World War III won't be nuclear...will it?

The answer is: It depends... It depends on who you ask. It depends on when you asked it. And it depends on what you meant by the question.

If you were listening to a broadcast from Tokyo in August, 1945, you wouldn't know what you were hearing. Nobody had ever dropped an atom bomb on anyone before. This is what Tokyo Radio reported after Hiroshima was bombed (right, top, from Fighter pilot Pierre Clostermann's 1952 book about WWII):

The horrors from the first two nuclear bombs were heavily censored for many years...

Eventually, even with knowledge of the horrors, nuclear war became normalized in the public's mind...even expected...

...and practiced. And studied. And America blew off over 1,000 nuclear bombs just so that, IF they ever got the chance to actually use one in war (again)... sometime... somewhere... they'd know the exact, or at least most probable, diameter of the fireball.

But that hasn't happened...at least, not yet.

No matter how much they practiced, they couldn't make "atomic" bombs big enough, so they made hydrogen bombs. Too big to explode on the continental United States (too many people would be shocked by how massive the blasts are, and many would have been directly impacted almost immediately by the radiation debris).

Ivy Mike was the first "full-scale" test of a thermonuclear device, or hydrogen bomb.

But bigger nuclear bombs weren't of any use in war anyway, and theatening them can't keep the peace either (it only caused Russia to explode the Czar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded at about 50 Megatons). Thermonuclear bombs are extremely filthy to test. Atmospheric testing was mostly halted in 1963, but "accidental" ("careless AND inevitable" is a much more appropriate description) venting of underground tests went on for decades afterwards. Testing continued by the United States until 1992, China and France until 1996, the Soviet Union until 1990 and the United Kingdom until 1991. Atmospheric tests by France ended in 1974. India and Pakistan haven't tested nuclear weapons since 1998. North Korea's last nuclear explosion was in 2017, by Donald Trump's bestie, Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea.

Some researchers realized that there was no place safe from nuclear war...which meant there were no safe nuclear installations of ANY sort...anywhere on earth.

But one thing could ALWAYS be said: The jobs paid well. And that worked out well for the nuclear navy, because they could promise their reactor operators high-paying jobs in the civilian nuclear industry after their tour of duty.

Unfortunately, their training didn't always apply, for example the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown was caused, in part, because civilian nuclear reactors do not operate precisely the same as naval reactors. (Briefly, so-called "commercial" nuclear reactors are built for peak efficiency at producing megawatts of electricity, and they can be shut down for refueling or maintenance whenever they can't operate at peak efficiency (or more accurately, at peak profit). The nuclear navy reactors -- especially the submarine reactors -- are desgined and built for steady operation under all circumstances, come hell or high water (so to speak), including war.)

But mistakes happen with distressing regularity in the nuclear industry -- as in any industry, but mistakes in the nuclear industry can result in much more serious consequences than anywhere else.

The U.S. Navy has lost two nuclear submarines at sea. (Russia has lost seven...so far.)

Everywhere we turn, and every time we turn around, there is another nuclear nightmare.

This is the world we've earned...by pushing nuclear solutions for ANYTHING all over the world and jumping the gun (so to speak) on their use in the first place.

The author I quote at the beginning of this post flew fighter planes in World War Two and saw the worst weapons could do in a pre-nuclear world. I have both his books, and wasn't expecting to find anything about nuclear bombs when suddenly I came upon the section quoted. In short, the bombs didn't win the war. Period.

Look at the difference between the development and use of laser weapons and our use of nuclear weapons. We've made absolutely no attempt to deploy laser weapons. Laser GUIDED weapons -- yes -- ever since they got hold of a workable aiming system they could combine with a heads-up display for the cockpit (since both are necessary to make the system work).

But NOT laser weapons, where the laser itself is the weapon.

Why not? Maybe because we know what a horror that would be for the world. Suddenly everybody would have them, and use them, and war would become even far more ghastly than it always has been. Just like what happened with nuclear weapons, except it hasn't quite happened yet: Various countries stockpile nuclear weapons, but no one dares to use them because everybody knows the most likely result. Chaos that nobody wins.

Laser weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons...everybody wants to leave them off the table. One would have thought exploding cell phones would have stayed off the table too. Can anyone trust their own phone or electric car not to be remotely exploded now?

Of course we've been assured those were special devices that had gunpowder in them (and I assume it's true), but we've all seen modern phone batteries expand...and nobody can know for sure. What will this do to the electric car market? If Israel manages to explode any of those, the whole world WILL rethink electric vehicles, as they are currently wondering about their phones.

The "brave new world" keeps becoming more and more challenging for sane people to navigate. As if gun violence in America isn't bad enough all by itself.

There are a lot of war hawks in government. But within the military itself, there is far greater caution, and undoubtedly a gut feeling that billions of dollars are wasted each year on weapons that should never be used under any reasonably foreseeable circumstances. And even in a "worst case scenario" we have far more nuclear weapons than needed for any job except total annihilation of the planet.

Claiming nuclear weapons won World War II was all propaganda. Everything about nuclear anything is propaganda. Nuclear weapons don't make us safe from attacks against our own nuclear facilities, which produce nuclear waste we have no solution for.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA October, 2024