Although he was born in a country without military power, the Costa Rican doctor Carlos Umaña knows a lot about the nuclear weapons that are currently in the world. And of the dangers, not only of being used, but of being activated by accident, human error or hacking.
In fact, Umaña is one of the great leaders in the fight to eliminate nuclear arsenals, a path that for him involves stigmatizing them and raising awareness about the risk of current rhetoric.
“Playing the bravest with nuclear weapons is an incredibly dangerous thing that has absolutely the whole world on the brink of a precipice,” he says.
Co-president of the International Association of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985), he himself obtained that award in 2017 together with ICAN, the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, at the that belongs.
BBC Mundo spoke with him in the context of his participation in the HAY Festival of Querétaro.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reignited fears of mass destruction, in a world that is increasingly connected and vulnerable. Is this the closest we have been to a nuclear war?
Several experts agree with this analysis.
The most famous fact would be the Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which this year and because of this war is pointing to minus 90 seconds from midnight, that is, it is the highest risk in history.
This is a clock that measures the risk of catastrophic destruction at human hands, and it has varied throughout history. The closer to midnight, the greater the danger.
In 1963, as a result of the missile crisis in Cuba, it was in less than 7 minutes. Then in 1983 it was minus 2 minutes, and at the end of the Cold War it was minus 14 minutes.
At a time when the rhetoric and threats of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia have set off all the alarm bells… Do you think that the leaders are aware of the consequences that a nuclear conflict would have?
They are aware, but at the same time there is a game that they are used to.
The consequences would undoubtedly be devastating for the world.
For example, a single detonation of a nuclear weapon is talked about as something tactical or strategic, as if a bomb were something small, but in reality there are no small nuclear weapons.
If a tactical nuclear weapon weighing about 100 kilotons – which would have a power of about five or six Hiroshima bombs – were to detonate in a large city, it would have the potential to immediately kill hundreds of thousands of people and injure thousands of people. many more.
And when we talk about injuries, we are talking about acute radiation syndrome, which is a breakdown of vital organs and systems, one of the most painful conditions that any living being can experience.
What if more than one detonation occurred?
If we’re talking about a full-scale nuclear war, in addition to the tens of millions of dead and injured, it would also generate a lot of soot and debris that would go up into the stratosphere and block out sunlight.
This blockade would in turn cause darkness and a drastic and sudden drop in temperature by an average of about 25 °C.
This is what is called nuclear winter.
In this way, what would have survived the devastation and radiation would have to face this extreme cold and this absence of sunlight.
What is the risk of this happening?
That’s the big crux here.
Currently the risk of misinterpretations and miscalculations is very high.
We have seen that in the United States alone there have already been more than 1,000 accidents with nuclear arsenals and we have been publicly known six times on the brink of a large-scale nuclear war, not in wartime, but in quote-unquote times of peace.
What happen? That of the 12,500 warheads that the world’s nuclear arsenals have, there are approximately 2,000 that are in a state of maximum alert, that is, they are ready to be detonated in a period of about 6 to 15 minutes.
These systems respond to whoever gives the order to detonate them, and depend on maximum alert systems, which are vulnerable to cyberattacks, technical errors, human errors, and have confused trivial things like a storm cloud, a solar storm, a band of geese or a weather balloon – with a nuclear threat.
The people behind these systems have to interpret these false alarms as either true or false.
This means that in a war context, where there are explicit nuclear threats, and where several red lines have already been crossed, the risk of miscalculation or misinterpretation is much higher.
So the most likely nuclear war is not an intentional one, but an accidental one?
Yeah, there’s definitely quite a strong accidental component here and we have something else to consider as well.
When people talk about nuclear war being unlikely, because no leader would be that crazy, we have to keep in mind that we are dealing with emotional people and all people think differently when faced with a crisis.
In fact, the drills that have been carried out with the decision makers in these environments ultimately escalate the war, because it is what must be done, because it is what the protocol mandates, that is, if they attack me with nuclear weapons, I have to strike back with nukes, and so on.
It is mutually assured destruction. It is better that everything be destroyed than only me destroyed.
That is the current thinking of the leaders and in the context of an accident it is very dangerous.
The acceptance of an international order in which some countries have weapons of mass destruction while others are prohibited is already seen by many experts as unsustainable. How unstable is this situation?
There is a contradiction here, because in the 1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, two very important treaties were signed: the Tlatelolco treaty, which was signed in 1967 and entered into force in 1969, by virtue of which all Latin America and the Caribbean is a zone free of nuclear weapons.
And the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which was negotiated in 1969 and entered into force in 1970, which has three pillars: nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and the peaceful use of nuclear energy as an inalienable right.
At that time, there were five nuclear states: the United States, the Soviet Union, now Russia, China, France, and Great Britain, all committing to nuclear disarmament within 25 years.
