The Great Crossing: From Competition to “Cooperatism”

A generation ago South Africa looked into twin abysses: becoming a nuclear weapons state, and race war. Looking into the heart of darkness that lay at the bottom of these separate abysses, they chose the common sense route of dismantling their nuclear weapons. Under the visionary leadership of Nelson Mandela, they also dismantled apartheid. This history is relevant because in 2024 the world is staring into its own two abysses: the growing potentiality of nuclear war and the worsening climate emergency. 

 

In terms of where we choose to put our resources and creativity, these two abysses are really one. The “great powers” who possess nuclear weapons are the same countries whose constituents are responsible for the majority of carbon dioxide emissions. But they have not addressed either issue on the Mandela level of vision and determination. Nor have they begun to think about the intimate relationship between the two crises. 

 

Instead, a vain competition for military superiority continues unabated. Looking into that abyss yields a no-win scenario in which “deterrence” keeps us secure—until it doesn’t. Even setting aside nuclear weapons, the suffering of modern wars falls overwhelmingly on civilian populations—in Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, in Sudan. “Victory” has become a phantom. 

 

Climate change, which deserves an international response along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s all-out domestic effort to lead the U.S. out of the Great Depression of 1929, remains mired in competitive values similar to those animating international military competition. Fly over any large city at night, and the jeweled sea of lights twinkling from office high-rises shows our complacency in the face of the climate challenge. 

 

The sun beats down ever more hotly on the throngs of men, many of them young, chanting slogans of revenge in Israel or Iran or Lebanon as they carry aloft the wrapped bodies killed in their endless tit-for-tat conflicts. Whether in Tehran or Tel-Aviv, rising temperatures will bring challenges in the Middle East at least as difficult to resolve as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

In a world where we can be blown up at any second, deterrence is a polite euphemism for revenge on the nuclear level. All the many activists who seek to make nuclear weapons and power illegal--the Rotarians who want to build international networks of friendship, the doctors warning of the horrific effects of nuclear war, the ecological visionaries researching new ways of producing energy, the nonviolent resisters heading to jails and prisons—these are the realists, not the mandarins of Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas whose profits are built upon the deterrence house of cards.

 

The paranoia of the competitive worldview paralyzes the decisions of officials as they drain their treasuries to pay for nuclear upgrades. The only force strong enough to begin to transform this fixation is a dual realization: (one) we are fighting wars with no positive outcome, and (two) the struggle to achieve cooperation to sustain our life-support-system can become the “good war.” 

 

On the level of values, the paired challenges come down to a race between competition and what might be called “coöperatism.”  Coöperatism combines into one the challenge of getting along with each other and the challenge of stewarding and nourishing the ecosystem which supports us—referencing a familiar ethic common to the world’s major religions: the Golden Rule. The Jewish version is one of the clearest: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others.” That formulation throws the utility of revenge, either by crude Hamas rockets or sophisticated ICBMs, into the dustbin of irrelevance.

 

The personal workout for us as individuals is to adjust our thinking to the reality that everything has changed. An enlarged, enlightened sense of self-interest emerges from realizing that everything I do or don’t do affects everyone else and vice-versa, everywhere. When it sinks in that our fates are not separate, we start to act differently, even if only in small ways. And those small ways can add up. A culture which values personal forgiveness more, for example, might lead us to a national policy of apology. What unexpected effect might it have on the Middle East if the U.S. apologized for its unethical coup in 1953 that deposed Iran’s democratically elected head and installed the dictatorial Shah?

 

At the end of his final book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud advanced the possibility of a new upwelling of Eros that might counter the nihilistic death-force which he witnessed in the Jewish Holocaust and we perceive in the horror of the October 7 attack on Israel, Israel's disproportional slaughter in response, and in the 14,000 nuclear weapons that exist in the world, many on hair-trigger. By Eros Freud meant love in the broadest sense, whatever includes anything positive and constructive. One name for that “erotic,” creative force is the good will of coöperatism. Whatever we call it, may it flourish in our hearts, our deeds—and, for those of us who have the privilege, our votes.

