There may
be no more urgent task for human survival than the elimination of nuclear
weapons, and there is apparent universal agreement on this, but one of the many
paradoxes of things nuclear is that the obvious thing that everyone wants has
proven unattainable. Everyone says she wants a nuclear-free world, but the
facts on the ground speak otherwise. One might say that the entanglements of
international relations have left humanity in a political situation that is like
the paradox of quantum physics that emerged early in the nuclear age. In 1935,
physicist Erwin Schrödinger conducted a thought experiment which he called
entanglement. He described how a cat may be simultaneously alive and dead in a state
known as a quantum superposition, if its survival were linked to a random
subatomic event that may or may not occur. If it is true for a cat, then perhaps
all of life on a tiny planet could be in the same undetermined state, waiting
for some final act of observation that decides whether the human species really
wants to live or whether it has a death wish. Only such counter-intuitive
imaginings could explain how we have managed to exist so long on the razor edge
between peace and annihilation.
Then again, we could ask if we really have avoided annihilation. Perhaps the world has been destroyed by nuclear war several times over, but we just carry on in another dimension after each "near miss," in a kind of purgatory where the gods give us a chance to reset the game and try to do it again without blowing ourselves up. Think of that part in the long telenovela LOST when the characters finally realize they are dead. They face the truth that should have been obvious all along: that no one could have survived that plane crash. So come on. Think about it. The human race created 60,000 nuclear weapons, and you really think we could have avoided nuclear war all this time?
To push
this metaphysical discussion a little further, we could say that there is another sort of
duality in existence when it comes to nuclear disarmament. There are two
effective forces in nuclear disarmament, but their paths may never cross. One
is the force within the circles of political power, while the other is the
force of the disarmament groups that work, with questionable effectiveness,
from outside the circles of political power. Both seem to carry on their
activities oblivious to those of the other.
Leaders of
the superpowers have, on rare occasions in the past, come together briefly to
make significant de-escalations in the strategic arms race. In 1963, the UK, US
and USSR signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and in the 1980s and early
1990s short and medium-range nuclear weapons were removed from Europe, and in
total the arsenals of the US and Russia were reduced by about two thirds.
Leaders took these actions because of pressure from within government to reduce
the costs and hazards of maintaining these arsenals, but they also claimed to
be reacting to popular pressure. It is also likely that these bold changes
occurred only because of the personalities of the individual leaders involved.
Kennedy, Khrushchev, Reagan and Gorbachev were strongly opposed within their
own governments, but they had the courage to overrule domestic opposition, put
aside differences about other aspects of Cold War rivalry (such as the
non-trivial matter of how they were simultaneously plunging the Third World into
their proxy wars) and prioritize the reduction of a mutual existential threat.
Considering how rare these moments of progress have been, we have to wonder if
further progress will depend on the lucky coincidence of compatible leaders with
the right intentions rising to power once again. It would be foolish to depend
on such luck, but what else is there in the historical record?
The other
parallel track of disarmament is in all the efforts that happen outside of
actions taken by the superpowers. (The lesser nuclear powers, the UK, France,
China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, NATO members and others under the
US “nuclear umbrella” make no initiatives at all.) Various non-government
organizations and non-nuclear nations have held independent or UN-sponsored
initiatives to revise and strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty and force the
nuclear powers to disarm, but there has been no significant progress since the
early 1990s, and in fact, the trust that was so hard won then has been
squandered. Now there is a general consensus that the US and Russia are in a Cold
War II that is similar but different, and perhaps worse than the first one in
some ways, mostly because of the incompetence of the new generation of leaders
who don’t comprehend the risks.
The
nuclear powers usually snub the conferences and legal challenges of disarmament
groups, but when they deign to appear it is just to make a brief statement
asking the non-nuclear nations to give up their plans, urging that rapid
disarmament would lead to a dangerous “destabilization.” It is as if the NGOs
and non-nuclear nations are being told they are powerless and too foolish to
know what is good for them. The US and Russia may not love each other anymore,
but it is time for the children to accept the divorce and, like, mommy and
daddy, get on with their lives. So far, no one in the disarmament movement has
figured out a version of The Parent Trap to manipulate them
into a reconciliation.
