Ukraine—and the Rest of Us—at a Crossroads

 

Our global security system, based in who has the most and the most modern weapons to enforce deterrence, is gradually becoming irrelevant, undermined by the ever-intensifying climate emergency. If any given nation is experiencing droughts, floods and unbearable, even life-threatening heat, what difference does it make if its government possesses more nuclear weapons than its adversaries?

This immense paradigm shift, though it is taking place right before our eyes, is hard to see and harder to keep in mind. Headlines about war eclipse complex stories of semi-visible change. Especially if we are climate skeptics or have a financial interest in not changing the way we operate, it's hard to admit that fires, floods, droughts and hurricanes raising our insurance premiums are tied directly to the climate crisis. Unbearable heat is coming first for the equatorial countries, though unless we change it will come for the temperate ones, too.

The shift includes the realization that everyone on Earth, citizens and governments, makes their contribution to the potentiality of nuclear war and various climate disasters according to individual and collective decisions. This is a form of conscious interdependence that we have never experienced before, even if variations of the Golden Rule, too often ignored, permeate the world’s religions.

Meanwhile we are caught up in the middle of the shift, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the fecklessness and brutality of the presidents of Russia and the United States, as they seem to be negotiating a disgraceful deal to end the war in Ukraine with the insufficient involvement of Europe or Ukraine itself.

All the limitations in the global security system are revealed by Putin’s aggression and America's flailing response—the reality that he can threaten to use nuclear weapons but that he can’t win anything with nuclear weapons, the reality that international institutions including the United Nations have insufficient power to bring Putin to his senses.

At the same time this war which has indiscriminately killed children and pregnant women in hospitals and grandmothers in their apartments is taking place in the larger context of the deep shift outlined above. If the thawing and melting of Russia’s vast frozen tundra accelerates and spews methane, a potent warming agent, into the Earth’s atmosphere, Putin’s dream of recovered Russian greatness will dissolve, as the Earth regresses into forms of chaos that will be far beyond the control of the most wily and paranoid autocrat, be they Russian, American, Hungarian, North Korean, take your pick.

Can we hold in our hearts and minds two opposing conceptions of security? On the one hand, we experience indignation that the people of Ukraine must suffer such monumental injustice, and on the other we also know that aggressive wars led by autocrats lead nowhere and will become more and more a distraction from the immense challenge of climate. Resources we allow to flow into the deterrence system by the trillions will be unavailable for building more solar panels.

Our wars are a monumental failure of our capacity to see ourselves in the other, revealing our shared interest in working together not just to resolve our differences peacefully but to plan for climate effects that are coming for everyone, rich and poor alike.

Putin and Trump are representatives of this tragic shortfall of ethical imagination. Ukraine is paying the price. The pundits are already handicapping the next possible test of obsolete paradigms of power: China and Taiwan. Both of those great nations manufacture software that can help the world make the transition to regenerative technologies more successfully and rapidly. What would a war between them prove, besides providing another occasion for nuclear brinksmanship or far worse?

Beyond the shift lies the possibility of a world where the trillions spent on war and weapons are redirected toward meeting human needs directly, creating a virtuous circle that spirals up into prevention rather than down into violence. Far from being utopian, the shift will be necessary for our survival. Positing the most optimistic scenarios, the damage we have already done to ourselves is going to require an immense educational, economic, military and political reorientation—as one example, think of what it will take in time and resources just to rebuild Gaza.

When it comes to both nukes and climate, my survival depends upon how those on the other side of the planet think and act, and their survival depends upon what initiatives I take. This commonality of self-interest can even be seen as an opportunity, at least in the immediate future. But to the extent we continue to drift (for example, no mention was made  at the latest climate gathering in Brazil of the need to move beyond fossil fuels) the window of relative order that allows for proactive initiative will begin to close.

Choosing life over death, cooperation over competition, poses a direct threat to the arms business, the nearest thing on Earth to a perpetual motion machine.  But where there is deep awareness and agreement that all of us share the human adventure together and each is responsible for all, the required shift will gather momentum. It will release our creative energies toward the real challenge of making our peace with the Earth. Only then can the biosphere continue to sustain us into the next phase of the human story. Fortunately the Earth itself has immense self-healing capabilities if we work with it.

Are We Fighting the Wrong Battle, Mr. Secretary of War?

