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.