It begins in childhood. Our parents and siblings and those close to us teach us how to love. They teach us how to love ourselves and how to love others, and the balance between the two. For a cursed minority, however, the lesson they are taught, through violence, neglect, abuse, or indifference, is to envy love. Their psychological formation leaves them bereft of the basic human capacities for empathy and care, a vacuum they are compelled to fill with a compulsion for power, wealth, cruelty and envy. There is an Ethiopian saying that sums up perfectly this most crucial finding of psychological science – “The child who does not experience love will burn down the entire village to feel its warmth.”
Serhii Plokhy’s alarming warning in The Nuclear Age evokes a range of visceral responses. The first is deep memory. For readers who lived through the last 50 years, Plokhy’s narrative will resonate as the terrifying, then hopeful, backdrop to our lives. He reminds us that, for those of us who were children in the 1970s, the nuclear threat was present as a much more immediate terror than climate change, with its longer timeframe for potential human annihilation, is today.
He reminds us too, of the heady days of anti-nuclear protests in the 1980s, including the one-million-person march in New York city to demand an end to the nuclear arms race. And he brings our minds back to Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War, which enabled the most radical reduction in nuclear weapons in history. During the 1990s, which Plokhy calls the Disarmament Decade, both the US and Russia cut their nuclear arsenals by 80 per cent, allowing the threat of global nuclear annihilation to recede to the backs of our minds.
Reading The Nuclear Age also provokes deep anger at those whose recklessness and absence of conscience have constituted a crime against creation. Among those are President Dwight D Eisenhower, the general in the White House, who presided over the largest nuclear build-up in world history and twice threatened China with nuclear attack; Edward Teller, who led and rejoiced at the development of the hydrogen bomb, and was a key persuader of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars plan to develop X-ray lasers in space to be powered by his beloved creation; and Mao Zedong, who said that the large-scale use of nuclear weapons did not frighten him. If half the world’s population were to die in a nuclear war that defeated imperialism, Mao said, that would not be so bad. The world population would grow back, after all.
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The final section of Plokhy’s book provokes dread. In it, he issues a stark warning that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine marks a radically dangerous escalation on four counts. First, nuclear blackmail is a core part of Putin’s war plan. On the day of the invasion, Putin released a recorded warning that any country tempted to interfere would be met with consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history”. Such nuclear blackmail has continued throughout the war. Second, the Russian invasion has triggered a reversal of the 1990s Disarmament Decade. The treaties limiting nuclear arms are in tatters, and all the major powers are now rushing to increase their nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Third, Putin’s invasion, and the failure of the other nuclear powers to adequately respond, has incentivised further nuclear proliferation. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for guarantees of its independence and sovereignty. Putin’s invasion showed that, as Plokhy writes, no security guarantees can replace the power of nuclear weapons themselves as a deterrent. Other would-be nuclear states have taken note.
Fourth, Putin has demonstrated that nuclear energy sites within an enemy’s territory can be weaponised as potential nuclear assets. To cause a nuclear incident, one does not have to attack the plant directly. Cutting the nuclear power plant off from the electricity grid, causing the plant’s cooling system to fail, is sufficient to cause a nuclear disaster. From the first day of its invasion, Russia has targeted Ukraine’s two major nuclear power plants, Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia. Any of the world’s 440 existing nuclear reactors could similarly be targeted for use as a dirty bomb.
In the midst of the second World War, Plokhy quotes Adolf Hitler as having responded to the possibility of nuclear weapons development by saying, “The scientists in their unworldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven might someday set the globe on fire.” Almost a century later, those nuclear scientists have placed the future existence of every man, woman and child on Earth in the hands of mercurial leaders such as Putin, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un - leaders whose thirst for power, wealth, and cruelty may indeed drive them to “burn down the village to feel its warmth”.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy, and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC
