Philip Johnston, a 30-year veteran writer and editor of London’s daily Telegraph, writes a compelling article in the July 25 edition, entitled “A Nuclear War Could Wipe Out All of Humanity and Nobody Seems To Care.” He takes off from the “powerful” “Oppenheimer” film he had just seen, reviews some history of the Cold War in England, including that arms talks were signed when it was realized that “both sides had enough weapons to obliterate each other, so talks were needed to limit their production and ensure they were never used.”
But watching “Oppenheimer,” he says, “was to be struck by the fact that the threat remains as real as ever and yet no one seems to take it seriously anymore, not in the way they once did.” There are no marches or protests. Once everyone was familiar with the terms START and SALT. No longer. Pivotal meetings, such as that between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, “seem to belong to another age.”
Johnston mistakenly asserts that with Putin in the Kremlin, Armageddon now seems more likely than it did during the Soviet era, but asks, again, why there’s so little concern about it. “Perhaps we just don’t want to think about it, but misunderstandings can bring nuclear war perilously close to reality.” He debunks the claim that climate change is the real threat today that is going to burn up the planet. Not so. Children are being fed this fable, but the truth is that “we can always adapt to global warming … but a nuclear war would really mean the end of life as we know it, which was why Oppenheimer spent his remaining years after the war arguing for controls.”
While Johnston claims that dialogue is problematic, due to the Ukraine war and “Putin’s mad ravings,” the truth is that “nuclear deterrence requires keeping open lines of communication even to potential enemies and embedding codes of conduct into formal treaties…. Arms control was once a key objective of foreign policy and must be again, whatever else is happening in the world. The stakes are too high to let the process falter, as Oppenheimer well understood.” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/25/nuclear-war-wipe-out-humanity-nobody-cares/)
