The Sixth Youth Nuclear Peace Summit: An American Perspective

High school students from Canada and from as far away as Japan gathered at the spectacular Canadian Museum for Human Rights to share their thoughts on the challenge of preventing nuclear war. Called “The Moral Responsibility of Humanity,” this was the sixth iteration of the Youth Nuclear Peace Summit, the brainchild of some extraordinary citizens of Winnipeg, including prominent attorney and David G. Newman K.C., retired school principal Estelle Lamoureux, and Kawser Ahmed, Executive Director of the Conflict and Resilience Research Center of Canada.

I was invited to participate in the conference as a former high school teacher and sometime writer on global issues. My impressions are entirely my own and do not reflect the views of my generous hosts or the staff of the various institutions that made the Summit possible.

Recently retired Parliamentarian Marilou McPhedran made the point in her talk to the students that we adults too often throw up our hands and say to the youth, “We failed; now it’s up to you,” an unfair delegation of survival tasks that remain intergenerational and, for that matter, international. Canada and the United States are geographically, militarily, environmentally, and morally interdependent. Neither country can achieve genuine security in isolation from the other. We’re all in this together, regardless of age or experience.

In private conversation Marilou also told me politely but firmly that Canadians know a lot about America and Americans don’t know very much about Canada. Point taken.

For example, progressive Americans romanticize Mr. Carney’s level-headed pushback against bizarre tariffs and even more bizarre visions of the outright annexation of your huge country. But it didn’t take long to understand that Canadians want accountability from their Prime Minister just as much as Americans want accountability from our hapless, narcissistic president (soon, fervently do we hope, to be at least somewhat declawed).

At the Summit, accountability naturally focused on nuclear issues, not only nuclear weapons but the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Indigenous participants, including Métis Elder Billie Schibler, made sure we were aware of the threats that both uranium mining and nuclear waste repositories pose to Indigenous lands and ecosystems. In addition, we explored the continued interdependence of Canada’s security—or lack thereof—with the security of the United States. This involves a fair amount of complex history which, in my amateur recounting, might further demonstrate American ignorance of Canada, but, in brief:

Prime Minister Carney may want to work toward increased security and defense independence from the U.S., but U.S. early-warning installations and infrastructure, which have required continuous upgrading as the arms race accelerates, have occupied Canadian soil for many decades. This raises an obvious but fundamental question: Can a country meaningfully retain independent control over its security choices when its geography makes it indispensable to a superpower’s defense? Canada must weigh the benefits of collective security agreements against the risks of deep integration with a much more powerful, and for the moment potentially unreliable, nuclear-armed neighbor.

The Youth Summit included previews of a powerful new documentary to be released in 2028 called “How To Stop a Nuclear War.” At the core of the film is the last testimony of the dying 90-year-old activist Daniel Ellsberg, who focused with laser moral force on the destabilizing effect of the land-based ICBMs not far south of the Canadian border. William Perry, Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, asserted that the U.S. could afford to stand down these weapons and that doing so would result in a net increase in everyone’s security. Instead, at breathtakingly vast expense, the U.S. is hell-bent on upgrading them.

President Trump’s vague fantasies of a “Golden Dome” of defensive, shoot-a-bullet-with-a-bullet antimissiles further blur the already unstable distinction between offensive and defensive weapons. The fundamental problem is that defensive systems can encourage an adversary to increase its offensive capabilities, while potentially giving the defending country a false sense of security.

And ultimately, what does Canada, or the U.S. for that matter, gain from even the most up-to-date early-warning system? In the unlikely event of a nuclear missile attack from Russia, the U.S. will have fifteen or twenty minutes to contemplate our own annihilation, including making the decision to use our own missiles before we lose them, thereby doubling the degree of mass death. Fallout or nuclear winter would, of course, engulf Canada along with everyone else worldwide.

It’s all pretty insane and heavy-duty stuff to lay on teens, but their presentations were creative, concise, soberly reflective, and hopeful. The cliché would be to say that our future is in good hands. But the challenges for all of us, old and young, are immense. One takeaway was that in looking at the uranium mining and nuclear waste issue alongside the nuclear war issue, we see yet one more way in which peacebuilding and environmental sustainability are interwoven.

I appreciated my new Canadian friends, especially their forbearance of our present American derangement. I was awed by the cathedral-like quality of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the powerful witness to the planet-wide struggle for compassion and justice its exhibits display. Most of all, I felt the poignant weight settling upon the teen participants as they struggled with the hard fact that the great powers haven’t yet figured out a way to global security that doesn’t involve perching on the razor’s edge of apocalypse.

