The US Congress has passed legislation enabling the 2005 US-India nuclear deal to go forward. This deal may accelerate the nuclear arms in South Asia.
The US Congress explicitly rejected proposals that the deal be conditional on India halting its production of fissile materials (plutonium and highly enriched uranium) for nuclear weapons. This is despite the fact that the United Nations Security Council had unanimously demanded that India and Pakistan stop such production (Resolution 1172, 6 June, 1998).
The U.S.-India deal will allow India access to the international uranium market. This will enable it to free up more of its domestic uranium for its nuclear weapons program. India could, for example, build a third weapon plutonium reactor and begin enriching uranium for weapons, as well as supply enriched uranium to fuel the nuclear submarine it has been trying to build for several decades. India could also convert one of its unsafeguarded nuclear power reactors to weapons-grade plutonium production, and generate an additional 200 kg/year of weapons-grade plutonium. This would allow India to produce an additional 40-50 weapons worth a year of weapon-grade plutonium — up from perhaps seven weapons worth a year today.
As part of the nuclear deal, the United States also agreed to let Indian keep its nuclear fuel reprocessing plants and plutonium breeder reactor program outside safeguards. The plutonium breeder reactor that India expects to complete in 2010 would produce about 25-30 weapons worth a year of weapon-grade plutonium in its blankets. India expects to build another four such reactors in coming years.
Pakistan’s National Command Authority, which is chaired by President Pervez Musharraf and has responsibility for its nuclear weapons policy and production, declared that “In view of the fact the [U.S.-India] agreement would enable India to produce a significant quantity of fissile material and nuclear weapons from unsafeguarded nuclear reactors, the NCA expressed firm resolve that our credible minimum deterrence requirements will be met.”
Our task
The international peace movement can still try to prevent this deal from triggering a major escalation in the South Asian nuclear arms race.
For the deal to come into force, it has to be accepted unanimously by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). The debate may be drawn out – the deal is supported by the United States, United Kingdom, France and Russia, while several members (including Austria, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand) are opposed, and other countries (among them Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Finland) are divided. China has proposed that instead of an India-specific exemption from NSG rules, a criteria based approach be adopted. This presumably would open the door for the NSG to eventually consider lifting restrictions on nuclear trade with Pakistan — whose nuclear weapon and nuclear power program China has supported.
The countries who are members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group must be urged to abide by UN Security Council Resolution 1172. They should promote an end to the production of fissile materials for weapons in South Asia as a condition for any international nuclear trade with India or Pakistan.
A moratorium on such production could also be important in fostering negotiations on a fissile material cut-off treaty. The United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France and China have all suspended production of fissile materials for weapons. India and Pakistan (along with Israel and North Korea) are continuing their production however. A complete halt to all production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons is a necessary step for nuclear disarmament.
For more information on the US-India nuclear deal:
Zia Mian is a research scientist with the programme on science and global security, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Out of the Nuclear Shadow: Pakistan’s Atomic Bomb & the Search for Security (Zed Books, 2001).
I have known David Krieger for the past twenty-five years, and he has never wavered, even for a day, from his lifelong journey dedicated to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war. If I were given to categorization, I would label such an extraordinary engagement with a cause as an instance of ‘benign fanaticism.’ Unfortunately, from the perspective of the human future, it is a condition rarely encountered, posing the puzzle as to why Krieger should be so intensely inclined, given his seemingly untraumatized background. He traces his own obsession back to his mother’s principled refusal to install a nuclear bomb shelter in the backyard of their Los Angeles home when he was 12 years old. He comments in the Preface to ZERO that even at the time he “hadn’t expected” her to take such a stand, which he experienced as “a powerful lesson in compassion,” being especially moved by her unwillingness “to buy into saving herself at the expense of humanity.” (xiv). Nine years later after Krieger graduated from college his mother was again an instrumental force, giving him as a graduation present a trip to Japan to witness first-hand “what two nuclear weapons had done to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (xiv) The rest is, as they say, ‘history.’ Or as Krieger puts it in characteristic understatement, “[t]hose visits changed my life.” (xiv)
On a psychological level, I remain perplexed by two opposite observations: we still lack the key that unlocks the mystery of Krieger’s unwavering dedication and why so few others have been similarly touched over the years. What ZERO does better than any of Krieger’s earlier books on nuclear weapons, and indeed more comprehensively and lucidly than anyone else anywhere, is to provide the reader with the reasons for thinking, feeling, and acting with comparable passion until the goal of abolishing the totality of nuclear weaponry is finally reached. Krieger himself extensively explores and laments the absence of widespread anti-nuclear dedication and tries to explain it by calling attention to a series of factors: ignorance, complacency, deference to authority, sense of powerlessness, fear, economic advantage, conformity, marginalization, technological optimism, tyranny of experts. (90-92) The argument of the book, concisely developed in a series of short essays is reinforced by some canonical documents in the struggle over the decades to rid the world of nuclear weaponry, including Obama’s Prague Speech of 2009, the Einstein/Russell Manifesto of 1955, and Joseph Rotblat’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of 1995.
Krieger’s approach as an author is multi-layered, and includes analytic critiques of conventional strategic wisdom that finds a security role for nuclear weapons, a worked out conception of how a negotiated international treaty could safely by stages move the world toward the zero goal of abolition, poems that seek to recapture the various existential horrors of nuclear war, essays of appreciation for the courage, commitment, and insight of the hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the 1945 atomic attacks), and a concerted inquiry into what needs to happen to make nuclear disarmament a viable political project rather than nothing more than a fervent hope. For a short book of 166 pages this is a lot of ground to cover, but Krieger manages to do it with clarity, a calm demeanor, and an impressive understanding and knowledge of all aspects of this complex question of how best to deal with nuclear weapons given the realities of the early 21st century.
Krieger is not afraid to take on critics, even those who tell him that his quest is ‘silly’ because the nuclear genie, a favorite metaphor of liberal apologists for the status quo, is out of the bottle, and cannot be put back. Krieger acknowledges that the knowledge is now in the public domain, and cannot be eliminated, but makes a measured and informed case for an assessment that the nuclear disarmament process poses far fewer risks than does retaining the weaponry, and that retaining the weaponry exposes humanity to what he believes to be the near certainty that nuclear weapons will be used in the future with likely apocalyptic results. For Krieger the stakes are ultimate: human survival and the rights of future generations. In other words, given his strongly held opinion that the weaponry will be used at some point in the future with disastrous results, there is for him no ethically, politically, and even biologically acceptable alternative to getting rid totally of nuclear weapons. Krieger argues both from a worldview that regards nuclear weapons as intrinsically wrong because of the kind of suffering and devastation that they cause and consequentially because of their threat to civilization and even species survival.
Ever since I have known David Krieger he has been deeply influenced by Albert Einstein’s most forceful assertion: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Krieger even gifts his readers with an imagined dialogue between Einstein and the most celebrated interrogator of all time, Socrates. In their exchange, Socrates is convinced by Einstein that the necessary adjustments “won’t come from our leaders.”(85) Socrates gets the point in a manner that unsurprisingly resonates with Krieger: “Then the people must be awakened, and they must demand an end to war, and a world free of nuclear weapons.” (85) There is a certain ambiguity in this statement when placed in the larger context of Krieger’s thought and work: is it necessary to end war as a social institution in order to get rid of nuclear weapons? In one way, most of Krieger’s efforts seem to separate nuclear weapons from the wider context of war making, but from time to time, there is a fusion of these two agendas.
