Shame and Hope

 

The primitive stupidity of the global “security” system in which we continue to drift sixty years after the Cuban crisis is beyond shameful. We have known all along that the nuclear taboo could be broken and that it would lead nowhere good.

 

The system has done too little to incentivize Putin to behave sensibly. Just as Hitler lost touch with reality, Putin has also. He dehumanizes his adversaries and operates from the paranoid projection that they will stop at nothing to destroy him. He has ignored essential moral and practical questions: Is the risk of Armageddon worth pursuing obsolete imperialist impulses? How could he feel no pity for the Ukrainian people given the millions of dead that Russia required to resist Hitler’s imperialism not so long ago? What would international security look like if everyone behaved like him?

 

But the shame is precisely that everyone does use, or in truth misuse, power in the international community based on the same cynical principles of force and counterforce which motivate Putin. Nuclear deterrence is an unworkable and self-destructive system that leads only in one horrible direction. We are not trying nearly hard enough to evolve alternatives, as if we were paralyzed by the challenge of killing war before war kills us.

 

The club, the bow, the gun, the tank, and the nuclear bomb trace an evolution of violence toward this moment when war has lost any association with victory. The U.S. and NATO could stop the Russian military in its tracks, just as the U.S. could annihilate China should it attack Taiwan, but the exercise of such ultimate force bears a serious chance of transforming much of the globe into a radioactive smoking ruin.

 

Shame on Mr. Putin for his callous violence and Orwellian rationalizations. Shame also on the greed of arms manufacturers and their political lobbyists. Shame on the diplomats who offer peace only in the form of an iron fist of domination. Shame on all leaders, both here and abroad, who misuse religion or nationalism or lying demagoguery to hold on to power. Shame on all of us for our passivity.

 

Why not try taking 5% of the trillions we spend on the weapons and enormously expanding international student exchange programs? Educate these traveling students to the reality that we’re all in this together and that building transnational face-to-face relationships is the most important thing they can do both to prevent war and  address the climate emergency. One generation of such a program would reduce international tensions with infinitely more effectiveness and infinitely less cost than nuclear deterrence.

 

Such exchanges could and should be put in place immediately for the military leaders of nations, allowing them to become friends, share the truth that the only way to win is not to play, and return home more prepared to restrain the shameless schemes of their civilian masters.

 

The 1929 Kellogg-Briand Treaty outlawing all war has never been revoked, though it has been honored more in the breach than the observance. It was signed by, among others, the U.S. (the Senate ratified it 85-1!), China, and the Soviet Union. While the Pact abysmally failed to outlaw war, the treaty is a stirring record of aspiration. Responsible leaders understood the futility of war and the reasonableness of doing everything possible to prevent it.

 

The present equivalent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact is The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, ratified so far by 59 countries, even if none of them are nuclear weapons states. Nuclear weapons are now illegal under international law, and the world is waiting for the nine nuclear powers to come to their senses.

 

More Unites Us Than Divides Us

 

 

This summer my daughter and I had the privilege of running the entire Grand Canyon of the Colorado from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. There were thirty people on our two rafts, many from states like Texas and Oklahoma. We were looking forward to evening campsite conversations with citizens holding political convictions different from our own.

 

The conversations never happened. A few offhand remarks quickly made it clear who thought the presidential election of 2020 had been stolen and who believed it had a legitimate winner and loser. By tacit agreement any discussion of religion or politics became a threat to the relaxed vibe of the river experience. And so we lost an opportunity for dialogue across our political divide, in the perfect setting of a national park owned in common by all citizens—improbably high cliffs of rosy stone, two hundred dizzying rapids, and the Milky Way sprinkled across the blackness of the night sky.

 

The sour mutual contempt poisoning our national media has shed a lot of heat but not much light. The easiest way to monetize the airwaves seems to be a variation on the old “if it bleeds it leads”: if there’s hating, high ratings.

 

Some of our differences are real and deep—equality and accountability under the law come to mind, or what truths are self-evident, or abortion, though even that complex issue has been used by demagogues to stir up potential voters.

 

Other issues seem downright manufactured: are teachers really bent upon “grooming” children or making them feel guilty about our difficult history of racism? Mr. LePage was absolutely right when he said that teachers should teach children how to think and not what to think—99.9% of teachers in Maine or anywhere else would surely agree.

 

Whatever our differences, mutual contempt will not help us resolve them. It’s only a short few steps down from that contempt to something infinitely more dangerous: dehumanization, where we assume that the only solution to our conflicts is to eliminate the opposition outright. History has shown us the black hole that lies down that road.

 

No Republican or Democrat is less than fully human. In America or in Lincoln County, we will only prosper together. Conflicts between values can only be resolved by never-ending reasoned debate.

A typical conflict between two positive values which is both local and national involves preserving the commons on the one hand and keeping the tax base robust on the other. At one extreme land is removed from the tax rolls to the point where community necessities like schools can become insupportable. At the other extreme we could lose the precious commons that is one of the primary reasons we choose to live here. There is no clear resolution, only ongoing attempts at balance.

 

What gets lost in reflexive contempt for those with whom we disagree is the value of really listening to opposing points of view, which can lead to more inclusive solutions. Dialogue between those who disagree, like democracy itself, is worth the risk and hard work to keep it going and keep it civil. The civil resolution of conflict is just as foundational to a working democracy as the vote. We are seeing the alternatives in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and far too many other places. They aren’t pretty.

