Reacting too late: humanity’s greatest existential crisis

When existential crises come, they come not single spies but in battalions. Oppenheimer, the film of the moment, alongside Barbie, tells the story of the Manhattan Project and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that hastened the end of the second world war. The monster of nuclear war has stalked us ever since, an existential crisis that has others for close company.At The BMJ’s south Asia editorial board meeting last week an academic hypothesised that, although nuclear armament might not have prevented India and Pakistan from political and social turmoil, it did prevent them from military decimation by foreign powers, an outcome seen in some Arab countries and in Africa. The same argument might be made for Iran, Israel, and North Korea.Is it, though, a risk worth taking? An existential crisis traded for national security? The calculus seems awry. The risk of nuclear war is growing, not receding, according…
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