Krieger realizes that changing our modes of thinking is a necessary step toward zero but it is not sufficient. He also believes that we cannot achieve a world without nuclear weapons unless we act “collectively and globally” (97) to create a sustainable future. In the end, there is some ground for hope: “We have the potential to assert a constructive power for change that is greater than the destructive power of the weapons themselves.” In effect, Krieger is telling us that what we can imagine we can achieve, but not without an unprecedented popular mobilization of peace minded people throughout the entire planet. Above all, Krieger wants to avoid a counsel of despair: “We must choose hope and find a way to fight for the dream of peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons. Achieving these goals is the great challenge of our time, on their success rests the realization of all other goals and for a more and decent world.” (105). Certainly Krieger has founded and brilliantly administered the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation over the course of more than 25 years maintaining faith of its growing band of followers with this uplifting vision. Such single mindedness is probably essential to motivate people of good will to support the endeavor, and to keep his own compass fixed over time, even in the face of many discouragements, on the destination he has identified as the one sanctuary capable of ensuring a desirable future for humanity. Although sharing all of Krieger’s assessments, values, and visions, I am both less hopeful and not as focused, being committed to other indispensable policy imperatives (addressing the global challenge of climate change) and to more proximate ends that involve current injustices (seeking realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people; seeking a UN Emergency Peace Force to intervene to protect vulnerable people facing humanitarian or natural catastrophes), but I would not for a minute encourage Krieger to dilute his anti-nuclear posture. This country and the world needs his message and dedication, and at some point, there may emerge a conjuncture of forces that is unexpectedly receptive to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons and even entertains the prospect of ending the war system as the foundation of national and global security. I can only pray that it will not emerge in the aftermath of some intended or accidental use of nuclear weapons, which seems sadly to be the only alarm bell that is loud enough to have an awakening effect for the sleeping mass of humanity.
From my vantage point such an anti-nuclear moment is not yet visible on the horizon of possibilities. After all, the Kissinger, Shultz, Nunn, and Perry call a few years ago for abolition, emanating from these high priests of political realism, despite being widely noticed at the time, had no lasting impact on the pro-nuclear consensus that guides the policymaking elites of the nine nuclear weapons states, and most of all the American establishment. And then Barack Obama’s 2009 call in Prague for a world without nuclear weapons, although qualified and conditional, was essentially abandoned even in the recent articulation of the president’s goals for his second term. Presumably, Obama’s advisory entourage pushed him to concentrate his energy on attainable goals such as immigration and tax reform, protecting entitlements, and retreating from the several fiscal cliffs, and not waste his limited political capital on the unattainable such as nuclear disarmament and a just peace between Israel and Palestine. Short-term political calculations within the Beltway almost always trump long-term visionary goals, “and so it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut taught us to say in our helplessness in the face of the unyielding cruelty of human experience.
In the end, after this adventure of response to the life and work of a dear friend, admired collaborator, and inspirational worker for peace and justice, I can only commend David Krieger’s ZERO to everyone with the slightest interest in what kind of future we are bestowing upon our children and grandchildren. The book can be obtained via the following two links: it is preferred that ZERO is ordered through the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at its online Peace Store:https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/menu/store/books/zero_the_case.htm
Nuclear strategist Paul Bracken is interviewed by Robert Kazel for the Nuclear Age Foundation on December 17 2012. Professor bracken has recently published his second book on the nuclear danger,The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics.
Professor Bracken seems to be mostly concerned with the risks associated with nuclear proliferation, and not with the danger arising from the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the USA. He does not see as real the risks of nuclear war started by mistake or intervention in the command systems. One reason is that he is convinced that the nuclear weapons are no longer on High Alert. He states that [protocols concerning] emergency authorization to use nuclear weapons have been revoked.
It would be very helpful if he provided us with the reason for that opinion. The information available to me gives no support for his statement. Thus, the report by the group lead by General James Cartwright,Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture, for Global Zero, and published last year, emphasizes that strategic nuclear weapons are still on High Alert. They stress that the time to evaluate whether the threat is real and a nuclear response is necessary is very short, counted in minutes. I quote: “The risks, while low, still exist for missiles to be fired by accident, miscalculation, mistake, false warning, bad judgment or unauthorized action. The results would be catastrophic.”
I do hope Professor Bracken in the future will be right in his assessment. Today he seems to be mistaken, unfortunately.
He also says, “I would be the first to give up U.S. nuclear weapons, all of them – every single one – if other countries would do so.” How does he know that other countries are not willing to give up their nuclear weapons if the USA does?
Without US leadership we will not reach a nuclear weapons free world.
Gunnar Westberg is former President (2004-2008) of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
On August 9, 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Within a radius of one mile, destruction was total. People were vaporized so that the only shadows on concrete pavements were left to show where they had been. Many people outside the radius of total destruction were trapped in their collapsed houses, and were burned alive by the fire that followed. By the end of 1945, an estimated 80,000 men, women, young children, babies and old people had died as a result of the bombing. As the years passed more people continued to die from radiation sickness.
Plutonium for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had been made at an enormous nuclear reactor station located at Hanford in the state of Washington. During the Cold War, the reactors at Hanford produced enough weapons-usable plutonium for 60,000 nuclear weapons. The continued existence of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium-235 in the stockpiles of nuclear weapons states hangs like a dark cloud over the future of humanity. A full scale thermonulcear war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, threatening to make the world permanently uninhabitable.
Besides playing a large role in the tragedy of Nagasaki, the reactor complex at Hanford has damaged the health of many thousands of Americans. The prospects for the future are even worse. Many millions of gallons of radioactive waste are held in Hanford’s aging storage tanks, the majority of which have exceeded their planned lifetimes. The following quotations are taken from a Wikipedia article on Hanford, especially the section devoted to ecoloogical concerns:
“A huge volume of water from the Columbia River was required to dissipate the heat produced by Hanford’s nuclear reactors. From 1944 to 1971, pump systems drew cooling water from the river and, after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned it to the river. Before being released back into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basins for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this retention, and several tetrabecquerels entered the river every day. These releases were kept secret by the federal government. Radiation was later measured downstream as far west as the Washington and Oregon coasts.”
“The plutonium separation process also resulted in the release of radioactive isotopes into the air, which were carried by the wind throughout southeastern Washington and into parts of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and British Colombia. Downwinders were exposed to radionuclide’s, particularly iodine-131… These radionuclide’s filtered into the food chain via contaminated fields where dairy cows grazed; hazardous fallout was ingested by communities who consumed the radioactive food and drank the milk. Most of these airborne releases were a part of Hanford’s routine operations, while a few of the larger releases occurred in isolated incidents.”
“In response to an article in the Spokane Spokesman Review in September 1985, the Department of Energy announced its intent to declassify environmental records and in February, 1986 released to the public 19,000 pages of previously unavailable historical documents about Hanford’s operations. The Washington State Department of Health collaborated with the citizen-led Hanford Health Information Network (HHIN) to publicize data about the health effects of Hanford’s operations. HHIN reports concluded that residents who lived downwind from Hanford or who used the Columbia River downstream were exposed to elevated doses of radiation that placed them at increased risk for various cancers and other diseases.”
“The most significant challenge at Hanford is stabilizing the 53 million U.S. Gallons (204,000 m3) of high-level radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks. About a third of these tanks have leaked waste into the soil and groundwater. As of 2008, most of the liquid waste has been transferred to more secure double-shelled tanks; however, 2.8 million U.S. Gallons (10,600 m3) of liquid waste, together with 27 million U.S. gallons (100,000 m3) of salt cake and sludge, remains in the single-shelled tanks.That waste was originally scheduled to be removed by 2018. The revised deadline is 2040. Nearby aquifers contain an estimated 270 billion U.S. Gallons (1 billion m3) of contaminated groundwater as a result of the leaks. As of 2008, 1 million U.S. Gallons (4,000 m3) of highly radioactive waste is traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River.”
The documents made public in 1986 revealed that radiation was intentionally and secretly released by the plant and that people living near to it acted as unknowing guinea pigs in experiments testing radiation dangers. Thousands of people who live in the vicinity of the Hanford Site have suffered an array of health problems including thyroid cancers, autoimmune diseases and reproductive disorders that they feel are the direct result of these releases and experiments.
In thinking about the dangers posed by leakage of radioactive waste, we should remember that many of the dangerous radioisotopes involved have half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, it is not sufficient to seal them into containers that will last for a century or even a millennium. We must find containers that will last for a hundred thousand years or more, longer than any human structure has ever lasted. This logic has lead Finland to deposit its radioactive waste in a complex of underground tunnels carved out of solid rock. But looking ahead for a hundred thousand years involves other problems: If humans survive for that long, what language will they speak? Certainly not the languages of today. How can we warn them that the complex of tunnels containing radioactive waste is a death trap? The reader is urged to see a film exploring these problems, “Into Eternity”, by the young Danish film-maker Michael Madsen.
We have already gone a long way towards turning our beautiful planet earth into a nuclear wasteland. In the future, let us be more careful, as guardians of a precious heritage, the natural world and the lives of all future generations.
John Avery is a leader in the Pugwash movement in Denmark.
Ray Acheson delivered these comments at an event at the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) at a launch event for Ward Wilson’s book Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons.
