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carnage - ['kɑnɪdʒ] the killing of a large number of people
hindsight - [ha͟ɪndsaɪt] the ability to understand and realize something about an event after it has happened, although you did not understand or realize it at the time
pivotal - [pɪ̱vət(ə)l] role, point or figure in something is one that is very important and affects the success of that thing
barren - infertile
arraign - [ə'reɪn] call or bring (someone) before a court to answer a criminal charge
zionists- [za͟ɪ͟ənɪst]
zionism - ['zʌɪənɪz(ə)m] a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel. It was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, and was later led by Chaim Weizmann
proximity fuse - радиолокационный взрыватель; дистанционный, неконтактный взрыватель
ballistic missile - ['mɪsaɪl] am ['misəl] - a missile with a high, arching trajectory, that is initially powered and guided but falls under gravity onto its target. Compare with guided
guided missile - a missile, esp one that is rocket-propelled, having a flight path controlled during flight either by radio signals or by internal preset or self-actuating homing devices
bomb - [bɒm]
harnessing of the atom - control and make use of
fission - ['fɪʃ(ə)n] nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom to produce a large amount of energy or cause a large explosion
usher - cause or mark the start of (something new)
animosity - [anɪ'mɒsɪti] strong hostility
blaze - a very large or fiercely burning fire; to blaze - fire a gun repeatedly or indiscriminately; two terrorists burst into the house with guns blazing
2.Answer the following questions:
· Why did WW2 overshadow every war ever been fought?
· How do contemporary politics and historical hindsight affect current visions of the war?
· What was the most immediate legacy of WW2?
· Why did the nations found the UN?
· What’s the UN?
· How does the UN affect the lives of many people according to the author?
· What problems does the UN tackle?
· How did WW2 contribute to the development of international Law?
· Why was the Jewish state established?
· What caused repeated breaks of violence in Palestine?
· How was the partition plan accepted by Jews and Arabs?
· What did WW2 catalyze and stimulate?
· What shaped postwar military strategy and politics?
· What ushered in the nuclear age?
· What did nuclear weapons in the Cold War threaten to engulf our planet?
· What did the end of WW2 signal?
· Why the wartime alliance between the USA and the USSR collapse?
· When was the collapse of the USSR?
· Why was the Cold War not simply a great power rivalry?
· What gave rise to great changes in global politics?
3.Prepare a report: “Legacies of WW2”
Organize a discussion on this issue.
Nuclear weapons should be abolished
By Jonathan Schell
With the invention of nuclear arms, we human beings brought ourselves face-to-face with the prospect of extinguishing the human race by our own hand. A decision to abolish nuclear weapons would represent a decision to survive. This quest for survival is the deepest, most important, and most enduring of the imperatives for nuclear abolition. Inseparable from it is the imperative of sparing the Earth’s ecosphere from irreparable damage.
Nuclear war also threatens catastrophes that, although less encompassing than extinction, are still outside all historical comparison. On August 6, 1945, moments after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, a history professor living in the hills of the city turned around, and, in his words, “saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.” In a flash, the city and most of its people had been annihilated. Those who did not die immediately were exposed to unimaginable suffering. A grocer in the city later said of the long lines of the injured filing out of the city that “you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back.”
The invention of the hydrogen bomb multiplied the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb by a thousandfold. Any city on Earth can be razed to its foundations by a thermonuclear bomb of the appropriate size. Ten bombs can annihilate ten cities; a hundred bombs a hundred cities. A single Trident submarine can carry enough nuclear bombs to level an entire continent.
Even more widely destructive than the explosive power of the weapons is their radioactive fallout, which causes radiation sickness. There is, simply, no meaningful limit on the destructive power of nuclear bombs. They put at mortal risk all that we human beings are, all that we have ever been, and all that we ever will be.
These perils—the destruction of cities, nations, continents, humanity, and Earth’s ecosystem—will be with us as long as nuclear weapons are with us. However, our particular historical moment—the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the new century—has provided new reasons for taking up the challenge of nuclear arms abolition with special urgency.
