Nuclear
weapons brought me to Rotary. Some years ago I was invited to give a talk, a
rough version of this very article. I had all the usual stereotypes in my
head—Rotarians were stiff, mostly male, prone to empty ritual. I was nervous
about how a controversial subject might go over. To my surprise, the audience
was friendly, respectful and curious. Within a few weeks I had joined Rotary
and began to know some of the most generous-spirited, creative and fun-loving
men and woman I have encountered in a long lifetime.
I am a
child of the atomic age, born in 1941. As the bombs annihilated two Japanese
cities, my father was training to become a translator as part of the
anticipated final invasion, which, in the standard historical interpretation, suddenly
became unnecessary.
People
in my demographic have been living all their conscious lives with the threat of
nuclear war as a kind of low-level background noise—a noise which rose to a roar
at key moments, like the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Especially
disconcerting over the decades has been the distance between ordinary citizens
and the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the arms race.
In 1984,
I was moved to join a group that was determined to make a real difference. We
arranged for a group of Soviet and American scientists to meet at a retreat
center in California and work together on a set of papers on accidental nuclear
war. The result was not only the first book published simultaneously in the
Soviet Union and the United States, but enduring friendships among the
participating scientists. Gorbachev read the book. Perhaps our initiative even
played a minor role in ending a fifty-year era of tension.
Sadly, former
Secretary of Defense William Perry asserts that, given the complexity of
defense systems and the possibility of error, nuclear war is more likely today than at the height of
the Cold War. In the midst of all our other planetary challenges, that is an
especially harsh reality to get our minds around.
Equally
hard to comprehend is how bizarre a system we have evolved to keep ourselves
safe. Imagine we are an alien from another planet checking in on Earth’s
progress. Leaders of our most powerful nations are accompanied everywhere by an
attendant with a suitcase full of codes capable of unleashing sufficient power
to destroy everything.
In the
mother of all paradoxes, in order to be sure they are never used, everyone’s
weapons must be kept ready for instant use. No misinterpretations or mistakes are
allowed—forever. The message of inevitable breakdown, even if rare, in
technologically complex systems—Challenger, Chernobyl, 737-Max 8s—must be
uneasily ignored. Meanwhile this deterrence system prevented neither the horror
of 9-11, nor the Russian invasion of Crimea, just to name two salient examples.
But the
oddity of the deterrence system doesn’t end there. We have known for decades
that the detonation of even a small number of the weapons could cause nuclear
winter. Which means that in even a limited nuclear war without any retaliatory
response, victory would dissolve into suicide. This is our security system. It
is meant, with the best of intentions, to prevent a third global war. But close
examination yields the reality that it is only postponing such a war, as we go
about our business and try not to think about the sword hanging over our
collective heads.
With the
Coronus pandemic, the planet has received a further incentive to think freshly
about our systems and values. The analogy with nuclear catastrophe is
inescapable. We knew it could happen but we just didn’t believe it really would.
We were unprepared. Medical systems worldwide were overwhelmed, as they would
be in a nuclear war—if medical systems still existed at all.
In the
early 19th century, chattel slavery in the U.S. seemed
psychologically, economically and politically immovable. While change necessitated
a tragically bloody civil war, equally essential were men and women committed
to bringing about a paradigm shift in what it meant to be a moral person
subject to the constitutional right of equality.
Today,
it is hard for me to see how Rotary, with its power of numbers, resources and
good will, can stand entirely aside from the nuclear challenge. Yes, there are complex
questions about why we might want to stay out of the fray—unless we imagine
what we might have done if we had been 1.2 million people worldwide confronting
the ethical contradictions of slavery in 1850.
I am
deeply convinced that there is an answer to the nuclear conundrum. It is
contained in the model supplied by the scientists from two adversarial nations
coming to a common understanding of the dangers of accidental nuclear war—a
very Rotary-like initiative.
The
world needs to get behind a U.N.-sponsored permanent international conference
of stakeholders to work on reciprocal, verifiable reductions in nuclear
arsenals. The bi-partisan Nunn-Lugar Nuclear Threat Reduction Initiative
provides an instructive model: as the Soviet Union dissolved, this astonishing
program was able to reduce the number of deployed warheads in places like the
Ukraine by 7000—almost half the number of nuclear weapons deployed today!
The
paradigm of how the world thinks about security is changing. Kissinger, Nunn,
Shultz and Perry have sensibly asserted the strategic uselessness of nuclear
weapons and called for their abolition. And so have the ever-increasing number
of nations that have signed the 2017 United Nations Treaty Outlawing Nuclear
Weapons. As people committed to peacebuilding and all the issues crucial to
peacebuilding in our areas of focus, it is time for us Rotarians to start
“living the questions,” as the poet Rilke put it, around Rotary’s potential
involvement, whatever form it might take, in the issue of nuclear abolition.
The eradication of polio once seemed impossible. But as Nelson Mandela said,
“it always seems impossible, until it’s done.”
