{"id":14165,"date":"2023-04-16T17:30:43","date_gmt":"2023-04-16T15:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/?p=14165"},"modified":"2023-04-19T18:38:52","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T16:38:52","slug":"facing-nuclear-vulnerabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/facing-nuclear-vulnerabilities\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Facing Nuclear Vulnerabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Beno\u00eet Pelopidas<\/a>
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On 12 October 2022, the French President seemed worried about the growing number of references to nuclear weapons in the public arena following Russian threats, and declared on the France\u00a02 national television channel: \u2018The less we talk about nuclear weapons, the more credible they are.\u2019 It is certainly the case that we usually do not talk about them, except during occasional panics whenever a crisis or a threat suddenly reminds us of the destructive capacity of these weapons and the inability of states to protect their populations from nuclear explosions.<\/p>\n

The State of Nuclear Weapons in 2023<\/h3>\n

There are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world as of 2023, in the hands of nine states (in chronological order of acquisition of nuclear weapon systems: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea), plus five NATO member states (Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey) that hosts American nuclear weapons. These fourteen states are all located in the Northern Hemisphere.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The vast majority of these weapons have a greater destructive capacity than the bomb that levelled the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The United States and Russia alone possess more than 90 percent of the world\u2019s nuclear weapons, but this figure is misleading because the smaller nuclear arsenals of the other nuclear states are also capable of ending civilisation as we know it. If 1% of these weapons were to be detonated on cities, current climate models suggest this would result in a \u2018nuclear winter\u2019 that would produce a global famine<\/a> likely to kill over a billion people. Finally, in 2021, there were 1,800 tons of highly enriched plutonium and uranium left on the planet\u2009\u2013\u2009enough to make more than 195,000 bombs similar to the one that destroyed Hiroshima.<\/p>\n

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Copyrights: Sciences Po’s Cartography Studio<\/p><\/div>\n

Two observations must be added to this state of affairs. First, analysts and intelligence services have grossly overestimated the desire of non-nuclear-weapon states to acquire nuclear weapons<\/a>. In fact, the demand for bombs has been fed by the rhetoric of nuclear-armed states, including the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which present them as an indispensable, strictly defensive, and risk-free guarantor of national security, and by the technology transfers<\/a> in which these states have engaged. Second, it is essential to bear in mind that the effects of the world\u2019s nuclearisation are not all known.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the extreme difficulty of locating nuclear ballistic missile submarines combined with the acceleration in their ability to deliver nuclear violence\u2009\u2013\u2009ballistic missiles move around twenty times faster than the bombers that used to carry the explosives\u2009\u2013\u2009has made it almost impossible to destroy the explosive before it is launched or to intercept it before it reaches its target. Hence, since the beginning of the 1960s at the latest, it is no longer possible to protect populations from these explosions. Being reassured Itby the absence of unwanted nuclear explosions thus far would, however, be wrong.(1)<\/sup><\/a>It is also false to say that nuclear weapons have only exploded twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear-weapon states have conducted more than 2,000 nuclear tests with massive health and environmental consequences.<\/span><\/span>