 

We may not be as far apart as we think. Using a model tested by Chloe Maxmin, we knocked on doors of Republicans in our town and simply listened to people’s concerns. Even if we heard things with which we deeply disagreed, we were always treated with friendly good will.

 

But it also sometimes seems as if politics occupies far too much of our mental landscape. Even before the mid-terms, we are already deep in into the presidential sweepstakes of 2024.

 

As the threat of Covid diminishes, perhaps there will be opportunities in Lincoln County not only for conversations across party lines, but even robust civil debate. Maybe we should care less about who might “win” such encounters and more about how they could strengthen the bonds of community as we get to know one another post-Covid and, hopefully, post-polarization. Imagine a chicken barbeque or lobster bake where Democrats and Republicans met together in celebration of civic engagement and the privilege of living in such a beautiful corner of our small planet.

 

 

 

War Is Obsolete

 

“We have communicated directly, privately and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the US and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail,”— Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor.

 

Here we are again, possibly as close to a possible nuclear war in which everyone will lose and no one will win as we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis a half century ago. A half century! And still the international community, including dictators, has not come to its senses around the unacceptable risk of nuclear weapons.

 

Between then and now, I volunteered for decades with a non-profit called Beyond War. Our mission was educational: to seed into international consciousness that atomic weapons had rendered all war obsolete as a way of resolving international conflict—because any conventional war could potentially go nuclear. Sometime after the happy end of the Cold War, the original effort of Beyond War disbanded, then reconstituted in smaller but still crucial efforts like Beyond War Northwest, based in Oregon, or larger ones like World Beyond War. Such efforts are replicated and extended by millions of organizations around the world that have come to similar conclusions, including big ones like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the Noble Peace Prize.

But all these initiatives and organizations have not been enough to move the international community to act on the truth that war is obsolete, and so, not understanding the urgency and not having tried nearly hard enough, the “family” of nations are at the mercy both of the whims of a brutal self-involved dictator—and of an international system of militaristic security assumptions stuck on stupid.

 

As a thoughtful and smart U.S. Senator wrote to me:

 

“. . . In an ideal world, there would be no need for nuclear weapons, and I support U.S. diplomatic efforts, along with those of our international partners, to limit nuclear proliferation and promote stability across the globe. However, as long as nuclear weapons exist, the potential use of these weapons cannot be ruled out, and the maintenance of a safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent is our best insurance against nuclear catastrophe. . .

 

   “I also believe that maintaining an element of ambiguity in our nuclear employment policy is an important element of deterrence. For example, if a potential adversary believes they have a full understanding of the conditions for our deployment of nuclear weapons, they could be emboldened to conduct catastrophic attacks just short of what they perceive to be the threshold for triggering a U.S. nuclear response. With this in mind, I believe a No First Use policy is not in the best interest of the United States. In fact, I believe it could have significant adverse effects regarding the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as our allies who rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella—notably South Korea and Japan—may seek to develop a nuclear arsenal if they do not believe the U.S. nuclear deterrent can and will protect them from attack. If the U.S. cannot extend deterrence to its allies, we face the serious possibility of a world with more nuclear weapon states.”

 

This can be said to represent establishment thinking in Washington and around the world. The problem is that the Senator’s assumptions lead nowhere beyond the weapons, as if we are trapped forever in the swampland of deterrence. There is no apparent consciousness that, given that the world could end as the result of one misunderstanding or misstep, at least a small portion of our creative energy and immense resources might usefully be spent on thinking through alternatives.

 

The Senator would surely argue from his assumptions that Putin’s threats make this exactly the wrong time to talk about nuclear weapons abolition—like the politicians who can be counted on after yet another mass shooting to say that it is not the moment to talk about gun safety reform.

 

The situation with Putin and Ukraine is classic and can be counted upon to repeat itself in some variation (cf. Taiwan) absent fundamental change. The challenge is educational. Without the clear knowledge that nuclear weapons solve nothing and lead nowhere good, our lizard brains turn again and again to deterrence, which sounds like a civilized word, but in essence we are primitively threatening each other: “One step further and I will come down on you with catastrophic consequences!”

 

Once enough of the world sees the utter futility of this approach to security (as have the 91 nations who, thanks to ICAN’s hard work, have signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons), we can begin to risk the creativity that becomes available beyond deterrence. We can examine the opportunities we have to make gestures that acknowledge the uselessness of the weapons without compromising our “security”(a “security” already utterly compromised by the nuclear deterrence system itself!).

 

For example, the U.S. could afford to stand down its entire land-based missile system, as former Secretary of Defense William Perry has suggested, without any crucial loss of deterrent power. Even if Putin didn’t feel threatened before and was just using his apprehensions about NATO to rationalize his “operation,” he surely feels threatened now. Perhaps it is in the planet’s interest to make him feel less threatened, as one way to prevent Ukraine from the ultimate horror of being nuked.

 

And it’s past time to convene an international conference where representatives of responsible nuclear powers are encouraged to say out loud that the system doesn’t work and leads only in one bad direction—and then begin to sketch the outlines of a different approach. Putin knows as well as anyone that he is in the same trap as the American soldier in Vietnam who said “we had to destroy that village to save it.”

 

Nine Stupid Nations

 

“Stupid” is the most harsh and humiliating adjective that can be flung at a person, let alone a nation-state. What’s the usual response to being called stupid? Nothing positive. We just go into reaction and resistance.

 

I’m sorry, but there is no other word to describe the obstinate refusal of the nuclear powers to cooperate to dismantle their nuclear arsenals at the same time the climate emergency sweeps across the world.

