Eric Schlosser’s hair-raising new book about actual and
potential accidents with nuclear weapons, “Command and Control,” sharpens the
dialogue, such as it is, between the 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 attacking
Cuba in 1962 (which would have begun World War III) pushed the Strategic Air
Command to adhere to strict protocols for the safe handling of the weapons—though
even his 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 potentiality 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 26th 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.
