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A scenario: You’re nearing the end of a blind date, waiting for the waiter to bring out the ice cream. Both of you are still trying to come up with fodder for conversation. You’ve covered the weather, countries you have visited, documentaries you liked, your favorite breeds of dogs, where to buy the best ground coffee.
Just then, your date declares with a smile, “So how about nuclear weapons? Wouldn’t using them be…well, sort of fun? The collapse of modern society, or at least the end of the comforts we know? Imagine the thousands of immediate deaths, the damage to the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystem. The famines. Oh, and I forgot the years of skyrocketing cancer cases!”
After you’ve finished staring, and blinking, after you’ve caught the waiter’s eye for the check, you might still be waiting for the punchline. No one could actually be so flip, so grotesquely cavalier about a grave danger to civilization — indeed, the gravest possible danger. Could they? Particularly with a new acquaintance they’re purportedly trying to woo? But I recently discovered this very discussion happening in reality, in the singularly strange world of “cyberdating.”
A screenshot of the OkCupid question about nuclear war.
For those who are still somehow unaware, Internet dating offers anyone the ability to post a profile on the Web about their likes and interests, typically with a photo. Users can then interact: send instant messages, talk, flirt. According to research, about 75% of single people are searching online for partners nowadays.
A friend told me to try OkCupid, the most popular dating site around. It was established 12 years ago and now has millions of regular users of every age group. One of the best-known features of OkCupid is its wealth of “match questions.” Once you join, the website — like a robot that’s been programmed to be endlessly, insatiably curious about what you love and hate — begins trying to discern the real you. A nearly endless stream of yes/no and multiple-choice questions continues for as long as you play along; the site suggests dating candidates based on your answers. Theoretically, it’s a matter of giving the algorithm of romance the food it needs to thrive and get smarter.
I spent some time grappling with the initial onslaught of questions, and at first most seemed somewhat reasonable. Would you consider dating someone who dislikes children? How shy would you say you are? Do you solely date people with athletic and toned bodies?
But then, the first day of my membership, this one appeared:
In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?
I read the question several times, with emotions that included confusion, exasperation and anger. The hippest dating site on the Web was challenging me to answer a question that was not only inane but insane. I looked around to see if Rod Serling’s ghost was watching from a dim corner of the room.
I’m not alone in my puzzlement.
OkCupid for years has hosted online forums: message boards at which members can debrief about any question — how they answered it, and what the “best” answer might have been. The one on nuclear war clearly has been in active use by the dating site for many years, because as far back as 2008 it was sparking extended debate. That year, a site member (one of several) summarily condemned it:
“This is not even OK to even consider…” the site user wrote, “…unless you are an absolute idiot and have begun to believe the government/military attempts to make you think that such a thing would be survivable and wouldn’t be the end of life as we know it, which it would be.”
In 2011, people were still flocking to message boards to talk about the question, to defend how they answered it or (as before) to denounce it. One user called it “the most moronic question on this site.” A member in his late 50s identified himself as a former worker in the nuclear missile industry and declared that any use of such weapons would obviously be “a nightmare.”
“Actually many would survive,” he wrote. “But what would life on this planet be after that? Radiation clouds, radioactive rain, on and on…at least 10 years of death or more.”
On the message boards, lots of OkCupid users appear to agree with him, and this buoys my spirits. But there are also an unsettling number of comments by people standing by the notion that nuclear war might be the ultimate source of thrills. Many of these do not reach beyond a superficial concept of “excitement” to examine the widespread, unparalleled tragedy that a nuclear exchange would bring.
“It’s the end of civilization,” one site user writes. “How is that not exciting? I’m not saying it will be enjoyable in the slightest, but it will be fascinating. Literally a once in a lifetime event.”
Another, a 26-year-old man, posts that it stands to reason many people would find any big change in their prosaic existence to hold a certain allure. “People are craving anything to break the monotony of their droning, boring lives, and something that touches every individual would do that,” he writes. “Everyone wants to see an explosion, a house of cards fall over…”
But perhaps the most revealing (and disconcerting) remarks are by those romance-seekers who declare the prospect of nuclear war generates, for them, a responsive chord: memories of entertainment that they’ve enjoyed in the form of action-packed movies and video games. Specifically, they point to apocalyptic films about zombie invasions, or video games that ostensibly simulate the aftermath of nuclear cataclysm.
Fallout 4, released in 2015, had $750 million in sales on its first day of availability alone.
Take, for example, a wildly popular video game named Fallout. Quite a few OkCupid members mentioned it. In Fallout, which has appeared in several editions since 1997, the Earth after World War III is an exciting place to be, indeed. The latest version of the game is set in the bombed, charred remains of Boston in the year 2287, more than two centuries after nuclear bombs have devastated parts of the United States. Gamers take on the identity of “the Sole Survivor,” a heroic figure who emerges from a bomb shelter to search for a baby who was stolen and spirited away into the radioactive ruins of Beantown. Intricately detailed adventures await, with cutting-edge special effects, as players encounter bands of evil humans, “ghouls,” wild animals and even aliens. There are also “super mutants,” who previously were human but because of germ warfare have transformed into “massive, muscle-bound creatures with a natural immunity to radiation damage and disease,” according to information from gamers on the Wikia.com Fallout page. These characters are programmed to have no facial expressions other than “a permanent sneer,” and some of them have access to football-size nuclear weapons that can be launched by catapult. And they’re not happy to see you.
Fallout 4 came out in November 2015, and an incredible 12 million copies of the game were sold in the first 24 hours. That amounted to about $750 million in income for the game manufacturer — breaking the first-day-of-release record for any game sold in 2015.
The 2008 video game Fallout 3 was set in Washington, D.C., 200 years after the region’s nuclear obliteration in 2077.
I honestly can’t get my head around that amount of money being spent in a day, especially on a game — let alone one that takes the worst existential peril humankind faces and seeks to turn it into a circus world that’s so amusing that it’s addictive. To compare, $750 million represents 6.2 times the top opening-day box office receipts of any movie in history (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” also in 2015). I also find it interesting, stepping away from fantasy, that the United States Institute of Peace, a bipartisan federal agency that works to mediate other nations’ conflicts without force and to find nonviolent ways for the U.S. to protect its interests, is now subsisting on a budget of roughly $35 million per year. Apples and oranges, perhaps, but show healthy skepticism if Joe Consumer says he has nothing left to spend on international amity.
Getting back to my experience on OkCupid: I never did get past the bizarre “match” question, and I have yet to become an active user of the dating site. As a supporter of nuclear abolition, for me the question became a vexing distraction that made me doubt the logic behind the site’s much vaunted software for playing matchmaker. True, the “nuclear war excitement” question apparently was first posed, a long time ago, as a suggestion by an ordinary site member, and I’m under no delusion that the average person is well-versed in the dreadful humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons use. We all know that lack of education and lack of empathy can be common.
