{"id":247680,"date":"2023-11-06T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=247680"},"modified":"2023-11-08T03:11:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-08T03:11:04","slug":"end-the-insanity-for-nuclear-disarmament-and-global-demilitarization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/11\/end-the-insanity-for-nuclear-disarmament-and-global-demilitarization\/","title":{"rendered":"End The Insanity: For Nuclear Disarmament and Global Demilitarization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dedicated to Daniel Ellsberg–in Loving Memory<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one believed Katrina would happen before Katrina happened. No one believed Fukushima would happen before Fukushima happened. Virtually no one believes a nuclear war will happen before it happens. But a nuclear war happening is not a disaster: it is a holocaust. Nuclear war must be averted, and most countries have already taken steps to opt out of nuclear madness. However, nine nation-states cling to their nuclear arsenals, throwing the planet and all its beings into devastation\u2019s way.<\/p>\n

Albert Einstein once stated that, \u201cthe unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.\u201d What dysfunctional modes of thinking are most pertinent in this regard? First, denial that nuclear war is possible. Second, the wishful thinking that since a nuclear war has not happened, it will continue to not happen in the future. Third, blaming the foe\u2014Americans, Russians, Chinese, Islamists, and so forth, who force<\/em> us (whoever \u201cus\u201d is) to need weapons of mass destruction. Fourth, that nuclear weapons keep us safe. Finally, there\u2019s the specious notion that a limited nuclear war is feasible and \u201clife will go on\u201d after it\u2019s over. Routing out these murky assumptions, humanity must unite to preempt nuclear war today through the wisdom of foresight, the clear understanding of its consequences, and a realistic expectation of our own agency.<\/p>\n

I.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is in the nature of humans to think in alignment with others, be it one\u2019s in-group or cultural trends at large. We tend to conform to social grooves of thought and concern, streaming our own voices into preset channels. Perhaps no concern has a bigger grip on lay citizens and scientists alike than global heating. With solid reason: anyone paying attention to climate change science and weather-related upheavals sees the writing on the wall. The planet\u2019s energy balance is skewing catastrophically and the climate is changing too rapidly for nonhumans and humans to have time to adjust.<\/p>\n

Despite a real climate emergency, a distortion of vision occurs when all eyes focus on one existential threat. Climate breakdown is narrowly framed as the<\/em> problem, bypassing its root cause, which is driving equally grave yet regularly sidelined emergencies. The root cause of today\u2019s polycrisis is the relentless growth of the human enterprise. Human expansionism has bulldozed the Earth through economic overproduction and consumerism, human population growth, the explosive rise of the uber-wealthy and the global middle class, ecosystem takeover for food production, skyrocketing \u201clivestock\u201d numbers, all manner of contaminants, and the sprawl of the technosphere that now weighs more than all living things. Earth\u2019s climate and biodiversity systems are shattering while the world is increasingly contaminated from this multiscale onslaught.<\/p>\n

The fixation on climate breakdown as \u201cthe problem\u201d skirts scrutinizing its root cause and marginalizes equally formidable crises. Four existential threats (that we know about with certainty) menace life: global heating, biodiversity collapse, worldwide toxification, and nuclear war. While the breakdown of climate, biodiversity, and planetary health are occurring rapidly on a geological timescale, all three would be trumped by a nuclear confrontation that can start on a morning and be over by the afternoon. Nuclear war (and militarism, to widen the focus) is the existential threat par excellence<\/em>.<\/p>\n

II.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Groupthink also distorts vision by inclining people to jump on bandwagons of collective fixations. We are witnessing this with Artificial Intelligence (AI), heralded variously as a benevolent technological tool, usher of the Singularity, harbinger of unimaginable calamities, and even a portal through which God\u2019s Adversary will reign.<\/p>\n

The point of resisting the tendency to circle the wagons around single issues (like climate change or AI) is that we become distracted from other fateful things that are emotionally repellant or less dramatic: for example, the consequences of deteriorating planetary health from massive pollution by fertilizers, herbicides, biocides, garbage, e-waste, sewage, factory-farm sludge, mining tailings, pharmaceutical waste, plastic, lost fishing gear, and industrial chemicals. The degradation of Earth\u2019s epidemiological environment is brewing disease conditions for all beings, including boosting human chronic and infectious illness. Is the collapse of planetary health less ominous than the unfurling of AI\u2014or just less glamorous?<\/p>\n

III.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our specific intention is to highlight how focus on singular issues may be diverting us from pondering war<\/em>, and nuclear war in particular. Aside from select news outlets and activist groups, this existential threat is not yet in collective view. There are indications this may be changing, a salutary turn we seek to reinforce.<\/p>\n

