A Hyunmoo II ballistic missile is fired during an exercise in South Korea on September 4, 2017. South Korea’s military says it conducted a live-fire exercise simulating an attack on North Korea’s nuclear test site, in response to the latter nation’s latest nuclear test. (Photo: South Korea Defense Ministry via NUR)
In the following excerpt from her introduction to Sleepwalking to Armageddon, pioneering anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott explains why nuclear catastrophe is still a very real and pressing danger to humanity.
Despite Donald Trump’s vows to seal the US border and eradicate ISIS, the real terrorists of the world today are the United States and Russia. They possess 94 percent of the nuclear weapons on the planet, and they hold the rest of the world hostage to their provocative and self-serving foreign policies and misadventures. As a result, we are closer to nuclear war now, at the start of the twenty-first century, than we’ve ever been before, even during the height of the Cold War.
While we must be concerned about global warming — the other existential threat to the planet — it is imperative that we do not take our eyes off the nuclear threat. To do so is to risk sleepwalking to Armageddon. Nine countries around the globe are known to have nuclear weapons, many of them on hair-trigger alert. In at least five separate locations in the world, two or more nuclear-armed countries are in actual or proxy wars or standoffs that could escalate at any time. And the United States has elected to the presidency…