Thank you to UNODA for inviting me to be a discussant on this panel. And thank you to Ward for this new book.
The basic myths that Ward addresses in this book are those that still capture the popular imagination. When talking to anyone not actively involved in the debate about nuclear weapons, if they are skeptical about getting rid of them it is because of at least one of these myths. Thus the style of the book, its accessibility and straightforward language and structure, will be extremely beneficial for any public discussion on nuclear weapons.
By interrogating five myths, Ward provides a compelling case that nuclear weapons are useless. This begs a larger question: if nuclear weapons are useless why do they still exist? Why are these myths maintained—who benefits from them? Nuclear weapons must be useful for someone or something or else they wouldn’t still exist, they would have gone the way of the penny farthing.
When considering the continued existence of nuclear weapons, we have to consider who is materially invested in these weapons—they are the ones who benefit from the perpetuation of the myths about nuclear weapons. Thus we need to look to the military-industrial complex, in particular the corporations that run the nuclear weapons laboratories and the politicians with these labs and corporations in their districts.
This brings me to a myth that wasn’t included in Ward’s book but that is very important, especially in the US context, and that’s the myth of jobs.
Corporations and politicians in the United States fight to keep the nuclear weapons budget very high, arguing that it is good for economic growth and in particular for jobs in their states. We saw this with the fight over ratifying New START in the US Senate, when the Obama administration had to commit to spend $180 billion over the next twenty years on modernizing nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and related facilities in order to get consent for ratification; and we’re seeing it again now in the fiscal cliff discussions where politicians with nuclear labs in their states are working to ensure that funding for the nuclear enterprise doesn’t diminish.
But economic benefit is another myth about nuclear weapons. There are several problems with the “jobs” argument. First of all, as the Los Alamos Study Group has shown, nuclear spending is an extremely inefficient method of job creation. Government documents show that multi-billion dollar modernization programmes result in very few temporary working class jobs. Money spent on the high-cost skilled labour needed to maintained global stockpiles is akin to perpetual workfare for top-tier professionals and specialists; individuals from jobs categories that have lower unemployment rates and higher paychecks anyway. Thus military spending creates very few jobs for those most in need of work.
Second of all, nuclear spending does not benefit communities or populations. Let’s take the case of New Mexico, which is home to two nuclear weapon labs (Los Alamos and Sandia) as well as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s National Service Center in Albuquerque, a nuclear waste disposal site, and four military bases.
New Mexico’s economic status is distorted by military spending. The median income for the state is significantly skewed by the incorporation of figures from Los Alamos, the town where the key nuclear weapons lab resides. In a recent report, Los Alamos was found to have the highest concentration of millionaires in the United States. There are 885 millionaire households among the population of Los Alamos of around 18,000, giving the town an 11.7 per cent concentration of millionaire households. Yet outside of Los Alamos the state suffers from poverty. New Mexico has among the worst poverty rates in the United States (18.6 percent in 2010).
In fact, as spending at the Los Alamos lab has increased, New Mexico’s per capita income rate has declined relative to other states and its income disparity has grown. As lab spending has increased, health and education rankings have decreased and violent crime rate and drug overdose rates have increased. Maintaining jobs at the Los Alamos lab requires a high military budget, which takes money from other federal programmes and incurs massive government debt, thus constraining the investments New Mexico can make in education, health, and infrastructure.
So why does the myth of jobs and economic growth persist? Because money controls the message.
In terms of New Mexico, campaign contributions flow from the nuclear weapons labs to the state’s congressional delegation, in quantities as great, or greater, as from any other source. In addition, among colleges and universities, the University of New Mexico is one the largest recipients of Pentagon money in the country. Thus former President Eisenhower’s farewell warning about “the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex” reigns true today.
Nuclear weapons are an addiction that needs to be overcome. Ward’s book is helpful for initiating discussion about a process of overcoming the addiction. He makes a compelling case for undermining many of the myths around nuclear weapons—compelling enough that he could have stronger prescriptions for action at the end.
In particular, the book suggests that pursuing disarmament in the near-term could be destabilizing, which is puzzling in a book that convincingly argues that the nuclear weapons enterprise has been largely sustained on the basis of myth. In this connection, Ward’s arguments actually support a far stronger conclusion, which should hopefully be apparent to any careful reader. If we accept the claim that nuclear deterrence is a myth, we must accept that the same is true for the roles of nuclear weapons in maintaining so-called strategic stability. In light of this, a reasonable person could only conclude that nuclear abolition is both viable and realistic.
Ray Acheson is Director of Reaching Critical Will, a project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
With few exceptions, the major Hollywood movie studios have ignored the ongoing peril of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. While moviemakers can generally rely on stories about zombies, mutants and superheroes to draw today’s crowds, films that spark genuine fear for the survival of our nation and world have become rare.
Three decades ago, however, several films depicting either circumstances leading up to a Third World War, or dire post-cataclysmic worlds, were spurring wide debate. If the late 1950s and early 1960s were the first golden age of nuclear-menace movies, including “On the Beach,” “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” “Fail-Safe,” and “Seven Days in May,” 1983 and 1984 can be seen as the second such age – and, so far, the last.
Thirty years ago, international events clearly were exacerbating the worries of people already concerned about U.S.-Soviet relations. The year 1982 had seen NATO moving ahead with plans to place new mid-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Secretary of State Alexander Haig was talking freely about “levels” of nuclear war, how such wars might be “limited,” and whether the U.S. could someday explode a nuclear bomb as a warning to scare Russian leaders during a crisis. President Ronald Reagan’s “defense modernization program” was a euphemism for a vast arms build-up seeking to add 17,000 warheads to the 25,000 that the U.S. already had. The government also had begun planning to pump much more funding into civil defense shelters.
As tensions between the U.S. and the USSR persisted, the nuclear freeze movement hit its full stride. Protests and state and local referenda on the issue abounded. In one event, some 500,000 people gathered in New York’s Central Park in June 1982 to demand the bilateral freeze that Reagan fervently opposed.
In theaters and on TV, anxiety over nuclear war was reflected in acclaimed movies such as “Threads” in Great Britain and “Testament” in the U.S. – both stark depictions of people suffering and dying amid nuclear fallout. The movie that reached the greatest audience was “The Day After,” a 1983 ABC-TV production watched by a record 100 million people. The program dramatized the nuclear destruction of Lawrence, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., and shocked and depressed many – including Reagan, who supposedly was profoundly troubled by it.
But it’s the 1983 nuclear action-adventure movie “WarGames” that probably is remembered most today as a memorable artifact of that era. The film presents the story of David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), a high school student, computer prodigy and hacker who uses a dial-up modem to play what he thinks is a computer game – only to reach a top-secret system at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The intrusion is accidental but triggers a domino effect that accelerates toward world war, as government computer experts and generals find themselves helpless to halt the “game” that NORAD’s overzealous computer has initiated on Lightman’s suggestion.
The movie was a huge, and perhaps unexpected, summer hit, grossing $79.6 million at the box office. It earned high praise from most critics and received three Oscar nominations. It also led to new media attention to whether accidental nuclear war was more likely in a new age of easy, widespread availability of computers. In addition, for the first time for the young audiences of the ’80s, “WarGames” made vivid the implications of U.S. nuclear missiles being on high-alert: the impossibly brief amount of time that the White House, and military, have to decide if signs of an enemy attack are real or a mistake.
To mark the 30th-anniversary year of “WarGames,” NAPF talked to John Badham, the film’s director. Badham (also known for his direction of the 1977 iconic disco movie “Saturday Night Fever”), was brought in by MGM/United Artists early in the film’s production to replace another director. Badham’s decision to mix the right amounts of humor, action and teen romance into the film is now credited with making it a smash hit – without sacrificing a serious moral about the futility of war and a nightmarish quality of dread that persists throughout.
The following is an edited version of the conversation.
KAZEL: I’ve been watching nuclear-war-related movies from the early ’60s and late ’50s, and the ’80s, and it seems a lot of the directors and producers who did those projects went into them with strong political views about the arms race. I know that Stanley Kubrick was deeply troubled about nuclear war, and Sidney Lumet was worried about it – and so were several of the actors who did [Lumet’s] Fail-Safe. Do you remember having any strong feelings about the topic before you were asked to directWarGames?
