There was a major story in Time magazine that military
personnel were cheating on competency tests relating to the command and control
of American nuclear missiles. This was one more confirmation of what we already
know in our hearts but prefer not to examine too closely: humans are too human,
too small, too fallible, to be in charge of the unfathomable destructive power
of nuclear weapons.
Activists, frustrated by a Congress in
the pocket of military-industrial corporations, have rightly shifted their
focus to building local coalitions that emphasize bottom-up renewal. The peace
movement is still hard at work, but overwhelmed by the size of the powers
arrayed against it.
Maybe it’s the top military brass of
the nuclear nations who ought to be leading the charge toward reciprocal
disarmament, because their political masters have laid upon them an impossible
task: to make zero mistakes when interpreting the behavior of other nations, to
keep these weapons and the people who handle them in a state of hair-trigger
readiness without tipping over the edge into accidents, and to avoid nuclear
winter should, God forbid, the weapons be used.
A tall order indeed, because our
experience with technologically complex systems designed not to fail is that
sometimes they all fail — not a Rumsfeldian unknown unknown. Just as the
occasional crash of a passenger plane or a space shuttle has proven inevitable,
or a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Three Mile Island meltdown is unlikely but
nevertheless has also proven inescapable, so too it is inevitable that, unless
we change direction as a species, there will be a fatal incident involving
nuclear weapons.
Some analysts claim that we are
actually in a more risky time than during the Cold War. As we see in the
cheating scandal, people in charge of the weapons, because their mission has
been rendered obsolete by the change from the Cold War to the “war on terror,”
are tempted by laziness and corner-cutting.
The United States, even while a
signatory to international treaties that enjoin it to reduce its nuclear
weapons and cooperate with other states to reduce theirs, is poised to spend
untold billions, money needed desperately for, say, transitioning to clean,
sustainable sources of energy, to renew its nuclear weapons systems. The tail
of corporate profit wags the dog of nuclear policy, but neither the cost nor
the danger of nuclear weapons appears to be a high priority for most Americans.
Terrorism naturally gets more focus
today. Avoiding nuclear terrorism may actually be easier to accomplish than to
guarantee in perpetuity those impossible conditions attached to “legitimate”
state-controlled nuclear weapons.
In the case of terrorists, the
objective is to secure and keep separate the parts and ingredients of weapons.
The vast majority of nations are in agreement with this goal and willing to
cooperate to reach it. Meanwhile the far greater danger may be the
relentless momentum engendered by the in-place weapons systems of the nuclear
club, motivating more states to want to join, resulting in more command and
control complexity, and more probability of misinterpretation.
In his famous poem “September 1, 1939,”
W.H. Auden wrote, “We must love one another or die.” Auden came to dislike the
poem for its preachiness. In 1955 he allowed it to be reprinted in an anthology
with the line altered to “We must love one another and die.” Though the
two lines obviously have different meanings, both versions are true.
It is inevitable that we will all die,
whether we learn to love each other or not. Is it also inevitable that we will
die in nuclear fire or under gray skies of nuclear ash? Not if nuclear nations
begin to have a conversation based in the common recognition that nuclear
weapons are not useful to planetary security.
Creative acts of love, truth-telling,
and inclusion are always open to us, as Nelson Mandela demonstrated. When the
Nazis occupied Denmark in April, 1940, 17-year-old Danish schoolboy Arne Sejr
wrote his “Ten Commandments” that were creative ways to nonviolently slow,
sabotage, and stymie Nazi goals in his country.
In the dark days of 1943 the people of
Denmark, at great risk, not only spirited 7,800 Jews into neutral Sweden to
shield them from the invading Nazis, but also interceded on behalf of the 5
percent who were already on their way to Theresienstadt, with the result that
99 percent of Danish Jews were spared the Holocaust.
The nuclear Gordian knot is in equal
need of heroes who can cut into it with the sharp blade of truth, and spirit
our species into a new paradigm beyond our present false sense of security. Is
it possible such heroes might emerge from within the military-industrial
complex itself? We need more high-ranking Ellsbergs, Snowdens and Mannings, not
only to reveal secret data or expose competency breakdown, but to also assert
that security via nukes overall is a futile project — not only for the U.S. but
for all nations who possess or want nuclear weapons.
Generals and weapons designers have
hearts and love their grandchildren like all of us. If a few of them spoke out,
the world would owe them a priceless debt of gratitude.
