Nuclear weapons cannot be relied on to keep peace: M V Ramana
They make a desolation and call it peace
— Calgacus, quoted by Roman historian Tacitus
Is the call for peace too much at times of war? Especially when social and political lives of communities are severely impacted?
“The environmental impact of wars begins long before they do. Building and sustaining military forces consumes vast quantities of resources,” says the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS, a new avatar of the Toxic Remnants of War Project).
“Militaries need large areas of land and sea… military lands are believed to occupy 1 to 6 per cent of the global land surface, in many cases these are ‘ecologically important’ areas. Militaries are responsible for 5.5 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally; however, reporting of military emissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is poor,” CEOBS adds.
International armed conflicts are highly destructive; civil wars may last for decades. Many contemporary conflicts have blurred the lines, lasting years but with sustained periods of high intensity warfare, the organisation points out. “Who is fighting, where they’re fighting and how they’re fighting all strongly influence the environmental impact of a conflict,” it says.
“The use of explosive weapons in urban areas create environmental risks, including vast quantities of debris and rubble, which can cause air and soil pollution. Pollution can also be caused by damage to light industry and environmentally sensitive infrastructure. The loss of energy supplies can have effects detrimental to the environment, shutting down treatment plants or pumping systems, or can lead to the use of more polluting fuels,” writes Doug Weir, CEOBS’ Director.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says, after four decades of war (1979-2021), Afghanistan is facing acute climate change, drought and environmental crises. The CEOBS notes that the first three years of the Russia-Ukraine conflict released 230 MtCO2e — equivalent to the annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined.
It is the first time that an effort has been made to calculate the emissions from any conflict, the organisation notes. The war in Ukraine also made clear to the world the risks of warfare in countries with extensive nuclear infrastructure. Both India and its neighbours, Pakistan and China, are nuclear-armed countries. There are a few studies from two decades ago that tell us what damage a war between these nations may cause.
India is yet to create an environmental damage measuring system for any conflict. India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri’s statement in Parliament on May 19 that neighbour “Pakistan did not resort to nuclear signaling, following Operation Sindoor” brought home to many how much on the brink of a possible nuclear faceoff the world is today.
This is because everyone knows that an aberrant rogue state is capable of more damage than a flagged nuclear entity. Policymakers also know that there is actually no such thing as ‘deterrence’ in inherited wars; it is more a matter of semantics when war is a No-Option.
The limits of deterrence
Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia, and Director of the Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs program at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, M V Ramana told me, “I don’t think possession of nuclear weapons automatically stop the likelihood of war. Decisions to go to war and how these wars are prosecuted are influenced by various considerations. While the presence of nuclear weapons does change how leaders think about war, it is not the only factor.”
“Domestic politics plays a key role,” he adds.
“Nuclear weapons also allow political leaders to assume that their nuclear arsenals provide a cover that would prevent conflicts from escalating, thus increasing the risk of small-scale conflicts, which in turn increases the probability of large-scale conflict. Therefore, nuclear weapons cannot be relied on to keep peace,” he says.
He should know. Ramana is a member of the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and in the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. “But if there are nuclear weapons, then one also has to think of the threat of nuclear destruction on top of the devastation from conventional war,” he cautions.
The Pahalgam attack reminded us that India’s borders, land as well as maritime, are porous — open to terrorist attacks. It did not help when media stories said, Hanif Abbasi, the Pakistani minister of railways, had warned that any attempt to cut off the Indus water supply could lead to full-scale war and stated Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile of 130 warheads was aimed towards India. In 2024, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated that Pakistan has a stockpile of around 170 warheads that could go up to 200 warheads by 2025.
Add to it stories that said, the remote for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is with China. With the pressing of any such remote, India can stand devastated.
Manhattan to Mumbai
As a result of the sporadic wars with a neighbour, India’s financial capital Mumbai on the western seaboard has become the most vulnerable city in the country. In 1993, 257 people died and 700 were injured in a series of bomb blasts. The train bombings of 2006 claimed 180 lives. The 2011 attacks killed 26 and left 130 injured. Televised terror attacks leave lasting images on the mind, as do the ‘shadows of people’ etched in stone after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that are reminders of the devastating impact of any such explosion.
