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By David Charbonneau

Eyeview

CHARBONNEAU: The bomb is back

Aug 15, 2019 | 10:45 AM

AS I WATCHED THE BOMB (Netflix), I couldn’t help but think of a line from Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons/First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” The beautiful mushroom-shaped clouds made by atomic bombs belie the total annihilation they foreshadow.

The threat of nuclear war never went away but awareness of it is making a comeback through novels, television and movies – even a study on B.C. wildfires.

There’s a lot of competition for existential threats. We are reminded often of the threat of climate change, so much that atomic bombs seem so yesterday.

The Bomb’s co-producer, Smriti Keshari, asked people: How many nuclear weapons exist in the world? She got a lot of baffled responses: “Um, four? 14? 222?” Columnist Elizabeth Renzetti writes:

“In fact, there are about 15,000 weapons in the possession of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, the vast majority in the possession of Russia and the United States. Nearly 2,000 of those are ready to be launched in an instant, at the sole discretion of two men (the presidents of Russia and the United States). When Ms. Keshari tells people the answer, their response changes from confusion to shock.” (Globe and Mail, April 1, 2019)

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Let’s hope that President Donald Trump, the delusional orange man with his finger on the red button, doesn’t mistake the button for a prop in a reality-TV show.

Rational leaders in past have realized that there is no winning a nuclear war. The deterrent, mutual assured destruction (MAD), is a doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.

Rationality escapes the delusional orange man who seems to think that a nuclear war is winnable. In his threat against Iran, he said: “I’m not looking for war, and if there is, it’ll be obliteration like you’ve never seen before.” When he says that he’s not looking for war, he means the opposite, as when people respond to an opponent: “with all due respect,” when they mean none at all.

Beyond the immediate threat of being blown to smithereens is the after-effect of ash and soot being spread around the globe, blocking out sunlight: a so-called nuclear winter.

Nuclear winter is characterized as a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect that would occur after widespread firestorms of a nuclear war. The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth.

B.C.’s wildfires of 2017 are providing a useful model of what cooling from a nuclear war would look like. The enormous plume of smoke formed, the largest cloud of its kind ever observed, circled the Northern Hemisphere according to a study from Rutgers University. The smoke lasted more than eight months in the stratosphere, where there is no rain to wash it away. (Kamloops This Week, August 8, 2019)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the delusional orange man were to advocate nuclear war to combat global warming.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.