John Launer: Nuclear war—it’s time to face up to the risks

As a child I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union came within days or possibly hours of all-out global nuclear war. Since then, I’ve expected that nuclear weapons would be used one day but assumed that this might be between two smaller nuclear powers, possibly in Asia. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, however, a nuclear war starting in Europe seems more probable. Organisations tracking the risk of nuclear war, including the Pugwash conferences and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, regard this risk as greater now than ever.12In the past year or two, the rhetoric around nuclear weapons has changed frighteningly. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, has explicitly threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons (with as much as 10 times the explosive power of each of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or “strategic” ones, which are several thousand times as destructive…
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