The Security Dilemma

 

 

You probably couldn’t have asked for a more thoughtful Chair of the Joint Chiefs than Mark Milley, whose term ends on September 30. He was one of the good guys who repeatedly restrained President Trump from veering into dubious schemes—such as a war of choice with Iran.

 

But there is also no mistaking that Milley is a general, a military person through and through. From a recent interview in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Milley graduated from Princeton in 1980):

 

“Milley and others believe that new technologies such as precision-guided munitions, global positioning systems, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and hypersonic weapons are already transforming how militaries are trained, supported, and operate, and that the pace will only accelerate.

 

‘All these technologies are coming at us very, very quickly,’ Milley argues. ‘And we, the United States, need to be on the front side of that curve. We don’t have to be perfect, but we have to be better than our enemy.’”

In a world of hypersonic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads, what exactly does it mean to be “better than our enemy”? 

 

As Stephen Kinzer argues in an op-ed in the Boston Globe: “In the coming years, China and its partners will work intensely to strengthen their military power—only to counter American threats, of course. So will the United States and its partners—only to counter Chinese threats. Each side insists that it seeks only to defend itself. Neither believes the other, so both prepare for war. That makes war more likely.

 

“Because this spiral of mistrust is so common, it has a name: the security dilemma. It tells us that steps one country takes to increase its security often provoke rivals to take countersteps. That leads to competition that makes all parties less secure.”

 

The security dilemma puts generals, no matter how cautious and intelligent, in an ever more impossible position. Is there any other way out except for military officials in opposing camps to openly acknowledge the issue and begin to talk with one another about how to resolve their nations’ conflicts in ways other than mutual suicide?

Ultimately, the only way to be “better than our enemy” is to think in a new way: to accept that security is interdependent: mine depends on yours and yours depends on mine. And to accept that the way to rethink global security cannot be through technological competition, which will never end except in a general conflagration. And finally to turn to the cooperative realization of shared goals: survival and the transformation of energy sources in order to mitigate global climate change. This new way is also an old way: the way of the Golden Rule, an ethic shared by all the world’s major religions.

 

Of the hundreds of scientists who worked under Oppenheimer to develop the first atomic bomb, only one ceased his research and left Los Alamos on moral grounds once it became clear that Hitler had been unable to make a weapon. His name was Joseph Rotblat. He is not mentioned in the popular film about Oppenheimer. He went on to be instrumental in developing the Pugwash Conference, where scientists meet yearly to engage in a frank exchange of ideas—exactly as the militaries of the world’s superpowers ought to be doing. Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, a half-century after the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan.

 

There are technologies necessary to confirm that arms control agreements have not been violated. And it remains crucial to further develop technologies that can help stop the illegal transfer of radioactive materials. But ultimately it is not technological advance, it is only people, like Rotblat or Mikhail Gorbachev, who will enable us to move beyond the security dilemma. I wonder if Mark Milley, ideally along with equivalent military leaders in China or elsewhere, as they lie awake pondering the paradoxes of military force in the nuclear age, will see the flashing “No Exit” sign before it is too late. There is still time, brother.

 

 

 

 

Oppenheimer’s Truth

 

 

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Oppenheimer saw immediately that any nation with adequate resources would be eventually able to build a weapon, and that something as gargantuan as an H-bomb had no possible military function. It could only be a mechanism for genocide.

 

As he tried to use his immense stature to positively influence nuclear policy, he was quickly steamrolled by McCarthyism and national overconfidence. The Christopher Nolan film dramatizes Truman’s smug certainty that the U.S. had a monopoly on the bomb, including the soon to be built H-bomb. Almost immediately spies spirited the technical knowledge for both fission and thermonuclear weapons to the Soviets. The U.S. monopoly dissolved, and the arms race Oppenheimer feared had begun.

 

In 1959 my Princeton roommate and I were pressed into service in an odd effort to provide sufficient bodies for a birthday party for one of the Oppenheimer children.

 

Becoming aware of our interest in art, Oppenheimer invited us into a small windowless room to show off a radiant Van Gogh, one of the late paintings of the fields outside the asylum of St. Remy.

 

Was it possible that this soft-spoken reed of a man with melancholy eyes was the legendary force that had corralled a vast and fractious team of scientific egos into building (in one of the all-time great euphemisms) a world-ending “gadget”?

 

The birthday ended sadly. Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, alcoholically blurry and drink in hand, descended from upstairs into the entryway as we were departing. “What the hell are you staring at?” she said to me, only she didn’t say “hell.” Hell was what the Washington establishment had visited upon her husband by removing his security clearance as the price for his misgivings about what he had wrought, including his refusal to fully assent to the H-bomb project. Kitty had been ravaged alongside him.

 

The biography on which the film is based quotes a section of an essay Oppenheimer published in the New York Times on June 9, 1946 laying out his ideas for the control of nuclear weapons:

 

“[Our plan] proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power.  That in this field there be international law.”

