How Frightened Do We Have to Become?
For most of my life, nuclear war has existed somewhere in the background.
Sometimes it was loud. Sometimes it was barely mentioned. But it never really disappeared.
Today, the subject is becoming harder to ignore.
Nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals. Old arms-control agreements have weakened or expired. Wars are being fought near the borders of nuclear-armed nations. Tensions involving Russia, NATO, China, North Korea, Iran, and the United States have become part of the daily news cycle.
Painting from EMN Online Museum of Art by Gio Kadagishvili “Pieta”, Oil on canvas, 24x30in
That does not mean nuclear war is about to begin.
It does mean we should stop pretending it is impossible.
There is a danger in exaggerating the threat. Fear can become its own form of paralysis. If people are constantly told that catastrophe is just around the corner, they eventually stop listening.
But there is also danger in becoming accustomed to risk.
Perhaps that is where we are now.
Most of us do not wake up in the morning thinking about nuclear weapons. We make coffee. We go to work. We pay bills. We complain about traffic. We argue about politics. Meanwhile, thousands of nuclear weapons remain in existence, some ready for use within minutes.
The frightening part is not that world leaders necessarily want a nuclear war.
Most almost certainly do not.
The frightening part is that wars do not always begin because someone carefully planned the final outcome.
They can begin with a mistake.
A radar signal is misunderstood.
A missile crosses the wrong border.
A military exercise is interpreted as preparation for attack.
A computer gives people the wrong information.
A leader believes there are only minutes left to respond.
One nation retaliates.
Another escalates.
Suddenly, people who never intended to start a nuclear war are trying desperately to prevent one.
If you want a surprisingly good fictional example of how that kind of chain reaction could unfold, watch the 1983 film WarGames.
The technology in the movie is dated, of course, but the central idea is not.
A teenager accidentally gains access to a military computer and believes he is playing a game. The computer does not understand the difference between simulation and reality. What begins as an innocent mistake starts moving the United States and the Soviet Union toward a nuclear confrontation.
Nobody begins the story intending to start World War III.
That is precisely the point.
The danger comes from misunderstanding, automation, bad assumptions, and people reacting to information they believe to be true.
The film eventually arrives at one of the simplest conclusions ever offered about nuclear war:
Some games cannot be won.
The only winning move is not to play.
For my wife, Hiroshima is not merely a name in a history book.
As a teenager, she traveled to Japan as an exchange student and lived with a Japanese family for four months. Her host family felt it was important that she make the extra trip to Hiroshima and see for herself what had happened only sixteen years earlier.
She went.
She was alone that day, the only Caucasian visitor among the Japanese people attending the memorial, and she remembers how much she stood out.
She had not been prepared for what she would see.
She did not understand, at that age, that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had taken place during the final days of World War II and was followed shortly afterward by Japan’s surrender.
She knew there had been a war.
She knew there had been a bomb.
But she had never connected those facts with the human reality of what happened in that city.
Then she stood there.
She saw forms of human bodies permanently blasted into stone walls where people had been standing at the moment of the explosion.
That is not the kind of thing a date in a history book can prepare you for.
There is a difference between learning that a war ended and standing in the place where tens of thousands of ordinary people died in the process.
There is a difference between reading military history and confronting what military decisions meant to families, children, homes, and lives that ended in an instant.
That experience gave Hiroshima a meaning no textbook could have given her.
It also exposes one of the great dangers in the way we talk about nuclear weapons.
We use tidy phrases such as deterrence, tactical weapons, escalation, strategic response, and acceptable losses.
Hiroshima was not tidy.
Nuclear war never will be.
And that may be the greatest weakness in the idea of nuclear deterrence.
Deterrence depends on everyone behaving rationally, every time.
It depends on machines working correctly.
It depends on intelligence being accurate.
It depends on leaders understanding one another.
It depends on communication remaining open during the very moments when fear, anger, confusion, and distrust are at their highest.
For more than eighty years, somehow, humanity has managed not to cross that final line again.
That is worth remembering.
It tells us something important.
We are capable of restraint.
There have been moments when military officers, presidents, premiers, diplomats, and ordinary human beings chose caution instead of escalation.
So perhaps the answer is not more fear.
Perhaps the answer is greater awareness.
Fear asks, “What terrible thing is going to happen?”
Awareness asks, “What can we do to keep it from happening?”
Those are very different questions.
We should want governments to communicate even when they despise one another.
We should want treaties that reduce weapons and increase inspections.
We should want military leaders to have reliable channels for preventing misunderstandings.
We should want political leaders to understand that restraint is not weakness.
And perhaps most importantly, we should stop treating nuclear war as just another political talking point.
There is no Republican nuclear war.
There is no Democratic nuclear war.
There is no Russian nuclear war, Chinese nuclear war, Iranian nuclear war, or American nuclear war once enough weapons are exchanged.
There is only human loss.
The strange thing is that humanity already knows this.
My wife stood in a place that proved it.
She stood there only sixteen years after the blast, surrounded by people whose country had lived through it, and saw physical traces of human beings who had been there at the instant everything changed.
We do not need another Hiroshima or Nagasaki to teach us what these weapons can do.
We do not need millions of deaths to prove that escalation was a bad idea.
We already know.
So perhaps the question is not whether nuclear war is coming.
Perhaps the question is why we continue moving close enough to the possibility that we have to ask.
How frightened do we have to become before we finally decide that nobody wins?
Maybe we do not need to become more frightened at all.
Maybe we simply need to become more awake.
For those who feel called to look a little deeper, Robert D. Sears’ work offers further reflections on spirituality, personal growth, and the timeless questions that shape the human journey. EMN invites readers to continue exploring his essays and books at dinojamesbooks.com—and perhaps discover a new perspective, question, or insight along the way.
For additional information, Robert can be reached at Robert@dinojamesbooks.com.