Reorientation

  

Our leaders operate out of a delusional and obsolete paradigm of national self-interest. Xi wanting to “possess” Taiwan; Putin, Ukraine; Netanyahu, Gaza and the West Bank; Trump, yesterday Venezuela, today Greenland, tomorrow Cuba—or Canada.

The climate crisis is rendering these various ideas of empire and much else about international competition into hollowed-out abstractions. Even superiority in numbers of nuclear weapons becomes meaningless in the context of the potential environmental crisis scientists call “nuclear winter.” All this is a fabulous illustration of Einstein’s perception that “we cannot solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that created the problem.” Our leaders are dominated by an “us versus them” consciousness when what is urgently needed is an “all in the same boat” consciousness.

These leaders are fighting the wrong wars, while their real adversaries loom not only as rising temperatures and more violent fires, floods and storms, but also as ever-advancing military technologies of destruction, now including AI, that make apocalypse ever more probable. War itself is the real enemy. Putin’s conception of bringing back the greater Russian Empire becomes an absurd vanity project while the vast tundra fields of Russia thaw and spew methane skyward. Nature herself is the empire that always bats last.

Trump is stuck in the dying world of fossil fuels. The oil sector helped put him in office. His joining Israel in a war of choice with Iran has mired him in a huge oil shipment bottleneck and driven up prices, putting his own political party’s dominance at risk. His climate change denial is grotesque in its arrogant no-nothing certainty, rationalized by oil company shareholder value. The obsolescent fossil fuel paradigm seems all too closely connected to war, and has been since neocons like Dick Cheney asked the question “why is our oil under their sand?” and answered it with futile budget-busting colonial boondoggles.

Look to thinkers like Bill McKibben for a refreshing reorientation. In his optimistic book “Here Comes the Sun,” he makes the clear case that fossil fuels have become the true “alternative energy,” as the price of solar panels keeps falling and their efficiency keeps rising. Daniel Poneman, Secretary of Energy under Obama and now a director at the Nuclear Energy Institute, tries to make the case that we can’t get over the hump into a clean energy world without recourse to nuclear power. Mckibben’s realistic solar-wind-battery vision of possibility blows Poneman’s obsession with nuclear energy out of the water. For the amount of labor, money and time it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running, solar and wind combined with batteries will yield far more electricity with far less time and money—leaving aside the still-unsolved problem of nuclear waste. If AI is really going to help the species resolve its many challenges and that means data centers, why not supply the huge power needs of these centers with solar?

The invitation to reorientation is not unlike the experience to which every astronaut testifies upon their return from space: they looked down and saw no borders, only one small fragile blue planet, home to all we love and value. We can have that same experience without going into space, simply by identifying not only with our own nation, but also with the whole—not only with the whole Earth, but with the extraordinary gift of the Earth-sun relationship. We are the beneficiaries of a fusion machine, safely 93 million miles away, that turns 400 million tons of hydrogen a second into all the energy we will ever need.

Reorienting our true self-interest, far from being woo-woo and abstract, is a practical and realistic way to think about all our interrelated problems. It pulls us in the direction of diplomacy, people-to-people initiatives—and political candidates who are in tune with this changed sense of “our” survival challenges—“our” now being everyone on Earth. This fundamental shift in thinking has immense potential to put a new spin on all the millions of specific, complex, difficult, mundane  (mundane—from the Spanish mundo, meaning “world”) conflicts we experience down here on the ground.

Beyond Contradiction

Daniel Poneman, a former U.S. Secretary of Energy—a position that includes supervision of America’s nuclear weapons—gave a recent talk called “Prospects for Nuclear Proliferation,” in which he argued that in an ever more dangerous world, the best chance for security is to bolster the U.S. deterrent. In other words, build more and better weapons and delivery systems. To be fair, Poneman also advocated for more arms control. But is that not a performative contradiction? An unworkable paradox has operated all along in American arms strategy and for other nuclear powers also: build more so that you are in a better position to negotiate reductions. Thus a leading establishment thinker and distinguished public servant ends up advocating, in a talk about preventing further nuclear proliferation, American nuclear proliferation!

Poneman’s premise is that the best method of disincentivizing more nations to go nuclear is to strengthen the so-called “nuclear umbrella” by which non-nuclear nations feel secure because they can rely on the strength of U.S. weapons to deter aggression. That trust is fraying as alliances change or are weakened by the U.S. itself, as Poneman pointed out.