 The disconcerting speeches of Hegseth and Trump to an assembly of silent, stone-faced military leaders at Quantico on September 30, 2025 revealed three intertwined visions of how armed force should be used to ensure security in our moment. All are familiar, but all three are becoming obsolete. Hardly extinct, but completely outmoded by current and future conditions. A fourth vision of what the mission could be for both our own and our adversaries’ militaries includes a radical consideration of looming climate effects upon military mission and strategy.

The first vision, from Hegseth, was a reversion to the idea that modern wars can be won by a ferociously male fighting culture. The major flaw in this vision of future glorious patriotic wars (setting aside that no one can “warfight” and win a nuclear war)  is revealed by stalemates such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, which became standoffs not from lack of U.S. ferocity, but because we failed to look more deeply inro the political and cultural interests  of our adversaries. The leaders of North Vietnam admired Thomas Jefferson, loathed and feared the Chinese, and wanted out from the colonialism both of the French and of the Americans who tried unsuccessfully to administer an updated version of what the French failed to achieve.

The second vision of war, from President Trump, was that our country can become peaceful if its own citizens are pacified, or forcefully suppressed, by using our own military against them. American constitutional government is designed to prevent just such a regression into civil war, whose story we should want, from painful experience, not to revisit. Mass violence between American citizens who are awash in numbers of guns, motivated by hate and fear, and basically indistinguishable from each other, would not be pretty.

The third vision of security, deterrence, is presently administered by that very group of trained,  intelligent, professional, dedicated military leaders that made up Trump’s and Hegseth’s command-performance audience. It is the establishment vision of war prevention through strength, about which Hegseth discoursed at length before going on to harangue the crowd about physical fitness and the prohibition of beards.

Hegseth declared that the military will no longer get involved with climate change issues, even though there are whole books about how the U.S. military is already having unavoidable encounters with the effects of global warming, including more ferocious storms and rising sea levels affecting bases at home and abroad. Setting aside that the militaries of the world are responsible for more pollutants than any other human institution.

The problem is that deterrence, given an unstable, headlong arms race, will eventually and inevitably break down. It already has. We came all too close to doing ourselves in with the Cuban crisis, way back in 1962. Our vast array of nuclear weapons did not prevent the 9-11 attacks.

But in our own time deterrence has an even deeper flaw: It addresses the wrong war. While we spend trillions updating our nuclear weapons, global temperatures keep rising at faster rates. In another ten years, we will learn to our considerable regret how stupid it was to spend 1.5 trillion dollars on projects like the Lockheed Joint Strike Fighter, instead of using those funds to build a stronger electric grid and hasten the transition to clean sustainable energy sources.

Left unaddressed, the follow-on effects of the global climate emergency will accelerate new tensions, as the refugee challenge intensifies and countries have to cope with mass deaths from excess heat, flooding, droughts, and storms.

The militaries of the world are not about to wake up, shed their weapons, and magically pursue the arts of peace. Yet it is worth asking what militarism does to address climate constructively. Sadly, the answer is, at the moment, nothing. Our grandchildren will be asking tough questions about who encouraged and who obstructed the great transition into sustainable energy and earth-regeneration.

In contrast to the Hegseth/Trump/establishment vision which could leads to mass death, imagine the militaries of the world gradually redirecting their resources, prowess, and logistical efficiency toward addressing the regeneration of Earth’s biosystems. It would be a very different conception of military strength—because authentic strength that leads to real security for all from now forward will be whatever contributes to the health of the whole planetary organism. We’re all in a leaky boat together, including the military.

Looking at the totality of world conflict, it may feel as if such a refocus would be a long time coming, if ever. The military brass sitting silently in Mr. Hegseth’s come-to-Jesus meeting are caught between a dying mission and what will become an inescapable new one. They know that the climate effects which are going to cause shortages, chaos, mass migrations and unwinnable wars are not a long time coming.  They’re here.

Winslow Myers, author with Libby Traubman of a recently publish book: One: One Earth, One Humanity, One Future, is a syndicated writer for Peacevoice, and serves on the Advisory Board f the War Prevention Institute

 

Common Sense

 

The term “common sense” is often evoked by President Trump, though his “common” sense can seem grotesquely solitary and unique, as for example when he cruelly shut down the USAID program, increasing disease, malnutrition and death for people in faraway places with desperate needs.

Or when he blamed the Washington plane crash on DEI initiatives. Even that eccentric assignment of blame already seems almost quaint a few weeks later as his “common sense” upends 80 years of NATO consensus and, in an inversion of truth worthy of Orwell, he blames Ukraine for causing Russian aggression. While Trump may not be a warmonger in the usual mold of a number of recent U.S. presidents, he admires dictators and shares their brutal, transactional temperament.