 

According to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2021 the nine nuclear nations spent a total of $82.4 billion on their nuclear programs—$156,841 a minute. The ultimate driver of this profligate, irrelevant, dangerous spending turns out to be: profit, shored up by $117 million in lobbying.

 

The major rationale the nations give for keeping their weapons is deterrence. But did they deter Putin from his (stupid!) invasion of Ukraine? They did not. Did they deter 9-11? They did not. And should deterrence break down, as it almost inevitably will unless we change, instead of victory by any one party to conflict, the outcome would at best be nuclear winter that leads to the starvation of most of the world’s population, and at worst a devastation that ends the human experiment altogether. Tolerating such a “security” system surely qualifies as the ultimate stupidity.

 

The United States was the biggest spender on nuclear weapons in 2021: $44.2 billion. It’s as if the left hand of “defense” has no idea of the real threats to our strength and security over on our right hand (dangerous heat waves, anyone?  Thousand year floods? Fires which devour whole towns?).

 

Pakistan is one-third underwater. Yet they spent over a billion dollars on their nukes in 2021. India’s spending was equal to Pakistan’s, even as parts of India become too hot to work outside in daylight. China, Russia, France, Israel, Britain, North Korea—all face daunting climate challenges that are becoming existential threats.

 

Who will be the first nuclear nation to admit this out loud? To make perfectly safe unilateral gestures of good will like openly bringing into port a nuclear submarine or standing down some land-based missiles? To build a political consensus among their constituents that we are on a road to nowhere and must make a major shift? To turn a deaf ear to lobbyists who seductively pretend to represent “security” when in fact they represent omnicide? To convene an international conference toward abolition? Such a conference would be built upon two well-understood principles: A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought; and the planet will not be habitable for our grandchildren unless we smarten up and repurpose that 82 billion a year—and much more—toward solar panels and batteries and wind turbines and geothermal plants—for our common security as a planet. Meanwhile, stupid is as stupid does.

 

The Great Ship

 

The great ship, a thin disc a quarter mile wide, had hovered for a month in geosynchronous orbit over the Earth, invisible, undetectable by any human device. Those on board, citizens from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, were finishing up the observations planned for this particular flyby (these occurred every Earth decade). They gathered on the bridge for a last conference before departure. Through gigantic windows they could view the ethereal blue curve of the planet under their scrutiny.

 

“Never in all our explorations have we observed a more striking opposition between gorgeous beauty and the degree of the trouble this particular planet finds itself in. So tempting to break the solemn rule of the Intergalactic Federation not to intervene.”

 

“Let’s begin with nuclear weapons. Humans are inherently tribal, but the destructive magnitude of their arsenals has raced ahead of their tribal mind-set, accelerating a fear-based “we build/they build” cycle.”

 

“The possibility of nuclear winter has only partially penetrated military strategy, not enough to cause their generals to take a second look at the collective assumption that more is better.”

“The war in Ukraine and the tensions over Taiwan have caused a ratcheting up of polarization, intensifying the illusion that nuclear weapons are the only way to deter attack—where in fact the reality is that deterrence has not prevented aggressions like the terrorist assault on New York City, or the invasion of Ukraine.”

 

“Humans remain blind to the reality that the deterrence system itself could actually become the cause of a war no one can win and no one wants, because they assume deterrence will work perfectly for all time. They refuse to take into account inadvertence, human or computer error, or the confusion when tensions escalate out of control. And so far the nine nuclear powers cannot find a way beyond their fear of letting down their guard. ”

 

“What about the United Nations?”

 

“It has had moments of effectiveness, but the structure of the Security Council is self-cancelling when it comes to the really big issues, on account of the veto muscle of the superpowers.”

 

“Humans participate in millions of non-governmental organizations working toward abolition. One of the most effective is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which is working to get more and more nations to sign on to a total ban through the United Nations Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

 

“The organization with possibly the greatest potential of all to make a difference is something called Rotary. It boasts 1.3 million participants in 33,000 clubs in 172 different nations. Many of their members are business people, with a strong interest in the relationship between peace and economic prosperity. They have the right values and a culture of good will and problem-solving that is consistent across national boundaries. They are effective. If they got behind the U.N. Treaty, pressure would increase on the nine nuclear nations to rethink their policies.”

 

“Let’s pray they rise to the occasion.”

 

Beyond the Mulish, Look to the Stars

 

Nancy Pelosi’s stopover in Taiwan may be brave or foolhardy, but the Chinese reaction so far (lots of live-fire weapons drills close to the island nation, along with acts of cyber-sabotage) suggests how threatened the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China feels. 

The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman even suggested that her visit could touch off WW3. It’s a measure of the strangeness of political “face”  (we denigrate the Chinese preoccupation with “face,” as if our “credibility” did not amount to exactly the same thing) when the diplomatic visit of a lone government official can become the kind of spark that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand played in setting off WW1. But almost any inadvertency could start WW3, because deterrence, to “work” (until it doesn’t “work” that is) requires hair-trigger preparedness. 

It’s an outrage, it’s evil, it’s incredibly stupid, and it ought to be illegal under international law. Oh, wait a minute, it isillegal under international law. See the Kellogg-Briand pact against war, in force since 1929; the treaty on Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (NPT), in force since 1971; and also the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in the process of being ratified by a majority of the world’s nations and having the force of international law applicable to allsince 22 January 2021. 

