Are presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin aware that any direct assault over Ukraine will take the conventional military conflict into another realm involving both their massive nuclear arsenals?

Both the US and Russia have 900 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, that could be launched in minutes. There are 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Just 50 could kill 200m people. As events in the Middle East and Asia escalate, a profound threat lurks over the horizon. The possibility exists that these conflicts could propel nations to exercise the dreaded nuclear option.

John F. Kennedy, seeking to break the logjam on nuclear disarmament, said: “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.”

There can be no doubt that the greatest threat to civilisation, perhaps of mankind, comes from nuclear weapons. Mankind is confronted with the threat of self-extinction from the massive and competitive accumulation of the most destructive weapons ever produced. Mankind is faced with a choice, we must halt the threats or face annihilation.

The effects of nuclear weapons transcend time, and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations, but the very meaning of civilisation.

Nuclear war threatens catastrophes that, although less encompassing than extinction, are still outside historical comparison. Although the physical threat of a full-scale nuclear holocaust has declined since the end of the Cold War, nuclear war remains a grim reality.

In a speech to the United Nations in 1961, Kennedy had the following to say: “Every man, woman and child lives under a sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

Farouk Araie, Actonville, Benoni