Beyond Conventional Joy

The politics of joy? I’m all for it! Happy warriors? Bring ‘em on! Walz? Send me in, coach! Gun safety laws as freedom from getting shot? A powerful recasting of the issue!

 

Meanwhile, in a phantasmagoric hell-hole called Gaza, the mass civilian gore produced by endless numbers of two thousand-pound bombs ensures that another generation of Palestinian youth will grow up hating Jews.

 

At the risk of being even more a skunk at the garden party, one also cannot ignore the story that President Biden has secretly reconceived nuclear strategy to adjust to the potential military cooperation of Russia, China, and North Korea.

 

Israel’s overwhelming military might did not deter Hamas from its October 7 horror show. Netanyahu has done exactly what Sinwar hoped and planned he would.

 

On both the conventional and the nuclear level, for the same reasons, neither deterrence nor war itself works. War is not working in Ukraine. War is not working in Gaza. War is not working in Sudan. In every case it is innocent civilians who endure the bulk of the suffering.

 

How can Israel respond more creatively to the bevy of existential threats it faces? How can the world prevent the existential threat of a nuclear catastrophe?

 

Our diplomats assert that China is not interested in arms control talks and is busy enlarging its nuclear stockpile toward parity with the U.S. Given Putin’s brutal aggression in Ukraine, communication that might prevent misinterpretation of routine military exercises has virtually shut down.

 

The contradictions are insupportable. We worry that a frustrated and paranoid Putin has threatened to use battlefield nuclear weapons to gain advantage in Ukraine, while we ourselves have such weapons by the thousands at the ready. Even if we don’t threaten to use them, the threat is implicit and indicates an odd double standard: my nuclear weapons are good and yours are not.

 

Our nuclear deterrence system ensures that it doesn’t matter how infinitely more decent and commonsensical Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz are than Mr. Trump. Should the moment come when some human or computer error leads to a breakdown of the system, even a strategic genius would be unable to think clearly about what to do in the fifteen minutes before, say, a rogue nuclear missile obliterates Washington. The only way to win is not to play.

 

Netanyahu has been offered alliances with regional partners that will enhance Israel’s security and isolate those who would be satisfied only with Israel’s extinction. The prevention of all-out war that Blinken and friends are trying to accomplish in the Middle East applies to the larger global stage. America does have the option of unilateral moves that could lessen tensions globally.

 

An easy unilateral move the U.S. could take has been suggested by ex-Secretary of Defense William Perry: retire our entire fleet of land-based intercontinental missiles. That would reduce, rather than intensify, the mutual paranoia that could lead to deterrence breakdown and war.

 

Just as Netanyahu needs to get over the idea that only ruthlessness will cow his enemies, we need to get over the idea that anything we do to reduce the threat of our own nuclear weapons would be seen as appeasement, misunderstood by Russia and China as weakness. They know as well as we that the games of nuclear chicken the great powers insist on playing lead nowhere except mutual suicide. Every leader, whether of a democracy or an autocracy, shares a common interest in not wanting to be incinerated.

 

Who knows whether unilaterally reducing our warheads, might render our two arch-adversaries more amenable to arms control talks? Of course the present tensions with both Russia and China make arms control initiatives a heavy lift, but we have no choice but to keep trying.

 

The world needs to turn its resources away from the black hole of militarism toward fighting the real war, the war against the climate emergency. Another positive unilateral move: become the first nuclear power to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 

If we elect Harris and Walz, they have the opportunity to evolve beyond the reflexively hawkish establishment thinking represented by presidents like Obama and Biden—decent leaders with a tragic sense of the necessity of having more bombs than our adversaries, as if that constituted real strength. That “realist” worldview offers no clear path toward what the vast majority of the world’s people want—to go forward beyond the nuclear age and even beyond war itself. Imagine the joy if that ever happened.

 

What is a Crime?

As another anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki passes and the survivors dwindle down, have we come any closer to moving beyond the nuclear age? No we have not. The risk of these weapons being used again against civilians is greater than ever.

 

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in 2011 where he asserted that organized crime had become international, fluid, and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Presumably the folks about whom Mueller was speaking, people who, even if powerful enough to evade justice, are still subject to laws that are on the books in at least some countries. They just haven’t been caught—yet.

