J. Pharoah Doss: Should all nations possess a nuclear deterrent?

by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier

Decades ago, a question was quietly posed to the international community. Would the world be safer if all nations possessed a nuclear deterrent? The answer was no, followed by another question. What if they fell into the wrong hands? But an insistence that nuclear weapons were in the “right hands” propelled the world into the nuclear age.

In 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Nazis were developing a nuclear bomb. Einstein and Szilard implored Roosevelt to create nuclear weapons before Hitler. 

In 1942 the United States entered World War II and started to develop nuclear weapons in the top-secret Manhattan Project. By May 1945, Hitler was dead, and Nazi Germany was defeated, but the United States was still at war with Japan, who vowed to never surrender.

By this time, US nuclear weapons were operational, but US President Harry Truman faced a moral dilemma.

Truman opposed invading Japan. The estimated loss of American lives made the invasion suicidal. Even if Truman was willing to accept the high American casualty rate, victory was still predicated on the annihilation of the Japanese population. Truman’s advisors rationalized if a nuclear attack forced Japan to surrender, that would spare the lives of American troops and the Japanese population.

However, the Manhattan Project scientists thought the moral issue extended far beyond the war with Japan. They petitioned President Truman urging him not to use nuclear weapons. The scientists stated they developed “the bomb” to counterattack the Nazis. Once Germany was defeated, that danger was averted. The scientists believed America’s lead in the field of atomic power brought the moral obligation of restraint. “If we were to violate this obligation our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. It would then be more difficult for us to live up to our responsibility of bringing the unloosened forces of destruction under control.”

In August 1945 the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan surrendered as Truman’s advisors predicted, but four years later the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear weapon test resulting in a nuclear standoff between the rival superpowers.

During the cold war period, there was a nuclear double standard. Nations agreed nuclear weapons threatened civilization but wanted their own arsenal to deter other nuclear powers. Therefore, Britain and France developed nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union, China developed nuclear weapons to deter the United States plus the Soviet Union, Israel developed nuclear weapons to secure their existence in a hostile region, and India developed weapons to deter China and Pakistan.

Every military conflict that involved conventional forces took place in countries without a nuclear deterrent during the first decades of the nuclear age. After these costly conflicts were deemed unnecessary in hindsight and it was clearly understood the nuclear genie was never returning to the bottle, experts quietly asked if the world would be safer if every country possessed a nuclear deterrent.

The question was ignored because the answer was feared. Other experts believed agreements between nations and international law were a reliable deterrent amongst civilized nations going into the 21st century.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. The countries that were behind the iron curtain sought independence and protection against future Russian aggression. Ukraine was a strategic territory within the Soviet Union. It possessed one-third of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal.

In 1994, Ukraine destroyed its nuclear arsenal in exchange for agreements made by Russia, Great Britain, and the United States that they would refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

Almost three decades later, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Ukraine was not a country and belonged to Russia. Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. Since Russia has nuclear weapons, no neighboring nation is willing to assist with troops to help fight back an illegal invasion. A Ukrainian member of parliament told the media, “Ukraine is the only nation in human history which gave up their nuclear arsenal, the third biggest in the world in 1994, with guarantees from the US, UK, and Russia. Where are those guarantees?”

Apparently, there are no guarantees in international relations except for the nuclear deterrent.

 

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