But I would have hoped the cyber-romance mavens who created the site — Harvard grads all — would have realized the question’s folly, too, instead of officially embracing it and then allowing it to foul the interrogatory stream all these years. (OkCupid didn’t reply to requests for comment about this essay.)
Actually, I have a strong feeling that those who run the dating site know that more than a few of its questions are absurd. But hey, it’s essentially free to use, and maybe that deters complaints (the site is mainly financed by advertising). To quote Christian Rudder, a co-founder of OkCupid who used to maintain his own blog before leaving the company, “The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position.”
That was honest, at least.
Do a strange dating-website question and an astonishingly successful game about a nuclear wasteland offer much to inform us about the future of the nuclear abolition movement? Perhaps.
These fantastical opinions and fantastical games prove, I believe, that people — decades after the Cold War — still have tremendous interest in the sheer power of these weapons and at least some awareness of their capacity to create calamity on an epic scale.
Educating these people, especially the younger generation, about the immeasurable extent of suffering inherent in any nuclear war, is the great challenge for antinuclear activists everywhere.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
Con las armas nucleares, ¿que podría salir mal? La respuesta es corta: Todo.
Las armas nucleares podrían ser lanzadas por accidente o error de cálculo. Ya ha habido varias “por poco” debido a advertencias falsas que casi provocan lanzamientos reales, lo que muy probablemente hubiera dado lugar a una represalia. Estas falsas advertencias son mucho más peligrosas para EE.UU. y Rusia sabiendo que cada lado mantiene cientos de armas nucleares en alerta, listas para ser lanzadas en cualquier momento al darse la orden para hacerlo.
La mera posesión de armas nucleares y el “prestigio” en la comunidad internacional asociado a dicha posesión es un incentivo para la proliferación nuclear. Actualmente hay nueve países con armas nucleares. ¿Cuánto más peligroso sería el mundo si en su lugar fueran 19, 29 o 99 naciones?
Las armas nucleares tratan de ser justificadas por una hipótesis sobre el comportamiento humano conocida como la disuasión nuclear. Se arguye que una nación (con o sin armas nucleares) no atacará a otra si hay la amenaza de represalia nuclear. Pero la disuasión nuclear no es infalible y no proporciona protección física. La seguridad que ofrece es totalmente psicológica. Falla si un lado no cree que la otra parte realmente efectuaría una represalia nuclear. Falla si uno de los lados no es racional. Es un error en el caso de que un grupo terrorista entre en posesión de armas nucleares, y al no tener un territorio, no se pueden tomar represalias en su contra y, además, podrían ser suicidas.
La disuasión nuclear puede proporcionar una débil, incierta y poco fiable protección contra otros estados, pero no ofrece ninguna contra los terroristas. Por lo tanto, los terroristas en posesión de dichas armas son la peor pesadilla de cualquier estado, incluyendo a los poseedores de estos fatídicos arsenales.
Ante tales peligros, tiene sentido tratar de reducir los arsenales nucleares al menor número posible de armas (con la meta de cero) para que las que queden puedan ser vigiladas con mayor eficacia y evitar que caigan en las manos de grupos terroristas.
También es cierto que el Tratado de No Proliferación Nuclear (TNP) obliga a los 190 países del tratado a negociar de buena fe sobre las medidas eficaces para poner fin a la carrera armamentista en fecha próxima y lograr el desarme nuclear completo. La obligación de negociar de buena fe para el desarme nuclear también se aplica a los cuatro países con armas nucleares que no son parte del TNP (Israel, India, Pakistán y Corea del Norte) a través del derecho internacional consuetudinario.
Ya que está claro que mucho podría salir mal con las armas nucleares, incluyendo que algunas caigan en manos de terroristas, es sorprendente que haya tanta complacencia en torno al tema. Esta complacencia es alimentada por la apatía, el conformismo, la ignorancia y la negación. Sin la participación ciudadana, empujando a los líderes políticos para que actúen, es probable que el mundo será testigo de la pesadilla del terror nuclear, ya sea ocasionada por un país o por terroristas en posesión de armas nucleares. La apatía y la negación tienen el potencial de corroer y disolver nuestro futuro común.
Por el momento, los nueve países con armas nucleares tienen planes para modernizar sus arsenales, a pesar de la inmoralidad, ilegalidad y desperdicio de los recursos involucrados en hacerlo. Tan sólo EE.UU. está planeando gastar mil millones de millones de dólares en la modernización de su arsenal nuclear en los próximos tres decenios. ¿Dónde está la lógica de estas acciones cuando hay tantas necesidades humanas incumplidas?
Las armas nucleares no son la solución a nuestros problemas, y plantean el espectro de la devastación de la civilización y el destino de la especie humana. ¿Que podría salir mal? ¿No deberían los ciudadanos simplemente ignorar los peligros nucleares y dejarlos en manos de los líderes de los países con esas armas? Eso sería una simple continuación del status quo y no habría ninguna solución.
Debemos reconocer que estamos viviendo al borde de un precipicio nuclear con todos los peligros antes mencionados. En lugar de confiar en la disuasión y seguir modernizando los arsenales nucleares, tenemos que presionar a nuestros líderes políticos para que cumplan con nuestras obligaciones morales y legales para negociar de buena fe la prohibición y la eliminación de las armas nucleares. Es decir, tenemos que liberarnos de nuestra absurda complacencia y comprometernos por lograr un mundo cero nuclear.
Este artículo fue publicado originalmente por Truthout.
With nuclear weapons, what could possibly go wrong? The short answer is: Everything.
Nuclear weapons could be launched by accident or miscalculation. There have already been several close calls related to false warnings nearly leading to actual launches, which would most likely have led to retaliatory responses. These false warnings are all the more dangerous for the US and Russia knowing that each side keeps hundreds of nuclear weapons on high alert, ready to be launched in moments of an order to do so.
The mere possession of nuclear weapons and the prestige in the international community associated with such possession is an inducement to nuclear proliferation. There are currently nine nuclear-armed countries. How much more dangerous would the world become if there were 19, 29 or 99?
Nuclear weapons are justified by a hypothesis about human behavior known as nuclear deterrence. It posits that a nation (with or without nuclear weapons) will not attack a nation that threatens nuclear retaliation. But nuclear deterrence is not foolproof and it does not provide physical protection. The security it provides is entirely psychological. It fails if one side does not believe that the other side would really engage in nuclear retaliation. It fails if one side is not rational. It fails in the case of a terrorist group in possession of nuclear weapons that does not have territory to retaliate against and additionally may be suicidal.