Democratic nuclear powers rationalize their weapons as good because their governments are representative, but in reality, world-ending weapons are all world-ending, not “good” nuclear weapons because they are in the hands of good people or “bad” nuclear weapons because they are in the hands of totalitarian dictators. The catastrophe resulting from escalating into even a limited nuclear war would render such a distinction meaningless.

Nobody, including both the non-democracies and the democracies, wants war. Meanwhile the deterrence system remains a holocaust waiting to happen that would dwarf the Nazi Holocaust. Nuclear policy consists of mulish refusal of nuclear nations to come together in their own self-interest and move beyond obsolete, unworkable games of chicken.  All these smart people interested in wielding power seem blind to the reality that it is perfectly feasible technologically to verifiably, reciprocally reduce nuclear weapons to zero, thereby raising humankind's chances of survival considerably.

The merciless and pointless invasion of Ukraine and the equally pointless war China threatens to make on Taiwan (or the second Gulf war for that matter) indicate a profound sickness in power dynamics—the failure to act upon the truth that we are all in this together on one small planet, and we either are going to destroy everything or learn to get along and save everything. The cries of the hungry and displaced are not cries for trillions of dollars to be spent in endless arms renewal. 

President Biden is a good, decent public servant, but he presides over what Elaine Scarry calls a thermonuclear monarchy, identical to the nuclear monarchies of oligarch-dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping.

Where is citizen mobilization around a larger vision of self-interest that would yield servant leadership at the top? Limitless egocentricity insists that the whole nuclear system continue merely for a few men to preserve their power. In the U.S. this egocentricity manifests of course in the phenomenon of Trump, who identifies with dictators and wouldn’t mind being one.

The misunderstanding of power dynamics on the part of these leaders, the utter failure to see past the short-term to the actual state of the Earth at this moment in the great unfolding story of the human experiment, is breathtaking. 

Mulishness, even if it is an insult to mules, may be the word to describe this complete misunderstanding, this narrowness of focus on remaining in power at all costs, including the casual willingness to use even nuclear threats in defense of that power. When leaders try to maintain a deterrent system which can fail at any moment for the flimsiest of reasons, the far, far greater power of nuclear weapons is going to inevitably come back to bite us all in our collective butts with its poisonous fangs.

When it comes to the environment, the reality of our oneness as a species has begun to penetrate, but not nearly far enough into the collective soul to make the necessary difference. The ecophilosopher Thomas Berry asserts that this moment on the planet, the radical degradation of our oceans, our air, our soil, along with the rapid extinction of thousands of species of birds and insects and other forms of life, represents the end of the 65 million year period of the Cenozoic, which began with the demise of the dinosaurs. 

Our energy as a species must now be focused upon bringing the whole Earth community together into a new moment of creative collaboration, which Berry has called the Ecozoic. That task far transcends the obsolete power dynamics, based in fear, hate and helplessness, that energizes not only the leaders of too many nations but too many of their followers as well.

Ultimately nuclear weapons and environmental disaster represent an identical misunderstanding  of our interdependence with each other and the biosystem. 

We are, as Berry says, at the end of an old, unworkable story. The new story, whatever form it may take, involves the harnessing of our creative energies in the context of forces infinitely larger and more mysterious than the political ego. 

As one example of what might encourage us to move safely into the future, we need look no further than the Webb telescope—to the cooperative spirit displayed by scientists from 14 nations who realized the project. Even more importantly, let us look to the vision the Webb reveals of our place among hundreds of billions of galaxies. We humans are an integral part of 13.85 billion years of creativity. We are the universe looking at itself in wonder. That wonder has the potential to dissolve our obstinate mulishness, re-energizing our politics, our economics, our religious convictions, and our understanding of self-interest.

July 12, 2022

On Tuesday July 12, as the horrors of war in Ukraine ground on, chewing up soldiers and civilians alike in its indifferent maw, the January 6 Committee held yet another hearing that tied the pathologically narcissistic Mr. Trump ever closer to a conscious conspiracy to violently subvert our election process, a conspiracy that resulted at least seven deaths and many more injuries and ruined lives.

But if we saw Putin and Trump each misusing power that unleashed unnecessary death and havoc, on that same ordinary day we also saw humans at their extraordinary best. Approximately 20,000 scientists from all over the world celebrated as they shared with us some of the first images downloaded from the Webb telescope, or, as they would like it called, either the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) or the Webb Observatory.

It took a quarter of a century of highly technical creative work, involving 14 countries, $9.7 billion, and most of all a scientific spirit of cooperation that sadly feels far rarer than it ought to be on our small planet, to put those microscopically aligned mirrors millions of miles out beyond the distortions of our atmosphere. Three hundred forty-four procedures, “points of failure,” any one of which gone wrong would have completely halted the mission, had to go exactly right over the deployment period of 30 days. And every one of them did, including the launch of the reliable Arianne rocket, the intricate unfurling of the layers of protective foil that keep the instruments from overheating, and the mind-bogglingly complex imaging technology that has now begun to send back crystal-clear images of the early universe, a gift to all of us on earth.

Clearly the universe brought to us by the Hubble and now the Webb is so huge and so numberless in its stars and galaxies that it is impossible that we are alone here. There are 400 billion planets just in our own galaxy,  among which are six billion that appear to have earth-like qualities, asserts the physicist Brian Thomas Swimme of the Human Energy Project. It is only a matter of time until contact happens between us and other forms of sentient life somewhere out there. Given the dire state of our planet, it is tempting to indulge the fantasy that a benign advanced alien civilization might communicate to us some pointers about sustainability and war-prevention.