BADHAM: It was a time, going of course back to the middle 1940s, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that even as a real youngster you became aware of the power of nuclear weapons and the frightening danger of them. In my grammar school, and this is late 1940s, we were having nuclear-war drills, as silly as they were – duck-and-cover and all that. It was very much on our minds. It was an environment setting up for the McCarthy business in the 1950s and that kind of paranoia. It’s always interesting that it takes a while for those kinds of worries to emerge in the popular media, in the form of Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Were they not almost the same year?
KAZEL: Yes, Fail-Safe came out just a few months after Strangelove[in 1964].
BADHAM: Right. Strangelove was such a definitive piece, but then along comes Lumet with a much darker take on it, in a way, because it was so serious. There was no laughing allowed (laughs) in the theater for Fail-Safe.
KAZEL: I’ve read your stepfather retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force. He served in both World War I and II?
BADHAM: He learned to fly in WWI.
KAZEL: Did you also serve in the military?
BADHAM: I did. I was in the Air Force from 1964 to 1970, some active duty and some National Guard – California National Guard.
KAZEL: Did you actually fly?
BADHAM: No, I was a medic. My father was all for me going to Officer Candidate School, and so on. But I had other thoughts – directing theater and directing movies. I think for a brief while I disappointed him until he started coming to my sets and saying, “Well, I guess the kid may survive after all.”
KAZEL: So, you’ve said before that Dr. Strangelove is one of your favorite movies. I was wondering what made it such a great film to you, and also what you thought of Kubrick’s decision to make it a very funny, black comedy instead of his original idea to do it as a serious suspense film.
BADHAM: Was that his original idea?
KAZEL: Yes, then he rewrote the script.
BADHAM: Well, once you got involved in the casting of Peter Sellers, that starts to twist it right there. You know, it [farce] is almost unavoidable. But, it certainly happens with films. My friend, the late Frank Pierson, who wrote the screenplay for Cat Ballou, said that what he was given to rewrite was a very serious piece. A serious Western. He kept going to the producers and saying, “Guys, it keeps coming out funny. I don’t know what to tell you.” Maybe they [the writers of Dr. Strangelove] started to think it was more accessible and less grim if they were to approach it in this way – that they would get the message across clearly without totally alienating an audience. As interesting as Fail-Safe is, it’s a tough one to take.
KAZEL: You have said before that you really disliked Fail-Safe, actually.
BADHAM: The reality of it is so heavy. It’s hard to enjoy that movie. (Laughs.) I don’t dislike it — you know, Sidney Lumet doesn’t do anything that you can really dislike. But the tone of it can sometimes be a downer.
KAZEL: Leonard Goldberg [producer of WarGames] said the idea, the goal of WarGamesfrom the start was just to create entertainment. In fact, as you know, when the script was first developed, it wasn’t even about nuclear war. It was just about a kid who was a genius. I think the title was “The Genius.”
BADHAM: That’s right.
KAZEL: When you were making the film, did you have any political goals in mind?
BADHAM: I’m one of those people who believe you tell the story, not the message. The old Broadway saying is, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. Now, I guess you could tweet it. (Laughs.) Walter Kerr, the drama critic for the Times, used to say, “They sold the play for a pot of message” – you know, a funny old Biblical reference. So, the message comes out of the subject matter. In this particular case, we’re talking about a very strong character of a little boy who starts in playfully, playing [computer] games and gets in way over his head. Out of it…you begin to see the other terrifying possibilities as we continue to automate our [military] system.
But a strong story about a character is what caught my attention, and that led you to something else entirely – which was made very accessible by the playfulness of this little boy and the almost black-comic situation he found himself in. There’s certainly a lot of influence from Dr. Strangelove coming to me, though I tried not to think about it while I was doing WarGames because that was not a place to go. But certainly the humor that’s sprinkled liberally throughout comes from the perception that as frightening as this is, it’s also kind of funny.
[Under the original director] they were treating it, in every scene I saw, in the tone of Fail-Safe. The actors, the lighting, the direction – it was extremely dark. The Matthew Broderick character was seen as a dark, rebellious kid lurking up in his room doing God-knows-what. I said to Leonard [Goldberg], if I could do that in high school – show a girl how I could change her grade [using a home computer], I would be peeing in my pants with excitement. I mean, good God, could you imagine how terrific that would be? You’d feel just on top of the world.
I took the script and changed the character of The General [commander of NORAD] to someone who had a great, funny Southern sense of humor, based a lot on my father.
KAZEL: To me, it seems a strong difference between what you did, and what Kubrick did, is you didn’t want to make the military or the government officials seem like idiots or clowns, or crazy. Some of the adults in your movie were eccentric or strange, but they were very earnestly trying to prevent World War III – something that the kid had started.
BADHAM: I think it’s easy to kind of write off the danger when you’re looking at people who are being portrayed as idiots. As much as I love Peter Sellers’ portrayal of the crazy scientist in the wheelchair with the arm that won’t behave, you have a tendency to write them off. A lot of what WarGames is talking about is technology taking over on us, and even though we may have good intentions and are trying to do our best, it could bulldoze us.
Of course we see evidence of this all the time. Larry Lasker and Walter Parkes, the screenwriters, and I, started talking back in those early days about the possibilities of cyber war, and what could happen if what was then innocent hacking became really serious stuff. Of course, that’s what we’re watching now. I don’t think we were prescient. I just think we were letting our imaginations say, “Where could this go to?”
KAZEL: Even though the movie seems dated in some ways, as you’re saying, in other ways — the threat of cyber warfare and the idea that unauthorized people could tap into a nuclear defense system — seems even more possible now than in the ‘80s.
BADHAM: Right. We’re seeing it. Our government’s going in and messing with Iran’s system. The Chinese government is coming in and tapping the New York Times’ addresses. It is sort of spooky. We’re in that age. Information is just flying everywhere, with nobody able to control it the way they’d like to control it.
KAZEL: Do you think that your film appeals to audiences of today? Can young people take something away from it?
BADHAM: Well, yes. It’s still very appealing to young film watchers because of the characters they can relate to. Once they get past the ancient, dated [home computer] equipment…it’s still fun for them to relate to it. At the end, I think, as you see what could catastrophically go wrong, it’s as clear as a bell.
KAZEL: The nuclear freeze movement was reaching its height right around the time that the movie came out. Do you think the context of what was happening in the world had a lot to do with drawing people to see WarGames, or would it have been popular with a youthful audience regardless of the events of the time?
BADHAM: I think the concept was just appealing. We’re talking about a 16-year-old boy who suddenly breaks into NORAD and almost starts [a war]? And, a very appealing young character. You know, the movie was in the Top 10 of the year, I think, and yet there’s not a star in it. Dabney Coleman was our big name. (Laughs.) And advertising was not necessarily great. There was just something about the package that seemed like this would be fun. People don’t really want to go to the theater to be lectured to, or frightened in a real way. They like to be frightened by Jaws because they’re not going in the water. … We were walking a fine line in that movie between how threatening and frightening would we make it.
KAZEL: Do you think a movie such as WarGames – about the danger of nuclear war, and deterrence theory, games theory – could be made today? Would there be any audience, or would studios be interested in it?
BADHAM: Well, at the time, nobody wanted to make WarGames. Leonard [Goldberg] managed to get it set up with United Artists…. It was tough to make, and the attitude of the studios was, “It’s about some kid with a computer, and who believes that?” Nobody got it. And yet, lots of imitations came out – lots of films trying to copy it afterwards, about kid geniuses running around.
KAZEL: Is it your impression that your film changed the way any leaders thought about nuclear weapons? It seems President Reagan may have thought that the movie was, in some ways, factual. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon has written that Ronald and Nancy Reagan screened the film before its release, and at a meeting with some Democratic congressmen to talk about the MX missile, he put aside his notes and started talking in a very excited way about WarGames and how it showed that a kid with a computer could break into NORAD.
BADHAM: Well, he certainly had a history, as an actor, of being able to suspend his disbelief and think about the possibilities: Could this happen and wouldn’t it be interesting? People have told me that maybe the Star Wars [strategic missile defense] initiative was bolstered by his seeing WarGames. … It definitely got some people thinking about it. I know we did a running in Washington that I attended, at the Motion Picture Association, where Dr. Helen Caldicott, who ran [Physicians for Social Responsibility] and Sen. Alan Cranston came. There definitely was an effort on MGM and United Artists’ part to get politicians aware of the film.