 But what about the kinds of crimes which are not subject to law because they are the ultimate enforcers of the law, crimes woven seamlessly into the established ways we conduct our affairs and a crucial responsibility for government officials?

 

 First among equals are the nuclear weapons of the nine nuclear-armed nations. We abhor and condemn the Jewish Holocaust. But those nations each have far more weapons than they need not only to perpetrate a holocaust in under an hour, but such weapons also devastate the ecosystem for decades with radioactive inundation and fallout. If that isn’t a crime, what is?

Establishment thinking assumes we must keep the weapons on hair-trigger alert so that no one else would dare to use similar weapons against us. But the possibility of misinterpretation or mutual paranoia makes it almost inevitable that they will be used. It doesn’t work to prevent a crime with a crime.

We must try to resolve the wrenching paradox we have been living with since 1945: the ultimate weapon of the military establishment we passively support with our taxes and honor with our parades and holidays is always minutes away from perpetrating the worst crime in history. 

 

As many peace activists have repeated as nauseam, it is time to cross over from thinking that rape or bombing innocent civilians are war crimes to thinking of war itself as a crime.

 

What has to change for that to happen? The way we think.

 

In the Middle East, the impulse to revenge, more appropriate to playground fights, is conflated with the need to maintain or reestablish deterrence. Everyone, Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. is experiencing the utter unworkability of this merging of deterrence with revenge as they draw ever closer to regional war, the exact opposite of what their citizens want. The implacable hatred of Israel’s Netanyahu and the Hamas leader Sinwar for each other, leading nowhere, is a perfect demonstration of the obsolescence of war as a means of accomplishing anything other than mutual devastation.

 

But the same conflation of deterrence and revenge happens on the nuclear level also. If, or we might say when, nuclear deterrence breaks down, the whole system is carefully arranged to enact a horrible and pointless revenge. Launch on warning is revenge and deterrence all in one. To call this is crazy is an understatement. But if I try withholding a portion of my taxes in protest, my government simply garnishes my bank account and the machine runs smoothly onward toward Armageddon.

 

So we’re left with people power, vote power, peaceful protest power, and the power of education to change minds and eventually to change institutions.

The impulse to outlaw war (it was tried in the 1920s with the Kellogg-Briand pact, still nominally in force) may seem both idealistic and futile, but as the potential for further use of a nuclear weapon on civilians grows in hot spots like Ukraine, it is worth every possible human effort to figure out how international enforcement of all war might become doable. We have to try because the alternative is unthinkable.

 

The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is now in force, a living testament to world opinion that these weapons are criminal, even if none of the nine nuclear have signed. 

 

The real war is the war to sustain the global environment. Wars always divide us. But the war to slow climate change has the power to unite us in a planetary level of cooperation for the good of all. Let’s build agreement that wars, no matter who starts them, and nuclear weapons, no matter who threatens to use them, are evil, stupid, and dysfunctional—criminal.

The Unspoken

How can Annie Jacobsen’s enthralling “Nuclear War: A Scenario” be an NY Times bestseller while there continues to be zero candidate conversation around fundamentally nutty U.S. policies like “launch on warning”? Why don’t we hear anything on the subject from the politicians? The silence is deafening.

 

Jacobsen’s book proves the utter insanity of genocidal nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. She dramatizes the total breakdown of “logical” decision-making as the fog of war thickens in the midst of the ridiculously short time-frame constraining officials as they try vainly to prevent the end of the world. And she is stomach-churningly specific about the varieties of gory violence visited upon millions of human bodies by nuclear war.

 

What becomes clear is that no human being possesses the capacity to think their way calmly through excruciating choices as information pours in from billion-dollar communications systems whose only utility, once Armageddon begins, is to count the minutes remaining for the president to be helicoptered out of Dodge before he is vaporized.

 

The fact that there is no way to fight and win as such events unfold leaves only the military’s weird assumption that the hair-trigger systems of the nine nuclear nations will deter war forever without any error. As so many authors, including Jacobsen, have documented, the list of near-misses that have already happened is far too long, including a Russian early-warning system mistaking the moon for a squadron of incoming missiles.