One group that
has made an impressive statement on disarmament is Wildfire,
a group that has tried to “change the game” by calling for more aggressive
approaches with “no more commissions, pontificating windbags, paper cranes, NPT
treadmill, and no more whining, wishing or waiting.”[1] At the 2014 Vienna Conference on
the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, using clear language that cut
past the diplomatic niceties and technical jargon, they called on the
non-nuclear nations to stop enabling their abusers:
…
my message today is for those states which do not have nuclear weapons, for
those states which, whatever the security threats they face, have foresworn nuclear
weapons by joining the NPT, for those states which, despite having no nuclear
weapons, unjustly bear the risks and will bear the terrible consequences of
their use, and my message to you, states without nuclear weapons, begins with
these words from Isaiah:
“How
long, Oh Lord?”
“Until
the cities are wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without people, and
the land lies utterly desolate.”
How
long will you keep playing this game? How long will you listen politely to the
nuclear-armed states? How long will you continue to accept the procrastination,
empty promises and endless excuses of the nuclear-armed states? How long will
you listen politely to nuclear-armed states that claim to support the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as a crucial step towards disarmament, but haven’t
ratified it after eighteen years? How long will you listen to the nuclear-armed
states express their unequivocal commitment to nuclear disarmament and then
come here and say that they need their nuclear weapons for stability? How long
will you wait for these mythical “right conditions” for nuclear disarmament?
And
now you have at last begun this discussion of the humanitarian impact of
nuclear weapons. How many more meetings will you have? How many times will you
listen to the harrowing tales of victims? How many times will you listen to the
chilling scientific accounts of catastrophic consequences? How many times will
you listen to analysis of the alarming risks of accidents, miscalculation or
deliberate use? How long will you sit, and worry, and complain, and talk, and
talk and talk? How long, Mr. Chairman, until you, the states without nuclear
weapons, decide to take this matter into your own hands and act? Because until
you do this charade is going to continue. Even if we take the nuclear-armed
states at their word, and believe that they are sincere about disarmament, it
is clear that they are addicted to their weapons. They are like the alcoholic
who is always promising to stop drinking but somehow never does. Their weapons
possess them.
Nobody
can force an alcoholic to stop drinking, and nobody can force the nuclear-armed
states to disarm. Only they can choose to give up their weapons, but you, the
sober members of the family of nations, can stop enabling them. You can remove the
ambiguity that supports their habits. You can make clear where you stand and
what you will not accept. You can negotiate, and adopt, and bring into force a
treaty banning nuclear weapons. This is something you can do. It is something
you can do now. The alternative is to sit, passive and impotent, while the
nuclear-armed states continue as they always have, risking your security, along
with all of human civilization, in a misguided attempt to protect theirs. It’s
your future, and your choice. You can sit, and wait, and whine, or you can take
control and negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons.[2]
This suggestion
that the non-nuclear states should take matters into their own hands is a
logical step. It is indeed what is necessary, but two years have passed since
this statement was delivered and none of the non-nuclear nations have taken up
the call to stop enabling the nuclear-armed states. In August 2016 in the UN
Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament “an overwhelming majority of nations… signaled
their clear intention to join negotiations in 2017 on a treaty prohibiting
nuclear weapons,”[3] but this commitment will be meaningless if it is not backed
up by a coalition of the weak that can impose punishing sanctions on the
strongest nations of the world. The reasons this won’t happen should be obvious.
The international community lacks the will, and there is no interest in such
reform in the domestic politics of the nuclear-armed states. In an interview
Edward Snowden gave around the same time as the 2014 Vienna conference, he
explained his view of why there has been no popular resistance to the
intrusions of the American security state into the private communications of
citizens, an issue which nonetheless receives more attention than nuclear
weapons:
I
don’t believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you
underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people who have too many
things going on in their lives. And we do not live in a revolutionary time.
