Below is my letter to the editor of The New York Times, which was published on 4/27/23.

To the Editor:

Re “A 3-Way Nuclear Rivalry Upends U.S. Strategy” (front page, April 20):

China’s decision to grow its nuclear weapons arsenal to be on a par with or potentially more advanced than that of the U.S. could not be worse news. I fear that the danger of an intentional or inadvertent launch of global nuclear war will soon be greater than it was when the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 put us on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse.

In more bad news, the war in Ukraine has led a desperate, reckless Vladimir Putin to unilaterally suspend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, our last functional nuclear control treaty.

The world already has an estimated 13,000 nuclear warheads, though just a few dozen detonations of thermonuclear weapons could end the ability of the planet to sustain human life. Our hope now is that intense, mutually respectful diplomacy will succeed in bringing sanity to the negotiating table.

During the late 1970s and ’80s, I was a member of a physicians’ antinuclear organization that rallied around this singular message: If we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, no matter how it starts, there will be no possibility of a medical response.

Our “prescription” was that prevention, meaning diplomacy, was the only strategy to save us from nuclear annihilation. Consider that prescription was officially refilled.

Irwin Redlener
New York
The writer, a pediatrician, is the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

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