 

Yet the beat goes seamlessly on. Trillions of our tax dollars, Chinese yen, and Russian rubles needed for the conversion to sustainable sources of energy continue to be poured down the rathole of nuclear “upgrading.”

 

The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has worked to ensure that nuclear weapons have become illegal under international law. Where is any discussion of this in the mainstream media? We are passive victims of what Noam Chomsky called “manufactured consent.”

 

Reportedly Jacobsen’s book will be made into a film by the director of the Dune films, Denis Villeneuve. This project could not be more timely when we recall the moment Reagan watched the relatively tame TV film “The Day After” and was inspired to change his attitude toward the evil Russian empire, allowing him to make real progress on disarmament with his visionary counterpart in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two leaders openly considered the mutual standing down of all their nuclear weapons—before alarmed aides jumped in to restore the “sanity” of the status quo. While Putin is no Gorbachev, he surely doesn’t want to risk incineration.

 

Even leaders of autocratic nations are vulnerable to pressure from informed and aroused populations. The United States, possessor of both the most deadly and advanced weapons systems and a long tradition of free speech, can help accelerate a worldwide debate.  

 

“Nuclear War: A Scenario ”gives average citizens the tools to begin conversations and ask effective questions. One doesn’t need to be an expert. The book shows that once nuclear war starts, the “experts” possess neither more expertise nor moral clarity than you or me. Someone should ask:

 

•“Candidate X, have you rehearsed scenarios of incipient nuclear war and the choices you have to make? Do you think you could maintain your cool once you are told that missiles are incoming, or have you realized that a deterrence breakdown would put you or any leader in an impossible position?”

 

•”Obama considered eliminating such protocols as launch-on-warning and no-first-use, but they remain official U.S. policy. Given the opportunity, would you try to change such policies?”

 

•”If responding vengefully to an attack with massive retaliation would make planet-killing nuclear winter a certainty, wouldn’t it make sense not to retaliate at all?”

 

•”Are there unilateral initiatives that the U.S. could take, including ex-Secretary of Defense Perry’s suggestion that we stand down our entire land-based missile fleet, that would enhance rather than threaten our security?”

 

•”The vast majority of the world’s citizens would be grateful if the U.S. signed the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Why not sign as an initial commitment to our long-term intention to help move the world beyond mass suicide?”

 

Beyond Contradiction to Interdependence

 

President Biden’s heartfelt comments on American political violence, while the United States continues to contribute many of the bombs which Israel has used to prosecute a near-genocidal war against Hamas, give rise to a painful sense of contradiction.

 

The split Mr. Biden makes between domestic and foreign policy when it comes to violence is either unconscious or politically expedient. But even political expedience reflects a larger unconsciousness that seems to be shared by many contemporary world leaders. They continue to refuse to see that national self-interest has been subsumed by global self-interest. Without exception, both the wars and the tensions that often preclude wars have become deeply irrelevant in the context of rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, and marine ecological breakdown.

 

Whether unconscious or expedient, the split is understandable. Leaders cannot lead too far beyond their constituents. We are well into a tremendous change in the fundamental conditions that make life possible, let alone bearable, on this planet. But apparently no politician in the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere can get elected and become an agent of positive change without trimming their sails to swerve away from some difficult, or as Al Gore put it all too long ago, inconvenient truths.

 

Our ambivalence, personal and collective, in the face of the global climate emergency is off the charts. It is surely a major cause of our general unease. The source of this ambivalence is a world culturally embedded in the values of consumerism, while we are engulfed by signs all around us that we need to change in order to survive.

 

Those bombs being shipped to Israel, let alone the thousands of nuclear weapons deployed by the most powerful countries, are integral parts of a seamless system of expediency based in the value of competition among free markets, both between arms manufacturers and between nations for general market dominance.  Is there an inevitable connection between capitalism and war as Marx asserted? If we demand it and vote for it we might see a far better outcome—the creative force of the free market weaned away from weapons and unleashed upon the global climate project.