In the second point, the so-called non-nuclears pledged not to acquire nuclear weapons, and the third was that all countries have the right to develop nuclear energy.
Obviously, disarmament did not happen in 1995, and the idea that nuclear weapons are only for a few sends the message to the rest of the international community that nuclear weapons are necessary and privileged, and weakens the non-proliferation regime.
Non-proliferation depends on progress, real progress in disarmament, and it is something that the nuclear countries, now nine (Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea have joined them) are not willing to give up.
But then how do you deal with opposition to the TPAN, which is the first agreement to push for a universal ban on nuclear weapons for absolutely all countries? Do you think you will achieve your goal?
This treaty brings something new: it is a universal prohibition that what it does is strengthen the multilateral system and stigmatize nuclear weapons.
We have to analyze the phenomenon of nuclear weapons, what is it that causes it, what is it that makes countries want to have them.
It is about seeing its true face, because nuclear weapons are not practical weapons, they are made to cause mass destruction and kill as many civilians in a heinous way.
They do not respect borders and it is practically impossible to detonate a nuclear bomb without someone else detonating another against you. So using them would be a suicidal act.
The countries that have them are aware that they cannot use them. The power of nuclear weapons is by virtue of the threat of their use, of the symbolic power that being a nuclear State represents. It is a symbol of deterrence.
This stigmatizing component is a phenomenon we have seen with other weapons of mass destruction such as chemical weapons, biological weapons, land mines, and cluster munitions.
Today there is no country that boasts of being a chemical powerhouse or having biological weapons.
This is because there are strong international regulations and there is a global climate of moral condemnation that makes this taboo.
How slow can this process of stigmatizing nuclear weapons be?
It depends on several factors and it is a bit difficult to predict. Prohibition is a paradigm shift.
On the one hand, people must be aware of the consequences of nuclear weapons, and on the other hand, this must generate pressure, activism both on the street and at the political and diplomatic level.
And that takes time.
If all the chips go well, let’s say that in about ten years an elimination of nuclear weapons could be achieved, although of course it could be sooner or later.
At this moment in which we are on the edge of the precipice, the most important thing is to move away from it a little, and go back until we are able to completely eliminate them.
Until we do so, we will not be free of the virus: either we end nuclear weapons or they end us.
And in this moment of threats, where is the Russell-Einstein Manifesto signed in 1955, which among other things said: “We appeal, as human beings to human beings: remember your humanity and forget the rest”? Have we forgotten our humanity?
It’s complicated, because it’s not a question of human culture in general.
It is a system in which the competition of some members prevails, a competition that makes them myopic to real progress and the needs of both its population and all of humanity.
If we change our mindset, if we think about using the interconnectivity tools that we now have to promote dialogue, cooperation, we can achieve this dialogue between humans and humans.
We must stop thinking of others as something different and inferior over which we have to rule, something that throughout history takes different forms.
For example, in popular culture, nuclear weapons are used in Marvel movies to kill off aliens, who are ugly, mean, and want to destroy humanity, and the only way is to kill them all.
In the 40s, the aliens were the Japanese. It was a way of justifying that mass murder that was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Their suffering did not matter because they were all participants in the decisions of their military leadership. They all deserved to be dropped by the atomic bomb because they were also different, they were bad, they were different.
It is the discourse of otherness that is also used in totalitarian regimes that justify war and stigmatize an entire population and justify military attack.
Speaking of Japan, the movie about “Oppenheimer” has rescued the history of this type of weapon. How do you see its evolution from the Second World War until now? Do you think that humanity has not learned from its mistakes?
It is very interesting, because you have to know the history, but the true history. There has been a lot of misrepresentation.
When the Hirosi attacks took place Ma and Nagasaki actively hid the humanitarian consequences from not only the US government, but also the Japanese.
The hibakusha, who are the survivors of the nuclear attacks, had their letters, photographs, even art or even poems censored.
They did not want the world to know what they were suffering from radiation. They wanted nuclear weapons to be celebrated without seeing the human drama they caused.
The crisis we are in now is precisely because of the rhetoric that has been around nuclear weapons, and how many people see them as a necessary evil. How they have been enthroned within the security doctrines and it is precisely because of this mishandling of information.
Therefore, the first thing we have to do is inform well what the risks are.
I do believe in the inherent goodness of the human being, which is something that is unlearned, according to our cultural context, and it is something that we need to promote.
And stop submitting without question to patriarchal structural systemic violence, to a system that governs by imposition, where the strongest is the one in charge.
The mistake has been not seeking cooperation, not seeking understanding, believing that there always has to be someone inferior to us who can be abused or exploited.
It is something that we are doing both with other human beings and with other species or nature itself.
We must stop ignoring our humanity, our impulse, and highlight the part of coexistence, the part of peace.
BBC Mundo spoke with Carlos Umaña within the framework of the Hay Festival Querétaro, which is held between September 7 and 10 in that Mexican city.
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See original article on BBC