Nuclear deterrence may provide some weak, uncertain and unreliable protection against other states, but it provides no protection against terrorists. Thus, terrorists in possession of nuclear weapons are any state’s worst nightmare, including nuclear-armed states. In light of such dangers, it would make sense to seek to reduce nuclear arsenals to the lowest possible number of weapons (on the way to zero) so that any that remained could be more effectively guarded and kept from the hands of terrorist groups.
It is also true that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires the 190 parties to the treaty to negotiate in good faith for effective measures to end the nuclear arms race at an early date and to achieve complete nuclear disarmament. The obligation to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament also applies to the four nuclear-armed countries that are not parties to the NPT (Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) through customary international law.
Since it is clear that much could go wrong with nuclear weapons, including some weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, it is surprising that there is so much complacency around the issue. This complacency is fuelled by apathy, conformity, ignorance and denial. Without citizen engagement, pushing on political leaders to act, it is likely that the world will witness nightmarish nuclear terror, either of the state variety or that actually brought about by terrorists in possession of nuclear weapons. Apathy and denial have the potential to corrode and dissolve our common future.
For the present, the nine nuclear-armed countries all have plans to modernize their nuclear arsenals, despite the immorality, illegality and waste of resources involved in doing so. The US alone is planning to spend $1 trillion on modernizing its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades. Where is the humanity in seeking to devote resources to improving nuclear weaponry and delivery systems when there are so many human needs that are going unfulfilled?
Nuclear weapons are not a solution to any human problem, and they raise the specter of the devastation of civilization and the doom of the human species. What could possibly go wrong? Shouldn’t good citizens just ignore nuclear dangers and leave them in the hands of whoever happens to be leading the nuclear-armed countries? That would actually be a continuation of the status quo and would be no solution at all.
We must recognize that we are living at the edge of a nuclear precipice with the ever-present dangers of nuclear proliferation, nuclear accidents and miscalculations, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war. Instead of relying on nuclear deterrence and pursuing the modernization of nuclear arsenals, we need to press our political leaders to fulfill our moral and legal obligations to negotiate in good faith for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. That is, we need to break free of our acidic complacency and commit ourselves to achieving a nuclear zero world.
This article was originally published by truthout.
At West Point I learned that technology forces warfare to evolve. The reason soldiers today no longer ride horses into battle, use bows and arrows, and wield spears, is because of the gun. The reason people no longer fight in trenches, as they did during World War I, is because the tank and airplane were greatly improved and mass-produced. But there is a technological innovation that has changed warfare more than the gun, tank, or airplane. That technological innovation is mass media.
Today most people’s understanding of violence is naive, because they do not realize how much the Internet and social media, the newest incarnations of mass media, have changed warfare. The most powerful weapon that ISIS has is the Internet with social media, which has allowed ISIS to recruit people from all over the world.
For most of human history, people from across the world had to send a military over land or sea to attack you, but the Internet and social media allow people from across the world to convince your fellow citizens to attack you. Several of the people who committed the ISIS terrorist attack in Paris were French nationals, and it now appears that the two people who committed the mass shooting in San Bernardino were influenced by ISIS.
To be effective ISIS needs two things to happen. It needs to dehumanize the people it kills, and it also needs Western countries to dehumanize Muslims. When Western countries dehumanize Muslims, this further alienates Muslim populations and increases recruitment for ISIS. ISIS commits horrible atrocities against Westerners because it wants us to overreact by stereotyping, dehumanizing, and alienating Muslims.
Every time Western countries stereotype, dehumanize, and alienate Muslims, they are doing exactly what ISIS wants. A basic principle of military strategy is that we should not do what our opponents want. In order for ISIS’s plan to work, it needs to dehumanize its enemies, but perhaps more importantly, it needs Americans and Europeans to dehumanize Muslims.
ISIS cannot be compared to Nazi Germany, because the Nazis were not able to use the Internet and social media as a weapon of war and terrorism. Trying to fight ISIS the way we fought the Nazis, when today the Internet and social media have dramatically changed twenty-first century warfare, would be like trying to fight the Nazis by using horses, spears, bows and arrows. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers during the September 11th attacks were from Saudi Arabia, one of the United States’ closest allies. None of the hijackers were from Iraq. ISIS seems to have better mastered the weapon of the Internet than Al Qaida, because ISIS is more adept at convincing French and American citizens to commit attacks.
Because technology has changed warfare in the twenty-first century and allowed ISIS to wage a digital military campaign, it is naive to believe that we can defeat terrorism by conquering and holding territory, which has become an archaic and counterproductive form of warfare. During the era of the Internet revolution, it is naive to believe that we can use violence to defeat the ideologies that sustain terrorism. ISIS and Al Qaida are global movements, and with the Internet and social media, they can recruit people from all over the world, including people on American and European soil. And they only have to recruit a tiny amount of Americans and Europeans, initiate a single attack, and kill a few people to cause the huge overreactions that they want from their opponents. Let us not react in ways that ISIS wants.
Paul K. Chappellgraduated from West Point in 2002, was deployed to Iraq, and left active duty in 2009 as a Captain. An author of five books, he is currently serving as the Peace Leadership Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and lectures widely on war and peace issues. His website is www.peacefulrevolution.com.
Tony de Brum and People of the Marshall Islands Win Right Livelihood Award
A Ground Zero Forgotten
Resources
December’s Featured Blog
This Month in Nuclear Threat History
The Climate-Nuclear Nexus
We Are Many
Foundation Activities
The Art of Waging Peace Documentary
Give the Gift of Peace from the NAPF Peace Store
Humanize Not Modernize Tote Bags Now Available
Evening for Peace Video Now Available
Quotes
Perspectives
Paris: War Is Not the Answer
by David Krieger
The attacks on innocents in Paris on November 13, 2015 were horrifying crimes, filling the city with grief and uniting people throughout the world in solidarity with the victims and with France. These attacks were cold-blooded murders of innocent people, clearly crimes deserving punishment. But when crimes are used as the impetus for war, the crimes and grief are multiplied and the toll of innocents increases to become the norm. Surely, we must cry havoc, but we must also be wary of letting loose the dogs of war.
The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 were also unspeakable crimes. These attacks also stirred the sympathy and solidarity of the world, in this case for the United States, until the U.S. answered the attacks by letting loose the snarling dogs of war, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq, a country having nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The leaders who perpetrated these wars also caused untold sorrow and death of innocents. While perpetrators of the attacks in New York, including Osama bin Laden, have been tracked down and captured or killed, those U.S. leaders who committed the worst of the Nuremberg crimes, crimes against peace, particularly in Iraq, have never been brought to justice.