 

It is beyond tears to realize that the horrors of Ukraine and Gaza arise from the way humans think, from their stubbornly limited conceptions of self-interest. Mr. Putin carries on with bombing childrens’ hospitals in the name of a 17^th century conception of his nation. Mr. Netanyahu remains in denial that no one in his region can be secure until all are. Xi Jinping makes the assumption that China will benefit from a military takeover of Taiwan that could risk nuclear confrontation. The Republican Party carries on with obsolete America First tropes. The reality of interdependence is swept under the rug. The real war, the relevant and urgent war to stabilize the climate, and the level of cooperation needed to win it, remains insufficiently addressed. Putin doesn’t seem to have a clue that his people are going to suffer far more than the Ukrainians from rapidly approaching climate effects.

 

Interdependence is about making connections on the basis of shared goals, climate above all. We’re still mired deeply in a competitive paradigm that is misaligned with the truth that everything I do or don’t do affects you and vice versa.  Wars are not going to solve this conundrum. What will begin to solve it is applying the perennial Golden Rule found in different forms in all the world’s major religions, expanded to every area of life. I like the succinct Jewish version: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others.”

 

It would be nice to have the opportunity to vote for leaders who understand the reality of interdependence that is forcing itself upon our consciousness, and to see responsive institutional changes both in our own government and in international bodies like the U.N.

 

In the U.S., it seems clear that whatever happens to the Biden re-election bid, Democrats may be more open to seeing the global implications of interdependence than the present Republican party. Those who see clearly have a special responsibility to reach out in a spirit of creative good will to political adversaries, be they foreign or domestic, to help make a world where good people like Joe Biden don’t have to make false distinctions between the violence of assassination at home and the violence of “foreign” wars.

 

Beyond Stupid

  

 

Stupid, . . . from French stupide (16c.) and directly from Latin stupidus "amazed, confounded; dull, foolish," etymologically "struck senseless," from stupere "be stunned, amazed, confounded . . ."

—www.etymonline

 

The first, and only, time, as an inexperienced father, I called my five-year-old son “stupid,” I could feel how it stung him. Never again, at least with children.

 

And yet when our gorge rises at the needless suffering of the powerless and the blindness of the powerful, sometimes only the word stupid suffices.

 

There are many aspects of international relations that make me feel stupid in the “stunned, amazed, confounded” sense—like the 1953 British-CIA coup that removed a democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, engendering bad karma that continues to this day. Or Vietnam, where smart strategists like Kissinger forgot that the Vietnamese and the Chinese had been rivals for a millennium, and so the “domino theory” didn’t apply.  Or the second Gulf war. Saudi Arabia has emerged as much more of a player in 9/11 than we thought. The leadership of the United States was sufficiently confounded by the destruction of the twin towers to engage in war with the wrong country, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and untold treasure. And now Netanyahu, the hapless leader of a great nation, is unable to get out of the way of his own dead-end vengefulness.

 

Experts on nuclear proliferation and arms control give the world community credit for keeping the number of nuclear weapons states to nine. But when the expertise is devoid of any vision of how we might move beyond the nuclear age, our stupidity antennae should quiver. Silence about the beyond may indicate acceptance of the rotten status quo, selling short the potential for creating our future.

 

Both Oppenheimer and Einstein knew by the late 1940s that the sharpest kind of intelligence was needed to meet the unprecedented challenge of nuclear fission. They advanced various idealistic proposals (they look pretty sensible today) such as dropping the notion of sovereignty not for nations but for nuclear weapons only, and establishing an international body to manage them.

The sheer stupidity of what happened instead is breathtaking, a pointless competitiveness resulting in the grotesque presence at the height of the Cold War of 60,000 nuclear weapons.

As the Oppenheimer film showed, Truman was smugly certain that the U.S. could maintain a monopoly on the bomb, but it took very little time for Russian agents to break that monopoly, leading to the we-build/they-build that we now experience as an arms race with no end in sight.

What kind of intelligence is needed for us to emerge from the other end of the nuclear tunnel? The international arena is full of guile, jockeying for advantage. But guile without a comprehensive vision of planetary self-interest will end in catastrophe. Trump and his fellow authoritarians worldwide are steeped in the guile of narrow self-interest. Trump is a master of guile-intelligence. That may be one source of his appeal to so many. He is a genius at appealing to our sleepy side, the side that wants no ambiguity.