People are not prepared to contest power. We have a system of education that is
really a sort of euphemism for indoctrination.[4]
There are
many other causes for which American citizens could be protesting against their
own government, and others for which foreign governments and foreign citizens
could also be stopping the actions of the American government: international
trade agreements that favor the rights of corporations, ecological destruction,
income inequality, food insecurity, arms sales to nations that abuse human
rights, interference in the domestic affairs of foreign nations, abuse of
international law, use of inhumane conventional weapons in wars that are not
sanctioned by UN resolutions. All of these issues directly affect the lives of
people in much more tangible ways than arsenals of nuclear weapons that have
never been used in warfare since 1945. It is not likely that any single nation
or a coalition of nations will do what is necessary to force the nuclear-armed
states to give up their weapons. Whatever level of sanctions and boycotts would
be necessary to force such change, it’s clear that there is no group of nations
with an interest in finding out.
A few historical
examples demonstrate the lengths to which nuclear-armed nations will go to
punish junior partners that step out of line. In the 1970s, Australia had a
prime minister who wanted to renegotiate the nation’s security arrangements
with the US. The Americans began to fear that their strategically important
intelligence gathering facility in the Australian desert would be closed down,
so pretty soon the CIA-friendly governor general fired the prime minister.[5] In
the 1980s, France exerted economic torture on New Zealand in order to win the
release of French intelligence officers who had killed a man on the Greenpeace
ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985. France was ready to use its influence in the EU
to block all agricultural imports from New Zealand. The New Zealand prime
minister had to surrender because the public would have never accepted such
economic damage as the cost of standing up for a principle.[6]
When it
comes to the topic of boycotts, sanctions and disinvestment to punish
nuclear-armed states, we need to look at how the undeclared “ambiguous” nuclear
power Israel is reacting to the BDS movement over its treatment of
Palestinians. Israel has exerted pressure on foreign governments to make
boycotts illegal, something South Africa never managed to do during the period
of sanctions over Apartheid. If this state of affairs exists regarding a
campaign against abuses that are actually happening, it is difficult to imagine
that a coalition of non-nuclear states could organize a “BDS” campaign against nuclear
weapons that are sitting harmlessly (for now) in their silos.
In fact,
the BDS campaign itself has expressed little concern about Israel’s status as a
non-declared possessor of nuclear weapons. Where would we begin in convincing
Israel to give up this arsenal that it can’t even admit to owning? There can be
no doubt that Israel thinks far ahead to a day when the Arab states’ oil is
depleted, the region is in even worse chaos than now, and American support is
gone. Israel wants its nuclear deterrent for that day, so it is inconceivable
that any amount of outside pressure would force it give up its nuclear weapons.
This topic never comes up at disarmament conferences because there is no desire
to get “sidetracked” into the enormously contentious issues in Middle East
politics, especially not Israel’s right to exist and protect that existence
with a nuclear deterrent. It is deemed better to pretend that we can make
progress in nuclear disarmament without facing the connections to other
intractable problems in international relations. At the 2015 Pugwash Conference
in Nagasaki I witnessed Mr. Kim Won-soo, UN Under Secretary-General and
Acting High Representative of Disarmament Affairs, claim that he was merely “extremely
disappointed” that the recent NPT negotiations failed. He failed to mention any
countries by name or that his disappointment referred to a motion that would
have forced Israel to declare whether it possessed nuclear weapons, one that
was overruled by the US, the UK and Canada.[7]
It is said
that states have no morals; only interests, and we could add that when it comes
to enduring economic pain, democracies have no self-respect and no principles.