KAZEL: I think many people who saw WarGames when they were young still have strong memories of it. Also, there’s a page on Facebook dedicated to the movie, and a lot of people post messages saying they’ve discovered it for the first time and that it’s one of their favorite films. When you were making it, did you have any clue it would endure as long as it has?
BADHAM: Quite honestly, I don’t think about things like that. I can only judge my initial reaction, which on reading that script was a very powerful reaction to the characters and the situation they found themselves in. A similar thing happened to me with Saturday Night Fever. I just loved that script. I had an amazingly strong reaction to it. Other people did not. Studio executives just dismissed it as a little movie. People asked me afterward, did I know that Saturday Night Fever was going to be this giant hit? No, I didn’t know. I just knew I really liked it and thank goodness, for once, my taste and the public’s tastes were in sync.
KAZEL: For WarGames, could a movie of its type have had anything other than a happy ending? At the end, everyone is smiling and hugging and the NORAD officers are throwing papers into the air. The final music is very lighthearted and breezy. There was very little criticism of the movie, but some critics have said there wasn’t even a glimmer of anything menacing at the end, or that nuclear weapons were still a huge danger.
BADHAM: That was definitely the ending that everybody wanted. I did not have a good idea at the time of [implying] that there is still something lurking in the background, that [the risks] haven’t gone away, as a little dangling thing to put out there. We were under the gun in delivering this to the theaters because it had been promised and we had started late. So we flew through post-production, and everybody was very happy with that kind of ending – though I absolutely understand what you’re telling me, and that criticism is very fair. It might have added a whole layer of extra texture and meaning to the film.
KAZEL: They [studio executives] wanted it entertaining instead of dark because the demographics of theater audiences had changed since the days of Fail-Safe?
BADHAM: Yeah. You can look at Fail-Safe and say, that really didn’t go anywhere. People who liked films, maybe, saw it. Here [with WarGames, we said,] “We’re going to spend a lot of money on a dodgy subject. Let’s at least make it entertaining.”
Badham, 73, now teaches would-be directors in the film program at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Historically, he says, he’s refused to read critics’ reviews of his films, good or bad, so he was unaware that Chicago Tribune movie maven, the late Gene Siskel, in 1983 wrote glowingly of his nuclear-brink hit. “Who is to say that WarGames won’t have the same connection to this generation of moviegoers that the wicked burlesque of Strangelove had to a generation earlier,” Siskel asked. In particular, the critic lauded the film’s spotlight on the growing role of computers in military systems, writing that “we have come to trust our computers more than ourselves, thus allowing our own personal responsibility for the future to be taken out of our hands and placed on autopilot.”
In WarGames, the teenage protagonist finds that no one understands or appreciates hackers, who haven’t appeared on the country’s radar screens yet. He’s arrested by the FBI, which accuses him of espionage. Much has changed. Today, the government is giving young hackers jobs. According to Fast Company magazine, the Pentagon believes cyber attacks on U.S. computer networks soared 17-fold between 2009 and 2011. Last year, the National Security Agency said it was supplying government-designed curriculums to four U.S. universities so that college computer hackers can be fast-tracked into cyber-security jobs, not only at the NSA but at such places as the CIA and nuclear weapons labs.
The curriculum recommended by NSA would be right at home on David Lightman’s bookshelf: Applied Cryptography, The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing, Practical Malware Analysis.
At one of the colleges that have adopted the coursework, the government-run Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., cyber-warfare students also take part in a special 11-week project: War games.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
To download the full 2013 Peace Proposal, click here.
Synopsis
Efforts are currently under way to define a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a target date of 2030. As we debate these goals, we must face head-on the underlying ailments of human civilization in order to ensure that efforts to improve the human condition are more than mere stopgap measures—that they enable people struggling in the face of dire threats to recover the hope and strength needed to lead lives of dignity.
For this we need a spiritual framework that will bring into greater clarity those things we cannot afford to ignore, while ensuring that all that we do contributes to the larger objective of a global society of peace and creative coexistence.
If we picture such a society as an edifice, the ideals of human rights and human security are key pillars that hold it up, while the foundation on which these rest is respect for the dignity of life. For this to be a meaningful and robust support for other endeavors, it must be felt and experienced palpably as a way of life.
To this end, I would like to propose the following three commitments as guidelines for action:
The determination to share the joys and sufferings of others
Faith in the limitless possibilities of life
The vow to defend and celebrate diversity
I believe that the social mission of religion in the twenty-first century must be to bring people together in an ethos of reverence for life’s inherent dignity and worth.
One pressing threat to the dignity of far too many people in our world today is poverty. The pervasive stress of economic deprivation is compounded when people feel that their very existence is disregarded, becoming alienated and being deprived of a meaningful role and place within society. This underlies the need for a socially inclusive approach focused on the restoration of a sense of connection with others and of purpose in life.
Regardless of circumstance, all people inherently possess a life-state of ultimate dignity and are in this sense fundamentally equal and endowed with limitless possibilities. When we awaken to our original worth and determine to change present realities, we become a source of hope for others. Such a perspective is, I believe, valuable not only for the challenges of constructing a culture of human rights, but also for realizing a sustainable society.
To forestall the further fissuring of society and enable a culture of peace to take root in the world, dialogue based on the celebration of our diversity is indispensable.
Outlawing nuclear weapons as inhumane
There has been a growing movement to outlaw nuclear weapons based on the premise that they are inhumane. It is my strong hope that an expanding core of NGOs and governments supporting this position will initiate the process of drafting a treaty to outlaw these weapons in light of their inhumane nature.
Japan, as a country that has experienced nuclear attack, should play a leading role in the realization of a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC). Further, it should undertake the kind of confidence-building measures that are a necessary predicate to the establishment of a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone and to creating the conditions for the global abolition of nuclear weapons.
The SGI’s efforts to grapple with the nuclear weapons issue are based on the recognition that the very existence of these weapons represents the ultimate negation of the dignity of life. At the same time, nuclear weapons serve as a prism through which to perceive new perspectives on ecological integrity, economic development and human rights. This in turn helps us identify the elements that will shape the contours of a new, sustainable society, one in which all people can live in dignity.
Toward this end, I would like to make three concrete proposals:
Making disarmament a key theme of the Sustainable Development Goals. Halving world military expenditures relative to 2010 levels and abolishing nuclear weapons and all other weapons judged inhumane under international law should be included as targets for achievement by the year 2030.
Initiating the negotiation process of a Nuclear Weapons Convention. The international community should engage in active debate to broadly shape international public opinion, with the goal of agreement on an initial draft by 2015.
Holding an expanded summit for a nuclear-weapon-free world. The G8 Summit in 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would be an appropriate opportunity for such a summit.
Fostering a culture of human rights
To enhance United Nations efforts to promote a culture of human rights, I propose that the promotion of human rights be a central element of the SDGs for the year 2030, including the following two specific targets.
Every country should set up a Social Protection Floor (SPF) to ensure that those who are suffering from extreme poverty are able to regain a sense of dignity. Some thirty developing countries have in fact already started implementing plans for minimum income and livelihood guarantees. Such guarantees are a necessary condition for sustainability and a culture of human rights.
Every society should promote human rights education and training. Alongside the legal system of guarantees and remedies, efforts to raise awareness of human rights through education and training could serve as a catalyst for the social interaction and support that provides a sense of connection and helps people regain hope and dignity. Regional centers for human rights education and training could be established within the framework of the United Nations University, along the lines of the centers currently promoting education for sustainable development.
Today’s children will inevitably play a crucial role in the work of constructing a culture of human rights. To protect them and improve the conditions under which they live, it is crucial that all countries ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols, and pass the domestic legislation needed to fulfill the treaty obligations.
Strengthening Sino-Japanese relations
Improving relations between China and Japan—currently said to be at their worst since World War II—is an essential element in building a global society of peace and coexistence.
Political and economic relations between these two countries are constantly impacted by the ebb and flow of the times. This is why, faced with a crisis, it is important to adamantly uphold the two central pledges in the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (1978): To refrain from the use or threat of force, and not to seek regional hegemony.
I urge Japan and China to set up a high-level forum for dialogue aimed at preventing any worsening of the situation. Its first order of business should be to institute a moratorium on all actions that could be construed as provocative. This should be followed by an analysis of the steps by which the confrontation evolved in order to facilitate the development of guidelines for more effective responses to future crises.