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Warns of Nuclear War, Nuclear Terror
by Robert Kazel
Although peace activists know it well, the average American is “blissfully unaware” that the likelihood of a nuclear attack inside U.S. borders has markedly increased for two reasons: serious deterioration in relations between American officials and their Russian counterparts and potential development by terrorists of improvised nuclear technology.
That was the warning delivered in November by William Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense, who told attendees in Chicago at the annual Clock Symposium sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that intensified public information campaigns will be essential to enlighten a citizenry that’s become complacent and ignorant about the rising threat of catastrophe.
Acceptance Speech at NAPF’s 2015 Evening for Peace
by Setsuko Thurlow
I am delighted to be here tonight, and meet all of you, working hard for a peaceful and just world free of nuclear weapons. I am honored and humbled to receive your Award tonight. I am truly grateful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Tonight I would like to share with you my personal testimony of surviving the atomic bombing as a child victim, and then living in North America advocating for the abolition of nuclear weapons. For the 70th anniversary of the bombings, it is appropriate to reflect upon and ponder the meaning of living in the nuclear age.
UN General Assembly to Vote on Nuclear Disarmament Resolutions
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is urging countries to vote in favor of numerous nuclear disarmament-related resolutions on December 7. ICAN is calling on governments to support resolutions in support of an open-ended working group on nuclear disarmament, the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, the Humanitarian Pledge, and the ethical imperatives of a nuclear weapons-free world.
These four resolutions were adopted in the First Committee by a significant majority. Since the First Committee voted in November, nuclear-armed countries have pressured non-nuclear countries to abstain or vote against the resolutions.
To read the ICAN action alert and see how you can help, click here.
Nuclear Insanity
Russia Says Leak of Secret Nuclear Weapon Design Was an Accident
A Russian television station has broadcast a report that seemed to inadvertently reveal the design for a nuclear-armed drone submarine that could attack coastlines. The submarine has not yet been produced, and the Kremlin insists that the revelation was accidental.
The document said that the submarine would “defeat important economic objects of an enemy in coastal zones, bringing guaranteed and unacceptable losses on the country’s territory by forming a wide area of radioactive contamination incompatible with conducting military, economic or any other activities there for a long period of time.”
Many analysts believe that this information was leaked purposely as part of the heightened nuclear saber-rattling between Russia and the United States.
U.S. Launches Nuclear Missile off California Coast, Causing UFO Scare
On November 7, the U.S. Navy launched an unarmed Trident II D5 missile from a submarine off the coast of California just after dark. The resulting streak of light across the sky, which could be seen as far away as Arizona, caused many people to think they were seeing a UFO or a meteor.
The Navy does not announce tests of its nuclear-capable missiles in advance. The missile, which can carry nuclear warheads many times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima, landed at a target in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Navy later stated that the test was part of “a scheduled, ongoing system evaluation test.”
On November 24, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet that it claims was violating its airspace after repeated warnings went unheeded. Russia, on the other hand, claims that the aircraft was in Syria when it was shot down. Regardless of the exact location of the Russian jet, this military action has significantly raised the levels of tension between nuclear-armed rivals. Also, when the tables were turned and one of his own jets was shot down by Syria in 2012 over an air space violation, then Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan (now its president) complained: “Even if the plane was in their airspace for a few seconds, that is no excuse to attack.”
Russia possesses approximately 4,500 nuclear weapons, while Turkey is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is a nuclear-armed alliance. The United States stores approximately 60 nuclear weapons on Turkish territory under the auspices of NATO nuclear sharing.
Martin Hellman, who writes regularly about nuclear risk, wrote of this situation, “If we keep ignoring [nuclear] risk, eventually one of these provocative incidents will blow up in our faces. The time to recognize that danger and to start work on reducing the risk is now, not once a crisis exists.” You can read Hellman’s three-article series by clicking the link below.
Does Your Bank Finance Nuclear Weapons Production?
Pax, a peace organization based in the Netherlands, has published a revised edition of the report “Don’t Bank on the Bomb.” The report examines in detail the records of companies involved in the production of nuclear weapons, as well as financial institutions that finance them.
While the majority of nuclear weapons funding comes from taxpayers in nuclear-armed countries, private sector investors also provide financing that enables the production, maintenance and modernization of nuclear arsenals.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation recently issued an action alert targeting State Farm, one of the many institutions that finance companies that produce nuclear weapons. Click here to take action by encouraging State Farm to stop financing nuclear weapons producers.
Michael McCord, Pentagon Comptroller, has said that the massive future costs of acquiring new nuclear weapon delivery systems will be one of the biggest challenges facing the next U.S. President. McCord estimates that by the year 2021, the U.S. will need to come up with at least $10 billion per year through 2035 in order to fulfill current plans to modernize its nuclear weapons, delivery systems and production facilities.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has published a new booklet entitled “Humanize Not Modernize” that outlines just some of the things that could benefit society instead of the $1 trillion that the U.S. intends to spend on nuclear modernization over the next 30 years. To read the booklet, click here.
Tony de Brum and People of the Marshall Islands Win the Right Livelihood Award
On November 30, Tony de Brum, Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, received the Right Livelihood Award in a ceremony at the Swedish Parliament. De Brum and the people of the Marshall Islands were given the award, commonly called the Alternative Nobel Prize, “in recognition of their vision and courage to take legal action against the nuclear powers for failing to honor their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law.”
To watch a video of de Brum’s award acceptance speech, click here.
To read more about the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits, click here.
A Ground Zero Forgotten
Over the past 70 years, the Marshall Islands have faced numerous challenges. The United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, resulting in incalculable damage to people and the environment that continues to this day. Lately, the realities of global climate change have been manifesting dangerously on the low-lying islands, with rising sea levels threatening their continued existence.
The Marshall Islands has not taken these challenges lightly. They are a leading voice in the movement to combat climate change, including at the international negotiations currently taking place in Paris. They are also proactively working to eliminate the nuclear weapons threat through the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits, which they filed in 2014 against all nine nuclear-armed nations.
This month’s featured blog is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their website, www.thebulletin.org, contains many distinct blogs, including Nuclear Notebook, Development and Disarmament Roundtable, Voices of Tomorrow, and many more.
History chronicles many instances when humans have been threatened by nuclear weapons. In this article, Jeffrey Mason outlines some of the most serious threats that have taken place in the month of December, including the December 5, 1965 incident in which a U.S. 4E Skyhawk fighter jet armed with a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb rolled off an aircraft carrier and fell into the Pacific Ocean. The hydrogen bomb was lost.
For more information on the history of the Nuclear Age, visit NAPF’s Nuclear Files website.
