The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The most destructive weapon ever devised is the weapon which enabled the two superpowers which emerged from World War II from ever engaging in a no-holds-barred war with one another. It is perhaps the greatest irony in military history that the magnitude of the nuclear weapons which the USA and the USSR developed from 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were the primary reason why neither of these enemy nations ever used any of them against one another.
The USA possessed just three atomic bombs in early 1945. The test bomb was detonated at White Sands, New Mexico in July, and the other two were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and 9 of that year. The level of destruction was more horrifying than even the most convinced of the physicists had imagined. After August, 1945, it became evident to the world that nuclear bombs might at some point in the future become capable of completely obliterating all life on Planet Earth.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD as it was appropriately known) kept both sides from ever using any of the fifty thousand bombs both of the superpowers eventually built. As many cynics observed, had some or most of those weapons have been fired more or less simultaneously, the last bombs to explode would merely rumble the rubble that would then have existed virtually everywhere.
Many conventional wars were fought during the Cold War. Americans fought with our allies in Korea against the North Koreans and the Chinese. In Viet Nam we fought again against quasi-communist insurgents, and in Afghanistan the Soviet Union fought against Islamist Afghans, but never during the Cold War did the USA and the USSR go to war against one another. The primary reason, and maybe the only reason, is that both nations knew the other had a huge nuclear arsenal, and it would be suicidal to go against one other with a mutually assured destruction of each other as the only possible result.
Russia has faded as the primary enemy of the United States since the Soviet Union disintegrated. Once the twenty-first century came, America and China have emerged as the two most powerful adversaries on earth. Until Xi Jingping himself became president of China, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, and the supreme commander of the Chinese military, relations between the old and the new superpowers were surprisingly cordial. Now the tension seems to be growing from month to month.
Singlehandedly, and almost certainly unintentionally, President Xi has turned the world military situation into a new Cold War. No doubt there will continue to be limited wars here and there, a current example being the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But an all-out nuclear war between America and China is as unthinkable as an all-out nuclear war between the USA and the USSR would have been. MAD is still the sanest policy to follow for the two world giants who are become increasingly wary of each other, and presumably everyone in the world knows it.
George Santayana said that those who do not study history are bound to repeat it. Are there enough students of history in Washington and Beijing to keep the nuclear lid fastened down in the twenty-first century, as leaders in Washington and Moscow did during the twentieth century? Shall the possession of weapons of mass destruction again be the factor which guides the world through the coming decades by avoiding an incomprehensibly massive war?
The awareness of MAD is not madness. Ironically, it may be our last best hope. Let us cautiously enter into the New Cold War.
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.