Nuclear war has had its sci-fi heyday of (by now) hackneyed narratives of billowing mushroom clouds always on some distant horizon. The blockbuster movie Oppenheimer<\/em> has kept the chattering classes busy, while avoiding explicit images of the horrors unleashed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If contemplating nuclear war generates \u201cpre-traumatic stress disorder,\u201d we seem to cope with our fears by projecting them onto fictions and movies, combined with selective inattention.<\/p>\n

Unless one is in it, conventional warfare appears as a quotidian affair\u2014a reality-TV spectacle of battles, bombings, villains, heroes, intrigues, and the like. War is what few want to think about deeply or contest. \u201cGive Peace a Chance\u201d sounds dated if not sentimental. We gaze upon war with jaded eyes, with a shiver down the spine or a shrug of the shoulders at \u201cincorrigible human nature.\u201d Regarding nuclear<\/em> war<\/em>, if we think about it at all, we are prone to cross our fingers and hope that reason will prevail.<\/p>\n

But if reason is failing to address climate change (where reason should patently carry the day) and is also failing to slow down and regulate AI (urgently called for), then why do we think that human reason will succeed at preventing nuclear war? And why do we think that reason is necessarily relevant? Just as likely as some \u201clevel-headed\u201d decision-maker setting off doomsday (to preempt a first strike or in deluded hopes of winning), nuclear war could be triggered by no<\/em> decision-maker (computer error or false alarm), or by a madman capable of crossing the Rubicon that should never be crossed.<\/p>\n

The moment this event occurs would be when all other existential woes (and delights) go moot. Without further ado, a nuclear holocaust will break the climate, cause mass extinction, and induce global radioactive toxification for the long haul. People who remain alive after nuclear immolation will be agonizing over survival and completely uninterested in what AI might have to say on the topic of nihilism.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: no matter how jaded we are about war and how much we hope it will not happen (or happen only on our news feed), we must put our collective thinking cap on and think wide-awake about war\u2014the whole Kit and Kaboodle.<\/p>\n

IV.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The dismissal of nuclear war, and billions of people sleepwalking toward annihilation, is not only the product of unexamined assumptions but also of governmental propaganda falling on receptive ears. Human beings can only imagine limited amounts of horror. We believe in the tenacity of our everyday worlds and slip our fears into nightmares we forget upon awakening. It is unbearably painful to think of the deaths of loved ones, but it is also searing to contemplate mass fatalities; as a result, many people simply avoid doing so.<\/p>\n

The planet has come terrifyingly close to nuclear war at least 33 times since 1950, due to computer errors, human malfeasance or carelessness, and failed communication, all of which have been documented. Some of us recall the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, probably the closest humanity has come to nuclear conflict. One of the results was the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty signed in Moscow in 1963, which has benefitted all Earthlings). Yet the non-visibility of nukes has also given a sinister spin to the adage \u201cout of sight, out of mind,\u201d fostering an illusory surety about the absence of threat. The atmospheric test by the United States on July 17, 1962 was the last time people could watch a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The pronuclear political and military establishment holds that however dire the consequences of their potential use, nuclear weapons deter adversaries and that their deterrence utility has been demonstrated. To be sure, all out nuclear war has not happened: this could well be because there was no issue sufficiently grave to trigger it, no leader foolish enough to instigate it, or simply due to luck as former US Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara believed. More pointedly, logic suggests a problem in congratulating nuclear weapons for the fact that we have not blown ourselves up with them: Had we done so, we wouldn\u2019t be around to thank them. The logic that nuclear weapons provide deterrence parallels the sick joke of the person falling from the Empire State Building, exulting on route, \u201cSo far, so good!\u201d \u00a0The clearest perspective on nuclear policy rationalizations was offered by Daniel Ellsberg: \u201cWhat is missing,\u201d he observed, \u201cis the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral\u201d.<\/p>\n

The number and kind of wars that nuclear deterrence has failed to prevent is striking. Nuclear-armed states have engaged in numerous wars with conventionally armed countries; in many cases, the latter have won. Moreover, states lacking nuclear weapons have not been deterred from attacking nuclear-armed opponents: e.g., China\u2019s incursion against US forces in Korea in 1950, Argentina\u2019s attack on the UK\u2019s Falkland Islands in 1982, and Iraq\u2019s lobbing missiles against Israel in 1991. In short, the myth of nuclear deterrence conveys great risk and no benefit.<\/p>\n