Any terrorist attack in India evokes real fears of two neighbouring countries with n-missiles pointed at us. There are five Asian countries possessing nuclear weapons: China, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel. As of June 2024, India was estimated to have a stockpile of 172 warheads. China had 600 warheads.
In a 1999 report (the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) Global Health Watch Report Number 3), Ramana had done a study titled Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion where his study city was Mumbai.
“In the first few seconds after the explosion, there are three effects directly related to the fireball. Blast or shock, thermal radiation and prompt nuclear radiation. In addition, there are:
“Effects caused by the electromagnetic pulse produced by the interaction of charged particles generated.
“By gamma rays with the earth’s magnetic field. While the effects of this pulse are by no means negligible, they are relatively less important when studying the social and human costs of a nuclear explosion,” he reminds us in this study.
“In exploding a nuclear weapon over a city, the attacker has the choice of weapon (yield), location of the point of attack, the height of burst and the time of the attack. Apart from general expectations, it may not be possible, especially if an attack is carried out during war, to choose a suitable weather pattern,” Ramana says in this study.
“In order to continue with this study, we will make some assumptions about these choices. We will assume that the attack happens on a clear day, and the weapon used is a fission bomb with a yield of 15 kilotons to explode at a height of 600m. The choice of yield and altitude corresponds closely to the weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima. This choice of height of burst will maximise the radius over which an overpressure of 10 pounds per square inch (psi) or more occurs — about 1.1 km. Relative to a surface burst, this height of burst will result in over twice the area being subject to an overpressure of 10 psi.”
“With such a small yield, it is not possible to destroy the whole city. The precise location of the attack determines which region of Bombay is destroyed. For example, an attack in the Fort area, centered around Hutatma Chowk, could destroy large parts of the financial district as well as the secretariat.”
“Likewise, an attack centered around the Chembur area or near Parel and Sewri would result in the destruction of a large number of industries. In the latter case, the attack could also lead to damage to the Mazagaon docks, whereas in the former case, it could lead to some damage to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre complex, India’s largest nuclear research facility, in Trombay. There are also very densely populated areas like Dharavi; if the explosion is targeted in this area, the number of casualties will be very large.”
This hypothetical estimate is applicable to any 2 to 3-million-people urban enclave in India even today.
In a 2024 joint study by Sadia Tasleem and Ramana, titled, The Limits of Anti-Nuclear Critique in Pakistan (published by a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis), the authors note:
The post-1998 anti-nuclear critique in Pakistan has overwhelmingly focused on challenges pertaining to safety and security, command and control, geopolitical imperatives of arms races, the operational limits of delivery systems like the short-range ballistic missiles and the risk of a nuclear war. We argue that such arguments inadvertently normalise nuclear weapons. Other arguments based on geopolitics make nuclear weapons appear inevitable in an anarchic world. Highlighting the consequences of a nuclear war has limited purchase in Pakistan where nuclear weapons are seen as the ultimate defense against all large-scale wars, nuclear and conventional.
But it is not only in Pakistan. “…unfortunately, nuclear weapons have been normalised in India – and that has been the case for a long time. Even though it is always important to highlight the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, that argument alone is unlikely to persuade everyone to oppose nuclear armaments,” Ramana points out.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, there are approximately 3,904 active nuclear warheads and 12,331 total nuclear warheads in the world as of 2025. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports, “the United States is already spending $75 billion annually — the equivalent of two Manhattan Projects every year — on new nuclear weapons until at least 2032. In total, the country is set to spend over $1.7 trillion on nuclear modernisation over 30 years — which is about the same amount as all student loan debt in the United States’.
Tasleem and Ramana argue: The alternative is to engage a broader critique focussed on the ways in which nuclear weapons are implicated in everyday social and political life. The many reasons to fear war and explore peace.