While deterrence may have had had some residual effect in making some nations more cautious, it contains a fatal dilemma: in order to never be used, everyone’s weapons must be kept on hair-trigger alert, and so they become accidents waiting to happen.

Detonation of only a small fraction nuclear weapons over large cities would be sufficient to raise enough soot into the upper atmosphere to bring on a decade-long nuclear winter. So the primitive nuclear “revenge” built into strategies like “launch on warning” becomes a psychotically suicidal response. This is the rock upon which nations build their global security?

Adding hypersonic delivery systems further reduces the small amount of time national leaders have to make sane decisions. While the U.S. has considered protocols that would slow down the process by placing the decision to respond in more hands, the speed of international ballistic missiles renders that effort meaningless.

The cyber dimension of the challenge is not reassuring. The weapons are tied to thousands of computers and fallible humans. Military AI will introduce further level of complexity that renders disaster more probable.

The United States has become siloed into polarized groups which do not communicate well with each other. How much more dangerous is such siloing on an international level, where nations refuse to make connections on the basis of their shared self-interest in survival? You do not have to love your enemies to realize that your survival depends upon them and theirs upon yours. That applies equally to both nuclear weapons and climate effects.

There is zero public debate about the ethics of nine nations’ readiness to use weapons could kill hundreds of millions of people and perhaps end life on earth. The silent acceptance of strategic “realism” feels close to helpless resignation to self-created planet-wide evil. Why are there so many Daniel Ponemans and so few Daniel Ellsbergs?

Meanwhile our president denies the very existence of profound changes in Earth’s climate in order to protect the fossil fuel corporations that helped elevate him to power. The planet has become not only too small for modern war, but faces a global climate emergency about which the militaries of the world as presently constituted can do very little—in fact they are major contributors to the problem.

There is no international authority with the teeth necessary to control the growing potential for either nuclear or climate catastrophe. But reality provides an authority of its own: absent change we are going to broil quickly in nuclear fire or broil more gradually as global temperatures increase.

There are alternatives, some of which are politically risky, but their time has come. Four possibilities for our own nation: first, the U.S. should stand down its entire land-based ballistic missile force, as a good faith gesture toward the reality of what the future could look like with a change of direction. Our security would not diminish; it would increase, because ballistic missiles, which cannot be recalled once launched, are destabilizing. Second, the U.S. should sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a further gesture toward a nuclear-free future. Third, we should call an international conference of political, military and non-governmental stakeholders to explore the no-exit nature of our present direction on Earth, including the relationship between military stalemate and the opportunity costs that come with failing to address chaos-causing climate effects. Fourth, to belabor the obvious, we are invited to elect political representatives that offer feasible plans for addressing climate change and are eager to work with other nations on agreements that ensure equal burden sharing. A further hope is the strengthening of people-to-people NGOs like Rotary International who are good at making human connections and building common frames of reference.

When are we going to understand that power no longer resides in military might, but instead in mutual understanding of what leads to common survival? The prevention of war by tenuous military superiority has now become unworkable on this planet, forever. When we admit this to ourselves, the door to new visions of security will open.

 

 

 

Helplessness

   

At this late date it is hard to take anything Mr. Trump says or does seriously. He seems not only out of touch with reality but also unable to make that reality conform to his narcissistic wishes. It has taken him a lifetime of defiant egoism to arrive at a condition which is universal to the human experience and especially to human learning: helplessness. War in the Middle East ties him in knots, drives up the price of gasoline, and brings him closer to mid-term defeat in Congress with its almost certain legal reckoning of his graft and deceit.

Helplessness is woven into human reality. We begin life as helpless infants and we end life helpless to escape our death. Helplessness humbles. Helplessness teaches us about our radical interdependence, about the relevance and practicality of the Golden Rule in its various versions.

Stephen Miller articulates Mr. Trump’s (and Hegseth’s and Putin’s and Netanyahu’s—almost everything argued here applies to them also) worldview in a few simple words: 

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

But Mr. Miller leaves out the reality that helplessness is an equally pervasive law and  fundamental condition, leaving us no choice but to make compacts with each other by which we agree to transform Miller’s Law of Force in return for agreements—the Force of Law— that allow us to live in relative peace with each other and create a culture where helplessly dependent children are allowed to gradually grow into adults possessing what might be called “mature interdependence,” a sense that includes a humble awareness that I may be doing well at the moment but it is almost inevitable that I will need to call on you for help sometime.