 

Idealistic? Perhaps. But if anyone then could have peered down the time stream, they might have given it a shot, to avoid what Oppenheimer knew loomed ahead. What do we see ahead of us? An accelerating drift toward a twin nuclear/ecological waterfall, the avoidance of which requires a spirit of cooperation equaling that of Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos.

 

Were he alive today, he would be appalled by  just how many nuclear weapons had been built by the early 1980s. But he would be happy that arms control treaties had reduced their numbers. He would be relieved that so far they have not been used on people again. He would rejoice in the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And surely he would be over the moon about the success of the Webb telescope, a multinational scientific feat as positive as the bomb was negative.

 

Insufficiently acknowledged by sovereign powers, both authoritarian and democratic, nuclear and non-nuclear, is the fact that sovereignty has already eroded far more than it ever would have been through any international agreement to renounce nuclear weapons. Sovereignty is an administrative necessity that protects national identity, sometimes existentially (Ukraine does not belong to Putin), but is now increasingly transcended by the reality that we live on one small planet facing challenges that can only be solved transnationally.

 

Specific to weapons and war, sovereignty is growing more and more shaky in the context of inadvertent computer and human error. Our security depends upon the professionalism of the Russian military, and vice versa. So too with all the nuclear powers, even as they spend vast sums to renew their nuclear weapons. No expert or general, however tactically brilliant, would be in full control of a slide into the kind of catastrophe that nearly occurred during the Cuban crisis of 1962, and could happen again in a conflict with China over Taiwan. 

 

Even on the level of conventional war, Mr. Putin is discovering he will have to destroy Ukraine in order to “save” it. Let’s pray that he understands that escalating to nukes won't help him.

 

Our distracted political culture in the U.S. does not encourage dialogue around such difficult issues. The popularity of Nolan’s film is an opportunity for citizens to ask probing questions of the presidential candidates that spur fresh thinking on nuclear policy. For example, would standing down our entire aging fleet of land-based ICBMs be destabilizing “appeasement” of Russia and China, or a unilateral initiative that could elicit further positive responses?

 

The anguish of Robert Oppenheimer, who unleashed destruction beyond measure and then tried his best to stop its further spread, reminds us that America bears special responsibility for creating the kind of world he hoped for, where the nuclear curse is finally lifted.

 

 

Lahaina and Global Reality

Rotarian Al Jubitz, founder of the War Prevention Initiative, has pointed out an ill-starred coincidence: the town of Lahaina was burning on the anniversary day, even at the very hour (11:02 a.m. in Japan is 4:02 p.m. in Maui) that the United States dropped its second nuclear weapon on the people of Nagasaki back in 1945. 

We have no need to rehash the controversy over whether Japan was ready to surrender even before President Truman decided to use those two city-extinguishing “gadgets” (as Oppenheimer and his team called them in an initial euphemism, one followed by many others, including “peacekeeper”) to quicken the end of a brutal war. 

What is infinitely more significant for us is what events like the Lahaina holocaust portend for the looming history of our future on Planet Earth. If Lahaina carries an echo of Pearl Harbor, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, it also ties together the two largest challenges our species faces together, nuclear war and climate catastrophe. 

The two crises are unavoidably and intimately linked. The nine nuclear powers are plunging headlong into the renewal of their nuclear arsenals at just the moment they need to be finding novel ways to cooperate to mitigate global warming. The money and scientific brainpower desperately needed for the conversion to sustainable energy continue to be drained into an international deterrence system which, as we have seen in Ukraine, does nothing to deter the scourge of war. And should deterrence break down completely, no victory is possible for anyone. 

In the case of both challenges, there is no impediment to workable solutions other than the lack of sufficient political will and the resistance of powerful special interests—though these are more than enough to accelerate our drift toward a twin apocalypse. This drift is perpetuated by a media environment where the indictment of a clownish conman for a dangerous but ultimately banal conspiracy to steal an election takes up a quantum more space in the press than more hopeful stories appearing at the same time, such as the children, exercising political will at its finest, demanding that the state of Montana live up to its constitutionally guaranteed environmental protections.

Even as we drift, a new idea has been pressing into our collective mind for almost a century: the fates of everyone on the planet are intertwined. This was always true, but now we know it both through the science of ecology, and through the poetry of seeing the curve of Earth from space. We’re all in this together. We have only one small home, in the shape of a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.

What I do to conserve energy, or waste it, in my local situation affects everyone else globally, and vice versa. My security is only as strong as the reliability of the circuits and wires in all the nuclear bombs out there, only as strong the training and restraint of the people who maintain them at the ready, only as sure as the communication systems that may be vulnerable to error or misinterpretation, only as healthy as Montana’s willingness to phase out coal. The Golden Rule that appears in all the major world religions turns out to have deep practical, logical, and scientific implications that call for a profound change in the way we think and act.

Our radical interdependence has been reinforced by our explorations of deep space by the Hubbell and Webb telescopes. Everything on earth, human, plant, rock, or the miracle of water, derives from atoms forged in the furnaces of stars. Everything is part of the same emergent story that is 26.7 billion years old. We all come from the same place and face the same fate together.

