ever succeeded in outpacing the other to the point of making a nuclear conflict "winnable", yet these weapons continue to threaten the very survival of our species and undermine our global security 58 years later.
Several nations have developed fission weapons, but have not demonstrably crossed the thermonuclear threshold. India tested its first weapon in 1974. Pakistan followed in 1998, and North Korea in 2006. Israel is widely assumed to have a significant arsenal.
Apartheid South Africa had six bombs, which were dismantled under president Mandela. The newly independent states of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine all inherited Soviet nuclear weapons, but chose to return them to Russia.
Realising both the danger, and the pointlessness, of nuclear weapons, the world began to discuss limiting, and eventually removing them, in the 1950s. Ireland's then minister for foreign affairs Frank Aiken proposed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1958, and it was opened for signing a decade later. The NPT recognises five nuclear weapon states, US, Russia, China, France and the UK, which undertake not to provide such weapons to other states, to reduce their nuclear arsenals until they are finally eliminated, and to make civil nuclear technology available. Non-weapon states undertake not to develop such weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) polices the agreement. India, Israel and Pakistan are non-signatories, North Korea withdrew in 1993.
As today's reality is that none of the five NPT weapon states threaten each other, Mad, the only military nuclear strategy that can be said to have worked, no longer applies. If the strategy is obsolete, then so are its weapons.
If nuclear deterrence can be said to work between nuclear weapons states, it has demonstrably failed between such states and their non-nuclear adversaries. The UK's nuclear arsenal did not dissuade Buenos Aires from invading the Falklands, any more than the 4,000 nukes in the active US arsenal intimidate Iraqi insurgents.
Israel's arsenal, including submarine-launched weapons, was designed to counter a massive invasion by its Arab neighbours, a threat the country no longer faces. North Korea's five kiloton test guarantees Pyongyang against invasion but barely poses a threat beyond the Korean peninsula.
Although the Pakistani-Indian mini-version of Mutual Assured Destruction has a degree of logic when viewed through the warped atomic prism, a nuclear conflict on the sub-continent would still destroy the planet's climate, according to work published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.*
The current Iranian controversy highlights many of the unresolved issues in the nuclear weapons debate. Iran, as a signatory of the NPT, is entitled to develop nuclear power. Teheran claims its programme is entirely civilian, and while many question that claim, no proof to the contrary has yet been offered.
The harsh reality is that any state determined to develop nuclear weapons can probably do so. The more outside assistance they receive, the faster the process, but developing simple fission weapons lies within the technical and industrial competence of dozens of countries.
So we have useless weapons, capable of destroying our species, which swallow vast amounts of defence budgets, often leaving security forces short of helicopters, secure radios, body armour or essential vehicles. Nuclear expenditures partly explain the absence of deployable forces for Darfur or Somalia.
Calling time on the dangerous nonsense of nuclear weapons is long overdue. Nuclear powers which have ratified the NPT have undertaken to gradually disarm, to deploy fewer weapons with fewer warheads.
This undertaking needs to be gently, but firmly and repeatedly, brought to the fore of the international agenda by all NPT signatories. EU members should nudge the union's two nuclear powers, France and the UK, towards meeting their engagements.
The US and Russia, who between them account for almost 90 per cent of the world's nuclear arsenal, deserve special pressure, and together with China need to be constantly reminded of their nuclear disarmament commitments. Pressure on India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan could steadily grow as part of such an approach.
In such a context of gradual but continuous removal of these useless and barbaric weapons, the pressure on Tehran, and all of tomorrow's Tehrans, not to go down the pointless kiloton road would become irresistible.
• www.copernicus. org/EGU/acp/acpd/6/11817/acpd-6-11817_p.pdf
• Tony Kinsella is a writer and international commentator who has specialised in arms control and security issues