His autocratic instincts are running roughshod over core conceptions of American identity, including the difficult balance of three co-equal branches of government, equality under the law, protection of minorities, the free press, and leading the free world against totalitarianism. His administrative minions (or is he their minion?) want to abandon Jefferson’s noble ideal of freedom of religion in favor of (white) Christian nationalism.

The contemporary meaning of “common sense” could use some examination. What principles might become essential to maintaining and enlarging our shared sense of reality, not only within our borders but beyond them?

Get any group of ordinary people together anywhere in the world and they would exhibit agreement, a common sense, that nuclear war was not a good thing and arms control treaties are a useful preventative. At the same time the “common sense” of establishment strategists in the nuclear nations seems to be exactly the opposite—build more and more weapons until the system breaks down into the very war nobody wants and nobody can win.

Same with the other biggest challenge the planet faces together: two contending “common senses.” One common sense asserts that untrammeled markets, narrow self-interest and growth all lead to greater prosperity. Drill, baby! The other common (and scientifically proven) sense is that untrammeled, narrow self-interest and growth are withering the biosystems which are the only possible true source of our prosperity.

During the American revolution Thomas Paine, an Englishman, penned a fiery and popular pamphlet entitled “Common Sense,” making the case for American independence. The pamphlet accelerated our Revolution. As our foundations are being shaken, is there an opportunity for a worldwide “peoples’ common sense” to emerge? What would be its outlines? What would its leaders look like?

The late Alexei Navalny, in his superhuman defiance of tyranny, was a modern-day incarnation of Thomas Paine and a demanding but universal model of common sense. All he wanted for his beloved Russia was the very same things we are in danger of losing in America at the moment: free speech, a free press, uncorrupted free and fair elections. Another dimension of common sense Navalny exemplified was nonviolence. While he apparently wasn’t a doctrinal pacifist in the Gandhi mold, like Gandhi his absolute confidence in truth was his only sword. Harassed by a Kafka-esque system of petty prison regulations deliberately designed to drive him nuts, he remained cheerfully defiant unto death.

In our own common sense defiance of lies and baloney, we must add the inconvenient truth of the global climate emergency which the President and his administration so painfully and backwardly deny, much to the deep distress of broad swaths of the world.

The primary context of planetary common sense today is radical interdependence. Everything “nests” in that larger truth. If we should slip into nuclear war, and as the global environmental crisis becomes more acute, people everywhere will suffer. We find ourselves all in the same leaky boat. Neither militarism nor unrestrained capitalist growth can get us where we need to go. Indeed, world military forces, with the U.S. leading the pack, are the single greatest source of fossil fuel emissions.

But these realities also give us a new sense of shared fate and therefore common, shared self-interest—a new anti-militarist pro-environment common sense. The meaning of strength and security has fundamentally changed.

Many countries are a mixture of help and harm; that is simply the norm. We abhor the Chinese record on human rights, but the reality that they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and electric car batteries will benefit our health by cutting greenhouse gases.

Our strength and security now come not from numbers of weapons or gross national product but instead from what each nation can contribute to strengthen the total health of the biosphere. This insight might be drowning in a vast sludge of uncommon nonsense, but truth has a way of willing out—whether painfully or triumphantly.

The Great Crossing: From Competition to “Cooperatism”

A generation ago South Africa looked into twin abysses: becoming a nuclear weapons state, and race war. Looking into the heart of darkness that lay at the bottom of these separate abysses, they chose the common sense route of dismantling their nuclear weapons. Under the visionary leadership of Nelson Mandela, they also dismantled apartheid. This history is relevant because in 2024 the world is staring into its own two abysses: the growing potentiality of nuclear war and the worsening climate emergency. 

 

In terms of where we choose to put our resources and creativity, these two abysses are really one. The “great powers” who possess nuclear weapons are the same countries whose constituents are responsible for the majority of carbon dioxide emissions. But they have not addressed either issue on the Mandela level of vision and determination. Nor have they begun to think about the intimate relationship between the two crises. 

 

Instead, a vain competition for military superiority continues unabated. Looking into that abyss yields a no-win scenario in which “deterrence” keeps us secure—until it doesn’t. Even setting aside nuclear weapons, the suffering of modern wars falls overwhelmingly on civilian populations—in Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, in Sudan. “Victory” has become a phantom. 