A leader like Fidel Castro was able to withstand American sanctions because he could
force his people to pay the price. If he had been facing re-election in a year’s
time, it is doubtful he would have been supported by popular pressure to endure
the economic pain of five decades of sanctions. While the nuclear-armed states
are addicted to their weapons, the non-nuclear armed states are addicted to
their access to markets in the nuclear-armed states. At this time, it is simply
not conceivable that a new non-aligned movement could succeed after the failure
of the first one launched in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 which the United States
found intolerable. Ten years later Southeast Asia was engulfed in a decade of civil
wars, genocide and carpet bombing.
But this
sort of historical awareness, or awareness of any concerns besides nuclear
weapons, seems to be something that the present disarmament movement is not
very good at. The movement lives in a silo, and it has to get out and engage
with the problems that need to be resolved before we can get to nuclear
disarmament.
One reason
for this sidelining of the disarmament movement may have been the recent
appearance in it of former American cold warriors such as Henry Kissinger who
have “seen the light” in their old age and come around to admitting the
uselessness of nuclear arsenals. However, beneath this apparently enlightened
discourse, there is a seldom-stated assumption of a continued American
exceptionalism and hegemony. In an editorial in The New York Times, James E. Cartwright and Bruce G. Blairaug
argued for adopting a nuclear “no-first-use” policy by saying first use would
never be necessary because the US enjoys dominance in every other aspect:
Our
nonnuclear strength, including economic and diplomatic power, our alliances,
our conventional and cyber weaponry and our technological advantages,
constitute a global military juggernaut unmatched in history. The United States
simply does not need nuclear weapons to defend its own and its allies’ vital
interests, as long as our adversaries refrain from their use.[8]
The
authors evince no awareness that it is this very predominance that makes old
hawks like Kissinger think nuclear weapons are no longer necessary and makes America’s
adversaries want nuclear weapons. When the nuclear-armed states speak
euphemistically about the loss of “stability” that would come with rapid
disarmament, they are talking about this stability that comes from the predominance
of American power. Americans want to preserve the “stability” of their
advantage, and all the other nuclear-armed states want to hang onto the “stability”
that comes from having a nuclear deterrent to hold American power at bay. It
should be obvious to all that there is only one player in this dangerous game
that can unwind it (Hint: It’s not North Korea).
 |
| In the film The Big Lebowski, set in September 1990, the protagonist (a drafter of the original counter-culture Port Huron Statement) signs a check postdated Sept. 11, 1991 for a 69-cent quart of milk. As he signs it, the television at the checkout counter broadcasts President Bush's New World Order statement from 1990. |
Mikhail
Gorbachev, the last head of state of the USSR, is a man who knows a few things
about negotiating with Americans. He has been pointing out this problem ever
since President Bush the First declared the American-led New World Order in
1990. Gorbachev is still fully committed to both the total elimination of nuclear
weapons and nuclear power plants, but he has consistently pointed out the
problems that lie beyond this elusive goal. In his recent book The New Russia, Gorbachev discussed some
of the comments he has made over the years on America’s abuse of its status as
the world’s sole superpower:
...
could it be considered realistic if, after ridding the world of weapons of mass
destruction, one country would still be in possession of more conventional
weapons than the combined arsenals of almost all other countries in the world
put together? If it were to have absolute global military superiority? In my
speech [World Political Forum, Turin, May 18, 2003] I warned that the answer
could only be negative:
I
will say frankly that such a prospect would be an insurmountable obstacle to
ridding the world of nuclear weapons. If we do not address the issue of a
general demilitarization of world politics, reduction of arms budgets, ceasing
the development of new weapons, a ban on the militarization of space, all talk
of a nuclear-free world will come to nothing.
I
reminded the conference that when, in years gone by, we had proposed moving
forward to a non-nuclear world, our Western partners had raised the issue of
the Soviet Union’s superiority in conventional weapons. We had not tried to
evade it and had entered negotiations that led to a mutual reduction of
conventional arms in Europe. Today we needed the West to adopt a similar
approach.