But we can already intuit the kind of advice we might receive from these hypothetical aliens, over and above any magical new energy technology they might provide. Surely such advice is perfectly modeled by the cooperative spirit that made the Webb a reality: the aliens would tell us that we are pouring money into the useless sinkhole of a nuclear arms race that will render us extinct unless we stop. That we are quibbling about who should bear the burden of changing to sustainable forms of energy. That we are denying that we occupy a single ecological system of ocean, air, and soil. That our leaders are stuck in obsolete fantasies of power and control. That we need to redefine self-interest beyond pointless nationalism, learn to get along, and share the finite resources our small planet, because our fates are radically interdependent.

There is a valid moral argument to be made that the $10 billion it took to design, build and deploy the Webb could have been spent to ameliorate the many forms of suffering endured down here on earth. But the counter-argument is that we desperately need living examples of high-risk/high-gain cooperation toward common goals that point the way toward how realistic and feasible it is for us to ease our global suffering. The resources are available to do both the Webb and feed the starving, but we continue to siphon them off into ill-conceived projects like the Lockheed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ($1.7 trillion) or the renewal of the American nuclear arsenal over 10 years ($634 billion)—or the brutal vanity of Russian imperial delusions.

In the light of the stupendous achievement of the Webb, Trump’s screaming fits as he refused to relinquish power or Putin’s ridiculous dreams of restoring Russia to 17th century glory look primitive, infantile, grossly detached from reality.

Putin with his state terror and Trump with his pathetic but dangerous schemes operate in a context of grievance, fear, and hate. The line from the song from “South Pacific,” “You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear,” implies that this infection is hard to catch. Not so; we are far more vulnerable to it than the most contagious Covid variant. I have to inoculate myself constantly against it, as perhaps this column already demonstrates. These self-centered leaders give me raving fits of indignation. The Webb story on the other hand is, refreshingly, one of detached, open curiosity. Does this open and curious attitude have any implications for our political culture? I hope so.

We can look upward and outward from the echo-chamber of despair, greed, fear, and cynicism that mark our era. We can dare to set new planetary goals—feeding all the hungry, finding homes and work for refugees, demonstrating the advantages of representational government, and deploying the technologies of wind, solar, and battery to move beyond fossil fuels. The scientists that pulled off the Webb have provided the most powerful possible example of setting a high goal and then learning how to work together to achieve it.

The Nuclear Superpowers and True Self-Interest

 

 

 

A number of nuclear strategy experts have agreed that the only sensible response to China’s alarming new buildup of nuclear weapons is for the U.S. itself to build more and better weapons. The apparent purpose of this buildup on our part is first to ensure that our deterrent is ironclad, and second it is argued as the only viable way to force the Chinese (and perhaps even the Russians, eventually) to the arms control table. After all, it worked before, when President Reagan outspent the Russians and helped end the first cold war.

 

There are three factors suggesting that this supposedly thoughtful establishment policy is performatively contradictory and growing more so year by year, decade by decade.

 

First, there is the dark paradox of having the weapons at the ready on hair-trigger precisely so that they will never be used. It is already a kind of miracle that we have been able to make it through decades of nuclear confrontation without making a fatal mistake (though the catalog of known near-misses is profoundly sobering); how much longer can our good fortune last? As the delivery vehicles move from supersonic to hypersonic, windows of decision become ever smaller and opportunities for misinterpretation ever larger.

 

Second, nuclear winter. Carefully designed computer models predict that it would only take about a hundred detonations over large cities to raise tons of soot into the upper atmosphere sufficient to cause a global freeze that would destroy most agriculture for a decade. This inconvenient truth not only cancels out any advantage afforded by competitive numbers of warheads but also throws deterrence strategy in general into disarray. If one hundred weapons can kill the planet, what’s the point of thousands more?

 

And third, opportunity costs. Together, the three superpowers are planning trillions in spending to upgrade their arsenals both in terms of quantity and “quality” (reliability, speed, ease of launch, variety, precision etc.) when the world is crying out for funds to feed the starving, find homes for refugees, vaccinate against Covid, get beyond fossil fuels, and heal a degraded environment.

 

If nuclear weapons could resolve the present tensions over Taiwan and in Ukraine, someone would presumably already have used them. But we all know that these weapons are completely useless as part of a winning military strategy. The game is up, but because of the international obsession with credibility, the game continues, no matter how meaningless, crazy, immoral, criminal, silly, and stupid ordinary citizens around the globe are convinced that it is.

 

From the institutional perspective of nuclear nations, obviously the system of nuclear deterrence is not seen as stupid, because each nuclear power is certain it would be subject to blackmail if it showed weakness by any unilateral disarmament initiative. Without the U.S. nuclear deterrent, perhaps the Chinese would more likely risk invading and subsuming Taiwan, or Putin would be even less restrained in his push for empire than at present. These suppositions do not even include the self-perpetuating momentum provided by the profit motive of the arms manufacturers.

 

The nuclear nations are stuck in a system which has no exit, no good outcome—unless they realize their common interest in change. As of today 66 nations have comes to their senses and ratified the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, good news for all of us.

 

What will drive the 9 nuclear nations toward the realization that they and their citizens share together a probability of annihilation unless they move together toward reciprocal, verifiable arms control? But someone must make the first move that initiates a possible virtuous circle. Why not the U.S.? As former Secretary of Defense Perry suggests, we could retire our entire land-based fleet of ballistic missiles without any loss of security.

 

The Chinese are said to be unwilling to engage in disarmament talks at the moment. But things can change as the self-interest of nations changes. For example, the Chinese have a demographic problem: their rate of population increase is falling fast due to their one child policy a generation back. How might that reality affect their strategic priorities?