 

Climate change, which deserves an international response along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s all-out domestic effort to lead the U.S. out of the Great Depression of 1929, remains mired in competitive values similar to those animating international military competition. Fly over any large city at night, and the jeweled sea of lights twinkling from office high-rises shows our complacency in the face of the climate challenge. 

 

The sun beats down ever more hotly on the throngs of men, many of them young, chanting slogans of revenge in Israel or Iran or Lebanon as they carry aloft the wrapped bodies killed in their endless tit-for-tat conflicts. Whether in Tehran or Tel-Aviv, rising temperatures will bring challenges in the Middle East at least as difficult to resolve as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

In a world where we can be blown up at any second, deterrence is a polite euphemism for revenge on the nuclear level. All the many activists who seek to make nuclear weapons and power illegal--the Rotarians who want to build international networks of friendship, the doctors warning of the horrific effects of nuclear war, the ecological visionaries researching new ways of producing energy, the nonviolent resisters heading to jails and prisons—these are the realists, not the mandarins of Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas whose profits are built upon the deterrence house of cards.

 

The paranoia of the competitive worldview paralyzes the decisions of officials as they drain their treasuries to pay for nuclear upgrades. The only force strong enough to begin to transform this fixation is a dual realization: (one) we are fighting wars with no positive outcome, and (two) the struggle to achieve cooperation to sustain our life-support-system can become the “good war.” 

 

On the level of values, the paired challenges come down to a race between competition and what might be called “coöperatism.”  Coöperatism combines into one the challenge of getting along with each other and the challenge of stewarding and nourishing the ecosystem which supports us—referencing a familiar ethic common to the world’s major religions: the Golden Rule. The Jewish version is one of the clearest: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others.” That formulation throws the utility of revenge, either by crude Hamas rockets or sophisticated ICBMs, into the dustbin of irrelevance.

 

The personal workout for us as individuals is to adjust our thinking to the reality that everything has changed. An enlarged, enlightened sense of self-interest emerges from realizing that everything I do or don’t do affects everyone else and vice-versa, everywhere. When it sinks in that our fates are not separate, we start to act differently, even if only in small ways. And those small ways can add up. A culture which values personal forgiveness more, for example, might lead us to a national policy of apology. What unexpected effect might it have on the Middle East if the U.S. apologized for its unethical coup in 1953 that deposed Iran’s democratically elected head and installed the dictatorial Shah?

 

At the end of his final book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud advanced the possibility of a new upwelling of Eros that might counter the nihilistic death-force which he witnessed in the Jewish Holocaust and we perceive in the horror of the October 7 attack on Israel, Israel's disproportional slaughter in response, and in the 14,000 nuclear weapons that exist in the world, many on hair-trigger. By Eros Freud meant love in the broadest sense, whatever includes anything positive and constructive. One name for that “erotic,” creative force is the good will of coöperatism. Whatever we call it, may it flourish in our hearts, our deeds—and, for those of us who have the privilege, our votes.

Beyond Conventional Joy

The politics of joy? I’m all for it! Happy warriors? Bring ‘em on! Walz? Send me in, coach! Gun safety laws as freedom from getting shot? A powerful recasting of the issue!

 

Meanwhile, in a phantasmagoric hell-hole called Gaza, the mass civilian gore produced by endless numbers of two thousand-pound bombs ensures that another generation of Palestinian youth will grow up hating Jews.

 

At the risk of being even more a skunk at the garden party, one also cannot ignore the story that President Biden has secretly reconceived nuclear strategy to adjust to the potential military cooperation of Russia, China, and North Korea.

 

Israel’s overwhelming military might did not deter Hamas from its October 7 horror show. Netanyahu has done exactly what Sinwar hoped and planned he would.

 

On both the conventional and the nuclear level, for the same reasons, neither deterrence nor war itself works. War is not working in Ukraine. War is not working in Gaza. War is not working in Sudan. In every case it is innocent civilians who endure the bulk of the suffering.

 

How can Israel respond more creatively to the bevy of existential threats it faces? How can the world prevent the existential threat of a nuclear catastrophe?

 

Our diplomats assert that China is not interested in arms control talks and is busy enlarging its nuclear stockpile toward parity with the U.S. Given Putin’s brutal aggression in Ukraine, communication that might prevent misinterpretation of routine military exercises has virtually shut down.

 

The contradictions are insupportable. We worry that a frustrated and paranoid Putin has threatened to use battlefield nuclear weapons to gain advantage in Ukraine, while we ourselves have such weapons by the thousands at the ready. Even if we don’t threaten to use them, the threat is implicit and indicates an odd double standard: my nuclear weapons are good and yours are not.