 

In the context of the potential of only 100 nuclear detonations causing nuclear winter, the efforts of the Chinese to attain nuclear parity with the U.S. seem—stupid. Putin wanting to “possess” Ukraine and Xi wanting to “possess” Taiwan are both based in obsolete paradigms of national self-interest—and the American objective of “full spectrum dominance” militarily is not far behind. The extension of the arms race into space will quickly re-approach the stupidity of where we were in the 1960s with 60,000 warheads.

A related type of intelligence is the don’t-rock-the-boat kind. Be cautious. Go along with groupthink lest you be revealed as disloyal or unsound. This makes for stupid experts. It creates pervasive agreement with assumptions so basic that no one in power dares question them. Example: nuclear deterrence will keep us safe forever. But what if the emperor is naked?

This groupthink syndrome is revealed in the difference between what policymakers do and say in office and how it is often modified in retirement—the primary example being Robert McNamara’s remorse about the Vietnam war—or Secretary of Defense Perry suggesting after he stepped down that we could safely retire our entire land-based fleet of ballistic missiles with a net gain in security.

What kind of intelligence is required by our two challenges, first, moving global security beyond the unworkable system of nuclear deterrence, and second, the global heat emergency?

It begins with seeing clearly the relationship between the two as a motivator for encouraging a wider understanding of self-interest. Maybe we cannot love our enemies as spiritual teachers recommend, but we can act intelligently around the fact that we are radically interdependent with adversaries ecologically, economically, and militarily.

The climate emergency renders national sovereignty a kind of abstraction. The strong personalities and the weapons make national interest as measured by strength seem real, even as the pollution of the ocean and air shared by all is a reality which demands the different strength of cooperation.

Find where we can cooperate on climate and push hard on that, because the science of conflict resolution tells us that working toward a shared goal diminishes enmity and alienation. That ought to be the basis for all our diplomatic initiatives, even toward the most disagreeable characters who occupy the world with us—not forgetting that we may look disagreeable to them.

 

Our hearts and minds are diminished by our semi-awareness that our security is based upon a holocaust-in-waiting that will kill millions of innocents. The real war is against climate disaster. Everyone in government service and we who vote for them should exercise the muscle of “We’re all in this together—as a planet.” That kind of intelligence will be a big step beyond stupid.

 

 

A Presidential Fireside Chat

 

 

Putin is threatening Ukraine with battlefield nuclear weapons. Arms control agreements are in the toilet. Many if not all of the nine nuclear powers are renewing their nuclear arsenal. None of them is willing to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 

The Union of Concerned Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever before. And yet it’s as if most of us were in a trance, hypnotized into passivity by the planetary challenge of how to move beyond the nuclear conundrum. 

 

From a lay point of view, a policy like launch-on-warning appears insanely self-defeating. But in the halls of power, where doubts are suppressed to avoid being perceived as weak or disloyal, a dangerous status quo continues, as if no alternative were possible. Sometimes silence speaks volumes. Only after admirals, generals and even statesmen like Henry Kissinger retire do we hear misgivings.

 

Imagine what a U.S. president might say to the nation if he or she were willing to break ironclad political taboos and admit some self-evident truths . . . 

 

My Fellow Americans:

 

 There are some issues that are so complex that experts are needed to find the safest way forward. One of these is nuclear weapons policy. But we are a democracy, where the peoples’ will prevails. Our country has never had a national discussion in real depth about nuclear issues. It is time to begin one.

 

The nuclear age brought a fundamental contradiction into our lives: we are ultimately relying for our security on weapons which could end life on our planet as we know it. The leaders of all the nuclear nations would have only minutes to decide how to respond to a nuclear attack. God keep any of them, including me, from having to experience such a moment. 

 

This cannot be a partisan issue. As Ronald Reagan said in 1982: “ . . .a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

 

The deterrence system encourages non-nuclear nations like Iran to want the weapons, and discourages the nuclear nations from being able to afford to give them up. Meanwhile the arms race accelerates in an endless cycle moving in a hair-trigger direction. While no one is prouder than I am of the professionalism of our military forces, systems made and administered by humans do fail. The space shuttle and nuclear power plant disasters, let alone when misinterpretations of early warning systems have almost led to the launch of weapons that could not be called back—we forget such realities at our ultimate peril.  