I suggest that Japan and China institute the practice of holding regular summit meetings, similar to those established through the Élysée Treaty that regularly brought together French and German Heads of State and Government. I further propose that Japan and China together launch an organization for environmental cooperation in East Asia. This would help lay the foundations of a new partnership focused on peace and creative coexistence and joint action for the sake of humanity.
The key to realizing all these goals ultimately lies in the solidarity of ordinary citizens. The year 2030 serves as a major goal in the effort to promote cooperation in the international community, and will also mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Soka Gakkai. Working with all those committed to a global society of peace and creative coexistence, we will continue to foster solidarity among the world’s people as we look ahead to that significant milestone.
Daisaku Ikeda is President of Soka Gakkai International.
Doctor of Law David Krieger is one of the most passionate and well-known in the U.S. advocate of non-proliferation, destruction and prohibition of nuclear weapons. In 1970 he was drafted into the army during the Vietnam War, but refused to serve, to approach the authorities with a statement that the war is immoral and participation in it is contrary to his convictions. But the authorities refused him. He did not give up and went to federal court. And he won. From 1982 until the present time, David Krieger is president of the NGO Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, lecturing at universities in the U.S., Europe and Japan. He was one of the leaders of the civil hearings in 2007 on the legality of U.S. actions in Iraq, and he was a member of the jury of public international tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005. He is author and co-author of dozens of books about the dangers of nuclear weapons, non-proliferation and elimination of it. His vision of the problems David Krieger shared with readers of “Rosbalt.”
Yaroshinskaya: There is no information in Russian media, but I know in February 2012 you were arrested – along with your wife, Carolee, Daniel Ellsberg, Cindy Sheehan, Father Louis Vitale, and ten other activists – near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Tell, please, shortly to our readers what you did there and how authorities punished you after all.
Krieger: Several times a year, the United States Air Force conducts test flights of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), without their nuclear warheads, from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Base – the only one in the US that tests ICBMs – is about 70 miles from Santa Barbara where I live. To try to minimize protests, the Air Force usually schedules missile launches for the middle of the night. My wife and I joined Daniel Ellsberg and some 70 others in a protest that took place just before midnight on February 24th at Vandenberg. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was protesting because land-based nuclear-armed ICBMs are first-strike weapons. In a time of high tensions, they are weapons that a country must use or face the prospect of losing to another country’s first-strike attack. I believe that citizens should not allow testing of such weapons systems to go on as a routine matter. These tests should not be routine. They are warnings of the civilization-destroying threats that nuclear arsenals pose to all humanity, and should be ended while agreement is sought to dismantle the weapons and their delivery systems.
After midnight, 15 of us joined hands and walked toward the front gate of the Air Force Base. We wanted to deliver a message to the commander of the base. The message was that this nuclear insanity must end, and that the routine testing of ICBMs is a form of collective insanity. Before we had gotten close to the kiosk at the front gate, young Air Force security personnel formed a line in front of us and then arrested us, handcuffed us behind our backs, put us in several vans and drove us to a deserted place in the woods where they took our fingerprints and photographs and issued citations to us for trespass on military property. The Air Force then dropped us off in the middle of the night (around 4:00 a.m.) in a closed shopping center many miles from our automobiles. When we appeared in federal court, we all pleaded “not guilty” to the charge of trespass.
We were scheduled for trial last October, but on the day of the trial the government prosecutor moved to drop the charges against us and the case against all of us was dismissed. I think that they didn’t want the publicity of a trial and perhaps were concerned that they would lose the case. It was an honor to be arrested with Daniel Ellsberg, my wife and the others to protest the absolute insanity of continuing to threaten other countries and the people of the world with nuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery systems. By our protest, we were giving voice to future generations of children who deserve a chance to live in a world without the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them.
Yaroshinskaya: Despite the fact that since the signing of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has been more than 40 years, it’s not diminished in the world. Few experts emphasizes that in this Treaty are registered also obligations of the nuclear club of the destruction of nuclear weapons. How are they implemented?
Krieger: The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the only existing arms treaty that contains obligations for nuclear disarmament. The treaty obligates the five nuclear weapon states that are parties to the treaty (US, Russia, UK, France and China) to negotiate in good faith for a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date, for nuclear disarmament and for a treaty on general and complete disarmament. These negotiations have not taken place and, after 43 years, “an early date” has certainly passed. All five of the NPT nuclear weapon states are in breach of their obligations under the treaty. Their failure to act to fulfill their obligations puts the treaty, as well as the future of civilization, in jeopardy. These states are demonstrating that they believe nuclear weapons are useful for their security. In addition to being wrong about nuclear weapons providing security, they are being extremely shortsighted. Nuclear deterrence is not “defense.” It is a hypothesis about human behavior and is subject to failure. By their reliance on nuclear deterrence, the nuclear weapons states are not only running the risk of nuclear war occurring by accident or design, but are also actually encouraging nuclear proliferation.
Yaroshinskaya: Russia and the United States are the major players on the nuclear world stage. How do you assess (estimate) last Russian-American treaty on the reduction of nuclear capabilities – START-3, signed by Dmitriy Medvedev and Barack Obama in April 2010? What is your opinion – does US side ready to further reducing of nuclear weapons and finally to eliminate them at all as Barak Obama promised before his first presidential election?
Krieger: The New START agreement called for the reduction of deployed strategic nuclear weapons on each side to 1,550 and of deployed delivery vehicles to 700 by 2018. These numbers are still far too high. I believe that President Obama viewed the New START agreement as setting a new platform from which to make further reductions in the size of nuclear arsenals. However, it seems clear that the US deployment of missile defense installations near the Russian borders may make this difficult to achieve. In 2009, in a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, President Obama spoke of “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” But he continued, “I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.” In my view, there needs to be a greater sense of urgency to translate this commitment into action within a reasonable timeframe if we are to achieve the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.
Yaroshinskaya: The former head of the Department of State Henry Kissinger spoke some time ago that the United States could lead the world’s nuclear disarmament. How realistic are these claims or it is nothing more than just politics games?
Krieger: Henry Kissinger no longer has political power. He has only the power of persuasion. He has joined with other US Cold War leaders – George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn – to call for nuclear weapons abolition. Like President Obama, however, they see this as a long-term goal. But I think it is correct that the US could lead the world in achieving nuclear disarmament. President Obama has also called for such leadership. If the US fails to lead, it is unlikely to happen. Of course, Russia could also step forward and demonstrate such leadership.
Yaroshinskaya: One of the most sensitive topics of Russian-American relations is American missile defense system in Europe. Do you personally believe that this system is directed only against countries such as Iran and North Korea, but not against Russia, as it declares the American generals?
Krieger: My personal belief is that the US missile defense system is primarily a means of funneling public funds to “defense” contractors. I doubt that missile defenses will ever actually be successful in stopping nuclear-armed missiles, and will certainly never be successful against a country, such as Russia, with sophisticated nuclear forces. Thus, I think it is correct that US missile defenses are aimed at less sophisticated countries, such as Iran and North Korea, rather than at Russia. It is easy to understand, though, why Russia is concerned. Surely, the US would also be concerned if Russia attempted to put missile defense installations near the US border.
Yaroshinskaya: What is your opinion with regard to the Iranian nuclear threat to the United States and the world? Does it actually exist? We remember about US mistake concerning Iraq nuclear program and we can see now the result of such mistake for people of that country.
Krieger: At present, Iran poses no nuclear threat to the US and the rest of the world. So far as I am aware, no national intelligence service concludes that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. What we know is that Iran has a program to enrich uranium and this could be converted to a nuclear weapons program. I believe it is important to discourage Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program, but this is made more difficult by the failure of the most powerful nuclear weapons states to make serious progress toward fulfilling their obligations for nuclear disarmament under the NPT.
Yaroshinskaya: And there is last question. I know that some time ago you entered into a correspondence with Vladimir Putin. If I may ask, what about do you wrote to each other?