The first of these reasons is that the end of the Cold War has granted us the greatest opportunity since nuclear weapons were invented to achieve the goal of nuclear abolition. During the Cold War, the obstacles to full nuclear disarmament were daunting. From a Western point of view, the totalitarian character of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) presented what appeared to be insurmountable obstacles. An agreement for nuclear disarmament required on-site inspections, but the secrecy of the Soviet regime seemed to render hope of such inspections entirely unrealistic. The West, in any case, seemed uninterested in abolition and relied on the nuclear threat to prevent an attack by Soviet forces against Western Europe. From the Soviet point of view, the West demonstrated little interest in nuclear disarmament; instead, it seemed bent on extracting the maximum military advantage out of its nuclear arsenals. Given these circumstances, it was not surprising that nuclear disarmament quickly became at best a topic for politicians’ speeches, not the object of any serious negotiation.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the most serious obstacles to nuclear abolition have been removed. No longer does a totalitarian regime stand in the way; no longer does systemic secrecy block the sort of inspection that would be required for nuclear disarmament. At the same time, the end of the Soviet-U.S. conflict removes the reason for nuclear proliferation.
The United States and Russia today have no cause for even the smallest of conventional (nonnuclear) wars, much less a nuclear conflict. The arsenals of thousands of weapons, each deployed to counter the other, are the grotesque and monstrous relics of an age that has passed. What is more, no systemic global ideological rivalry has risen to replace the Cold War. The conditions for peace among the great powers are better than they have been in several hundred years.
A second historical reason for acting quickly to abolish nuclear weapons is to avoid what many fear will become a kind of nuclear anarchy—the untrammeled spread of nuclear weapons, and of biological and chemical weapons as well. In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, new sources of nuclear danger have appeared and are growing. India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in May 1998 and now have apparently embarked on a nuclear arms race. North Korea and Iraq both have built sophisticated nuclear weapon programs.
For these and other reasons, the web of nuclear arms control agreements that modestly constrained nuclear danger in the last years of the Cold War are falling apart. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has been rejected by the United States Senate. The U.S. decision to consider constructing nuclear-missile defenses has impeded progress in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks between Russia and the United States. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obligates the nuclear powers to eliminate their nuclear arsenals in return for a commitment by 182 nonnuclear powers to renounce nuclear weapons, is under serious strain.
The evident resolve of the United States and the other nuclear powers to hold on to their weapons fatally undercuts their efforts to stop other nations from building nuclear weapons. Possession of nuclear weapons by the existing nuclear powers is the root of proliferation. Only when nations commit themselves to abolition will they have the standing and the resolve to work together to stop proliferation.
A double standard, in which some nations were permitted to have nuclear weapons and others were not, was once tacitly accepted by much of the world. Those days are over, and the world must now move to a single standard, which can only be the abolition of nuclear weapons. The historic opportunity to achieve nuclear disarmament will not last indefinitely. Each year the difficulties multiply, as the roots of nuclear danger grow down into the soil of more countries. In particular, the influence of the United States—already badly compromised by its insistence on keeping nuclear arsenals even in the absence of a global foe—will steadily wane.
There are, it is true, some arguments against abolition that survive the end of the Cold War. Although they lack the force of the arguments that prevailed during the East-West rivalry, they still have substance. Antiabolitionists argue that abolishing nuclear weapons is reckless because inspection can never be adequate. Even if the hardware is eliminated, they correctly point out, nuclear know-how will remain, enabling irresponsible nations—“rogue states”—to violate an abolition agreement and build nuclear arms, whether secretly or openly. In a world in which all nations have disarmed, they conclude, any nation that comes to possess even a few nuclear weapons will rule. Removal of nuclear danger, they further maintain, will permit conventional war to break out. According to this view, nuclear weapons are a benefit because, through the discipline of the balance of terror, they prevent conventional war—admittedly, no small gain. Some analysts even go as far as to favor nuclear proliferation for this reason. For them, the Cold War was a demonstration that nuclear deterrence works, and they recommend the system to other nations for the future.