 

Strategists know that the arms race and the unfolding of current events in general is an ever-surprising unstable state. But it is clearly difficult for them to look down the time-stream and see that unless we change the nuclear paradigm by aggressively building agreement around the futility of the game, there is a waterfall ahead toward which the world is drifting. Nuclear arms control will inevitably take place in a context of conflicts large and small, including apparent Chinese intransigence and continuing war in Ukraine. But once strategists disenthrall themselves of the supposed necessities of deterrence, a new picture of a shared self-interest in moving beyond the nuclear age may come into focus.

 

 

 

The Lost Conversation

 

 

Eight days of rafting down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon with my daughter promised to be an exceptional experience. Introducing myself to a fellow voyager, a Texan, I joked that surely Texas wasn’t really planning to secede, because it would be a pain to have to obtain a visa to visit Austin. This didn’t seem to go over very well.  Perhaps I had overreached. I retreated for the rest of the trip into an affable neutrality.

 

Turns out others did the same. There would be an occasional dig at Biden’s senility, or a whisper about Trump’s criminality, but soon a taboo began to govern the otherwise warm and caring sociability of our group. Even though we were a diverse assembly of thirty people, gay and straight, black and white, aged 9 to 81, a freewheeling dialogue about politics or religion in the group at large was strictly off the conversational table. In spite of us all being citizens of one country floating down wild rapids together in our country’s most magnificent national park, on a deeper level we remained as alienated as groundhogs and gardeners.

 

And that was fair enough as far as it went: people had paid for a challenging outdoor adventure, not a seminar on current events or conflicting epistemologies. Both of which continued to unfold at top speed without us. While we were without internet in the Canyon, Roe was overturned, and the poised young assistant to Mark Meadows tied the ex-President ever closer to the planning of the January 6^th insurrection.

 

Progressives opened political conversations among themselves and no doubt conservatives did also. But because I find loyalty to the ex-President or to gun rights so mysterious, as a progressive I would have welcomed some sort of dialogue with opposing views, though we all sensed it was a bridge too far.

 

What we did have in common was the experience of the river and the canyon. Sleeping outside in the dry 90 degree heat at night, we shared the closeness of the stars ringed by looming black towers of stone, stars that included a spiral arm of the Milky Way, a faint mist of light that feathered across the more familiar constellations.

 

One of our participants was heard to assert that creation began 6000 years ago. During a hike up a small side-canyon, our guides pointed out a visible manifestation of the Great Unconformity, where quartz-like crystals rested directly on schist, indicating a geological gap, an erosion of evidence of a billion and a half years of change. My daughter, a trained biologist, was over the moon to have found a small rock with fossil ancestors of sea stars compressed into it before there was even a canyon at all but only layers of sediment spread out under a vast shallow sea.

 

The scientific evidence of a 13.85 billion-year unfolding from matter to cellular life to mammals with a capacity to care for their offspring seems to erase a lot of unnecessary conflict between science and religion—again a rich possible theme for a dialogue that never was. The factions in our group seemed fatally inhibited, perceiving each other as an immovable “they.”

 

Still, there were unmistakable “we” experiences. Midway down the river came one that topped even the raft-swallowing green rapids and the mile-high stepped cliffs glowing in the morning sunlight. We had stopped at yet another dry side-channel. After a short hike up through narrowing walls of smooth stone, with no advance warning, we came upon a string quartet playing Elgar! Waterproofing their instruments, the musicians had arrived safely by raft to concertize in this most wildly improbable of venues.

 

The music drew us into the larger conversation of the universe with itself: an enigmatically self-organizing system had crushed and melted and swirled titanic masses of rock, which over hundreds of millions of years sank below and rose again above great seas, leaching out elements that combined into the first forms of cellular life—life that became self-sentient and sawed down other woody forms of life to fashion cellos to play notes derived from harmonies already built into the cosmos, harmonies drawn forth into distinct combinations by the mind of Bach or Elgar, now conveyed to insect-bitten, sweaty river voyagers by these generous performers.

 

Call this unfolding creative process God or Evolution or what you will, we were in it together, regardless of the lack of a conversation that might have led to some affirmation of our group’s interdependence as citizens of one country, or at least as humans on one planet. Secession from the universe is not an option—even for Texas.

 

 

Welcome, Children

 

Welcome, children, to the world we so-called adults are handing over to you—a planetary culture of lies and power. The greater the power, the bigger the lie. The Russian lie that a “special military operation” is not a war, and the Ukrainians brought this on themselves. The Chinese lie that the Uyghurs are being well cared for in education camps. The American lies that Trump actually won re-election, or that the Congress is helpless to do anything about school massacres. And maybe the biggest lie of all, that real security can come from having more world-destroying weapons than the other guy.

 

American children, welcome to the shame of a country that, outrageously, requires you to endure lock-down drills against a random lottery of death for the sake of Second Amendment “freedom.” Those in power fanatically deny the root cause of massacres, which is, obviously, the sheer number and availability of guns in our country—400 million of them. Welcome to a culture that is beyond embarrassing in its hypocrisy, that fusses and fumes over the rights of fetal life but is apparently indifferent to your safety in the classroom. Where an infantile ex-president panders to the NRA by nattering on about mental illness when he himself is in dire need of intervention for pathological narcissism.