The Climate-Nuclear Nexus
Just in time for the global climate meetings in Paris, the World Future Council has published a new report entitled “The Climate-Nuclear Nexus.” The report, principally authored by Jurgen Scheffran of the University of Hamburg, considers how nuclear weapons and climate change have grave implications for global and human security, and how the two interact with each other.
For a rising number of people, the effects of these two threats are not a theoretical, future issue of concern. Behind the facts and figures are stories of real suffering from climate change and nuclear weapons programs. The people of the Marshall Islands, who are threatened by rising sea levels and are still heavily impacted by U.S. nuclear weapon testing from 1946-58, are a clear example.
A new documentary film entitled “We Are Many” will be screened in the coming weeks in New York and Los Angeles. The film, by Amir Amirani, chronicles the 2003 worldwide protests against the invasion of Iraq that were the largest global protests ever. On February 15, 2003, over 15 million people marched to protest the invasion of Iraq in over 800 cities around the world. The film unveils the drama, emotion, magnitude and stories of this historic day. To view a trailer of the film, click here.
The film will screen numerous times each day in New York from December 4-10, and in Los Angeles from December 11-17. For information and tickets to the New York screenings, click here. For information and tickets to the Los Angeles screenings, click here.
Foundation Activities
The Art of Waging Peace Documentary
NAPF Peace Leadership Director Paul K. Chappell may soon have a new teaching tool available for the classroom and for non-violence activists everywhere: a documentary on The Art of Waging Peace.
Filmmaker Kent Forbes first heard about Paul when he gave a lecture at the University of Maine in 2012. “His talk really stuck with me,” said Forbes. “I was very intrigued by his original approach to the problem of war and by his unique qualifications.”
To read more about the documentary and to watch a teaser, click here.
Give the Gift of Peace from the NAPF Peace Store
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s online peace store has many great gifts for your peace-loving family and friends. From books to t-shirts, from sunflower “seeds of peace” to tote bags, you’re sure to find some meaningful and lasting gifts.
Order today and you’ll receive your items in time for the holidays.
Humanize Not Modernize Tote Bags Now Available
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s new campaign, “Humanize Not Modernize,” has just been launched. Over the next year, we will be letting you know specifically what could be done with the $1 trillion that the United States plans to spend modernizing its nuclear weapons, delivery systems and production infrastructure over the next three decades.
As part of this campaign, we have produced a limited number of “Humanize Not Modernize” reusable tote bags. They can be a great conversation starter about this important issue wherever you go. The bags are available for purchase in the NAPF Peace Store.
In addition, through December 31, if you donate $25 to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we will send you a tote bag as a token of our thanks. If you donate $50 or more by December 31, we will send you two tote bags – one for yourself and one to give away.
Evening for Peace Video Now Available
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has published a video of our 2015 Evening for Peace, honoring Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and a dedicated campaigner for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Ms. Thurlow’s acceptance speech is also available as a written transcript here.
Quotes
“We condemn the billions of dollars that several nuclear weapons states are committing to spending to modernize their arsenals as well as the arms race such actions are stimulating.”
— Statement from the 15th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, which took place in Barcelona November 13-15, 2015.
“What shall remain in the wake of this war, in the midst of which we are living now? What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims, and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers.”
— Pope Francis
“The hope of humankind is that compassion and compromise may replace the cruel and senseless violence of armed conflicts.”
— Benjamin Ferencz, American attorney and prosecutor at the Nuremburg Tribunal. This quote appears in Speaking of Peace: Quotations to Inspire Action, available for purchase in the NAPF Peace Store.
December 5, 1965 – A U.S. naval aircraft, a 4E Skyhawk fighter jet rolled off an elevator on board the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Pacific Ocean 70-80 miles east of the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa, Japan drowning the pilot. The aircraft carried a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb which was lost in the three mile deep ocean waters of the Pacific. When the U.S. Defense Department first admitted this accident in 1981 it claimed the accident happened “more than 500 miles off the coast of Japan.” Comments: There are dozens of lost nuclear warheads and nuclear reactors on the ocean floor from sunken naval vessels and crashed aircraft. Some of these are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep, but the health and well-being of millions of people. This is but one of the many deadly legacies of the ongoing seventy year-long nuclear arms race. (Source: Michael W. Maggelet and James C. Oskins. “Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents.” Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing. 2007, p. 217 and William Arkin and Joshua Handler. “Neptune Papers III: Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.” Greenpeace International, 1990. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/planet-2/report/2006/2/naval-nuclear-accidents-arkin-pdf accessed November 18, 2015.)
December 5, 2012 – The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) conducted its 27th subcritical nuclear test, designated Pollux, in which chemical high explosives were detonated next to samples of weapons-grade plutonium (plutonium-239), at the Nevada Test Site. The NNSA says the test was performed in order to “test the ongoing safety and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear weapons.” However, this test was conducted without significant commentary or criticism by the mainstream news media despite the fact that many arms control experts and critics of U.S. nuclear deterrence policies see such tests as violating the spirit of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which was signed by President Bill Clinton on September 24, 1996 but rejected by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 51-48 on October 13, 1999 (and not ratified thereafter despite the Russian Duma’s approval of the treaty on April 21, 2000 by a vote of 298-74). Since the CTBT was not ratified by the U.S., supporters of a robust U.S. nuclear arsenal claim that these subcritical tests are being conducted legally. However, the Iranian Foreign Ministry, as well as the mayor of the city of Hiroshima, Japan, both condemned the test. Mayor Kazumi Matsui noted that, “the test proves that the U.S. could use nuclear weapons anytime.” Comments: Six and a half years after President Barack Obama’s April 2009 Prague speech on eliminating nuclear weapons, the Administration has done little to act on the President’s promise to “aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the CTBT,” or to work toward accelerated nuclear arms reductions. In fact, the President has given his blessing to spending a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize and expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal! Even military hawk President Ronald Reagan, in a December 19, 1985 letter to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, noted that, “A comprehensive test ban…is a long-term objective of the United States…” (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 9, 13, 19, 22 and William Broadman. “U.S. Nuke Test Draws Few Protests.” ConsortiumNews.com. December 10, 2012. https://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/10/us-nuke-test-draws-few-protests/ and “U.S. Nuclear Test Condemned by Iran, Japan.” RT.com. https://www.rt.com/news/US-nuclear-test-nevada-criticism-582/ both accessed on November 18, 2015.)