But our thinking has not caught up to such fundamental principles. We remain religiously sectarian and politically factional, blind to a more planetary vision of our self-interest. The hollowness of our avoidance has become a cavern in which we all sit passively, waiting for experts to find us a way out. 

And there are experts. We know a lot about how to resolve our conflicts nonviolently. We know more than we ever did about how to communicate clearly, how to share our separate assumptions across languages and cultures to ensure understanding. We can model possible futures with our computers. With their help we can see how the potential of nuclear winter renders the whole enterprise of the nuclear arms race irrelevant at best, malevolent in fact.

But even the most knowledgeable and experienced establishment experts (as one of the most revered, Henry Kissinger, admits) have no idea what will unfold once the chaos of conventional war, say, between the United States and China over Taiwan, escalates to the nuclear level. There isn’t a single general or statesman on Earth who can predict what will happen, let alone control it to any one party’s advantage. This reality in itself points to the only solution: survival requires us to go to war against war itself.

In the same way the global climate emergency also invites us to go to war against real enemies like rising levels of greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures, and to mobilize on the level of urgency that the allied powers did during World War II, when our leaders knew that citizens were waiting to be called to sacrifice for a larger cause. The decimation of Lahaina has brought out that spirit of cooperative good will—can we summon a similar spirit to prevent global conflagration and build a world where children can flourish?

Mobilize and Live

 

 

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”  —Kurt Vonnegut

 

One summer when I was in college I boarded a so-called “student ship” for Europe. This slightly down-at-the-heels craft was called the “Groot Beer” (big bear), run by the Holland-America line, and it took eight days to cross the Atlantic. The “Groot Beer” had been built as a so-called “Liberty Ship” during World War II, one of 2700 such vessels designed to keep arms, men and goods crossing to Europe in spite of the deadly depredations of German U-Boats. The average time to construct these 450-foot steel ships was thirty days, and the fastest time was four and a half days! Imagine the urgency, the round-the-clock teamwork of the designers, welders and riveters, tying together the modular sections, slapping on paint, and letting another steel giant slip down the runway into desperately needed service.

 

This is only one example of the extraordinary mobilization of resources, talent and will that defeated the Axis powers. Is there something about us humans 85 years later that prevents a similar mobilization against our real enemies? We possess vastly faster and more efficient productive capabilities than those that were available to Franklin Roosevelt.

 

But the reality of our personal and global interdependence has not yet penetrated our minds deeply enough for us to undergo a similar, now worldwide, mobilization.

 

Fly over any major city at night, and you will see lights burning in hundreds of skyscrapers as if global warming did not exist. Examine the military budgets of the nuclear powers and you will see trillions of dollars pouring into the renewal of nuclear arsenals—weapons for a war no one can win. Establishment foreign policy journals are full of articles about the Ukraine war and its implications for possible hot conflict with China—themselves also wars no one can win, except maybe the arms dealers. In the board rooms of the giant fossil-fuel companies and in the halls of Congress, executives and lobbyists rationalize slowing the inevitable transition to renewables on the basis of their obligation to maximize benefits to shareholders. Our chaotic political-media complex masks the dysfunctional juggernaut of economic and military competition with their own competition for ratings.

 

We humans are an odd species. In spite of all our accomplishments, there seems to be a near-fatal lag between the conditions that threaten us and the actions required for survival.

The future always belongs to the species that can adapt successfully to the conditions that surround them. These conditions now include world-ending weapons and world-stressing heat, floods and storms. Such transnational challenges dictate the nature of the changes we must make. No exceptions for any life form on earth, very much including people, rich or poor.

 

President Biden showed his understanding that we were in a new world when he said in Vilnius a few weeks ago: “When others do better, we do better as well—where we understand that the challenges we face today, from the existential threat of climate change to building a global economy where no one gets left behind, are too great for any one nation to solve on their own, and that to achieve our goals and meet the challenges of this age, we have to work together. The world is changing.  We have a chance to change the dynamic.”

The eco-philosopher Thomas Berry insisted that the earth cannot be saved in pieces. Anyone who puts solar panels on their roof benefits the planet as a whole. Anyone who builds more coal-fired plants to generate electricity degrades the planet as a whole. My survival and yours depends upon both of us, all of us together, doing what is necessary for the survival of all, including trees, fish, bees, plants and rivers, whether you are my adversary or my ally.

 

Military strategists warn generals not to fight the last war—in other words, to adjust their thinking to actual present conditions. But in every war around the world, the reality is we are fighting that last war, and, to an ever-increasing absurd degree, it is completely the wrong war. So how do we start to fight the right war against the right enemy—war against war itself and against global climate catastrophe?

 

A Peace Corp volunteer once said something that sounds like the merest bromide but is profoundly true: “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.”  Pogo said something similar: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” These snippets of folk wisdom point the way to survival. Because we are all in the same leaky boat, the right war begins with a global climate change in the way we think. Heeding Vonnegut, we can realize the true cost-effectiveness of mobilizing against our real adversaries in a way that leads to survival and even a new flourishing.

 

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.”