Throughout his life, AWR friend Henk Glimmerveen (1923-2020) showed that engaged citizens can make a difference. He was an extremely effective activist for Christian migrants from Turkey in the Netherlands in the 1980s (please see my in-memoriam about this remarkable man). Henk was a keen observer and a critical one, not just accepting any story of persecution at face value. He viewed a recent film in which a Coptic Evangelical pastor and his family showed how they have dealt with extortion efforts during a period of lawlessness. The threats in this film were, he concluded, terrible but cannot be described as Christian persecution.
In the summer of 2019, Henk Glimmerveen wrote his last article, “Europa op ramkoers; gevaren niet genoeg onderkend,” (Europe on collision course; dangers not sufficiently recognized). This was his last exhortation to humanity to protect itself and indeed all life on our beautiful earth from this deadly threat. His life and his efforts to voice his concerns at the end of his life were my inspiration to write this paper on the Worldwide Threat of Nuclear Weaponry. This paper describes the rapid development of nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1970, and the 1979 NATO decision to deploy 572 medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads in Western Europe. This decision resulted in massive anti-nuclear weapons demonstrations in the Netherlands (and other countries not described in this paper). The INF Treaty of 1987 and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran greatly diminished the risk of a nuclear war, but with the US pulling out of the treaties with Iran (2018) and Russia (2019), fears of a nuclear disaster have increased. Chillingly, Lord Howell of Guildford, chairman of the International Relations Committee of the UK House of Lords, commented in April 2019, “We are now dangerously close to a world without arms control agreements, paving the way for a new arms race and for increased risk of nuclear weapons use.”
More and more countries have built nuclear reactors including Israel, Iran, Egypt and Jordan. Four other countries, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, have nuclear weapons but have not submitted to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and thus their arsenals cannot be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), increasing the dangers of the proliferation and use of these weapons.
We are living in a word where a number of strategists and politicians still believe that we can survive a nuclear war. In 1983, US astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) described in Science what the world could look like after a nuclear explosion and introduced the concept of “nuclear winter:” prolonged dust and smoke, an abrupt drop in Earth's temperatures resulting in a widespread failure of crops leading to a massive worldwide famine to the extent that “the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded.” The weapons establishment responded in playing down the dangers. Other researchers provide calculations that show the disastrous effects of even a “small” nuclear war. The effects are beyond comprehension for most people who also believe they have no chance to influence these developments and live in apathy and denial. Henk Glimmerveen was discouraged by this mindset and stressed that there remains an urgent need for a wake-up call, making the public aware of the dangers of nuclear weapons.
