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The residents of Hiroshima yesterday marked the 61st anniversary of the atomic bombing of their city. Nagasaki suffered the same fate three days later.
The world cannot plead ignorance to the destructive force of such weapons. Modern nuclear warheads carry in their payload a destructive power many times greater than those used on the Japanese cities. Yet mankind is still haunted by the threat of weapons of mass destruction, weapons that could terminate life, as we know it on the planet. There is no security in nuclear weaponry.
He did not know what weapons would be used, former US president Lyndon Baines Johnson once said, to fight the third world war but he knew what weapons would be used after it; stones.
Mutually assured destruction was a mindset of Cold War nuclear poker whereby one superpower would not attack another for fear of the reprisal. But in recent years, nuclear weaponry and its possible use have become almost respectable. So-called limited impact scenarios, where a device would be used to destroy a bunker or wipe out an army in the field, have entered the language of military planners. Surgical use of nuclear weapons is a contradiction.
If there is one message from Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is that nuclear weapons provide security for none and imperil us all.
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