Perhaps it will not surprise you
that around the hundreds of billions of stars in these galaxies spin many
planets that support life. I hope it will be a wake-up call for you to know
that just within the Local Group, a tiny fraction of the total universe, there have
already been 87 planets which have annihilated themselves with weapons of mass
destruction.
Try to take this in. An immense
struggle of life, exactly like yours, evolving over millions of years out of
inert matter on a small sphere in orbit around its own star, slowly developing
into forms of mammalian care, self-conscious awareness, and love —but then
unleashing complete self-destruction. Some of these worlds had their equivalent
Shakespeares, their Mozarts, their Van Goghs, but their masterpieces are as
extinct as they are.
We have watched with growing alarm
since we received the signal of your first atomic explosion on earth in
1945—immediately followed by the use of nuclear bombs on two cities full of
civilians.
Fifty two years beyond the Cuban Missile
Crisis, my fellow-citizens of the Milky Way, you refuse to take in its
foreboding lesson. You have not seen that all nations share a common problem,
which is that the weapons systems you have developed as your bastions of
security have become the gravest threat to that same security.
Yes, for many decades deterrence
did indeed work, by a miracle of good fortune, to prevent a third world war.
But if nine nuclear powers should turn to fifteen, to twenty one, to thirty
five, all connected to complex electronic systems, and the systems are all
connected to thousands upon thousands of fallible human beings, your chances of
survival will diminish to zero. Will you passively assent to visiting this doom
upon your children and grandchildren?
The unworkable paradox of
deterrence is that the purpose of nuclear weapons is meant to ensure that they
will never be used, but at the same time nuclear strategists require them to be
on hair-trigger alert for deterrence to be credible.
This is a holocaust waiting to
happen.
In the very midst of your democratic
institutions you tolerate thermonuclear absolute monarchies, where one person
has the power to decide whether to annihilate millions. And where that same person may have to decide within minutes
whether to counterlaunch if attacked.
But even without a counterlaunch,
computer models have warned you about nuclear winter, which posits that if less
than 1% of your weapons are detonated, the soot and ash could spread around
your planet and shut down agriculture for a decade—in effect, a death sentence
for your species, exactly what happened in the case of three other planets in
the local group. Therefore the shared problem of nuclear winter should be the
foundational talking point of abolition.
Your planet continues to drift
downriver on a raft toward an immense waterfall. You have oars, but you have
not learned how to row together toward shore. You foolishly believe that you
won’t go over the falls, that you will be the exception.
You have not learned to row
together because you have locked yourselves into obsolete identifications. You
think of yourselves as Jews or Muslims or Persians or Republicans or
Palestinians or Africans, each with their separate, tribal story of origin or
inviolate holy texts. Such
tribalism served your survival instincts for thousands of years. But having
seen photographs of your blue planet from space, you know now you are one human
tribe facing challenges that no single nation can solve alone.
Many planets in the local group
made it through the stage in which you find yourselves by realizing that
“enemy” is not a productive concept—especially when it became clear that
hurting the enemy only means hurting oneself. When you fear and preoccupy with
those who hate you, you do harm to them that makes them hate you more, and you
fear them more, perpetuating an endless, futile cycle. You have built your
security systems upon this cycle.
No one will be secure until all are
secure. Conflict on your planet will not cease. The task is to resolve conflict
without fear, hate, and killing, knowing that my survival depends upon yours,
and yours upon mine.
I am not here to force dominion
upon you, but only to set before you a free choice between further maturation
or suicide: evolve your thinking or die. We have the technical means to destroy
every one of your warheads, but without your own species-wide change of hearts
and minds, you would only build them again. Change must come from you. You must learn to love your
children, including the children of your adversaries, more than you fear those
adversaries. Ask yourselves what
benefits all children, and that will point the way.
Whatever happens, you can’t say
that you haven’t been told.
Winslow Myers, the
author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” writes on global issues and
serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative.
