How about a nice game of Tic Tac Toe?

The chances of miscalculation or accident are too large for humanity to live under.

This article was originally published in Issue XXXI of Bournbrook Magazine, which you may buy here. Subscribe to receive future print issues here.

In 1980, the British Government conducted Operation Square Leg, a Home Defence exercise that simulated a Soviet nuclear attack on the United Kingdom. The results were devastating to the notion of nuclear 'defence'. Deaths were projected at twenty-nine million (which, at fifty-three per cent of the population, would be the equivalent of thirty-seven million today).

Other casualties were forecast at seven million – yet many of these would eventually die, too, as hospitals would be destroyed or else entirely overwhelmed. Even painkillers would run out within days. The fires would take nearly a week to bring under control. Every window in Britain would be shattered. Hundreds of thousands of refugees – many with third degree burns, radiation sickness, serious injuries or in severe shock – would soon start staggering from cities to rumoured safe havens.

The Government, forced to conserve limited food supply, would withhold it to ensure it was not wasted on those who would soon die. Even when distribution started a fortnight after the attack, daily rations were just 800 calories and two pints of water – but only for those who could work in the reconstruction; anybody who could not would receive death rations of 600 calories and a pint of water. Provisions for feeding infants were entirely inadequate. Disease would be uncontrollable as modern medicine was unavailable and sewerage systems greatly destroyed. In the desperation and societal breakdown, looting and violence would go largely unchecked, as limited police resources would also be carefully husbanded.

There would have been no recovery from such a catastrophe. It would have been the end of Britain – an agonising, burning death in an afternoon. In its place would be an irradiated medieval hell, whose few million occupants would be ridden with cancer and previously conquered illnesses, forever on the verge of hunger, watching through cataract-misted eyes a third of their children die in infancy.

Yet Square Leg simulated an attack totalling some 200 megatons, even though the report admitted that 1,000 megatons was likely. Mystifyingly, it also assumed that the Soviets would not target Whitehall, leaving the government intact. Square Leg, for all its terror, was an optimistic scenario.

It is easy to understand the allure of nuclear disarmament. Who would not want a world free of such weapons? In May, Patrick Porter, the Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham, wrote an essay for The Critic that asked two questions: "Is a world without nuclear weapons possible?" and, "Is it even desirable?” Counterintuitively – perhaps even shockingly – he answered ‘No’ and ‘No’.

On the first question, Professor Porter contends that it would be impossible to ratify that a nation had scrapped its weapons or stop it rebuilding them once they were scrapped. Only a global Leviathan, Porter argues, could absolutely “verify disarmament and stop disarming states from regenerating”. This is plainly true – in the abstract.

It ignores, however, the real world successes of disarmament and non-proliferation. The USSR and US built robust verification systems for the “Salt” and “Start” treaties, and both, it seemed, adhered to them despite the backdrop of Cold War distrust and paranoia. Furthermore, since the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, remarkably few states have sought to attain nuclear weapons.

Imperfect? Yes. Better than nothing? Certainly. A concerted nuclear disarmament effort would by necessity be slow, phased and exactingly verified at every stage. Yet even an effort to begin negotiations for a modest treaty – say, to reduce armaments by a small percentage and remove certain categories of nuclear weaponry from armaments – would be a signal of good will, and the completion of them, and subsequent verification process, would build momentum and trust. It might even see the creation of systems and tools for future verification.

Furthermore, that one step would in itself be a precious gift to humanity. But should we even want to get to zero? "Would a post-nuclear world," Porter asks, "not be more frequently unstable, violent and genocidal?" The first answer is that the world is already unstable, violent and genocidal. Whether in the Balkans or Africa in recent memory, or on every continent since Trinity, genocides, ethnic cleansing and military violence have occurred with depressing frequency.

