Category: The Big Questions

A recent BBC documentary by the BBC highlighted the appalling and long lasting aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII

Some of todays Hydrogen Bombs are 1,000 times more powerful than the Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan! It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realise what horrors the deployment of such weapons would wreak!

For those of us who didn’t really live through it, it’s easy to underestimate just how close the world was to a truly disastrous situation at the peak of the Cold War. With tensions boiling over at times and everyone living in fear of the possibility of nuclear war, it was a pretty terrifying time.

One of the most famous and scary episodes in this behind-the-scenes escalation came between 1981 and 1983, when the world’s fate hung on a knife edge.

In 1981, the Russian Government  became so afraid of a pre-emptive strike by the US with its nuclear arsenal, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov began Operation RYaN (Nuclear Missile Attack), a huge surveillance operation. Things only got more tense from there, as the US started to fly its planes briefly into Russian airspace to test their defences and remind them of the threat they carried, while the Russian authorities invested more and more in both defence capabilities and its own missile armada.

It was in this atmosphere that, on 21 September 1983, the Soviet Orbital Missile Early Warning System (SPRN) reported that a single intercontinental ballistic missile was on its way from the US to Russia.

The officer on duty that night was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, and he might just have saved the world by remembering a key detail from his training. Intelligence suggested that if the US launched a real attack, it would be with at least three missiles, but only one was apparently incoming, which didn’t seem right to Petrov.

Petrov made the unbelievably brave decision to label the data as a false alarm, and didn’t alert his superiors, a judgment that would quickly be proved correct as no missile actually entered Russian airspace.

Petrov told the BBC’s Russian Service in 2013: “I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it.” He added: “The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it. “There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike.”

Instead, Petrov reported a system malfunction, and realised he’d been correct when nothing happened after half an hour. This wasn’t the only time there were near misses during the Cold War  but it was one of the closest, and a reminder that sometimes it only takes one person to avert catastrophe.

Petrov’s decision may have literally saved humanity!

Nuclear weapons are unlikely to become a thing of the past until they are rendered useless by an, as yet unknown, defence system. We can only pray that no country or other agency is ever foolish enough to initiate a nuclear attack and that in the event of a false alarm the watchkeepers are as brave as Stanislav Petrov.

A young primary school teacher taking a class discussing ‘Equality’ began by asking if anyone in the class had recently hurt there elbow. A few put their hands up so she gave each of them a plaster for their elbow. She then asked if anyone had bumped their heads. Again, a few hands went up. The teacher proceeded to give each child who had bumped his or her head a plaster for their elbow. The children looked confused. The teacher then asked if anyone who’d recently grazed their knee to put their hand up. She proceeded to give each of these children a plaster for their elbow. By this time the children were all looking very confused.

The teacher explained that although she had treated all of her class equally in giving everyone a plaster for their elbow that was clearly a silly thing to do as only some of them had hurt their elbows.

She went on to explain that equality meant giving everyone the same opportunities and this often meant treating some people differently. Some children in the school sometimes needed ear protectors because they found classrooms too noisy for them to concentrate, others might have difficulty with sitting and needed a special chairs, yet others might find concentration hard and so needed special help and so on.

The teacher then asked the class to consider how each of us could treat each other equally. After an animated discussion the class agreed that we shouldn’t always expect to be treated exactly the same or treat each other exactly the same. We should try to help one other be the best we and they can be.

Wise words indeed!

……..  and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.

These words were spoken almost 3,000 years ago, looking forward to a time of hope where peace was the norm and everyone could live without fear.

And yet here we are, where wholesale slaughter of other human beings is perpetrated in the name of who has the right to ‘own’ which bit of land.

Prince Harry recently said in reference to his time in the military: “In truth, you can’t hurt people if you see them as people”. His comments were roundly criticised by the UK military but they are surely true – who but a psychopath could cold-bloodedly kill and maim other human beings simply because they were ‘on the other side’ unless he or she didn’t identify them as people with families, friends or aspirations but as ‘the enemy’?

On October 7^th, Palestinian fighters committed unspeakable atrocities against unarmed Israeli civilian; men, women and children.  In retaliation, Israeli soldiers and airmen and women have killed over 17,000 civilian men, women and children in Gaza, bombed hospitals and schools, restricted access to food water, energy and medicines.  

How can the perpetrators on either side do this? Because they see war as nation against nation or faction against faction. They are conditioned to be blind to the suffering of individuals in pursuit of goals defined by their leaders.

For peace to prevail in the Middle East, Ukraine or in the numerous areas of conflict around the world, WE all need to see beyond the geopolitical manoeuvrings and national pride and insist that our leaders do all in their power to end wars even if doing so comes at an economic cost to us.

As Winston Churchill famously said: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. 

It is only when all humanity recognises that every human being, even those who we count among our enemies, is of immeasurable value and should be treated as such, that the peace envisaged 3 millennia ago will be realised.

No – it will not happen in a day or even a year or a decade but it has to start somewhere and some time. Why not here? Why not now?