President Joe Biden and top subordinates have refused to publicly acknowledge the danger of nuclear war \u2014 even though it is\u00a0now higher<\/a>\u00a0than at any other time in at least 60 years. Their silence is insidious and powerful, and their policy of denial makes grassroots activism all the more vital for human survival.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was more candid. Speaking at American University, he\u00a0said<\/a>: \u201cA single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.\u201d Kennedy also noted, \u201cThe deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.\u201d Finally, he added, \u201cAll we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.\u201d<\/p>\n Kennedy was no dove. He affirmed willingness to use nuclear weapons. But his speech offered some essential honesty about nuclear war \u2014 and the need to seriously negotiate with the Kremlin in the interests of averting planetary incineration \u2014 an approach sorely lacking from the United States government today.<\/p>\n At the time of Kennedy\u2019s presidency, nuclear war would have been indescribably catastrophic. Now \u2014 with large arsenals of hydrogen bombs and what scientists know about \u201cnuclear winter<\/a>\u201d \u2014 experts have concluded that a nuclear war would virtually end agriculture and amount to\u00a0omnicide<\/a>\u00a0(the destruction of human life on earth).<\/p>\n In an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0after publication of his book\u00a0The Doomsday Machine<\/em>, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg summed up what he learned as an insider during the Kennedy administration:<\/p>\n What I discovered \u2014 to my horror, I have to say \u2014 is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then because they weren\u2019t including fire, which they found was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So the real effect would\u2019ve been over a billion \u2014 not 600 million \u2014 about a third of the Earth\u2019s population then at that time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ellsberg added:<\/p>\n What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983 and confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you call them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn\u2019t be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn\u2019t cause extinction. We\u2019re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine four months ago, the risks of global nuclear annihilation were at a peak. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its\u00a0Doomsday Clock<\/a>\u00a0at a mere 100 seconds from apocalyptic Midnight, compared to six minutes a decade ago. As Russia\u2019s horrific war on Ukraine has persisted and the U.S. government has bypassed diplomacy in favor of\u00a0massive arms shipments<\/a>, the hazards of a nuclear war between the world\u2019s two nuclear superpowers have increased.<\/p>\n But the Biden administration has not only remained mum about current nuclear war dangers; it\u2019s actively exacerbating them. Those at the helm of U.S. foreign policy now are ignoring the profound lessons that President Kennedy drew from the October 1962 confrontation with Russia over its nuclear missiles in Cuba. \u201cAbove all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,\u201d Kennedy\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cTo adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy \u2014 or of a collective death-wish for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n In sync with the overwhelmingly hawkish U.S. media, members of Congress and \u201cnational security\u201d establishment, Biden has moved into\u00a0new Cold War overdrive<\/a>. The priority aim is to make shrewd moves on the geopolitical chessboard \u2014 not to engage in diplomacy that could end the slaughter in Ukraine and prevent the war from causing\u00a0widespread starvation<\/a>\u00a0in many countries.<\/p>\n As scholar Alfred McCoy just\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cWith the specter of mass starvation looming for some 270 million people and, as the [United Nations] recently\u00a0warned<\/a>, political instability growing in those volatile regions, the West will, sooner or later, have to reach some understanding with Russia.\u201d Only diplomacy can halt the carnage in Ukraine and save the lives of millions now at risk of starvation. And the dangers of nuclear war can be reduced by rejecting the fantasy of a military solution to the Ukraine conflict.<\/p>\n
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