Krieger: In February 2012, we sent an “Open Letter on NATO Missile Defense Plans and Increased Risk of Nuclear War” to President Obama, President Medvedev and other US and Russian officials. You can find this letter at https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/db_article.php?article_id=313. I received a letter back from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He stated in his letter to me in March 2012: “We fully share the view that the fact the North Atlantic Alliance refused to include Russia into a joint missile defense is the evidence of its unpreparedness to treat our country as an equitable partner. This appears to be specifically alarming against the background of enlarging NATO and pursuit of vesting global military functions into the coalition. One cannot help agreeing to a conclusion that deployment of missile defense system at the very borders of Russia as well as upbuilding system’s capabilities increase the chance of any conventional military confrontation might promptly turn into a nuclear war. We have numerously been outspoken that such steps taken by the US and NATO undermine strategic stability and make further progress in reducing and limiting nuclear arms problematic.” He also expressed his “hope for continuing this positive and unbiased dialogue.” The full text of the letter from Mr. Lavrov may be found at https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/pdfs/2012_03_27_lavrov_reply.pdf. I hope such dialogue will indeed continue at the official level and lead to negotiations for a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the total elimination of nuclear weapons in a phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent manner.
Alla Yaroshinskaya published this article in Rosbalt, a Russian news service.
This is a transcript of the 12th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future, presented by Dennis Kucinich on February 8, 2013 in Santa Barbara, CA.
In Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, just after the majestic opening of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, a soaring sun splits the darkness, seemingly heralding the new Genesis, and next a man-ape uses a femur bone to dispatch the leader of another group in order to gain control over a water hole. It is a simple act of one mammal clubbing another to death. It is what Friedrich Nietzsche, in his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra, may have countenanced as “the eternal recurrence of the same.” Yet, Kubrick does not leave us stranded upon the darkling plain of brute violence, for emotion is admitted, and so exultant is the conqueror at the demise of his extent competitor that he flings the femur skyward in triumph and, through the match cut magic of movie-making, the femur tumbles end over end, high up into the heavens, where it is transformed – into a space station!
We surf on Kubrick’s monolith into an evolutionary spiral across space and millions of years, now equipped with high technology, but burdened with the signal responses of our lower limbic system and its embedded fight-flight conflicts, ever ready to take up the electronic cudgel to drive contestants out of water holes or oil holes. Violence is. Its expression neither regressive nor progressive, it exists as a disconnection from our own divinity, a fall from the heavens, a departure from grace, a descent into the lower circles of that philosophical hell of dichotomous thinking, of us versus them, whoever they are. The invention of the other, the evocation of the outgroup, the conjuring of the enemy are the precedents of violence. We hear the siren call. But what makes us answer the tocsin of rage clanging in our heads, in our homes, in our cities and in the world? Could it be the ripping of the moorings of our reality, the anxiety of separation shaking our core, the earthquake beneath our ground of meaning, dissecting through our bedrock beliefs when we learn that what we thought was true was indeed false? Peter Berger once wrote that reality is socially constructed and culturally affirmed. What happens when the sociopathic trumps the authentic?
We cannot justify violence, but we must determine its roots. Before Kubrick, before Strauss, there was Zarathustra, or Zoroaster himself. He confronted us with this moral proposition: That the central struggle of our existence is the determination of what is true and what is false. Is it our inability to strive for, to discern and to receive and to know truth which binds us to violence? Is what we see what we get? Are we bound to truth-shattering illusions? How do we know what we are told is true? Has the misuse of power in our society so distorted meaning that truth and lies are indistinguishable, or worse, morally relative? These are questions of import in our interpersonal relations, and the consequences of untruth grow geometrically when a major progenitor of perceptions in our society – the government – stumbles or seeks, and practices to mislead.
To ponder that question, let us first look at another production called 2001: September 11 – the catastrophe of nearly 3,000 innocent souls perishing in waves of hate. That date is burned into our memories as one of the worst days we have ever known. We know the choices which our government made, acting with the tacit consent of we the people, to respond to the 9/11 crimes committed against our nation. But we seldom reflect on our government’s response, as though to do so publically is either impolitic or un-American. Is it rude to mention that, acting upon the color of crime and tragedy on September 11, 2001, we began a descent to officially-sanctioned mass murder called war, into the lower circles of the infernos of torture, rendition and drone assassination? We established an anti-democratic state of emergency which exists to this day, with its Orwellian “Patriot Act,” its massive spying networks, its illegal detention, its extreme punishment of whistleblowers, and its neo-police state, in violation of posse comitatus, which put MPs on the streets of Washington, D.C. during the recent Inaugural.
We have cut and pasted the Constitution in the manner of a disambiguated Word Document through sheer casuistry, excising those sections which guarantee protection from unreasonable search and seizure, which protect an individual’s rights of habeas corpus, and due process, which prohibit any one person from simultaneously being policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner and coroner. Violence has enabled the government to grow and the republic to shrink.
It was ten years ago next month that the United States, despite a massive peace movement that put millions in the streets protesting the upcoming invasion, launched a full-scale attack on the nation of Iraq. “Shock and Awe,” it was called. Hellfire was brought to the cradle of civilization, its people, its culture, its antiquities – in our name – for a war based on lies. In awe of our weapons, we shocked ourselves, vicariously, with their effects, never experiencing the horror visited upon the people of Iraq.
When I say “we,” I mean all morally conscious Americans. Over a million Iraqis were killed in our name, for a war based on lies. In awe of our destructive power and its toll on innocent human life, we shocked ourselves and then returned to our normal lives. Trillions of dollars of damage was done to that country, in our name, for a war based on lies. Trillions more spent by the US taxpayers, for a war based on lies. In awe of the monetary cost of war, we shocked ourselves with massive deficits. Thousands of US troops were killed and tens of thousands wounded. In awe of the long-term, human cost of war, we shocked ourselves with broken lives, broken families, suicides, PTSD.
Shock and awe, indeed. We attacked a nation which did not attack us and which had neither the intention nor capability of doing so. We attacked a nation which did not have the yellow cake to be processed into the substance fit for a nuclear warhead. We attacked a nation which did not have weapons of mass destruction. We visited upon the people of Iraq the equivalent of one 9/11 a day for a year and with it the irretrievable rending of families, of places to live, places to work, places to worship, ripping apart Iraqi society in a war which soon became so remote that it was finished off by unmanned vehicles. The mission that was “accomplished” was wanton destruction, ecocide, alienation, statecraft puppetry – and for what?
What was it all about? It did not make us safer. It weakened our military. It killed and injured our soldiers. It seriously weakened our nation financially. The long-term cost of the post-9/11 wars of choice will run over $6 trillion. Want one reason why we have a $16 trillion debt? We borrowed money from China, Japan and South Korea to pursue wars while those countries built their economies and their infrastructures. We blew up bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at such expense that we are now preaching austerity here at home, unwilling to face the fact that we have over $2 trillion in infrastructure needs in America which have not been met, unwilling to invest in America. All too willing to invest in wars, we became the policemen of the world and ended up being resented worldwide. We have fueled the fires of reactionary nationalism abroad, which are easily stoked by foreign occupation or invasion. We have helped further fundamentalism and made decisions which placed in positions of power those whose very existence supposedly drove us into conflict in the first place. What passes for our recent history is an acculturated, sleep-inducing lie from which we must wake up. We must awake from the stupor of our self-imposed amnesia or shock; we must shake off the awe which comes from the misuse of power on a global basis. We must always question governments whose legitimacy rests not upon accountability and truth, but upon force and deception. A government which assumes that we are neither intelligent enough, nor loyal enough, to know the truth about its actions a dozen years ago or a dozen hours ago is not worthy of a free people. We must bend the fear-forged bars which imprison the truth. We must seek the truth. And we must know the truth. For it is the truth that will truly set us free and lead to the wisdom which can rescue us from destruction, the wisdom which can reclaim America. America. The mere utterance of the word should set the pulse pounding with the excitement of discovery, of possibility, of love – not fear.
We must demand that America, our nation, establish a fully-empowered Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, so that those responsible for misleading us into annihilating innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere be brought forward to a public accountability in a formal process of fact-finding, of inquiry, of public testimony, of admission, of confession. There is no way out of the moral cul-de-sac in which resides the monstrous crimes of mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and rendition, other than to have atonement: AT ONE MENT. It is in atonement that we will achieve what Blake called “the unity of opposites.” It is in reconciliation that the Blakean idea of the contrary nature of God, containing multitudes of humanity, causes us to understand the fragility of our social compact and the possibility that any of us could be murderer and victim. Lacking public expiation over the unbridled use of force, the wanton violence we have writ large in the world will replicate, perpetuate and be our ruin. This is the importance of a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation. We had and have a right to defend ourselves as a nation. But we went on the offensive, and the violence which we have visited abroad will inevitably blow back home. The violence we create in the world in turn licenses and desensitizes the wanton violence which is exercised in our streets and, unfortunately, in our homes. We must understand the causal links. What is outermost presses down upon what is innermost. What is innermost becomes outermost.