Further, now we are aware that the detonation of only a few nuclear warheads, perhaps hundred or less, over cities, could lead to what scientists call nuclear winter, where soot rising high into the upper atmosphere could cause global cooling and even the radical diminishment of agriculture for a decade—an effect that obviously should concern not only us but all countries, nuclear or not.

 

The Russians, the Chinese, Iran and North Korea are all making aggressive moves—not an opportune time to bring up how we might reduce our dependence upon our nuclear arsenal. But they too want to survive. There is no good or bad time to have this discussion except before, not after, another Cuban Missile Crisis or worse. 

 

Would it be easier or harder to alert ourselves to violations of weapons agreements were there fewer weapons? Should we seek new arms control agreements with our adversaries that could result in the reciprocal reductions of numbers of weapons? Should we invite the militaries of the nuclear nations to dialogue about launch on warning, mistakes, and nuclear winter? Should we make easily reversible gestures like bringing a few of our submarines into port, hoping that adversaries would send similar signals? 

 

The community of nations face the challenge not only of nuclear weapons but also of global sustainability: the transition out of not only nuclear weapons, but also fossil fuels. Nations have become so deeply interdependent economically and ecologically that no one country can be secure until all are. Can the world afford to continue to pour its resources into a nuclear deterrence system that diminishes funds needed to meet the global climate emergency? A system which, should it break down, would mean the end of everything we cherish? There will always be conflict, but the science of conflict resolution tells us that even mortal adversaries can cooperate if they work toward a shared goal—in this case, planetary survival. 

 

I am committed to whatever policies make both the United States and the world safer. If there are fundamental changes to be made, I cannot execute policy without the advice and consent of the Congress and therefore, ultimately, of you. Experts may formulate policy, but broad citizen agreement is required for your representatives to continue to push whatever policy direction we choose beyond a single four year administration.

To encourage a national dialogue on the role of nuclear weapons and their place in the context of the sustainability challenge, I will be sending teams of people all around our country who are equipped to listen and to encourage honest and civil conversation. I am calling it the National Nuclear Weapons Policy Dialogue. I’m certain it will result in a stronger, safer America.

 

God bless America and God bless our troops.

Nukes and Climate Are One

 

The conservative columnist George Will wrote a very welcome column calling attention to a book, Nuclear War: A Scenario by historian Annie Jacobsen, a riveting must-read that details just how easily deterrence could unravel, how fast and irreversibly escalation would occur, and how complete the worldwide destruction would be. 

 

But Will undercut the value of his review by saying we ought to pay more attention to nuclear war and less to the climate crisis, of which he is a denier. Climate deniers these days are as obsolete as Holocaust deniers and surely neither should be given space in major American newspapers.

 

The climate crisis is inescapable,  the nuclear crisis is becoming more so, and the two are inescapably intertwined.

 

Both crises continue because of denial. The extreme kind is exemplified by Mr. Will and, from all indications, candidate Trump—neither of these thinks global climate change is an emergency at all. That an influencer of Mr. Will’s scope has become anxious about nuclear war is a good thing. As for Mr. Trump, whatever his thoughts about nukes, it is clear he should never again be in charge of nuclear command and control (bearing in mind that no leader would be able to conduct themselves calmly in the minutes before the world ended).

 

Some degree of denial encompasses us all. We see the obvious indicators of climate and nuclear dysfunctionality and feel helpless. The exceptions are the Bill Mckibbens and Greta Thunbergs and their followers who have given their utmost to waking the rest of us up, including the doctors of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, or the activists in International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

 

The denial of the passive mass middle around both issues includes the political establishments of many nations. Some countries are doing more than others to mitigate global warming, even as the powerful fossil fuel industry fights tooth and nail against its own looming obsolescence. On the nuclear front too many nations are renewing their arsenals. The invasion of Ukraine and China’s ongoing threat to repossess Taiwan are rendering new arms control initiatives all the more difficult—just when the aggressive pursuit of such treaties is most needed.

