Introduction to 75th Anniversary of the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing Supplement Issue on the Nuclear-Pandemic Nexus Scenarios

Abstract

Even before the pandemic hit humanity in the first quarter of 2020, the risk of nuclear war was increasing due to the complexity of the global order based on nuclear threat from now nine nuclear-armed states. Nuclear arms control and disarmament were on the retreat due to the ideological views and capricious actions of leading Trump Administration officials aimed at destroying existing arms control treaties. This animus was superimposed on the widening mismatch between historic arms control treaties and emerging strategic systems such as proliferating anti-ballistic and anti-satellite weapons, new nuclear weapon delivery platforms such as submarine drones and hypersonic systems, and disruptive technologies such as cyber weapons and artificial intelligence. Regional conflicts centered on India and Pakistan, the United States and the DPRK, and Russia and the NATO allies, all posed real risk of conventional war and escalation to nuclear war in recent crises. A number of middle and great powers were also adopting more authoritarian political institutions while their leaders espoused nationalist, populist, and even demagogic views. These trends began to disrupt trade flows, and to close borders to refugees, slowed migration, and limited free flow of information, thereby reversing the trends of previous decades of globalization. Concurrently, other existential threats erupted into protracted crises that stressed the resilience of states and societies, most critically, climate-induced firestorms, floods, and super-storms in both hemispheres. Onto this dismal and increasingly dangerous tableau burst the coronavirus pandemic in the last quarter of 2019 and first quarter of 2020, turning the world upside down. Borders slammed shut, international travel ground to a halt, cities and states locked down, in some cases for more than four months to control the viral attack. Even so, millions were infected, died or were hospitalized. Some states managed well from the start or recovered quickly – most significantly given its size, China. Some were lucky or were favored by the season. But many states found their public health systems – and their political systems – overwhelmed by Covid19-induced stress, and failed catastrophically to contain the pandemic, initially in Europe, but most notably in the United States. Meanwhile, global scientific institutions made common cause with big pharma to make