Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Winslow Myers

  • Duck and Cover

    Once those articulate Florida high school students, God love them, are finished exposing the craven emptiness of politicians like Marco Rubio and others subverted by the NRA, they might want to turn to nuclear weapons as another sacred cow ripe for the “we call B.S.” treatment.

    The acute dangers of gun violence and nuclear weapons offer ominous parallels. Both are deadly serious issues that provoke absurd levels of avoidance and paralysis.

    For 22 years, pressure from the NRA upon the Center for Disease Control caused Congress to defund research into gun fatalities. Opportunists like Rubio duck and take cover from the obvious root cause of our endless mass shootings, the glut of unregulated guns, to any other explanation no matter how implausible, in order to avoid shutting off the spigot of blood-soaked NRA cash.

    The solutions to keeping children in schools safe from mass shootings have never been hidden. There is a slam-dunk correlation between the numbers of guns in any country and the number of mass shootings, and the United States wins the booby prize for having by far the most guns and the most shootings.

    Avoidance continues rampant on the nuclear issue as well. Last fall Senator Corker, acknowledging bipartisan concerns about the unstable temperament of the president, opened a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examining some of the legal issues of nuclear command and control, by remarking that this was the first hearing on the subject since 1976! Senator Rubio was there, tut-tutting that even talking about whether military personnel had the option to refuse to carry out illegal orders (they do) might undermine our credibility with North Korea.

    While the president’s unhinged bellicosity may indeed keep us up at night, the overall structure of executive authority over nuclear weapons is an even greater cause for sweaty insomnia than any particular person in office. No human being, however well-trained in sober decision-making, should ever be put in the position of having five minutes to decide whether to launch a fleet of nuclear-winter-causing missiles because someone else’s nuclear-winter-causing missiles were already on their way—or not, as in the case of the Hawaiian false alarm.

    Those who call for arming teachers, who buy into deterrence theory on either the gun level or the nuclear level, must justify the improbable notion that the more we are armed, the more we can move into the future without errors, misinterpretations, and accidents. Nuclear deterrence, designed to ensure stability, is undercut by the inherently unstable momentum of “we build-they build.” In order to be certain that the weapons, whether a loaded pistol in the drawer or a ballistic missile in a silo, are never used, they must be kept ready for instant use—accidents waiting to happen.

    Fortunately, the insane levels of destructiveness built up during the Cold War were reduced by the hard work of skilled diplomats—reminding us that sensible further reductions in nuclear arms remain within the realm of possibility even if political will is presently lacking.

    Reductions in the equally grotesque numbers of guns in the possession of American citizens are equally possible with well-structured buyback programs and common-sense regulations based upon the model of licensing citizens to drive cars.

    Duck and cover stopgaps only fuel vain illusions of survivability—crouching in closets or hiding under desks as a viable protection from either a shooter with an AR-15 or the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Prevention is not nine-tenths but ten-tenths of the cure.

    The rhythmic repetition of shootings tempts us to assume that the probability of nuclear war is much less likely than further gun slaughter. The reality is that without a fundamental change of direction, both more mass shootings and more nuclear weapons used against people are tragically inevitable. Too many assault rifles in the hands of too many angry, alienated young men will yield more incidents. The authority to launch nuclear weapons from North Korea is itself in the hands of an alienated young man, leaving aside that our president is himself a far cry from being a grown-up.

    Powerful lobbying efforts thwart reasonable plans for reducing either guns or nuclear weapons. In the case of the latter, a vast program of renewal costing trillions is getting under way, in clear violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory.

    The argument that the more we are armed to the teeth the safer we will be simply does not hold up under statistical examination. Where gun regulations are stricter, violent incidents drop, and where they are looser, incidents rise. Period. There is no logical reason to assume matters are any different with nuclear weapons. The more there are, and the more people who are handling them, the greater the chance of their being used. Period.

    That is why 122 nations signed an agreement at the U.N. last year banning nuclear weapons. In a similar spirit the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School quickly sublimated their grief and rage into a growing political movement to change gun laws. When they become adults and begin to run for office, it’s hopeful to imagine they will also call B.S. on the notion that more nuclear weapons make us safer.

    Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative and writes for Peacevoice.