December 8, 1953 – Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the concept of Atoms for Peace, which called for the creation of an international atomic energy agency that would receive contributions from nations holding stocks of nuclear materials and utilize such contributions for peaceful purposes. Although this plan led to the July 29, 1957 creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which later became an important component of the international nonproliferation regime as actualized in the July 11, 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Atoms for Peace and Project Ploughshares, another program to use nuclear weapons for “peaceful purposes,” spawned some incredibly naïve and reckless Soviet and U.S. proposals to build nuclear-powered aircraft and locomotives, to create artificial harbors by using nuclear demolitions, even to use small nuclear power plants to heat and cool residences, as well as many other irrational health-threatening schemes. According to nuclear historian Spencer Weart, the U.S. alone spent over a billion dollars on Atoms for Peace before President John Kennedy ended the program in 1961. (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 61 and Spencer R. Weart. “Nuclear Fear: A History of Images.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 173.)
December 12, 1991 – President George H. W. Bush signed the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act (the Nunn-Lugar legislation) which approved U.S. monetary and technical assistance to aid the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union) with the storage, transportation, dismantlement, and destruction of nuclear and chemical weapons. It also provided spending to promote defense conversion and U.S.-C.I.S. military-to-military exchanges. Over the next two decades over $4 billion was budgeted by the U.S. for these nonproliferation activities sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN). As a result of this and related programs, the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan became nuclear-weapon-free nations. Over 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nearly that many ICBMs silos were destroyed along with thousands of other missiles and weapons platforms including 27 nuclear submarines. In addition, approximately 58,000 former weapons scientists from C.I.S. countries were reemployed in peaceful R&D programs organized with the assistance of U.S.-funded International Science and Technical Centers. However in January 2015, as a result of tensions relating to the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis and a rejuvenated Cold War II, Russian Federation representatives informed their U.S. counterparts that Russia would no longer accept U.S. Nunn-Lugar assistance and that they would continue the program on their own. (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 3 and Bryan Bender. “Russia Ends U.S. Nuclear Security Alliance.” The Boston Globe. January 19, 2015. https://www.bostonglobe.com/new/nation/2015/01/19/after-two-decades-russia-nuclear-security-cooperation-becomes-casualty-deteriorating-relations/5nh8NbtjitUE8UqVWFlooL/story.html. accessed on November 18, 2015.)
December 15, 1995 – Ten Southeast Asian nations signed the Bangkok Treaty establishing the Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone (SEANWFZ). The treaty has a protocol that allows nuclear weapons states to participate in the regime, however, so far no member of the Nuclear Club has signed onto the treaty. Nevertheless, the treaty entered into force on March 28, 1997. The agreement obliges its members not to develop, manufacture, or otherwise acquire, possess, or have control over nuclear weapons. Other NWFZs include the December 1, 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the February 14, 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco covering Latin America, the August 6, 1985 Raratonga Treaty creating a South Pacific Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone, the April 11, 1996 Pelindaba Treaty covering Africa and NWFZs covering a large number of the world’s metropolitan areas including some U.S. cities. Comments: One goal of the growing Global Zero movement is to expand these existing NWFZs to include the entire planet, with the proviso that Nuclear Club Members and recalcitrant non-NPT participants like Israel must all embrace, without caveat, a Worldwide Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zone. (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 3, 62, 65, 75-76 and “Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone.” Monterey Institute of International Studies. http://cns.miis.edu/inventory/pdfs/seanwfz.org. accessed November 18, 2015.)
December 22, 1975 – During the Gerald Ford presidential administration, at a National Security Council meeting held on this date, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) director Fred Ikle agreed with the thesis of a new Rand Corporation study that concluded that, “launching the ICBM force on attack assessment (launch-on-warning policy) is the most simple and cost-effective way to frustrate a Soviet nuclear counterforce attack on the U.S. – but as a declared policy, we believe it would be vigorously opposed as both dangerous and unstable (i.e., that an accident could theoretically precipitate a nuclear war).” But Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft disagreed. Scowcroft argued that, “It is not to our disadvantage if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.” Comments: The “rationality” of pressing a button to commit unprecedented, irreversible nuclear genocide has still not been sufficiently discredited and relegated to the scrap heap of human history. Strategic calculations based on irrationality are extremely unwise, tremendously destabilizing, and clearly counterproductive to the long-term sustainability of the human species. (Sources: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013.)
December 23, 1983 – A seminal scientific study on the previously unknown but most critical global climate consequences of even a so-called “limited” nuclear war, titled “Nuclear Winter and Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” was published on pages 1283-1300 in the journal Science by a group of scientists identified by the acronym TTAPS (R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan). Using data from studies of the climatic cooling impacts of volcanic eruptions throughout recorded history, the authors concluded that the explosion of hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons within a short period of time (hours, days) would result in the injection of very large amounts of debris into the upper atmosphere which would block the sun’s rays and cool the planet, particularly the northern hemisphere if a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange occurred. The global impact of this event would be the drastic reduction of agricultural yields resulting in the starvation of a large proportion of the world’s population, particularly in the Third World. The worst-case scenario of a large nuclear exchange could be the extinction of the human species. The threshold for the triggering of this “nuclear winter,” the authors concluded, could be very low, possibly as little as 100 megatons of nuclear weapons yield. Many subsequent studies have verified the TTAPS’ conclusions including work by Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University. Comments: Nonetheless, the nuclear doomsday machine, maintained and expanded in future military budgets by members of the Nuclear Club, has a life of its own, unfortunately. A paradigm shift that would discredit the flawed doctrine of deterrence and force the drastic reduction of global nuclear arsenals may be the most critical evolutionary advance in the history of the human species. Otherwise, omnicide is a likely scenario. (Source: “Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict: Nuclear Winter Is Still A Danger.” Professor Alan Robock, Rutgers University, 2014. http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/ accessed on November 18, 2015.)
December 31, 1948 – By the end of 1948, the U.S. Strategic Air Command possessed 56 atomic bombs as disassembled cores and component parts that could be reconfigured to explode within a day or so. In these days, before the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested on August 29, 1949, a number of U.S. military leaders such as SAC’s commander General Curtis E. LeMay, were counseling President Truman to launch a preemptive nuclear first strike bomber attack on the Soviet Union particularly before they could develop their own nuclear weapons. Comments: As a plethora of historians, commentators, scholars, activists, and political leaders have concluded, the human race is lucky to be alive during this ongoing seventy year-long nuclear arms race. (Source: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013.)
Although peace activists know it well, the average American is “blissfully unaware” that the likelihood of a nuclear attack inside U.S. borders has markedly increased for two reasons: serious deterioration in relations between American officials and their Russian counterparts and potential development by terrorists of improvised nuclear technology.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Perry.
That was the warning delivered in November by William Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense, who told attendees in Chicago at the annual Clock Symposium sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that intensified public information campaigns will be essential to enlighten a citizenry that’s become complacent and ignorant about the rising threat of catastrophe.