 

Children, your classmates keep dying because the pretty obvious 18^th century meaning of the Second Amendment has been grossly perverted by that NRA, accommodated by empty suits like Messrs. Cruz and McConnell along with empty robes like judges Scalia and Thomas and Alito.

 

21^st century gun safety is surely not that difficult. Adults wishing to exercise their privilege to possess a gun need a kind of training similar to what the law requires to license, register, insure and drive a car. Potential gun owners need to be run through an instant national background check, including at gun fairs, and wait 48 hours, and if no red flags come up, they can present documents that confirm that they have had safety training, and then properly register their gun—as long as it’s a civilian and not a military weapon. It is now technically feasible to render a gun unusable without its sensing a particular fingerprint, just as we each have unique keys to our car. These reasonable hoops are a minor inconvenience and not some slippery slope toward the moment they come to take our guns.

 

Children, sorry to let you in on a disconcerting aspect of adulthood: violent power, unaccountable power, leads to lies on every level, such as: a good guy with a gun is the best antidote to a bad guy with a gun—or a good guy with a nuclear weapon is the best antidote to a bad guy with a nuclear weapon. Back in the 1950s when I was a child, we practiced “duck and cover,” an insult to our budding intelligence, supposedly protective against a nuclear explosion, but just as disheartening as your lockdown drills. If we do not change direction on this planet, what is coming will make Uvalde look like a garden party. Those experts who say that safety lies in having more weapons than our adversaries forget that there are already more than enough weapons to destroy life on earth, just as the glut of assault weapons in the U.S. is enough to kill every schoolchild.

 

We can do better on every level. But only when power becomes accountable, and that is up to all of us, those who have the privilege of voting and those who act courageously and resourcefully even without the vote, like the Russians who risk jail to protest a dirty war. You yourselves have demonstrated that resourcefulness, such as when Miah Cerrillo, an 11 year old survivor of the Uvalde massacre, smeared blood on herself, played dead, and dialed 911 for help. Her fear did not paralyze her the way it paralyzes too many hapless politicians. Or Zander Moricz, the gay president of his high school class, who gracefully sidestepped his principle’s ham-handed efforts to censor his use of the word “gay” by talking instead in his graduation speech about learning to feel pride in his curly hair.

 

Children, we are part of a great contest, but it is not the war that so many politicians and nuclear strategy experts and arms manufacturers tell you we are fighting. We are in a world war against violence and monetized hate and unaccountable power, power that rationalizes any lie to justify itself.

 

A big part of winning this war for truth and accountability is our willingness to see in ourselves what we criticize in others. We are all human and imperfect. When we admit this, our hearts expand enough to feel pity not only for all the dead children, whether in Uvalde or Mariupol, but even for the powerful who may never know the joys of servant leadership, of making a positive difference in the lives of their constituents.

 

Too many of us hate our enemies more than we love our children. That fear helps create a planetary culture of bullies who are obsessed with obtaining the kind of total control that puts them above accountability, even if it means indifference to the massacre of the innocent, by assault rifle or artillery or nuclear bomb. It is not a sign of weakness to sit down with others, even others with very different views, to look searchingly together at what is our true and shared self-interest. When we do, we can move beyond empty posturing and begin to see how we might make the world a safer place for children—at least a world that permits children to live to be adults.

Humility

 

 

Humility is endless. —T.S. Eliot

 

Winslow Myers

 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared that he wants Russia weakened. Of course he meant militarily weakened. Still, his words summoned an echo of Versailles in 1918, when the complete humiliation of Germany planted the seeds for the next world war. Unlike 1918, we inhabit a nuclear world, where humiliating other nuclear nations may be infinitely more dangerous.

 

Putin has done criminal harm on a colossal scale. But Putin and his minions are not all of Russia. I have had friendly Zoom conversations with Russians who are just as interested in peace and representative government as we are. While Putin seems to be far from interested in democracy, it is hard to imagine that he is not interested in avoiding nuclear war.

 

Sharing that interest with Putin means staying humble about our own faults and refusing simplistic good guy versus bad guy scenarios. There are no good and bad nuclear weapons. Everyone is human and fallible. Preventing escalation requires confronting Putin’s arrogance without humiliating him, even as he fails to humiliate Ukraine.

 

It is humbling to admit how much the U.S. and Russia share in common. First, those in power in our own country have launched their own imperialist wars with murky motives against Vietnam, Iraq, and others going back into our distant past.

 

Second, accountability. The Russian state does not hesitate to poison or murder its critics without consequence. But the U.S. also has a systemic accountability problem. Our police too often get away with racist murder. The richest among us find ways of paying no taxes at all. No politician has been made accountable for the costs and consequences of war and torture. Our previous president seems to possess an impenetrable Teflon coating that repels all attempts at legal accountability for corruption.

 

Third, the U.S. and Russia share delusion and nostalgia, including the delusion that endless arms races will bring us the security we long for. Putin is soaked in grievance about the breakup of the Soviet Union and thrives on delusions of restoring Russia to 17^th century glory. He has tried to keep his citizens in a state of delusion about the invasion of Ukraine.

 

America too suffers from nostalgic delusion. Vast numbers of our citizens, encouraged by politicians eager to ride to power on the whirlwinds of deception, believe nonsense about voter fraud. Anti-scientific Covid misinformation has led to numbers of deaths higher than any other nation.

 

Too many white Christians, threatened by inevitable demographic change, long for a version of national greatness that never was, again encouraged by politicians and commentators who have mainstreamed formerly extremist racist ideas.