  • The Madness of Deterrence

    At some point in the near or semi-distant future, one way or another, Mr. Trump will have departed public office. For many reasons, perhaps most of all because we managed (if we do manage) to avoid nuclear war during his tenure, we will feel relief. But we may also feel a kind of letdown. Instead of having our anxieties focused upon the shallowness, impulsivity, and macho vengefulness of one particular leader, we will be forced to go back to worrying about the craziness of deterrence itself, irrespective of who is leading us.

    A conference at Harvard on November 4 on “Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” examined whether the law should be changed and the choice to initiate nuclear war ought to be placed in the hands of congress rather than the president’s hands alone.

    It may be of academic interest where launch authority should reside, but the question fails to address that moment of maximum awfulness when someone in the military reports to civilian authorities—accurately or not—that incoming missiles have appeared on a screen, requiring that someone decide how to respond, with millions of lives in the balance, in the space of a few inadequate minutes.

    To have drifted into the creation of a system that culminates in such a moment, to put any one person or team of people in that position, is to have participated in a form of collective psychosis. We are all complicit, for example in the way both citizens and the press tolerated the bizarre reality that the topic was never brought up in any of the presidential debates.

    It is not surprising that people find it challenging to think clearly, or to think at all, about the issue of nuclear war. Its utter destructiveness is so impossible to wrap our heads around that we take refuge in the fantasy that it can’t happen, it won’t happen, or if it does happen it will occur somewhere else. Mr. Trump’s ascendency has sharpened our apprehension, which may be a good thing if it helps us reexamine the bigger machine in which he is only an eccentric cog.

    Many argue, speciously, that the potential destructiveness is the very thing that makes the system work to prevent war, forgetting the awful paradox of deterrence: that in order to never be used, the weapons must be kept absolutely ready for use. The complexity of the electronic systems intended to control them keeps on increasing as they are deployed in ever greater variety—on missiles from ships, on tactical battlefield launchers, from bombers and submarines, from aging silos in the Midwest. Error is inevitable, and close calls are legion.

    The planet as a whole has pronounced clearly its judgment on deterrence, in the form of a treaty banning all nuclear weapons signed by 122 nations. The United States, citing the erratic and aggressive nuclear behavior of North Korea, boycotted the conference that led to this majority condemnation.

    16 years ago, Henry Kissinger joined William Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn to write a series of editorials in the Wall Street Journal arguing that deterrence is obsolete and abolition must be the ultimate policy goal, even if fiendishly difficult to realize. On October 28, 2017, Kissinger was quoted in the New York Times saying:

    “If they [North Korea] continue to have nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons must spread in the rest of Asia. It cannot be that North Korea is the only Korean country in the world that has nuclear weapons, without the South Koreans trying to match it. Nor can it be that Japan will sit there,” he added. “So therefore we’re talking about nuclear proliferation.”

    It is unclear from this statement whether Dr. Kissinger has changed his mind about the goal of abolition in favor of further proliferation.  If he has, it is a little like arguing that people should take guns to church to prevent mass murder. Which will result in a safer world, one where everyone has nuclear weapons, or the world envisioned by Kissinger and colleagues in the Wall Street Journal, a direction encouraged by the 122 nations who voted so unambiguously at the U.N.?

    The answer to the North Korean crisis is not further nuclear proliferation, nor, God forbid, is it all-out war on the Korean peninsula that would leave millions dead and make the United States, were we to participate with or even without nuclear weapons, a pariah nation.  Instead we can start by reassuring North Korea in word and deed that we are not an existential threat to them, and wait patiently for internal changes in their governance that time will make inevitable.

    Former Secretary of Defense Perry has argued we can afford to entirely eliminate the land-based leg of our land-sea-air nuclear triad with no loss of security. What would happen to planetary balances of power if our country unilaterally joined those 122 nations in a treaty that categorizes nuclear weapons, like chemical weapons, as beyond the pale, and we began to stand some of our weapons down in confidence-building gestures of good will? Would the Chinese or the Russians, or for that matter the North Koreans, really risk nuclear winter by launching unilateral attacks upon the U.S.?  Isn’t the risk of that happening a good deal less than the risk of slipping into war with North Korea merely because leaders in both countries assumed that credible deterrence required the madness of mutual threats?

    Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative and writes on global issues for Peacevoice.

  • What On Earth are Nuclear Weapons For?

    Eric Schlosser’s hair-raising new book about actual and potential accidents with nuclear weapons, “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” sharpens the dialogue, such as it is, between the anti-nuclear peace movement and nuclear strategists who maintain that these weapons still enhance the security of nations.

    We can imagine a hypothetical moment somewhere in time. No one can say when exactly, but for my money it is definitely far in the past. Before that moment—perhaps it was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, or perhaps one of the terrifying incidents Schlosser describes, when computer glitches caused the Soviets or the Americans to misperceive that nuclear missiles had been launched—realists could argue that the deterrent effect of the balance of terror was preventing world war. After that moment, the more nuclear weapons, the more risk and insecurity for the planet as a whole and therefore for all nations whether they have the weapons or not.

    One of the important points that Schlosser makes, one which former Secretary of Defense William Perry has also emphasized, is that our present moment is not less dangerous because the Cold War has passed and treaties have reduced the overall numbers of warheads, but much more dangerous—because military service in the nuclear weapons sector is considered a career dead-end, and the very lack of post-cold-war tension increases potential carelessness. At least General Curtis Lemay, whom John Kennedy had to restrain from launching World War III by attacking Cuba in 1962, pushed the Strategic Air Command to adhere to strict protocols for the safer handling of the weapons. Still, even that additional rigor was insufficient to prevent some of the near-disasters that Schlosser chronicles in such vivid detail.

    The ultimate absurdity of the whole system of security-by-nukes is the potential of nuclear winter, which posits that it would only take the detonation of a small percentage of the total warheads on the planet to loft enough soot into the atmosphere to shut down world agriculture for a decade—in effect a death-sentence for all peoples and nations. Wherever the hypothetical line is before which nuclear weapons enhanced international security, the possibility of nuclear winter demonstrates irrefutably that we are on the other side of that line.

    If some superior intelligence equipped with an interstellar version of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders looked closely at the accepted order of things on our planet, they would have serious misgivings about our mental health. As such a visit from aliens seems unlikely to happen, we come to the question of authority here on earth. Ever since Oppenheimer and other scientists gave us nuclear weapons, other deep thinkers like Herman Kahn in his book “Thinking about the Unthinkable” and Henry Kissinger have tried to make rational the permanently irrational subject of mass death. In retirement, Kissinger has thrown up his hands and works now for total abolition. He does this because he knows from experience that nuclear weapons put us in the realm of Rumsfeld’s unknown knowns—no matter what experts may assert, we do know that no one knows how a nuclear war might begin. We have a somewhat clearer idea of how it would end, and “victory” is not one of the words that we associate with such an end.

    No one defined more exactly the reasons why we have been so slow to acknowledge our own madness than Dag Hammarskjold:

    “It is one of the surprising experiences of one in the position of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to find in talks with leaders of many nations, both political leaders and leaders in spiritual life, that the view expressed, the hopes nourished, and the trust reflected, in the direction of reconciliation, go far beyond what is usually heard in public. What is it that makes it so difficult to bring this basic attitude more effectively to bear upon the determination of policies? The reasons are well known to us all. It might not be understood by the constituency, or it might be abused by competing groups, or it might be misinterpreted as a sign of weakness by the other part. And so the game goes on—toward an unforeseeable conclusion.”

    On Thursday, September 26, 2013, the UN hosted the first ever High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament. Russia and the United States boycotted the meeting.

    The urgent and primary task is educational, and that is where you and I can do our small but necessary part, with letters to our newspapers and our legislators. The task is to seed into worldwide discourse the complete dysfunctionality of “realist” nuclear rhetoric—an act of love on behalf of our beautiful and deeply threatened planet. If we succeed in changing the paradigm, a moment in time will come, again a hypothetical, indefinable moment, when the majority of the world’s people and leaders, Obama and Putin and Netanyahu and Hasan Rouhani, the new head of Iran, the thinkers and the generals of the nine nuclear powers, the corporations who make money off these weapons, all will come to realize the futility of the course we are on. And together we will begin to change. God help us, may no fatal accident or misinterpretation happen before that moment arrives.