Perhaps, therefore, the question Professor Porter is really asking is whether the great powers would be more tempted to wage total war against each other in a post-nuclear world? Here, he appears to have discarded the cost and risk of war against nations with large standing armies and great economic capacity. Was it the prospect of thermonuclear war that deterred the GSFG from sweeping into Western Europe during the Cold War, or was it the US V Corps, British Army of the Rhein and the rest of Nato? Surely both played a role: even in a world without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have had to have considered those conventional forces, and the economic potential of the Atlantic Alliance, before taking military action.

Recent months in Ukraine have exposed the difficulty and cost of gaining conventional, combined arms victories against an opponent with a modern military. China is currently examining a similar calculus in Taiwan, where conventional, not nuclear, arsenals are deterring war. It is obvious, therefore, that large and potent conventional forces can and do prevent war, even absent nuclear weapons.

The most important absence in Professor Porter's essay, though, is what President Kennedy called in 1961, the "nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness”. The sobering Michael Dobbs book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Minute to Midnight (2008), revealed that Valentin Savitsky, the commander of the Soviet submarine B59, gave an order to fire a nuclear torpedo at the US Navy ships blockading Cuba. He had assumed war had started when depth charges were dropped near his submarine. Uniquely within the Soviet Navy, however, Savitsky required consent to do so, because B59's second in command, Vasiliy Arkhipov, was also the chief of staff of the Soviet flotilla in the region. Arkhipov refused to provide authorisation, and in the argument that ensued, persuaded the captain to take B59 to the surface.

There have been far too many other near misses, most notably during Nato’s Able Archer exercise in 1983, which simulated an escalating conflict that would culminate in a coordinated US nuclear strike. In 1981, as the Reagan Administration rapidly increased military spending and ramped up anti-Soviet rhetoric and psychological operations, increasingly fearful Soviet leaders initiated Operation RYaN to collect intelligence that might provide a pre-launch warning of a US nuclear first strike. Abel Archer, which the US planned to make as realistic as possible, looked almost exactly like the preparations RYaN said the West would take before such an attack.

On the night of September 26th, 1983, only eleven days before the commencement of Abel Archer, the Soviet orbital early warning system reported one ICBM launch from the US. The alarm then went off a second time, warning of four more ICBMs heading toward the USSR. The duty officer in the early warning bunker near Moscow, Stanislav Petrov, dismissed the alarms and, in contravention of his orders, did not report them to his superiors.

A later investigation discovered that the early warning satellites had been triggered by a rare alignment of sunlight with high altitude clouds. Had Lieutenant Colonel Petrov followed procedure, Yuri Andropov, the leader of the Soviet Union, would have been woken and told that the US had launched a first strike against the Soviet Union. Andropov, reportedly a paranoid man thought to believe the US was truly willing to start a nuclear war, would have known that RYaN, a programme he himself had initiated when Chairman of the KGB, was indicating a heightened risk of a surprise attack. Soviet nuclear forces were at the time set to 'Launch on Warning’.

It is a mathematical fact that over a long enough time frame, the probability of highly unlikely events happening approaches one. Eventually, one of these nuclear near misses will hit.

It is also the case that our understanding of nuclear strategy and deterrence is based on guesswork that has already been demonstrated as, to be kind, fallible. The release of formerly secret papers, and historical research over the passage of time, has revealed that Western leaders were mistaken in their understanding of what Cuba and the Soviet Union viewed as 'rational' use of nuclear weapons in the event of conflict and of their likely responses to nuclear messaging and escalation. It seems possible that a similar incomprehension exists today between Western powers and China and Russia, and between China and Pakistan and India. The objective truth is that we have – at best – an imperfect understanding of what potential nuclear adversaries view as ‘rational’.

Yet, even if this were not the case, even if potential nuclear adversaries were of one mind and nuclear game theory was sound, the chances of miscalculation or accident are too large for humanity to live under – or likely survive for much longer. If the only winning move in the game of global thermonuclear war is not to play, then the only acceptable number of nuclear weapons in the world is zero.