This is a commentary by Mark Murphy, a longtime contributor to the Savannah Morning News.
In October 1962, 60 years ago this month, it became evident that the U.S.S.R. was
installing nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba, a nation only 90 miles from the coast of Florida.
The United States responded with a naval “quarantine” of Cuba, with orders to turn back any vessels containing offensive weapons. Squadrons of U.S bombers crowded Cuban radar screens. The resulting Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 intense days.
It was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.
President John F. Kennedy once estimated the odds of the crisis escalating to full-blown warfare were “somewhere between 1 in 3 and even.” Such a war would likely have resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million Americans (over half the U.S. population at that time) and a similar number of Russians.
I was born in 1962. The implications here are obvious.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought us, once again, to the brink of the
unthinkable: The end of all things, a nuclear Armageddon.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, ignoring two World Wars, once described the 1991
collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
This imperialist mindset provides the psychological foundation for his unwarranted invasion of Ukraine, a nation of 41 million whose recent westward political drift has not been to Putin’s liking. Ukraine has roots dating back well over 1,000 years. Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, predates Moscow by three centuries. The Ukraine is a large nation, about the size of Texas, with an abundance of natural resources coveted by Russia. The warm water port of Odessa on the Crimean Peninsula, the home of the Black Sea fleet during the Soviet era, has great strategic importance to Russia.
The idea of Ukraine increasing its ties to the European Union, and particularly the possibility of it potentially joining NATO (as several other former Soviet bloc countries have done) was a burr in Putin’s saddle.
Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24—the first large-scale military
operation on the European continent since the end of World War II.
But Putin miscalculated. His actions galvanized the nations of NATO, giving that sclerotic and inhomogeneous entity a unity of purpose not seen in decades. Historically neutral Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. An array of economic sanctions crippled the Russian economy.
And no one anticipated the steely resilience of the Ukrainian military, which has now taken the offensive and pushed the Russian forces backward over the last several weeks.
Putin’s response? More saber-rattling. A controversial partial mobilization of Russian
reservists, the first since World War II. A sham “referendum” in the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk resulting in the illegal Russian annexation of those regions. And, most ominous of all, the Russian threat to use “any means necessary” to defend itself.
By that, Putin could mean chemical weapons, like those previously used in Syria.
However, he’s specifically mentioned the possible use of nuclear weapons, saying he was “not bluffing” about their use.
According to the Arms Control Association, Russia has 6,490 nuclear warheads. The U.S. has 5,550. here are 150 U.S. nuclear
warheads stored in European bases, and the UK and France have a total of 515 nuclear devices between them. The detonation of a single tactical nuclear device could kill hundreds of thousands of people, with devastation like that seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
An all-out nuclear war would be devastating, possibly resulting in the end of humanity.
A full-scale nuclear war would directly kill billions of people. However, models suggest
that a nuclear war of that magnitude would also result in a worldwide temperature drop of 13-15 degrees Fahrenheit. This “nuclear winter” which would likely last for several years. It would be an environmental catastrophe, causing widespread crop failures, global economic collapse, anarchy, starvation, and further warfare. It would truly be the end of the world as we know it.
I have a 4-year-old granddaughter. Her name is Violet. We took her to her first college
football game this weekend. Her brown hair was in pigtails as she put on her red and black Georgia cheerleading outfit. Pom-pom in hand, she cheered on the Bulldogs to a victory over Auburn.
I want Violet to have more weekends like this one. She deserves to go to the beach and
feel the sand between her toes, to visit Disney World, and blow out the candles at a hundred birthday parties. She should be able to hang out with her friends, go hiking in rain forests, attend college and perhaps even study abroad. I want her to get married and have children, and eventually have grandchildren of her own someday.
I don’t wish for many things in life, but I do wish for a future for Violet.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Putin’s talk of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, endangers our children