Our sense of universal interrelationship has received a new impetus in the form of the global climate emergency that the President completely denies. We all breathe the same single atmosphere. The gasoline car you or I drive degrades the whole system; the individual and collective efforts we are making to increase the use of clean energy strengthen the entire threatened biosystem that supports us. 

And in 1945 a further dimension of helplessness entered our consciousness in the form of the invention of a weapon so powerful that it rendered everyone on Earth vulnerable to its effects. Mr. Trump has given a number of different rationales for his pursuit of “victory” over Iran, but the goal he repeats the most is the goal that he is most helpless to achieve: that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. 

This is patently absurd, on a number of levels. 

First, it assumes a double standard. Our nuclear weapons are OK because we will never use them for evil purposes, while theirs are evil because they are evil. They in the case of Iran includes 90 million people, most of whom are roundly contemptuous of the corrupt militarists that govern them by violence, torture and incarceration. 

Second, the Miller paradigm of force against force only incentivizes more nations to join the nuclear elite. 

Third, much emphasis has been placed upon destroying Iran’s centrifuges and other equipment needed to fashion nuclear weapons as if they could never be rebuilt—or Iran could not buy nuclear weapons from some other nation. 

The present paradigm of war, ever developing toward both more nations possessing nuclear weapons and also toward autonomous drones and other new ways to kill each other’s children, contains no way out. With the right materials and equipment, any nation or even, God forbid, any non-state entity, can build a nuclear weapon. They are with us forever. We must break the equation that asserts that more nuclear weapons equal more security, and the nuclear nations must take the lead.

Modern war demonstrates that we, including the U.S., the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Netanyahu, Hezbollah, Putin, the Houthis, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and on and on, cannot kill our way to peace. 

The purpose of identifying as communists or socialists or capitalists or Russians or Jews or Muslims or Christians, all the categories by which we separate ourselves in order to deny our Oneness, is to strengthen our certainty that we are on the side of right. The helplessness that would come with climate catastrophe or nuclear war would reduce these categories to irrelevance. 

Are the twin realities of nuclear weapons and climate a powerful enough dose of reality to transcend the present gigantic dynamism of our suffering Earth: the endless competition, the arms trade, the “shareholder value” which more and more divides the haves and have nots, the alienation and misunderstanding within nations and between them, the denial of common sense—all in the context of floods and fires and typhoons and ecosystem collapses? So far, not yet. But the level of cooperation required for survival implies a new vision that transcends the forces of greed and short-term self-interest that presently motivate us.

Realizing such a vision might begin with an admission of helplessness around both the direction of the arms race and our radical climate interdependence. Looking down the time-stream, really seeing that we share one future, either dying together or learning to live together, is an essential thought-operation that can start us toward hopeful action. 

“Us and Them” Is Obsolete

   

Competitiveness is one of our primary values. Competition runs the world. It orients success in business, or sports—and above all in war. Adversaries seek the transient glory of military advantage. Yet none of our four biggest challenges, the climate emergency, nuclear weapons, the rise of AI, and global pandemics are “us and them” problems. They are “us” problems. This may seem more obvious with climate change and disease, but it is just as true for AI and nukes, especially in some fatal combination of AI and nukes under theoretical consideration by the masters of war. The ruins of Gaza show us that even conventional wars can approach a nuclear level of destruction.

As AI gets further integrated with modern weaponry, it will turn into an “us” problem. Revenge, advantage-seeking and tit-for-tat among “us and them” is fueling an ever-accelerating arms race toward a no-exit level of destruction. To use AI only to help “us” overcome “them” will prove futile—there will be ever-shifting moments of temporary technological advantage such as we are seeing in the standoff in Ukraine. But not only will no one win definitively, everyone may lose. AI will be a saving grace only to the extent of what it could do for all of “us.”

If we cannot forgive, let alone love, our enemies, we can at least acknowledge the futility of the competitive cycles of violence to which we are addicted. While it is understandable that collective trauma might make the following thought experiment impossible for most Israelis, imagine that the response to the October 7 pogrom shifted 180 degrees—that Israel had been honest about how hard its leaders have worked to make sure they would never have legitimate partners on the Palestinian side. That the sickeningly labeled strategy of “mowing the grass” may even have been one of the causes of the brutal Hamas attack.

