Operation Buster-Jungle Dog in exercise Desert Rock I at the Nevada Test Site, 1 November 1951 – the first US nuclear field exercise conducted on land with troops only 6 miles from the blast, public domain image in Wikipedia “Nuclear Warfare”
(9) NUCLEAR WARFARE
“It’s Defcon One…get me Big Mac, fries to go!”
Few forms of warfare have loomed as large as nuclear warfare but at the same time to have never existed in actual warfare except as threat or hypothetical prospect with one exception – fortunately, “the first and only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict was the United States atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.
While nuclear weapons haven’t been used in warfare apart from that exception, that hasn’t stopped a select few nations with the means to acquire or develop them, primarily the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia, from detonating them “on over 2,000 occasions for various testing purposes” or deploying them on a large scale in readiness for use.
The prospect or threat of nuclear warfare has effectively operated as a limit on other forms of warfare, at least directly between states with nuclear weapons, to avoid escalating to nuclear warfare with each other, given the sheer destructive potential of mutually assured destruction at best and the possibility of human extinction at worst – “nuclear winter, nuclear famine, and societal collapse”, oh my!
And that pretty much sums up nuclear warfare, except for how dangerously close we’ve come to the tripwire for it.
“Countries have increased their readiness to carry out strategic and tactical nuclear attacks in response to intensifying conflicts, including the Korean War, First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War, Sino-Soviet border conflict, Yom Kippur War, Gulf War, and Russo-Ukrainian War”.
“The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, between the nuclear superpowers of the U.S. and Soviet Union, is often considered the closest call with a nuclear exchange” – one of two occasions, along with the Yom Kippur War, that the United States was at Defcon Two, the stage before actual deployment in Defcon One.
The other famous measurement of the risk of nuclear war is the Doomsday Clock.
Throw in the extraordinary extent to which states have planned for “limited” nuclear war or had tactical nuclear weapons deployed for use on the battlefield – missiles, munitions, torpedoes and depth charges on the battlefields – as well as the risk of deployment from accident or false alarms, and one sometimes wonders how we ever made it this far without nuking ourselves.