V.<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the last decade, global military investments have been eerily on the rise, including military budgets, arms production, expansion of autonomous weapons systems, and nuclear warhead upgrades. We shall call this the military machine. \u00a0According to the latest publication of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the world\u2019s nuclear-armed states \u201ccontinue to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons systems in 2022.\u201d SIPRI\u2019s press release headline warns: \u201cStates invest in nuclear arsenals as geopolitical relations deteriorate\u201d It\u2019s a sentence not to gloss over.<\/p>\n

Why is the world\u2014especially academic, media, political, environmental, and spiritual leaders\u2014paying virtually no attention? Do we feel so impotent before the military machine that we are unwilling to even think about it, let alone push for its abolition?<\/p>\n

The military machine enjoys two dominant frames that serve it brilliantly: invisibility and normalization. As long as warfare is not conspicuous in the global arena (and wars are often made invisible if they occur \u201cperipherally\u201d), all of warfare\u2019s prerequisites (budgets, corporate contracts, research, conscriptions, etc.) are not deemed knowledge worthy developments. The ground of the military machine\u2014the infrastructure and work that it demands\u2014is shrouded (Lazzarato 2021). The military machine gets partially unveiled when newsworthy war breaks out (as in Ukraine), at which point war becomes normalized. In other words, when the military machine is unveiled (through war), it is immediately re-veiled by being processed for consumers through \u201cnormal\u201d and even exciting streams of reports on battles, strategies, and other machinations.<\/p>\n

We call for ending the conventional invisibility and normalization of the military machine. Organized warfare has always been irrational: No person in their right mind wants to die prematurely or to kill without grave cause. Warfare, moreover, has always been unjust: outsourced to dispensable people<\/em> enrolled by force, enticed by pay, or bullied by propaganda. War has also been unjust to uncountable and unmourned nonhumans forced into the terrors of battle\u2014horses, dogs, elephants\u2014or suffering and dying as bystanders.<\/p>\n

While historically war has been irrational and unjust, today it is full-blown insanity. For example, the price tag of the US military budget (the world\u2019s largest) is in the ballpark of one trillion dollars a year. Yet not only should the United States come to terms with its dire national deficit, but a bill of one trillion dollars must be judged against the urgent demands and costs of climate breakdown, public healthcare, refugee crises, species extinctions, as well as education, pensions, family planning, and other social services. Humanity must loudly deplore the dissonance of allotting exorbitant resources to death technologies in this time of reckoning.<\/p>\n

We can no longer afford the pseudo-normality of the military machine and its inevitable wars nor find solace in nuclear deterrence. There are eight billion people on the planet, bustling to make ends meet amidst climate disasters and nature destruction. The basic resources humans need\u2014arable land and freshwater\u2014are maximally exploited and polluted. In this world-historical situation of looming scarcities, nation-states contend\u2014with ludicrously bad manners\u2014cheek to jowl as they have parceled Earth up like a cookie-cutter. Hundreds of millions of people will be dislocated in this century by mega-fires, droughts, floods, sea-level rise, conflicts, and other threats. Present circumstances have humanity, along with all Earthlings, perched on a pyre. A spark from any direction\u2014the Middle East, South Asia, Russian borders, China, the Koreas, or elsewhere\u2014can set off an inferno. It is therefore utterly irrational to maintain the military machine, never mind escalating it. The machine itself cannot perceive the spurious nature of its \u201csecurity\u201d quest. The rest of us, however, know that our safety and well-being, and the lives of our nonhuman kin and future generations, are on the line.<\/p>\n

VI.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given that every large-scale Earth system is in crisis, how dare the global political military machine chug along with its demonic research, obscene budgets, armament trading, modernization of nuclear weapons, and patriotic drivel? The immense waste of lives and resources, malfeasance in allotting taxpayer money, and Orwellian rhetoric of homeland security, motherland or fatherland glory, and global empire building\u2014is a travesty. Life is imperiled. Humanity must look to what is real<\/em>\u2014the splendor and joy of living\u2014which is being defiled under our jaundiced watch.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s never been a better time than now to jettison the military machine. The extreme precarity forecast by socio-ecological upheavals offers the clearest backdrop of war\u2019s obsolescence: We simply can no longer afford any war or preparation for war, even discounting World War III. We call for the global recognition of this slim historical window to abolish the military machine.<\/p>\n