Imagine that Israel, knowing from bitter experience what it means to be the victim of dehumanization and genocide, refused to make similar victims of the Palestinians either in Gaza or the West Bank. Imagine that the resources expended by the IDF, billions of dollars, setting aside the lives of far too many on both sides, had flowed directly into the establishment of an Israeli-initiated Palestinian state with safe borders, equality under the law, subsidized land and housing and a working economy, taking the wind out of the sails of the hate-driven proxies of Iran like Hezbollah.

What is true for any intractable quarrel on our small planet is just as true for all the others. Peacebuilding has a chance when people recognize their own role in the conflict. We venerate Nelson Mandela because he sought reconciliation rather than victory. Just as Netanyahu might look into the face of the late Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar and see his own ruthlessness, so could Secretary Hegseth look at his counterpart in the Iran Revolutionary Guards and see a fanaticism resembling his own. The face of “them” is a mirror.

The feckless unnecessary war with Iran will presumably only end with some version of the very treaty that the Trump-detested Obama had already painstakingly solidified, along with a return to the status quo ante of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where the U.S. and Iran are trying absurdly to outblockade each other. In the climactic scene in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a medical officer, after caring for his British fellow-prisoners while they spend months painstakingly building a railroad bridge, has to witness the bridge being blown up—by British commandos. “Madness! Madness!” he exclaims.

The astronauts who have viewed the whole Earth from space almost all report a transformation in their thinking, a sense that their home is no longer their nation of origin, but the planet. War is a bomb-cratered, blood-spattered, child-screaming distraction from the shift toward which the Earth-inclusive spirit of the astronauts urgently points.

In another thought experiment that seems far easier than Israelis reconciling with their many adversaries, imagine an alien attack upon Earth. How quickly would our local “us and them” disputes transform into a single “us” against the aliens. But we have been invaded by forces that have an equal capacity to unite us—the scourge of weapons of mass destruction and the threat of rising global temperatures. Our opportunity is a paradigm shift from “us and them” to “us” working together to solve challenges no nation can solve alone.

 

Naïveté

        In a tough and complex world, people tending to the left side of the political spectrum are often accused of starry-eyed naïveté when they push for the prevention of war and the building of peace through law, diplomacy and budgetary control over military forces—replacing the law of force with the force of law. The operating paradigm of the hawkish, by contrast, is peace through strength: no amount of weapons is ever enough and the glove of diplomacy only thinly covers the iron fist of force. These are caricatures, simplified to make a point.

We now have a Secretary of Defense who is himself a caricature, and the engine that motivates him is a naïveté so deep that he has been rightfully eviscerated in the media. His conception of the resolution of international conflict is tattooed on his own body.  His models of choice are Christian-Muslim wars in the Mid-East that ran for two centuries and ended about 1300. It would be more amusing if it did not lead to catastrophes like the mass slaughter of schoolchildren.

Mr. Hegseth is almost too ripe a target. But the bigger picture suggests an underexamined naïveté in establishment thinking about international relations generally. The global security regime has encouraged the strong possibility of apocalyptic scenarios which one would assume experts would try far harder to avoid, accidents waiting to happen. The first such scenario that comes to mind is that twenty-minute moment when a leader must decide how to respond to signals that one or more ballistic missiles are incoming and have gotten past any defensive measures (the plot of the powerfully understated film “House of Dynamite”). The choice becomes to do nothing, or launch in response and risk that Armageddon was based on a mistake. Isn’t there an extraordinary naïveté in the fatalist assumption that nothing can be done about this insanity? Especially when it is so clearly in every nation’s shared best interest to change it?

But this naïveté/insanity is based on the pervasive assumption of peace through strength: the weapons are ready for instant use so that they will never be used—forever. Isn’t this really as laughably naïve as Mr. Hegseth’s killing Muslims for Christ?

The truth is more ominous. Think of what’s really out there “protecting” us: thousands upon thousands of world-destroying warheads, connected to thousands of computers and early-warning sensors, connected to thousands of fallible, however well-trained, human beings.

But it’s not as if all this weaponry reinforces a balanced opposition of power. It is taking place within two rapidly changing contexts: the back-and-forth of the planet’s various conventional wars, and the perpetual motion of we build/they build technological advances (with the military use of A.I upping the instability ante.)

What could go wrong?

And yet the vast majority of the commentariat that fills our airways with opinions is fundamentally OK with our all-in-the-same-leaky-boat condition.

