It is my thesis that it is not only imprudent but foolish to an extreme unprecedented in the events of the human species to have so large an arsenal of weapons of such destructive power simply available. Now, the prompt effects of nuclear war are reasonably well known. I will say a few words about them, but I want to concentrate mainly on the more recently discovered, more poorly known, delayed longer-term and global effects.
Imagine the destruction of New York City by two one-megaton nuclear explosions in a global war. You could choose any other city on the planet, and in a nuclear war you can be reasonably confident that that city would suffer some similar fate. Starting at the World Trade Center and continuing about ten miles in all directions, the effects would play out. You know about the fireball and the shock waves, the prompt neutrons and gamma rays, the fires, the collapsing buildings, the sorts of thing that were responsible for most of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the bomb light also sets fires, some of which are blown out by the shock wave as the mushroom cloud rises. Others are not.
And these conflagrations can grow. And in many cases, although certainly not all, the conflagrations merge to produce a firestorm. Recent work suggests that firestorms should be much more common and much more severe than had been expected in earlier research, producing the kind of fire as in a well-tended fireplace with an excellent draft. The net result, as advertised: No cities are left standing. But that's the least of the problem.
Beyond the obliteration of the cities is the production of a pall of sooty smoke sitting not just above the city but carried by the fire to quite high altitudes, where this dark smoke is heated by the Sun, which then makes it expand still more. This happens, obviously, not just above one target but above many or most targets.
Cities and petrochemical facilities would be preferentially targeted. Prevailing winds would blow the fine particles in the same direction, from west to east. In anything like a full exchange something like ten thousand nuclear weapons would be detonated.
Some ten days later, there would still be a few nuclear explosions from, I don't know, nuclear-submarine commanders who have not been told that the war was over. The smoke and dust would circulate all around the planet in longitude and spread poleward and equatorward in latitude. The Northern Hemisphere would be almost entirely socked in with smoke and dust. You would see outriders, plumes of smoke in the Southern Hemisphere. The cloud would then cross the equator well into the Southern Hemisphere. And while the effects would be somewhat less in the Southern Hemisphere, sunlight would dim and the temperatures would fall there as 'well.
Some calculations have been done at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in which a five-thousand- megaton war occurs in July. The widespread distribution of smoke twenty days after the war is over would produce temperature declines as much as fifteen to twenty-five centigrade degrees below normal.
The net result, as you might imagine, is bad. The effects are global. It appears that they last for months, possibly years. Imagine what disastrous worldwide consequences the destruction of agriculture alone would have. The northern midlatitude target zone is precisely the region that is the principal source of food exports (and experts) to the rest of the world. Even countries nowhere near malnutrition today-Japan, for example- could utterly collapse in a nuclear war from the clouds blown eastward from China, an almost certain target in a nuclear war. Even apart from that, if there were no climatic effects in Japan, and not a single nuclear weapon dropped on Japan, it turns out that more than half the food that people eat there is imported. That alone would kill enormous numbers of people in Japan, and the actual effects would be much worse.
When scientists try to estimate what the consequences of a nuclear war would be, you have to worry not just about the prompt effects. They would be bad enough. The World Health Organization calculates that in an especially nasty nuclear war the prompt effects might kill almost half the people on the planet. You also have to worry about nuclear winter, the cold and the dark that I've just been describing; you have to worry about such facts that those conditions kill not just people and agricultural plants and domesticated animals but the natural ecosystem as well. At just the point that survivors might want to go to the natural ecosystem to live off it, it would be severely stressed.
There is a kind of witches' brew of effects that have been very poorly studied by the various defense establishments, some more than others. These include, for example, pyrotoxins, the smogs of poison gas produced from the burning of modern synthetics in cities, increased ultraviolet light from the partial destruction of the protective ozone layer, and the intermediate timescale radioactive fallout, which turns out to be some ten times more than confident assurances by miscellaneous governments have had it. And so on. The net result of the simultaneous imposition of these independently severe stresses on the environment will certainly be the destruction of our global civilization, including Southern Hemisphere nations, nations far removed from the conflict-nations, if you can find any, that had no part of the quarrel between the United States and the Soviet Union-and, of course, northern midlatitude nations, it goes without saying.
Beyond that, many biologists believe that massive extinctions are likely of plants, of animals, of microorganisms, the possibility of a wholesale restructuring of the kind of life we have on Earth.
It would probably not be as severe as the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe, but possibly approaching it. A number of scientists have said that under those circumstances they cannot exclude the extinction of the human species.
Now, extinction seems to me serious. Hard to think of something more serious, more worthy of our attention, more crying out to be prevented. Extinction is forever. Extinction undoes the human enterprise. Extinction makes pointless the activities of all of our ancestors back those hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Because surely if they struggled for anything, it was for the continuance of our species. And yet the paleonto-logical record is absolutely clear. Most species become extinct. There's nothing that guarantees it won't happen to us. In the ordinary course of events, it might happen to us. Just wait long enough. A million years is quite young for a species. But we are a peculiar species. We have invented the means of our own self-destruction. And it can be argued that we show only modest disinclination to use it.
This is what in a number of Christian theologies is called crimes against Creation: the massive destruction of beings on the planet, the disruption of the exquisitely balanced ecology that has tortuously grown up through the evolutionary process on this planet. So, since this is clearly recognized as such a theological crime as well as all the other kinds of crimes, it is reasonable to ask where are the religions-the established religions, the incidental independent-thinker religionists-on nuclear war?
It seems to me this is the issue above all others on which religions can be calibrated, can be judged. Because certainly the preservation of life is essential if the religion is to continue. Or anything else. And for me personally, I believe there is simply no more pressing issue. Whatever else we're interested in, it is fundamentally compromised by nuclear war. Whatever personal hopes we have for the future, ambitions for children and grandchildren, generalized expectations for future generations-they are all fundamentally threatened by the danger of nuclear war.
It seems to me that there are many respects in which religions can play a benign, useful, salutary, practical, functional role in the prevention of nuclear war. And there are still other ways that are maybe longer shots but, considering the stakes, are well worth considering. One has to do with perspective.
Now, not all religions have this perspective on the stewardship of the Earth by men and women, but they could. The idea is that this world is not here for us only. It is for all human generations to come. And not just for humans. Or even if you took only a very narrow view of the world, if you were a speciesist in the same sense as being a racist or a sexist, still you would have to be very careful about all those other nonhuman species, because in many intricate ways our lives depend on them. I remind you of the elementary fact that we breathe the waste products of plants and plants breathe the waste products of humans. A very intimate relationship if you think about it. And that relationship is responsible for every breath you take. We in fact depend on the plants, it turns out, a lot more than the plants depend on us. So that sense that this is a world that is worth taking care of is, it seems to me, something that could be at the heart of religions that wished to make a significant contribution to the human future.
Then there are more direct kinds of political activity. For example, religious people played a role in the abolition of slavery in the United States, and elsewhere. Religions played a fundamental role in the independence movement in India and in other countries and the civil rights movement in the United States. Religions and religious leaders have played very important roles in getting the human species out of situations that we should never have gotten into that profoundly compromised our ability to survive, and there is no reason religions could not in the future take on similar roles. There are, of course, occasional circumstances, individual clergypersons who have taken that role in this particular crisis, but it is hard to see any major religion that has made this kind of political activity its foremost objective.