 

Our nuclear deterrence system ensures that it doesn’t matter how infinitely more decent and commonsensical Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz are than Mr. Trump. Should the moment come when some human or computer error leads to a breakdown of the system, even a strategic genius would be unable to think clearly about what to do in the fifteen minutes before, say, a rogue nuclear missile obliterates Washington. The only way to win is not to play.

 

Netanyahu has been offered alliances with regional partners that will enhance Israel’s security and isolate those who would be satisfied only with Israel’s extinction. The prevention of all-out war that Blinken and friends are trying to accomplish in the Middle East applies to the larger global stage. America does have the option of unilateral moves that could lessen tensions globally.

 

An easy unilateral move the U.S. could take has been suggested by ex-Secretary of Defense William Perry: retire our entire fleet of land-based intercontinental missiles. That would reduce, rather than intensify, the mutual paranoia that could lead to deterrence breakdown and war.

 

Just as Netanyahu needs to get over the idea that only ruthlessness will cow his enemies, we need to get over the idea that anything we do to reduce the threat of our own nuclear weapons would be seen as appeasement, misunderstood by Russia and China as weakness. They know as well as we that the games of nuclear chicken the great powers insist on playing lead nowhere except mutual suicide. Every leader, whether of a democracy or an autocracy, shares a common interest in not wanting to be incinerated.

 

Who knows whether unilaterally reducing our warheads, might render our two arch-adversaries more amenable to arms control talks? Of course the present tensions with both Russia and China make arms control initiatives a heavy lift, but we have no choice but to keep trying.

 

The world needs to turn its resources away from the black hole of militarism toward fighting the real war, the war against the climate emergency. Another positive unilateral move: become the first nuclear power to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 

If we elect Harris and Walz, they have the opportunity to evolve beyond the reflexively hawkish establishment thinking represented by presidents like Obama and Biden—decent leaders with a tragic sense of the necessity of having more bombs than our adversaries, as if that constituted real strength. That “realist” worldview offers no clear path toward what the vast majority of the world’s people want—to go forward beyond the nuclear age and even beyond war itself. Imagine the joy if that ever happened.

 

What is a Crime?

As another anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki passes and the survivors dwindle down, have we come any closer to moving beyond the nuclear age? No we have not. The risk of these weapons being used again against civilians is greater than ever.

 

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in 2011 where he asserted that organized crime had become international, fluid, and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Presumably the folks about whom Mueller was speaking, people who, even if powerful enough to evade justice, are still subject to laws that are on the books in at least some countries. They just haven’t been caught—yet.

 But what about the kinds of crimes which are not subject to law because they are the ultimate enforcers of the law, crimes woven seamlessly into the established ways we conduct our affairs and a crucial responsibility for government officials?

 

 First among equals are the nuclear weapons of the nine nuclear-armed nations. We abhor and condemn the Jewish Holocaust. But those nations each have far more weapons than they need not only to perpetrate a holocaust in under an hour, but such weapons also devastate the ecosystem for decades with radioactive inundation and fallout. If that isn’t a crime, what is?

Establishment thinking assumes we must keep the weapons on hair-trigger alert so that no one else would dare to use similar weapons against us. But the possibility of misinterpretation or mutual paranoia makes it almost inevitable that they will be used. It doesn’t work to prevent a crime with a crime.

We must try to resolve the wrenching paradox we have been living with since 1945: the ultimate weapon of the military establishment we passively support with our taxes and honor with our parades and holidays is always minutes away from perpetrating the worst crime in history. 

 

As many peace activists have repeated as nauseam, it is time to cross over from thinking that rape or bombing innocent civilians are war crimes to thinking of war itself as a crime.

 

What has to change for that to happen? The way we think.

 

In the Middle East, the impulse to revenge, more appropriate to playground fights, is conflated with the need to maintain or reestablish deterrence. Everyone, Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. is experiencing the utter unworkability of this merging of deterrence with revenge as they draw ever closer to regional war, the exact opposite of what their citizens want. The implacable hatred of Israel’s Netanyahu and the Hamas leader Sinwar for each other, leading nowhere, is a perfect demonstration of the obsolescence of war as a means of accomplishing anything other than mutual devastation.

 

But the same conflation of deterrence and revenge happens on the nuclear level also. If, or we might say when, nuclear deterrence breaks down, the whole system is carefully arranged to enact a horrible and pointless revenge. Launch on warning is revenge and deterrence all in one. To call this is crazy is an understatement. But if I try withholding a portion of my taxes in protest, my government simply garnishes my bank account and the machine runs smoothly onward toward Armageddon.