More
general problems must also be addressed if we are to build a relationship of
partnership and trust. Foremost is the problem of military superiority. I
pointed out that the US National Security Strategy adopted in 2002 explicitly
proclaimed the principle that the United States should enjoy global military
superiority: “This principle has in effect become an integral part of America’s
creed. It finds specific expression in the vast arsenals of conventional
weapons, the colossal defense budget and the plans for weaponizing outer space.
The proposed strategic dialogue must include all these issues.” [Mikhail Gorbachev
referring to his NYT editorial of April 22, 2010]
The
correlation between reduction and elimination of weapons of mass destruction
and the general state of international relations and security is something any
sober-minded politician should be keeping in mind. The generation of
politicians that replaced ours failed signally to improve security in Europe
and the rest of the world. The worst blunder was the decision to expand NATO
and turn it into a ‘guarantor’ of security not only in Europe but beyond its
borders. [9]
Gorbachev
also cited the speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri, in May 1992, the hometown of
President Harry Truman where Winston Churchill made the speech that launched
the Cold War in 1946:
Under
the guise of protestations of peace-loving intentions and the need to protect
the interests of the world’s peoples, both sides took decisions that split the
world. Their antagonism was misrepresented by both sides as a necessary
confrontation between good and evil... [The most important thing today was] not
to make the intellectual, and political, mistake of seeing overcoming the Cold
War as a victory for America. We now have the opportunity to move forward to
peace and progress for everyone, relying not on force, which is a threat to all
civilization, but on international law, the principles of equal rights, a
balancing of interests, freedom of choice, cooperation and common sense.
I
urged my listeners to acknowledge an important reality: it was not possible in
this day and age for “particular states or groups of states to reign supreme on
the international stage.” My speech at Fulton was less a polemic against
Churchill than against those hatching plans for global domination.[10]
Mr.
Gorbachev’s insights here suggest that something needs to be added to Wildfire’s
refreshing appeal to cut through ossified discourse on disarmament. Dismantling
American hegemony and the military industrial complex is a prerequisite of
nuclear disarmament. It is not something that can wait for later.
Unfortunately, the permanent war state remained unmentionable even during the
recent “radical” campaign of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination.
The historian Gareth
Porter argued that it must become a more prominent issue if the progressive
movement is to advance:
So
the strategy of the movement… must include a broadly concerted campaign that
explains to young people, disaffected working-class people and others how the
permanent war state produces winners and losers. The winners are the national
security organs themselves, as well as those who make careers and fortunes from
the permanent state of war. The losers are those who must suffer the
socioeconomic and other consequences of such reckless policies. Such a campaign
should aim at nothing less than taking away the flow of money and the legal
authority that the permanent war state has seized on the pretext of “threats”
that are largely of its own making… the legitimacy of the permanent war state
is extremely tenuous. A determined campaign to challenge that legitimacy,
carried out with sufficient resources over a few years with the participation
of a broad coalition, could shake it to its roots.[11]
If this
advice applies to the American progressive movement, it also applies to the
international community. The call for non-nuclear-armed states to withdraw
support of nuclear-armed states would be a highly disruptive change in the
world order, one which, judging by the historical record, would be severely
resisted by the United States in the form of “making the economy scream,” to
quote a phrase used by Richard Nixon when Chile wanted to pursue an independent
path in the early 1970s.[12] A complete overthrow of the Chilean government
followed the economic torture. It has been argued here that nuclear abolition
movements both inside and outside the United States will reach their goals only
if they turn their attention first to the non-nuclear bombs that are actually
falling on people’s heads at the present time. This explains why the Wildfire
group has found disarmament talks so ineffectual, replete with commissions,
pontificating windbags, paper cranes, whining, wishing and waiting. The
movement has been unable or unwilling to address the root problems which led to
the creation of nuclear arsenals in the first place.
Notes
[9]
Mikhail Gorbachev, The New Russia
(Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2016), 304-306.
[10]
Mikhail Gorbachev, ibid, 340-341.
