I think we'll be extraordinarily lucky if we don't have a global war in the next century.
It seems strange to ask about World War 3 but today here are commemorating the first
world war and it has now been some 70 years since the end of World War 2.
It's easy to forget that there was no world war for the whole of the 19th century.
One could perhaps talk about the Napoleonic wars as a world war after all they were fought
in North America and India as well as in Europe but for the whole of the 19th century there
was no global war and then in 1914 one broke out.
The biggest difference today is that people have forgotten that the capacity for huge
destruction still exists and that perhaps is the greatest threat.
When we think about confrontation with Russia, we forget about the thousands of nuclear weapons
that the Russian's and the Americans still have ready to fire on a hair trigger.
We know little about Russia but we know in America that senior officers were sacked for
alcohol abuse and corrupt gambling practices just in the last couple of years and that
morale amongst the men and women who prepare everyday to launch these missiles is at rock
bottom.
So it isn't so much a war by intent as accidental war in crisis.
And what about nuclear weapons, you mentioned nuclear weapons there we don't know much about
North Korea's nuclear weapons do we?
Well we don't know much about North Korea, India, Pakistan or indeed Israel but the fact
of the matter is that these countries have very small numbers.
Now these could kill hundreds of thousands indeed millions of people but they don't pose
a threat of global extinction which the thousands of nuclear weapons still in the Russian, American
arsenals do.
We comfort ourselves that everyone would be too sensible to use them but sadly people
have not been too sensible when it came to the recent fiascos of Iraq, the long-drawn
out loss in Afghanistan and the current slow moving train wreck in Ukraine and there aren't
a seperate group of decision makers, as it were, kept to one side who somehow have a
more or less sanctified view of nuclear weapons that would keep us safe from them.
It's the same people, the same institutions, organising nuclear weapons as organise the
rest of the military and I think this should give people pause for thought.
And right now there isn't any global system to control let alone abolish these weapons.
So it isn't so much saying well who would start the war but one can be sure that if
such a war broke out as indeed the great Albert Einstein said that you don't know quite what
would happen in World War 3 but you can be sure that World War 4 would be fought with
sticks and stones because we'd be back in the caves.
Well of course, we could say could you abolish these weapons and the short answer is yes
it's not rocket science.
We have a project scrapweapons.com which is all about scraping all the weapons in the
world and if you look at how the treaties that Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachov signed
on not just nuclear weapons but covering aircraft and tanks.
If you look at those provisions, there's the how to.
It's an awful lot simpler than trying to control global warming which we think we can do to
count the weapons and check them and these agreements were made to stick in a world without
Google Maps and without drones that cost ten thousand pounds.
In the modern world of observation to verify what is going on with another country's is
much much simpler so then it comes to political will and that of course, is in a sense, chicken
and egg and I think what we do with the scrap weapons project is to say listen, here is
how to do it, we can get rid of these weapons, it is practical, we know how to do it, we've
done it before, the technology is there so don't tell us it's not practical.
And indeed one of the ironies of the Iraq inspection regime was that it worked, there
were no weapons, the inspectors got it right, the UN inspectors in Iraq succeeded.
If we talk to Ambassadors and say well if you tell us it isn't possible they have a
designed world.
If you talk to officials from China or Russia or China or sorry, United States or Britain
they say it isn't possible you say well perhaps you can sign up to the regime we had for Iraq
and they say oh no we don't want to think that tough.
Obviously almost without blushing because of course that regime was highly intrusive,
wasn't effective and actually now the technology is another ten, fifteen years on in terms
of checking it so to say that we couldn't have disarmament is utter nonsense.
It is practical and once we realise it's practical it becomes easier I think to start to create
the political world.
We're talking about the things that really go bang and radio logical weapons and dirty
bombs, chemical weapons, biological weapons all very serious problems but to be frank,
none of them destroy property or things, these weapons destroy or hurt people but they leave
buildings and everything else in tact so from a military perspective they rarely aren't
that perspective.... that desirable.
Again without wanting to underestimate them biological and chemical weapons are truly
horrific if they get to you, weapons like VX but they are actually quite hard to manufacture,
quite hard to handle safely, quite vulnerable to temperatures being high or low and when
it comes to biological weapons yes there are horrors such as anthrax which have very high
fatality but for the rest to be frank if you're a well fed, healthy person from the north
from Europe then what you've got is a public health problem.
They really are lethal if you are poor and impoverished and vulnerable anyway these sorts
of replicated diseases.
The Americans and the Russians each have several thousand nuclear weapons ready to go, ready
to fire at a few minutes to a few hours notice then they have another 5 or 10 thousand nuclear
weapons in the back of the store room ready to stick them on a rocket if they need to.
In reserve.
And then you have to go down and the Chinese and French have a couple of hundred, the UK
pretty much rents its ones from America there's no real independent UK forces, the kind of
Emperor's new clothes problem that no one wants to talk about in the Westminster village.
Well it's an American system and even owned by American companies nowadays you go below
that and you're looking at China, India, sorry Israel, Pakistan with perhaps a few dozen
nuclear weapons each which is not to say after all Japan's surrendered partly after, as a
result of two weapons, that one or two nuclear weapons can cause a huge amount of catastrophic
damage and suffering but it's a very different order of magnitude to having hundreds or thousands.
When were they produced and could more be produced in the future or are they still being
produced?
Yes, all the countries with nuclear weapons are engaged in building new ones sometimes
they just say they are being refurbished and nuclear weapons unlike a bullet which you
can make in 1914 and put on the shelf and take it off the shelf and stick it in a rifle
and fire it today a hundred years later.
That isn't the case with nuclear weapons, they have sell by dates or bomb by dates stamped
on nuclear weapons because the radioactive material deteriorates the radiation attacks
the plastic and other components and they have to be continually refurbished so they
were first of all made in 45, you then had a massive increase in production so that perhaps
that's 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world.
there were some seven thousand nuclear weapons just in Germany in the Cold War and nuclear
weapons were made to be fired out of artillery guns and there were thousands of these produced
particularly by the United States had an affection for them but now the numbers have come down
to just 10, maybe 20 thousand altogether.