“Our first steps today must be education and activism,” said Perry, who led the Defense Department under President Bill Clinton between February 1994 and January 1997. Perry, 88, is now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, where he also is a senior fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute.
The political relationship between the U.S. and Russia, nearly 24 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has become just as hostile as it was during the Cold War, Perry told an audience of mostly scientists and students at the University of Chicago.
“How in the world could this have happened?” Perry asked, recalling that in the period following the fall of the USSR, American and Russian officials were amicable enough to jointly dismantle about 8,000 nuclear weapons, hold many diplomatic meetings and even engage in joint peacekeeping exercises.
To some extent, Perry blamed today’s Russian government leaders for producing soured relations. Russia has violated Ukrainian boundaries and embarked on a new, major build-up of its ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) forces, nuclear submarines, and nuclear-capable bombers, he said, even as the U.S. is engaged in major, long-term modernization of its own nuclear technology.
Russian leaders, in addition, have made reckless statements regarding their government’s ability to use nuclear weapons as a tool of power, Perry said. Government-backed Russian news agency chief Dmitry Kiselyov, he recalled, said in 2014 that his nation “could turn the U.S. into radioactive ash.”
The statement was broadcast on TV, with Kiselyov situated in front of a photo of a mushroom cloud; it was a response to cautions from the Obama Administration that the Russians mustn’t try to annex Crimea.
Later in 2014, Perry said, President Vladimir Putin boasted that his country was “one of the most powerful nuclear nations” and should not be interfered with militarily. He indicated that Russia could rely on tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance threats to its interests in Eastern Europe.
Perry also criticized Russia’s apparent rejection of a no-first-use policy governing strategic use of nuclear weapons. The Russian military more than 20 years ago said it might use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack that posed an existential threat to the country, negating a longstanding no-first-use doctrine espoused by Soviet leaders. More recent remarks by Russian leaders, though, have seemingly reconfirmed that officials no longer believe no-first-use has value for Russia today amid strained relations between Washington and the Kremlin. [It should also be noted that the U.S. government has never espoused a no-first-use doctrine.]
But it’s not only Russian officials who are liable for the current deep freeze in relations with the U.S., Perry said. American policy since the end of the Cold War has not always produced trust, he suggested, starting with what he called “premature expansion” by NATO in the period after the demise of the Soviet Union. East Germany joined NATO in 1990 after Germany was reunified, and three former Warsaw Pact nations, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO in 1997. They did so in 1999. Since 2004, nine other Eastern European countries have joined NATO.
“Part of the problem we’ve brought on ourselves,” Perry said.
Furthermore, Perry was critical of the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, which forced that treaty to be terminated. Because it wished to pursue a National Missile Defense program, the George W. Bush Administration declared it would no longer participate in the treaty, which had banned signatories from building systems to intercept and destroy nuclear weapons delivered to targets via ballistic missiles. Russian leaders say they fear and oppose U.S. ABM programs and plans.
Many in the Russian government now believe that American leaders are seeking to foment counter-revolution against Russian interests around the world, as well as supporting factions in Russia that oppose Putin, Perry said. These fears, together with a dismal Russian economy that seems to have little chance for recovery in the near future, have engendered “ultra-nationalism” in Putin’s actions and speech that conceivably could lead to war between the U.S. and Russia — and even a nuclear exchange in a worst-case scenario, he said.
“The danger is that he [Putin] may overplay his hand and blunder into a war, and a war nobody wants,” he said.
The United States and Russia must try to reopen “serious dialogue” to find peaceful diplomatic solutions and address nuclear issues, Perry said. At the very least, American and Russian scientists need to have unofficial discussions about how to reduce existential threats to the world’s future — a practice that was much more common in past decades, he said.
The alternative will be a new nuclear arms race, which Perry said the U.S. and Russia stand at the brink of already, and also a risk that the two powers may once again turn to nuclear tests.
“We have to stop drifting to a nuclear arms race and testing,” he said.
Even more probable and alarming than a major war between nuclear-armed nations, Perry said, is the prospect of a terrorist organization such as ISIS obtaining nuclear materials. He said that these materials conceivably are “within reach” of these organizations, considering the amount of unprotected fissile material in the world. A so-called “crude” bomb constructed by terrorists, though unsophisticated by modern standards, would probably still have the destructive power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, he said.
Perry showed a brief video that depicted what might occur if such a weapon were to be detonated by terrorists on the ground in Washington, D.C. The new video will eventually be used to show high school and college students, in a very dramatic way, the stark reality of the effects of a nuclear explosion on government functioning and everyday life. It was commissioned by the William J. Perry Project, an educational initiative he founded in 2012 in connection with the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
In the movie, which Perry narrated live from the lectern, a “rogue group” of citizens from an unnamed nuclear nation manages to improvise a single, compact uranium bomb and transport it in a crate by airplane — under the guise of agricultural equipment — to a Dallas airport. The box is then shipped to a warehouse in Washington, D.C. and driven in a van by a terrorist down Pennsylvania Avenue. Midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, the bomb is exploded.
About 80,000 people die instantly.
The dead include the president, vice president, speaker of the house, secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and 320 members of Congress. The president pro tempore of the Senate is later sworn in as the new commander in chief in a hospital.
In the scenario, terrorists declare in a radio message that they will set off five more nuclear bombs — one every week — in unspecified cities, until various political demands are met. Panic seizes the nation and people try to evacuate cities.
Meanwhile, Wall Street trading is halted. The U.S. economy plunges. Widespread rioting occurs in urban areas. Martial law is declared there, and National Guardsmen move in and start shooting looters. The video depicts civil liberties effectively being ended, as the military sets up “concentration camps” to hold those who are feared to be dangerous.
“This is my nuclear nightmare, essentially,” Perry said after presenting the video, which had evoked tears from some audience members while it was being played.
The Clock Symposium is held annually by the Bulletin to discuss grave threats to the survival of the planet, and in recent years speakers have focused both on nuclear weapons and global warming. The metaphorical clock is used by the organization as a symbol to be adjusted every year to depict the relative danger to humanity, with midnight representing doomsday.
The Doomsday Clock now stands at 3 minutes to midnight. The minute hand was set two minutes closer to midnight at the beginning of 2015; it had stood at 5 minutes to midnight in 2014. The Bulletin said the change reflected unabated global climate change together with efforts by several nations to both modernize and enlarge their nuclear arsenals. The farthest the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, when the U.S. and USSR signed the START Treaty; the minute hand was set to 17 minutes to midnight.
The next position of the clock hands is expected to be announced in January.
