Let’s admit it, nuclear bombs have done more for world peace than conventional weapons

Nuclear weapons – or, rather, the threat of nuclear power – has in many ways helped keep the peace, writes Mark Almond. Let’s just hope they’re never used

When Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, Tom Lehrer announced his retirement because the absurdity of reality had rendered satire redundant.

Well-meaning people will, therefore, welcome the award of 2024’s Peace Prize to the Japanese group, Nihon Hidankyo, founded by survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They warn against the horrors of nuclear war and promote disarmament.

We can be confident that they won’t follow some recent political recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, who have all too often seen it as sanctifying them and their political ambitions – including the use of force.

Remember how, in his oration in Oslo after receiving his Nobel, Barack Obama eloquently justified the USA resorting to force to defend and impose its values, before bombing Libya?

More recently, Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed became a Nobel peace laureate as his vast and complex country was about to descend into inter-ethnic civil war.

Let’s not even mention the Middle Eastern laureates...

So many lives have been lost in the “conventional” wars fought since 1945 that there is an ethically dubious deficit in concentrating on the risk of the end of the world, which has not yet happened, and leaving everyday slaughter to take care of itself.

Even Albert Einstein’s famous (if semi-apocryphal) warning that if the third world war was fought with nuclear weapons, then we could be confident that the fourth would be fought with sticks and stones, has been falsified so far by experience.

When the troops of two nuclear powers, India and China, clashed in June 2020, along their disputed border in the Himalayas, the soldiers restricted themselves to bashing each other with clubs and throwing rocks at each other.

The need to avoid stepping on an escalatory ladder to a nuclear exchange restrained both Beijing and New Delhi from the kind of bitter border war which they had fought in the icy wastes back in 1962, when neither possessed the bomb.

On India’s western flank, Kashmir remains far from pacified, with Muslim insurgents backed by a nuclear armed Pakistan. India and Pakistan fought three serious wars between 1947 and 1971, when neither had the bomb, but have kept their rivalry contained below the threshold of nuclear war since both had atomic weapons after 1998.

Even North Korea’s regime has not used its much-sanctioned bomb, while non-nuclear Iran and nuclear Israel are on the verge of all-out war.

Non-nuclear states have fought wars with a nuclear-armed superpower without the bomb owner going atomic. North Korea and North Vietnam battled the Americans in the past and today, Ukraine resists Russian invasion. Ukrainians bemoan as a loss of deterrence the removal of Soviet-era warheads from their territory in the 1990s for paper guarantees from the west, but Kyiv did not actually control them. What is important is that the Kremlin has not bombed Kyiv.

Recently, President Biden admitted his fears that Vladimir Putin might have used Russia’s nuclear warheads in 2022, as his invasion of Ukraine went badly wrong. His ally, China, as well as the Americans, have warned Putin against going nuclear. It turns out that it is not the trump card for an aggressor because his nuclear peers want to maintain the taboo against using the bomb – even against the weak.

There is no guarantee that deterrence will always work, but consider how restrained even mass murderers like Mao, mad-man theoreticians like Richard Nixon or his acolyte Donald Trump have been once in control of “the ultimate deterrent”. The most disastrous and destructive wars since 1945 from Korea to Gaza have shown how apocalyptic “conventional” weapons can be for civilians.

Two cheers for the bomb then...?