 

So we’re left with people power, vote power, peaceful protest power, and the power of education to change minds and eventually to change institutions.

The impulse to outlaw war (it was tried in the 1920s with the Kellogg-Briand pact, still nominally in force) may seem both idealistic and futile, but as the potential for further use of a nuclear weapon on civilians grows in hot spots like Ukraine, it is worth every possible human effort to figure out how international enforcement of all war might become doable. We have to try because the alternative is unthinkable.

 

The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is now in force, a living testament to world opinion that these weapons are criminal, even if none of the nine nuclear have signed. 

 

The real war is the war to sustain the global environment. Wars always divide us. But the war to slow climate change has the power to unite us in a planetary level of cooperation for the good of all. Let’s build agreement that wars, no matter who starts them, and nuclear weapons, no matter who threatens to use them, are evil, stupid, and dysfunctional—criminal.

The Unspoken

How can Annie Jacobsen’s enthralling “Nuclear War: A Scenario” be an NY Times bestseller while there continues to be zero candidate conversation around fundamentally nutty U.S. policies like “launch on warning”? Why don’t we hear anything on the subject from the politicians? The silence is deafening.

 

Jacobsen’s book proves the utter insanity of genocidal nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. She dramatizes the total breakdown of “logical” decision-making as the fog of war thickens in the midst of the ridiculously short time-frame constraining officials as they try vainly to prevent the end of the world. And she is stomach-churningly specific about the varieties of gory violence visited upon millions of human bodies by nuclear war.

 

What becomes clear is that no human being possesses the capacity to think their way calmly through excruciating choices as information pours in from billion-dollar communications systems whose only utility, once Armageddon begins, is to count the minutes remaining for the president to be helicoptered out of Dodge before he is vaporized.

 

The fact that there is no way to fight and win as such events unfold leaves only the military’s weird assumption that the hair-trigger systems of the nine nuclear nations will deter war forever without any error. As so many authors, including Jacobsen, have documented, the list of near-misses that have already happened is far too long, including a Russian early-warning system mistaking the moon for a squadron of incoming missiles.

 

Yet the beat goes seamlessly on. Trillions of our tax dollars, Chinese yen, and Russian rubles needed for the conversion to sustainable sources of energy continue to be poured down the rathole of nuclear “upgrading.”

 

The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has worked to ensure that nuclear weapons have become illegal under international law. Where is any discussion of this in the mainstream media? We are passive victims of what Noam Chomsky called “manufactured consent.”

 

Reportedly Jacobsen’s book will be made into a film by the director of the Dune films, Denis Villeneuve. This project could not be more timely when we recall the moment Reagan watched the relatively tame TV film “The Day After” and was inspired to change his attitude toward the evil Russian empire, allowing him to make real progress on disarmament with his visionary counterpart in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two leaders openly considered the mutual standing down of all their nuclear weapons—before alarmed aides jumped in to restore the “sanity” of the status quo. While Putin is no Gorbachev, he surely doesn’t want to risk incineration.

 

Even leaders of autocratic nations are vulnerable to pressure from informed and aroused populations. The United States, possessor of both the most deadly and advanced weapons systems and a long tradition of free speech, can help accelerate a worldwide debate.  

 

“Nuclear War: A Scenario ”gives average citizens the tools to begin conversations and ask effective questions. One doesn’t need to be an expert. The book shows that once nuclear war starts, the “experts” possess neither more expertise nor moral clarity than you or me. Someone should ask:

 

•“Candidate X, have you rehearsed scenarios of incipient nuclear war and the choices you have to make? Do you think you could maintain your cool once you are told that missiles are incoming, or have you realized that a deterrence breakdown would put you or any leader in an impossible position?”

 

•”Obama considered eliminating such protocols as launch-on-warning and no-first-use, but they remain official U.S. policy. Given the opportunity, would you try to change such policies?”

 

•”If responding vengefully to an attack with massive retaliation would make planet-killing nuclear winter a certainty, wouldn’t it make sense not to retaliate at all?”

 

•”Are there unilateral initiatives that the U.S. could take, including ex-Secretary of Defense Perry’s suggestion that we stand down our entire land-based missile fleet, that would enhance rather than threaten our security?”

 

•”The vast majority of the world’s citizens would be grateful if the U.S. signed the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Why not sign as an initial commitment to our long-term intention to help move the world beyond mass suicide?”