Once a full process of Truth and Reconciliation has helped us to discern the truth of our experience of the past decade, equipped with the truth of our errant descent into errant wars, we must be prepared to forgive those who would be forgiven, and forgive ourselves for having participated with either our assent or our silence. Then we may move forward with the truth as the standard under which we organize a stronger, better America.
We must think often of our nation, re-imagine it, reestablish it as the exemplification of our highest ideals. [We must think of] those lofty sentiments present at its founding, of its spiritual origins, ofAnnuit Coeptis, a US Motto: “He has favored our undertaking.” [We must think of] its transcendent purpose presaging human unity, E Pluribus Unum: out of many we are one. The paradox of multiplicity in singularity. Let us renew our faith in our nation. Let us unite so that the power of unity will lift up this nation we love. Let us declare our faith in each other, as it occurred so many years ago with that clarion call for the rights of “we the people!” Let us find that place within ourselves where our own capacity to evolve catalyzes the evolving character of America, where, through the highest expression of informed citizenship, we quicken the highest expression of informed nationhood: America for Americans for the World. Let the truth be our empire, the plowshare our sword, nature our textbook and let us once again celebrate the deeper meaning of what it means to be an American.
Then, reimagining the town hall model, let us consider what America represented to each of us on September 10, 2001, the day before 9/11. Let millions of people in tens of thousands of places across our nation meet, rediscover and celebrate again our nation and its purpose and recapture the spirit of America which we know already resides in countless places. That spirit of America is always ready to be called forward with a sense of wonder and joy, which our children will in time come to understand as our capacity to rise from the ashes of our own suffering and disillusionment, a quality which becomes their civic inheritance.
While we were founded with the idea of striving for perfection, we were not a perfect nation by any means before 9/11, but I remember a greater sense of optimism, of freedom, of security, of control of our destiny. We need to come together now, in the town halls across America, to appreciate our common experiences, to share our narratives about the best that is America, about what it is that we love about this country, about our own journeys, our own miracles, about those things in our lives which directly connect us to what we have called the American Dream. And when we so share, we will know each other better and love our country even more.
Violence today casts us in a psychological wilderness. There is a path out of the wilderness of violence in which so many of our fellow countrymen and countrywomen are lost. If we are to help them find that path, it would be helpful for us to look again to the origins of our nation and find the map.
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the Independence of the 13 colonies, and the achievement of peace was recognized as one of the highest duties of the new organization of free and independent states. Peace at the Founding. Yes, [this was] the paradox of revolutionary war, but the destination was peace, articulated and enshrined.
The drafters of the Declaration of Independence appealed to the Supreme Judge of the World, and derived the creative cause of nationhood from “the Laws of Nature” and the entitlements of “Nature’s God,” celebrating the unity of human thought, natural law and spiritual causation, in declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The architects of Independence “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence” spoke to the activity of a higher power which moves to guide the Nation’s fortune and lends its divine spark to infuse principle into the structure of a democratic governance.
The Constitution of the United States of America, in its Preamble, further sets forth the insurance of the cause of peace, in stating, “We the people of the United States, in Order to Form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” We must remember where we have been so that we can chart where we will proceed. It is the sacred duty of the people of the United States to receive the living truths of our founding documents and to think anew to develop institutions that permit the unfolding of the highest moral principles in this Nation and around the world.
Those words from the Constitution are included in the preamble of legislation I wrote in 2001. They form the basis of my understanding of the conceptive power of freedom. The Founders of this country gave America a vision of freedom for the ages and provided people with a document which gave this Nation the ability to adapt to an undreamed of future. What can we give back?
When I first came to Congress I saw how easily we slipped into conflict. I saw how normally placid people could get swept up by war fever. It led me to study war. I learned that during the course of the 20th Century more than 100,000,000 people perished in wars. Today, violence is an overarching theme, encompassing personal, group, national and international conflict, extending to the production of nuclear, biological, chemical weapons of mass destruction, which have been developed for use on land, air, sea and space. Such conflict is taken as a reflection of the human condition without questioning whether the structures of thought, word and deed which the people of the United States have inherited are any longer sufficient for the maintenance, growth and survival of the United States and the world.
Personal violence in the United States has great human and financial costs, costing hundreds of billions of dollars annually, not including war-related costs. Child abuse and neglect cost over $100 billion annually.
We are in a new millennium and the time has come to review age-old challenges with new thinking wherein we can conceive of peace as not simply being the absence of violence, but the active presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness, of respect, trust and integrity, where we all may tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness and conditions which impel or compel violence at a personal, group, or national level toward developing a new understand of and commitment to compassion and love, in order to create a “shining city on a hill,” the light of which is the light of nations.
It was this thinking, this articulation which I was privileged to bring forth on July 11, 2001, fully two months before 9/11, to introduce a bill, HR 808, to create a cabinet level Department of Peace, soon to be reintroduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee as the Department of Peace Building.
Imagine, coming from a position of love of our country and for each other, if we moved forward without judgment, to meet the promise of a more perfect union by meeting the challenge of violence in our homes, our streets, our schools, our places of work and worship, to meet the challenge of violence in our society through the creation of a new structure in our society which could directly address domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, gun violence, gang violence, violence against gays. This goes much deeper than legislation forbidding such conduct, or creating systems to deal with victims. Those are necessary but not sufficient. We need to go much deeper if we are to, at last, shed the yoke of violence which we carry throughout our daily lives.
We know violence is a learned response. So is non-violence. We must replace a culture of violence with a culture of peace, not through the antithetical use of force, not through endless “thou shalt nots” and not through mere punishment, but through tapping our higher potential to teach principles of peace building, peace sharing at the earliest ages as part of a civic education in a democratic society.
Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist, has written that “the behavior of the human organism may be determined by the external influences to which it has been exposed, but it may also be determined by the creative and integrative insight of the organism itself.” We are not victims of the world we see. We become victims of the way we see the world. If we are prepared to confidently call forth a new America, if we have the courage to not simply re-describe America, but to reclaim it, we will once again fall in love with the light which so many years ago shined through the darkness of human existence to announce the birth of a new freedom.
Out in the void I can see a soaring sun splitting the darkness. Behold the dawn of a new nation, our beloved America.
Dennis Kucinich was a member of the House of Representatives from 1997-2013.
This is a transcript of remarks delivered by David Krieger in advance of the 2013 Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future.
Welcome to the 12th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future. This lecture series has brought many great thinkers and visionaries to Santa Barbara and tonight is no exception.
The lecture series is a program of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons, and to empower peace leaders. We have 60,000 members around the country and the world. If you are not already a member of the Foundation, we invite you to join us in becoming a force for peace that cannot be stopped. You can learn more about the Foundation at our information table outside or join us online at www.wagingpeace.org.
This lecture series is named for Frank Kelly, a man whose life spanned most of the 20th century. Frank was an outstanding science fiction writer as a teenager, a citizen-soldier during World War II, a newspaper reporter, a speechwriter for President Truman, Assistant to the Senate Majority Leader, vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and a founder and senior vice president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Frank had a deep faith that humanity’s future would be bright. He believed that everyone deserves a seat at humanity’s table and that everyone’s voice matters. This lecture series honors Frank’s commitment to creating a more decent, peaceful and participatory future for humanity.
Our lecturer tonight is Dennis Kucinich, a visionary leader in Congress for the past 16 years. He has been a principled, passionate and persevering leader for peace and disarmament in an institution often characterized by its lack of thoughtful deliberations and its mob-like enthusiasm for military solutions to conflict. He has stood and struggled for peace as a beacon of hope during dark days of war, days that continue still. He is the author of legislation to create a United States Department of Peace, with Assistant Secretaries of Peace represented in every other major department of the US government.
I know that Dennis believes in the “power of now,” that it is what we do now that makes all the difference for our common future. He writes, “War is never inevitable. Peace is inevitable if we desire to call it forward…. But if we call peace forward from the unseen we must name it, we must give it structure, we must prepare for it a place to exist – a space to breathe, to be nurtured, to flower – so that it can be appreciated as an expression of that divine spark of creation.”