Gareth O'Callaghan: How much longer can we avoid nuclear war?
In this September 8, 1945 image, only a handful of buildings remain standing amid the wasteland of Hiroshima, the Japanese city reduced to rubble following the first atomic bomb to be dropped in warfare. Picture: AP
“The story of the human race is war,” Winston Churchill once said. Few will ever have heard of Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the mousetrap, the haircurling iron, and the fire sprinkler.
Despite objections from Thomas Edison, he even laid claim to inventing the lightbulb. However, Maxim is best known for the machine gun which he invented in 1895.
It was while he was visting Vienna that he met an American who told him to “hang your chemistry and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility”. So he did.
Not long after, a gun based on his design became standard issue for the British Army during World War I, which became known as “the machine gun war”.
Maxim’s invention was responsible for almost 25% of the battlefield deaths — approximately four million — equal to half the current population of New York city.
World War II was the largest and most violent military conflict in human history resulting in over 50 million deaths. Hiram Maxim said: “Only a general who was a barbarian would send his men to certain death against the concentrated power of my new gun.”
But send them they did.
In the years between the two wars, the killing machines that would dominate the battlefields became more sophisticated, capable of killing greater numbers faster and more grotesquely. And then, barely weeks before the European war ended, the world’s first atomic bomb, named Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima from a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay, giving the world its first taste of what this creation was capable of.
Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, but verbal rumblings are getting louder at the prospect of another world war — a war that could not only end all wars but also civilisation, reducing the planet to a radioactive desert. Only two years ago, Joe Biden said the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is the highest it’s been for 60 years.
It’s a notion the human mind finds impossible to process. Perhaps that’s why we remain complacent towards its reality. There are certain aspects of life that we simply tune out because of how catastrophic they would be. Armageddon is one of them. It’s a fact that nuclear war has taken on a more immediate reality in recent times.
I was a child of the 1960s, at a time when every home in Ireland was issued with a survival handbook containing advice on what householders should do in the event of a nuclear attack.
“Keep your radios switched on and tuned to Radio Éireann all the time — day and night,” we were told.
Following the broadcast of a national alert, we were instructed as follows: “If you are at work, you may be advised to go home. If you are a long way from home and unable to get back there in a few hours, you will have to make up your mind where you are going to take cover and go there immediately.
"Managers of hotels and institutions should be prepared to provide protected accomodation for those in their care.”
It was comforting advice, if utterly pointless; but the reasoning behind it was to prevent widespread panic if such an event were to happen. The reality is a lot different, and perhaps not for those of a nervous disposition.
Annie Jacobsen spells out the horrors of a nuclear attack in her latest book, . While I highly recommend this non-fiction bestseller, it’s not bedtime reading.
North Korea launches an unexpected nuclear missile strike against the US. Washington responds with a volley of LGM-30G Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at North Korea’s weapon sites and command centres.
Their route takes them over Russia, where the president, fearing his country is under attack, orders an all-out nuclear strike on America.
Jacobsen’s shocking account reads like a thriller, but her scenario is based on known facts and proven maths concerning the reality of nuclear war, and the insanity of its purpose.
It would take just under 30 minutes from launch in Kozelsk, 160 miles from Moscow, or Pyongsong in North Korea, for nuclear weapons to reach US destinations, including the Pentagon — about the time it takes to watch the evening news.
Here in Ireland, we still believe we won’t be targetted in the event of a nuclear war as we’re not a member of Nato, but that’s a flimsy no-longer-relevant argument. As recently reported in this paper, more than 220,000 US soldiers have travelled through Shannon Airport over the last three-and-a-half years, seriously undermining our neutrality.
Shannon Airport is an hour from the hotel and golf resort owned by Donald Trump. Let’s banish the notion that we would be overlooked.
That myth belongs in the same category as the baloney that iodine tablets will save our lives.
Based on Jacobsen’s scenario, let’s imagine a 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon striking Cork city. Nuclear experts call it a Bolt out of the Blue.
On impact, the temperature soars to 80 million degrees Celsius, five times hotter than the sun’s core, creating an enormous fireball and near-synchronic shockwave that increases in size at millions of miles per hour.
In less than a second, the city centre is obliterated in a blinding flash, every human within a one-mile circular distance of ground zero is vapourised. Nothing remains.
Those who die instantly will later be considered the lucky ones. CUH and the Mercy have been annihilated, staff and patients no longer exist. There’s nothing left of Angelsea Street, including its fire and garda stations, City Hall and civic offices — all instantly converted into combusting carbon. Emergency services can’t respond because they have perished.
Radiating heat from the initial fireball travels outwards at the speed of light for miles in all directions, igniting everything in its trajectory that can burn. A firestorm flattens a 100-or-more square-mile area including Ballincollig, Blarney, Carrigaline, Midleton, Cobh, and Fermoy, and every town within 10 to 15 miles of the strike zone. Extermination on an unthinkable scale. Nothing survives.
Less than three seconds since the initial blast: Road surfaces in a 20-mile radius melt and explode, becoming their own deadly weapons. Those further out along the fireball’s trajectory who haven’t burnt to death are now suffering from blindness and third-degree burns, requiring emergency specialist treatment, but the nearest hospitals are in Limerick and Waterford, if they even still function.
Thermal radiation from the bomb has burned deep into the bodies of over 200,000 more people, 90% of whom won’t survive. All electronic and electrical equipment within a hundred-mile radius has been permanently disabled in an instant, including electric vehicles.
Those who are dying will never know what happened, their calls for help unheard because there is no help. It’s now less than 10 seconds since the bomb ignited.
Maxim’s machine gun might seem trivial in comparison to a nuclear bomb, but its intention was no different — both originating from a place of greed and evil.
Considering North Korea caught Washington’s attention 10 days ago by test launching its newest deadly missile designed to reach the US, the threat of nuclear war is real. All we can do is hope that the world leaders who have access to these weapons are responsible, but even that notion simply fuels the insanity.
As Noam Chomsky said in 2012, “It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.”
But for how long more?
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