These arguments, however, overlook both fundamental historical lessons and fundamental differences between the two-sided, or bipolar, nuclear balance of the Cold War and the multipolar world that has emerged since. They hugely underrate the dangers of living in a world that has not committed itself to abolition while overrating the dangers of an abolition agreement. Although it is true that violation of an abolition agreement is possible, the advantage thus gained appears less formidable in light of the historical record. In several cases, nuclear powers have fought and lost wars with small, conventionally armed adversaries. This was true, for example, of England in the Suez Crisis of 1956; of the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s; and of China in its border war with North Vietnam in 1979. In none of these wars was the nuclear-armed giant able to prevent a conventional war or extract the slightest detectable military or political advantage from its overwhelming nuclear monopoly.
If, in the past, great nuclear powers have been unable to bully conventionally armed nations, then how, in a nuclear-weapon-free world, would small nations possessing a few nuclear weapons bully the entire world? Whatever advantage a cheater might have would be brief. The former nuclear powers will not have forgotten how to build nuclear weapons, either, and would likely go into production if their other means, including the massed conventional forces of the world, failed to bring the violator to heel. Great powers that rely on the integrity of an abolition agreement for their own safety would possess a will to enforce it. The more one examines the supposed advantages of violating an abolition agreement, the more they melt away.
The differences between the bipolar nuclear balance of the past and the multipolar future, which already includes eight nuclear powers, are also important. Nuclear deterrence—the doctrine that prevailed during the Cold War—makes sense only when two sides confront one another, if then. Add a powerful nuclear-armed third nation, not to mention a 10th or 15th, and the system is thrown into confusion and disarray. Sudden changes in alliances, of which history shows many examples, would threaten to capsize even the most carefully wrought agreements.
With the advent of what defense analyst Albert Wohlstetter called a nuclear-armed crowd, nuclear deterrence cannot provide stability even in theory. Arms control agreements would be entangled in hopeless complexity. During most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were unable to achieve reductions in offensive nuclear arsenals, which consequently grew to preposterous size. What chance is there that a dozen major nuclear powers, arranging themselves in any number of shifting alliances, could achieve lasting agreement on appropriate levels of nuclear arms? In addition, the already great danger that terrorist groups would acquire nuclear bombs and use them could only rise exponentially as nuclear technology spread. Abolition, which would require the tightest feasible controls on nuclear materials and technology, would help eliminate this problem.
It would be wrong to suggest that a world without nuclear arms would be without danger, even nuclear danger. The risk of cheating would be real, as would the risk that a possible conventional war might spin out of control and spur nuclear rearmament. The point, however, is that those perils are lower by several orders of magnitude than the ones in the world of nuclear anarchy toward which our inaction points us now. We are not called to choose between danger and perfect safety but between two species of danger. Reflection shows that the level of risk under an abolition agreement is far lower than that which exists in a world without one.
There are further reasons to abolish nuclear weapons. Since the destruction of Nagasaki, no nuclear weapon has been used in war. In a world of proliferating arsenals no one knows how long this good luck will hold. What we can and do know is that over the long run no civilization can be based on a willingness to kill hundreds of millions of innocent people. As long as the Soviet Union existed, the West could at least argue that it resorted to this extreme means in order to counter the horrific threat posed by an immense totalitarian empire. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that justification disappeared. The nuclear powers are left with their own insistence, unrelated to any particular peril, on preserving these means of annihilation.
Although the physical threat of a full-scale nuclear holocaust has declined since the end of the Cold War, the cultural and spiritual threat has grown. The exploded bomb can end human life on Earth. The unexploded bomb—the incarnation of the worst impulses of human beings—spreads moral devastation within. We are brought face to face with ourselves—with the character and proclivities of the liberal civilization that now bids to dominate the world’s affairs. Can we preserve this civilization without menacing it and all life on earth with annihilation? Or has our idea of civilization come, by some twisted logic, to incorporate the threat of annihilation into its essence? Surely an acceptance of annihilation contradicts the avowed principles of our civilization at every point and, even in the continued absence of nuclear war, darkens its future. Freeing the world from this burden is yet another reason to abolish nuclear arms.