We understand that this sounds like a pipedream. But the abolition of slavery\u2014an institution as ancient as militarism and deeply entangled with it\u2014also once sounded like a pipedream. Ditto for the divine right of kings, dueling, and apartheid. We are profoundly capable of recreating ourselves when human conscience lights up with understanding and an unambiguous mandate. War is neither a social nor a biological necessity\u2014it is a millennia-old historical custom that prevailed through conquest and imitation. It can no longer continue without endless bloodshed, ruination of nature, perpetual cycles of trauma and hatred, and ultimately holocaust.<\/p>\n

We must eliminate the military machine. The convoluted equation of the 21st<\/sup> century will be difficult enough to solve without it. We know that what is coming\u2014regardless of sociocultural identity or economic status\u2014is coming for all of us. We need to gather together to keep each other and all Earth\u2019s beings safe. That will be impossible so long as we tolerate the military machine and shelter it in invisibility and normalization.<\/p>\n

VII. Call to Action<\/strong><\/p>\n

We who love this planet, love life, and are astonished at the splendor of existence, rise against the military machine.<\/p>\n

We call for immediate military de-escalation. All nations\u2019 military investments can be slashed by half for starters. Nations can, moreover, choose the path of complete demilitarization, as Costa Rica has shown. Freed resources must be repurposed toward education, family planning, healthcare, prevention medicine, law enforcement against child trafficking, marriage, and labor, enforcement against wildlife poaching and trafficking, universal basic income, meaningful employment, pensions, protected areas of nature, conservation projects, ecological restoration, and regenerative agriculture. These endeavors will catch human and nonhuman worlds in safety nets, avert a mass extinction event, soften the blows of climate upheaval, and start to undo Earth\u2019s contamination by agrochemical and industrial pollutants.<\/p>\n

We celebrate the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by nearly half the world\u2019s countries in 2021, and urge all countries to join. Knowledge of this treaty should become widespread and act as a thorn on the side of the nuclear-armed states. Most especially, we single out the Big Three, the wannabe empires. Big Three, you should know what you look like from out here in the bleachers. You look like The Three Stooges auditioning for a Game of Thrones: neither funny nor entertaining, but preposterously unreal. The international community and its leaders (environmental, scientific, political, business, religious, academic) can join their voices to compel global nuclear disarmament. Research into modernizing nuclear weapons\u2014and upgrading them with AI\u2014must stop.<\/p>\n

We appeal to news media to break frame with business-as-usual journalism: Cease reporting on war in the guise of \u201cdry facts,\u201d as spectacle, and in pseudo-moral idioms of \u201cbad guys\u201d versus \u201cgood guys.\u201d Also cease the pseudo-morality of decrying \u201cwar crimes\u201d\u2014as if war is not the crime and as if war is not the cause of war crimes. Free your thought and recognize the ringleaders of war\u2014most especially the nuclear-armed ones\u2014as forces holding us captive and threatening all life.<\/p>\n

We call on conscientious objectors worldwide to refuse military summons. It\u2019s a question for all of us: Which reality do we choose, ephemeral nationalistic divisions, illusions of security and power, or timeless Earth unity? We should all jump ship from a system whose core identity has been conquest and militarism\u2014for see, now, where it is taking us.<\/p>\n

The advocacy movements for ecological sustainability, social justice, and world peace need to unite for the realization of our common aim: to chart a new human history through substantially downscaling the human enterprise and reorienting it in harmony with Earth. Such a coalition for peace refuses all weapons: weapons of war, weapons of hate, weapons against plants, forests, and animals, and the weaponized extraction of energy sources from Earth\u2019s crust and seabed.\u00a0We call for a broad, grassroots Peace Movement that gathers to safeguard humanity, nonhumans, and nature\u2019s places from the hardships here and coming.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Eileen Crist is Emerita Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech, where she taught for twenty-two years. She is author of eight books and many articles.<\/em><\/p>\n

Judith Eve Lipton is a retired psychiatrist, author of eight books and numerous articles about nuclear war, peace studies, and sexuality.<\/em><\/p>\n

David P. Barash is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. He has written, edited or co-authored 40 books, including ones on human aggression, peace studies, and the sexual behavior of animals and people.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one believed Katrina would happen before Katrina happened. No one believed Fukushima would happen before Fukushima happened. Virtually no one believes a nuclear war will happen before it happens. But a nuclear war is not a disaster: it is a holocaust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":247681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1817,2009,853,1253,123,1175,1476,1323,1301,481],"class_list":["post-247680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-anti-militarism","tag-anti-war","tag-atomic-weapons","tag-demilitarization","tag-disarmament","tag-extinction","tag-nuclear-abolition","tag-nuclear-club","tag-nuclear-war","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247682,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247680\/revisions\/247682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}