Perry told symposium attendees that he felt a U.S.-Russian nuclear war that would cause the end of civilization is now “very unlikely still, though possible.” But he said that if the Doomsday Clock were adjusted based solely on the basis of the danger of nuclear terrorism, he would set it to 1 to 2 minutes to midnight.
Also at the Bulletin’s symposium, Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and co-chair of the 2010 International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, warned that the world’s biggest peril is that any nation with nuclear weapons might see one or more of them launched due to error or accident, causing a regional nuclear war. “It really is only a matter of time before weapons are used,” he said.
That such a calamity has not happened already, he said, is “a matter of sheer, dumb luck.”
Evans, who is now chancellor of the Australian National University, said abolition of nuclear weapons wherever they exist must remain the long-term goal of world leaders, even if the goal appears very elusive now.
“The main game in all of this…is not peaceful uses, or nuclear security, or nonproliferation, but outright nuclear disarmament–the complete elimination from the face of the Earth of the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented,” he said. “The basic argument first articulated by the Canberra Commission in 1996 remains compelling: So long as any country has nuclear weapons, others will want them; so long as any country has nuclear weapons, they are bound one day to be used, by accident if not by design; and any such use will be catastrophic for life on this planet as we know it.”
The key role of experts such as nuclear scientists in today’s world is to refute arguments about nuclear deterrence that are once again being used to justify proliferation and modernization, even though such deterrence theories make little practical sense anymore, Evans said.
“It is not just a moral argument–as important as the reborn humanitarian movement now is–that has to be mounted against nuclear weapons,” he said. “Nor a financial argument, though the extraordinary opportunity cost of nuclear programs–in terms of other desirable expenditure foregone–might appeal to some hardheads. What policy makers need to be persuaded about are the rational, strategic arguments against nuclear weapons: that in fact they are at best of minimal, and at worst of zero, utility in maintaining stable peace.”
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Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
The attacks on innocents in Paris on November 13, 2015 were horrifying crimes, filling the city with grief and uniting people throughout the world in solidarity with the victims and with France. These attacks were cold-blooded murders of innocent people, clearly crimes deserving punishment. But when crimes are used as the impetus for war, the crimes and grief are multiplied and the toll of innocents increases to become the norm. Surely, we must cry havoc, but we must also be wary of letting loose the dogs of war.
The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 were also unspeakable crimes. These attacks also stirred the sympathy and solidarity of the world, in this case for the United States, until the U.S. answered the attacks by letting loose the snarling dogs of war, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq, a country having nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The leaders who perpetrated these wars also caused untold sorrow and death of innocents. While perpetrators of the attacks in New York, including Osama bin Laden, have been tracked down and captured or killed, those U.S. leaders who committed the worst of the Nuremberg crimes, crimes against peace, particularly in Iraq, have never been brought to justice.
It was the illegal U.S. war against Iraq, at least in part, that gave birth to ISIS and stoked its smoldering resentment and aggression against the West, and yet those who perpetrated this war still walk free. And crimes within these wars, such as the bombing of the Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz (Afghanistan), still continue. Unfortunately, we cannot roll back time or erase bad decisions by U.S. leaders, but we can learn from those bad decisions. The West, particularly France, can seek out the perpetrators of the Paris crimes and bring them to justice. Crimes demand justice for the victims, not warfare that will only create more victims in an ongoing loop of vengeance and retaliation.
The challenge today is to find a means of ending this loop of vengeance and retaliation. This will require acting morally, legally (under international law), and pragmatically (by not inflaming more deaths of innocents and more violence). This is a great challenge, which will require a new way of thinking, based on avoiding wars rather than perpetuating them. It will require righting many of the wrongs that the West has inflicted on the Middle East, including ending the long-standing injustices that have been brought to bear on the Palestinians. It will require the West curbing its hunger for cheap oil from the Middle East. It will require finding a means of cutting off sources of funding for ISIS, which allow it to pursue war and support terrorism.
It is also clear that the West cannot fight terrorism with nuclear weapons. These devices of mass annihilation are not suitable for stopping crimes associated with terrorism. On the other hand, if the number of nuclear weapons in the world is not dramatically reduced (on the way to zero) and bomb-grade fissionable materials not brought under secure safeguards, terrorists will end up with nuclear or radiological weapons. This could lead to disasters almost beyond comprehension. Terrorists in possession of nuclear weapons will not be subject to nuclear deterrence. They are suicidal, and they do not have territory to retaliate against. Thus, nuclear deterrence won’t work against them. If we don’t want to witness or be victims of nuclear terrorism, it is now past time to begin negotiating seriously to create a Nuclear Zero world, as we are required to do under international law.
The terrorist acts in Paris were a terrible tragedy, but war is not the answer. In solidarity with the people of France, we must seek justice, not war, if we are to end the cycle of violence that threatens us all and undermines our common humanity.
The fate of humanity and that of all other inhabitants of the planet rests far too comfortably in the hands of a small number of national leaders (currently all male) who have the self-ordained authority to launch nuclear weapons. They hold in their hands the fate of every man, woman and child on the planet. On one sunlit morning or afternoon any one of these powerful individuals could launch his country’s nuclear weapons, triggering retaliatory responses. The skies would darken with the ash and soot rising from burning cities and create a nuclear winter. Even a small nuclear war could cause a nuclear famine, leading to the deaths by starvation of some two billion of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
Those with the power and control over nuclear weapons could turn this planet, unique in all the universe in supporting life, into the charred remains of a Global Hiroshima. Should any leader hold so much power? Should we be content to allow such power to rest in any hands at all?
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein painted the starkness of our dilemma six decades ago in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
Humanity has a choice to make. We can continue with business as usual, standing in the dark shadows of apathy, conformity, ignorance and denial, or we can take action to abolish nuclear weapons. Doing nothing all but assures that nuclear weapons will spread to other countries and eventually again be used by accident or design. Doing all we can to move the world to Nuclear Zero is our only chance to save the planet and assure a human future. We can start by changing apathy to empathy, conformity to critical thinking, ignorance to wisdom, and denial to recognition of the threat posed by nuclear weapons. The time is short and what is at risk is all we love and treasure.
The mere possession of nuclear weapons and the prestige in the international community associated with such possession is an inducement to nuclear proliferation. There are currently nine nuclear-armed countries. How much more dangerous would the world become if there were 19, 29 or 99?
At West Point I learned that technology forces warfare to evolve. The reason soldiers today no longer ride horses into battle, use bows and arrows, and wield spears, is because of the gun. The reason people no longer fight in trenches, as they did during World War I, is because the tank and airplane were greatly improved and mass-produced. But there is a technological innovation that has changed warfare more than the gun, tank, or airplane. That technological innovation is mass media.