The naïveté of a leader like Benjamin Netanyahu may be more wily but is basically similar to Hegseth’s. Like the Secretary, Netanyahu trafficks in the familiar “either you’re with us or against us” fallacy. He uses the dual context of the Holocaust and of the October 7^th Hamas attack to give no quarter to his many adversaries and no hope to the Palestinians. To transform oneself from victim to “invincible” storm-trooper invulnerability and lay to waste, even preemptively, all perceived enemies is functionally naïve if only because it will never lead to Israeli’s security.

We live in radically new conditions. Two other Jews laid it out for us: Einstein said in 1946: “The unleashed power of  the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” And Jesus suggested a path that sounds naïve to hawks but seems more realistically imperative by the day: that we must learn to love our enemies as much as we love ourselves. Challenging as that ideal may seem, it wouldn’t be as difficult as trying to pick up the pieces after WW3.

Why “Us-and-Them” Thinking Equals Strategic Failure

Intrepid space voyagers have once again sent back photographs of the whole Earth from space, underlining our all-in-the-same-leaky-boat condition of interdependence that renders national demarcations oddly irrelevant. The detonation of anyone’s nuclear weapons would spread radioactivity across such abstract lines; likewise pandemics show equal disrespect for borders, as do rising sea-levels and ever more ferocious storms. All this is new in the human story, and our thinking has yet to catch up.

While we may have spent decades trying to transcend our limited identifications, old habits persist. It is so instinctively easy to worry more about successfully extracting a second downed American pilot from Iran than about 175 Iranian children killed by an American missile. Reflexive national chauvinism lies deep and dies hard.

As a prime example it is hard to ignore Mr. Hegseth’s holy war, take-no-prisoners approach, which represents an obsolete way of thinking going back to the Crusades. He has allowed himself to become a mirror-image of the Iranian fanatics he wants to annihilate without mercy, making no distinctions between the hard-liners and the millions of Iranian people who have no use for theocratic government. As our fresh-thinking American pope said in his Palm Sunday homily, the “King of Peace” rejects the prayers of those who wage war.

Failing to comprehend the radical implications of the view from Artemis II, we fall into unworkable contradictions. Two apparent goals of Trump’s war—to reduce Iran's ambition to possess nukes and to ensure the free flow of fossil fuels through the strait—have boomeranged against him. The president's climate denial and attachment to fossil fuels mires him in an energy paradigm which is counterproductive to everyone's interests, including the non-recoverable effects of the climate emergency.

This unnecessary war has ensured that hatred and fanaticism and the desire for revenge will further extend for decades. It repeats the mistakes and abysmal lack of both historical and cross-cultural understanding that marked our previous misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone in Central and South America. Worst of all, our “excursions” are a distraction from the real war—the war to sustain our threatened biosystem.

Change begins to happen when near-catastrophe threatens the old-paradigm thinking of establishment experts, even as outlines of better alternatives begin to emerge from those able to imagine them.

It is already clear that the brutal Iranian regime will not be bombed into submission and collapse and will be probably all the more motivated to join the nuclear club.

Which brings us back to the fundamental change on our small blue planet wrought by the invention of never-can-be-uninvented nuclear weapons. What constitutes security in our new condition? Every country a nuclear power? Or pushing toward a different security system based upon the irreducible reality that no one is safe until everyone is? Toward a system which reduces incentives to possess weapons of mass destruction?

There are no good nuclear weapons or bad nuclear weapons. They’re all bad. So when we go to war to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, we might think about gestures toward reducing our own. Paradoxically, as William Perry, the defense secretary under President Clinton, has pointed out, the U.S. would be more secure if it unilaterally eliminated its entire land-based ballistic missile system, which consists of weapons which cannot be called back in the event of a mistake. We could go further. We could begin the arms control process again with both Russia and China. Perry’s proposal might count for something against Russia’s and China’s present unwillingness to negotiate. The U.S. could commit itself in principle to acceptance that nuclear weapons cannot accomplish anything good by being the first nuclear power to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

All inspections of imports will include an urgent need to detect a clandestine nuke. All wars from here into the future will be fought under the looming presence of these weapons. World leaders seem to sense that they cannot be used in wars. Putin could “win” with them against Ukraine. Israel and the U.S. could “win” with them against Iran. But we have restrained ourselves, at least so far, because we know the depth of loss such a “win” implies. Now the president of the U.S. is threatening the Iranians with hell. Is he implying that he might cross the nuclear threshold? That would be the ultimate strategic failure of  obsolete “us-and-them” thinking.