 

No national culture, whether in Russia or America or China or anywhere can thrive if it bases its religious or political principles in fear, lies and exclusion. Just as many in Russia may be accepting Putin’s delusion that Ukrainians are all Nazis worthy of extermination, many in the U.S. along with their supposed political representatives have bought into delusions of conspiracy because they have felt threatened and humiliated by unaccountably rapid economic and cultural change.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court clings to nostalgic interpretations of a Constitution that was conceived in a different world. The framers would recoil at the Court’s definition of money as speech, or if they could see how a gross distortion of the meaning of a well-regulated militia and the right to bear arms has resulted in a nation awash in 400 million guns where mass killings are routine. If Democrats and Republicans stereotyped each other to the extent that those guns were used to resolve our cultural differences, it would make Ukraine look like a picnic.

 

American and Russian military arrogance were equally humbled in Afghanistan. Whoever “wins” in Ukraine, there will be no genuine victory. War between nations is really civil war. Besides the harm to the Ukrainian people themselves, the war has caused a global food crisis, because so many nations depend upon the bounty of Ukrainian agriculture. Our real challenges, like preventing nuclear apocalypse and sustaining the biosystem that supports us, transcend both the quarrels of nations and the quarrels within them.

 

National pride has strengthened the arm of Ukrainian resistance. But as Teilhard de Chardin asserted, “the Age of Nations is past. It remains to us now, if we do not wish to perish, to set aside ancient prejudices and build the earth.”

 

We—we the planet—are between an old unworkable story and an emerging one. In the old story, nature is a resource to be exploited in support of economic prosperity dependent upon an illusory model of infinite natural resources, and both nature and other humans are best controlled according to the principle of might makes right.

 

In a possible emerging planetary story, we have the chance to see that we have more in common than what divides us, based in the challenges we face together. Tanks, fighter jets and nuclear missiles—and the greed, hatred and paranoia motivating their endless deployment—do nothing to address the death of coral reefs, the breakdown of ocean ecosystems and fisheries, the rise in sea levels, the mass migrations of refugees.

 

Because our global situation transcends “us and them,” there’s a relationship between the opposites of humility and humiliation. Keeping our own faults in mind, we can avoid the arrogant temptation to humiliate the Russian nation. Both we and they are in need of radical self-examination. The U.S. may be alienated from Russia at the moment, but we still need to join each other as soon as we can in both disarmament and ecological initiatives. Our very lives depend on it.

 

 

 

Beyond Our Nuclear March of Folly

The planet and its national and international institutions are not even close to facing the realities that confront us. Instead, we live in a fantasy la-la land, or what Greta Thunberg might call blah-blah land. No one is more insanely deluded than Vladimir Putin, who launched a horrific and unnecessary war in which he could unilaterally decide to use nuclear weapons at any moment, based in grievance and an obsolete nostalgia for empire.

 

Real men and women in touch with the actual do not kill children. This reality includes growing tendencies toward autocratic rule. Dictators, some possessing nuclear weapons, try to distract their citizens from loss of freedom by externalizing enemies. We rely upon a security system based in nuclear deterrence, which can break down at any time intentionally or inadvertently. And we face a host of challenges like the global climate emergency, resolvable only by a new level of transnational cooperation. Wars between nations are not only sublimely irrelevant to these realities but tragic setbacks to forward motion. India is experiencing killer heat waves, giving us a sense of what is coming if we fail to get our act together. In Siberia the frozen tundra is thawing, releasing large quantities of methane. Surely that would be a more relevant focus for Mr. Putin’s attention.

 

Even as wars drag on in Ukraine or Yemen or Sudan and too many other places, we can either go the fatalistic route and say thank God we have nukes to keep dictators from doing even worse things, even as we continue to rely weapons that will almost inevitably do us in somewhere down the time-stream unless we change—or we can think of deterrence as a bridge across to new thinking that leads to moving beyond the nuclear age.

 

The nine nuclear countries spend trillions on weapons based on the illusory premise that only if everyone has them will they never be used. But we refuse to spend a tiny fraction of that amount on a permanent conference of high-level officials that can talk through the insanity of the present system and brainstorm together how to get beyond it. How much does the deterrence system itself heighten tensions between nuclear superpowers? Can national leaders be made to see how much it is in their interest to forge treaties that begin a verifiable cycle of nuclear weapons reduction? The conference should include those countries who don’t have nuclear weapons but would like to, and also those countries who agree already that nuclear weapons are worse to have than not have. As one step, the United Nations Treat on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons awaits the first signer from among the nine nuclear powers.

 

A Roman general once said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” In the nuclear age, if we want peace, we have no choice but to prepare preventively for peace. That requires building agreement about fundamental principles across diverse political systems.

 

The global internet so far has been something of a double-edged sword. While it spreads hate and misinformation, it also can help build a shared vision based in truth. There’s enormous potential in the networks that are linking across the world, neurons connecting a kind of global brain that can share scientific knowledge and creative solutions applicable in many locations. This sharing might even, someday, become more powerful than national governments, because it will amplify all that humans have in common, transcending the ginned-up enemy stereotypes that are authoritarian nationalism’s stock-in-trade. Truth will always manage to eventually sneak past their filters.

 

A few big truths remain a good starting point for building agreement: We have much more in common than what separates us. We share a single planet and single life-support system, a common evolutionary history, a collective wish to leave our children a better life than ours, and an interdependent future where our survival depends upon each other. We see this interdependence of survival most acutely in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But even when these are unbuilt, interdependence between humans and between humans and the biosphere will remain our inescapable condition—a reality upon which to build a more workable international security regime.