About the author: Journalist Jonathan Schell is the author of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (1998). He has written for The Nation, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. He is a former writer and editor with The New Yorker.
Exercises:
1.Study the vocabulary:
· To extinguish the human race by their own hand
· The quest for survival
· To spare the Earth’s ecosphere from irreparable damage
· To drop a bomb on
· To be annihilated
· The hydrogen bomb - hydrogen bomb is an immensely powerful bomb whose destructive power comes from the rapid release of energy during the nuclear fusion of isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium), using an atom bomb as a trigger
· To multiply by a thousandfold
· To be razed to foundations
· A thermonuclear bomb - a type of bomb in which most of the energy is provided by nuclear fusion, esp the fusion of hydrogen isotopes Also called: thermonuclear bomb, fission-fusion bomb See also hydrogen bomb
· To level something
· Radioactive fallout
· To put at mortal risk
· To take up something with special urgency
· Full nuclear disarmament
· To be bent on extracting some advantage out of nuclear arsenals
· To remove the reason for nuclear proliferation
· To be deployed to counter the other
· The untrammeled spread of nuclear weapons - not deprived of freedom of action or expression; not restricted or hampered
· To conduct nuclear tests
· To embark on a nuclear arms race - If you embark on something new, difficult, or exciting, you start doing it.
· To constrain nuclear danger - to compel or force, esp by persuasion, circumstances, etc.; oblige
· The comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
· The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks - [strə'tidʒɪk]
· The nuclear Non-Prolifiration Treaty
· To renounce nuclear weapons – to renounce: refuse to continue to recognize or abide by
· To be under strain
· To hold on to their weapons
· To break out a conventional war
· Nuclear deterrence - [d ɪ te ̱ rəns, AM -t ɜ ͟ r-] Deterrence is the prevention of something, especially war or crime, by having something such as weapons or punishment to use as a threat.
· To rise exponentially – exponentially: growing or increasing very rapidly. [FORMAL]
· To spin out of control
· To spur nuclear rearmament – to spur: promote the development of; stimulate
2.Prove using arguments that because of their awesome destructive force nuclear weapons should be abolished.
3.Dwell on the following:
- A decision to abolish nuclear weapons would represent a decision to survive
- Nuclear weapons also threatens catastrophes that, also less encompassing than extinction, are still outside all historical comparison
- Radioactive fallout is even more destructive than the explosive power of the weapons
- During the Cold War, the obstacles to full nuclear disarmament were daunting (daunting- seeming difficult to deal with in prospect; intimidating)
- The end of the Soviet - US removes the reason for nuclear proliferation
- To abolish nuclear weapons - s to avoid nuclear anarchy
- The web of nuclear arms control agreements are falling apart
- Possession of nuclear weapons by the existing nuclear powers is the root of proliferation
- Each year the difficulties multiply, as the roots of nuclear danger grow down into the soil of more countries
- Some analysts hugely underrate the dangers of living in a world that has not committed itself to abolition while overrate the dangers of an abolition agreement
- Nuclear deterrence makes sense only when two sides confront one another
- Terrorist groups can acquire nuclear bombs and use them
- The level of risk under an abolition agreement is far lower than that which exists in a world without one
- The nuclear powers are left with their own insistence, unrelated to any particular peril, on preserving these means of annihilation
- Although the physical threat of a nuclear war has declined since the end of Cold War, the cultural and spiritual threat has grown
4. Participate in a role-play assuming the role of an analyst, the topic under discussion is the following: “Nearly all experts agree that nuclear weapons are so powerful that they are capable of totally annihilating entire countries, even continents. ”
Дата: 2019-12-10, просмотров: 241.