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.