ABSTRACT
Efforts to prevent or limit wars are not new. Rules for its conduct and courts for the arbitration of disputes have strengthened the moral and religious barriers against violence between nations. Attempts to achieve disarmament or arms control, however, have been less successful. Of significance here were the International Peace Conferences held in 1899
and 1907 in The Hague, which sought to codify the rules of war and establish an institution to settle international disputes, which later effloresced into the International Court of Justice. The extensive use of poison gases in the First World War led to negotiation of the exemplary Geneva Protocol in 1925 that prohibits the use of poison gases and bacteriological weapons in war; it has been generally observed by nations, except for a few aberrations like Italy using poison gases in Abyssinia and Japan using biological agents in China during the thirties. This was the situation before the Second World War ended, ushering in the
nuclear age. Despite feckless attempts that have periodically been made to shade over the difference between nuclear and conventional weapons, the obvious bears reiteration that nuclear weapons are different. Why? Simply stated, nuclear weapons make possible altogether new levels of destruction within extremely short timeframes, and there are no credible means to escape that damage for any length of time. It is common knowledge that the destruction by nuclear weapons arises from their blast, heat and radiation effects, which differs according to the yield, size and design features of the weapon. How the weapon is used, at ground level, or in an airburst mode or under water, affects the energy distribution due to blast, heat and radiation effects of nuclear weapons, which can be varied by the weapons designer. Roughly half the energy released by the typical nuclear weapon would be due to blast, about a third to heat and the remaining to ionizing radiation.1 But this only refers to its immediate effects. Most of the survivors would be killed by radiation from the resulting fallout. Two areas remain about which only speculation is possible. First, the long-term effects of a nuclear war on the ecology, climate and psychology of the survivors, and, second, the synergistic effects of two or
more effect, of nuclear explosions like heat and radiation, contamination of food and water, unavailability of medical services and so on. There is much reassurance currently that a nuclear war is a very remote
possibility. President Reagan’s belief that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought has passed into the folklore of the nuclear age. However, so long as nuclear weapons remain, the possibility of nuclear conflict cannot be ignored for, as Murphy’s Law postulates, if anything can go wrong, it will. For instance, during the Kargil conflict in South Asia in the summer of 1999, US intelligence found ‘disturbing evidence that the Pakistanis were preparing their nuclear arsenal for possible use … ’.2
