Resource Insights: Nuclear war: A forgotten threat to human sustainability.
The possibility of a new Cold War between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies brings with it the spectre of nuclear war, an all-but-forgotten threat since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Even as the number of nuclear weapons has declined through mutually agreed reductions from a worldwide total of 68,000 in 1985 to anestimated 16,400 today, the destructive force of such weapons is so great that if the remaining ones were used, they might well spell the end of human civilization as we know it.
One indication of the rising threat is what NATO calls an “unusual” increase in Russian military flights over Europe involving so-called Bear bombers, long-range Russian counterparts to American B-52 bombers. But, of course, U.S. and Russian nuclear forces have been operating all along since the end of the Cold War even as their arsenals were being slashed. The threat of nuclear war was always there even if tensions were falling between Russia and the United States.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin making a premature exit from the G-20 summit as world leaders began to discuss Russian complicity in a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, it seems likely that tensions between Western powers and Russia will escalate from here.
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