 

In the Jacobsen book it takes only 72 minutes to pretty much change the planet we know and love into a world where those still living would envy the dead. But because global warming is not just somewhere over the horizon but here now, there are going to be far too many people who will die in the summer of 2024 from the effects of heat,  Mr.Will’s air-conditioned denial to the contrary.

 

Establishment thinking assumes that we have enough money and creativity to cope with both crises. For 35 years one member of the International Physicians for Nuclear War who is on the activist end of the spectrum, Dr. Robert Dodge, has been writing hair-on-fire editorials that apply a formula for determining how much of our tax revenue is poured down the nuclear weapons rathole. In tax year 2023, just the one small town of Ojai where Dodge lives spent $2,742,698 funding U.S. nuclear weapons programs. Ventura County, where Ojai is located in California spent $253,174,999. The total U.S. Nuclear Weapons Programs expenditure was $94,485,000,000. That’s 94 billion.

 

There are differences between the leaders of the nine nuclear powers. Mr. Biden has little in common with Kim Jong Un, though the other candidate for U.S. president, spending his down time in court at the moment even as he polls neck-and-neck, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Mr. Kim.

 

But all the leaders of the nuclear powers are failing to put the interests of the planet above the interests of their sovereign nations: they know that a nuclear war cannot be won, that launch-on-warning is insane, and that none of them could possibly be prepared for those awful minutes of decision described so powerfully by Jacobsen. But they refuse to act creatively upon the implications.

 

Jacobsen’s book is short on solutions, but there is a way out, and, once again, it involves the interconnection between nuclear war and the climate crisis. Start by pulling our ostrich heads out of the sand and admit the crazy dysfunctionality of nuclear deterrence. The nine nuclear powers need to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons even if they may violate its provisions for some years yet. Make gestures which are quickly reversible if no other party responds, like bringing home a few nuclear-armed submarines. Convene the generals, Russia’s and China’s included, and talk about the no-exit nature of the situation—and talk unilaterally about it even if some generals refuse the invitation.

 

And talk equally loudly about the need for a new level of cooperation on climate. Think outside the box: the military forces of all nations happen to also be the biggest polluters. How could they work together to help with the effects of climate already here, the refugees, the water crises, the conflicts over resources? It’s a proven fact that tensions decrease when adversaries cooperate toward a common goal.

 

Everything has changed in our world: we can no longer deny along with powerful influencers like Mr. Will and Mr. Trump that everything we do or don’t do affects everyone else around the world and vice versa. We all breathe one ocean of air.

 

But there’s some consolation that were all in this together. Will the fact that leaders would die in a nuclear war along with the rest of us, or that the real war ought to be against chaos of climate effects, constrain them and push them in new directions? There’s hope in accepting our radical interdependence and acting on it. As a start, we can probe our representatives at every level with questions that drive home the connection between the two challenges.

 Shorter version of letter to WAPO:

 

Dear Editors:

 

George Will’s op-ed reviewing Nuclear War: A Scenario by historian Annie Jacobsen

was most welcome. The book shows how easily deterrence could unravel, how fast and irreversibly escalation would occur, and how complete the destruction would be. 

 

Will undercut his own review by saying we ought to pay more attention to nuclear war

and less to the climate crisis, of which he is a denier. Arguably, climate deniers are as

obsolete as Holocaust deniers. Both crises continue because of denial.  

 

Both crises are globally existential. Jacobsen explains it takes only 72 minutes

to change the planet into a world where the living would envy the dead. Global warming is not just somewhere over the horizon but here now. Many people will die in the summer of 2024 from heat effects.

 

The leaders of the nine nuclear powers know that launch-on-warning is insane. None of them could possibly be prepared for those awful minutes of decision laid out by

Jacobsen. A ‘victory’ is impossible. But they do not act on the implications.

 

Jacobsen’s valuable book is short on solutions. The way forward connects the nuclear and the climate crises. The arms race drains scientific creativity needed to reduce global warming. The military forces of all nations are also among the biggest polluters. They can work together to reduce the effects of climate destruction. History shows that tensions decrease when adversaries cooperate toward a common goal.

 

It is more pragmatic to invest in clean energy than preparation for war. To conserve life on Earth, we all need to be "conservatives."