OMNI
NUCLEAR
WEAPONS
ABOLITION NEWSLETTER # 20, July 20, 2014.
OMNI Building a
Culture of PEACE, Justice, and Ecology.
Compiled by Dick Bennett.
(See #1, June 14, 2007; #2, January 8,
2008; #3 May 16, 2008; #4 June 10; 2009,
#5 July 23, 2009, ; #6 Sept. 21, 2009; #7 August 29, 2010; #8 April 11,
2011; #9 August 4, 2011; #10 Feb. 27, 2012; #11 April 4, 2012; #12 June 27,
2012; #13 July 27, 2012; #14 August 11, 2012; #15, Dec. 4, 2012; #16 July 20,
2013; #17 Dec. 17, 2014; #18 Feb. 8, 2014; #19, May 25, 2014)
Newsletters
Index:
Blog
Contents of Nuclear Weapons
Abolition Newsletter #20, July 20, 2014
Presidents Obama and Medvedev
Commitment 2009
Plan to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Statement by UN Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon
Global Zero Movement
Two Reviews of Elaine Scarry’s Nuclear Monarchy
PRESIDENT OBAMA URGES
NUCLEAR ABOLITION
On April 1, 2009, Presidents Obama and Russia’s Medvedev
jointly “…committed [their] two countries to achieving a nuclear free
world.” Three days later in Prague
PLAN TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS,
POST-OBAMA/MEDVEDEV 2009 COMMITMENT
http://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/GZAP
Home
DONATE: FUEL THE MOVEMENT
DEMAND ZERO
OUR MOVEMENT
GET THE FACTS
MEDIA
Status message You have been added to our mailing list.
You are here
Home > Get the Facts > Global Zero Action Plan > Get
the Facts > Get the Facts 9 August 2013 http://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/GZAP
THE GLOBAL ZERO ACTION
PLAN
The Global Zero Action Plan calls for the United States and
Russia – who hold more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons – to negotiate
deep cuts in their arsenals, followed by international negotiations to
eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2030.
Support for this goal is widespread among experienced and
respected leaders, throughout the world and across the political spectrum,
including the hundreds of political, military, diplomatic and national security
leaders worldwide who are part of the Global Zero movement. The Action Plan
builds on the vision of President Reagan whose goal was “the total elimination
one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth” and who – along with
President Gorbachev – began the process of nuclear arms reductions 25 years
ago.
This will not happen overnight. It will take years of work. We
are doing it and we will get there.
PHASE I
After ratifying the New START Treaty, the United States and
Russia agree to reduce to 1,000 total warheads each by 2018. Upon ratification of
the U.S.-Russian bilateral accord, all other nuclear weapons countries cap the
total number of warheads in their arsenals and commit to participate in
multilateral negotiations for proportionate reductions of stockpiles.
Preparation for multilateral negotiations begin.
PHASE II
Through a multilateral framework, the United States and Russia
reduce their nuclear arsenals to 500 total warheads each by 2021 – as other
nuclear weapons countries maintain a cap on their stockpiles until 2018 and
commit to a proportionate reductions until 2021. A rigorous and comprehensive
verification and enforcement system is implemented, including no-notice,
on-site inspections, and strengthened safeguards on the civilian nuclear fuel
cycle to prevent diversion of materials to build weapons.
PHASE III
The world’s nuclear-capable countries negotiate and sign a
Global Zero Accord: a legally binding international agreement for the phased,
verified, proportionate reduction of all nuclear arsenals to zero total
warheads by 2030.
PHASE IV
The phased, verified, proportionate dismantlement of all nuclear
arsenals to zero total warheads is complete by 2030. The comprehensive
verification and enforcement system prohibiting the development and possession
of nuclear weapons is in place to ensure that the world is never again
threatened by nuclear weapons.
get the action plan
http://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/GZAP
GET THE FACTS
The Road to Zero
Global Zero Action Plan
U.S. Nuclear Strategy
NATO-Russian Tactical Nukes
$1 Trillion Per Decade
FAQs
STAY CONNECTED
http://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/GZAP
Email Address
FacebookTwitterYouTubeRSS
Global Zero is the international movement for the elimination of
nuclear weapons.
Global Zero Home
TAKE ACTION
Will you join the movement and help us eliminate the nuclear
threat once and for all? Add your name now.
Watch and share our new video with Michael Douglas, Matt Damon,
Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Naomi Watts and a host of amazing artists!
Start a Global Zero chapter on your college or high school
campus today!
LEARN MORE
Frequently Asked Questions about the nuclear threat and the
Global Zero solution.
The Global Zero Action Plan for the elimination of all nuclear
weapons.
The Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Strategy Commission proposal for
deep cuts to the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
GZ IN THE NEWS
Scientists Developing Novel Technique That Could Facilitate
Nuclear Disarmament
جهانی سازی فتوای هستهای؛ راهی برای به صفر رساندن تسلیحات اتمی
Les réseaux sociaux, la solution pour dire non aux armes, selon
Michael Douglas
STAY CONNECTED
FacebookTwitterYouTube
® 2014 Global Zero
9
August 2013
|
|||
|
Department
of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York
|
MUST
ELIMINATE ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN ORDER TO ELIMINATE THEIR GRAVE RISK,
SECRETARY-GENERAL
SAYS IN MESSAGE TO MEMORIAL CEREMONY IN NAGASAKI
Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message to the
Peace Memorial Ceremony in Nagasaki, 9 August:
Today, people around the world join the citizens of Nagasaki in
commemorating the many thousands who died when this city became the victim of a
nuclear attack 68 years ago.
As we solemnly remember those who perished, we also pay our
respects to the hibakusha and their families who
survived. I have been enormously impressed by their determined efforts to
educate the world about the full humanitarian consequences of the use of
nuclear weapons. Their efforts will help to ensure that these
indiscriminate arms are never used again.
We must eliminate all nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the
grave risk they pose to our world. This will require persistent efforts
by all countries and peoples. A nuclear war would affect everyone, and
all have a stake in preventing this nightmare.
We may take a lead from the scholars and researchers at Nagasaki
University who have studied this issue, and strengthen disarmament and
non-proliferation education worldwide so a younger generation of emerging
leaders, voters, and taxpayers can understand the vital need for policies to
advance disarmament goals.
I count on civil society groups worldwide to help inform the
general public about the benefits of disarmament and the terrible risks of
failing to achieve it. I also call for diplomatic coalitions of States to
intensify their efforts to advance the global nuclear disarmament agenda.
I especially appeal to the States currently possessing nuclear
weapons, particularly those with the largest nuclear arsenals, to agree on deep
and verified reductions, stop developing new or modernized weapons, and
accelerate their individual and collective efforts to achieve a world free of
nuclear weapons.
To the citizens of Nagasaki and likeminded people around the
world, I assure you that you that the United Nations will be relentless in
pursuing this goal. Nuclear disarmament is one of the greatest legacies
we can pass on to future generations. Let us rededicate ourselves today
to realizing this vision.
GLOBAL ZERO MOVEMENT
www.globalzero.org/our-movement
Global
Zero
Powered
by a visionary group of 300 leaders and experts who support our bold,
step-by-step plan to eliminate all nuclear
weapons by 2030, the relentless ...
[PDF]
www.globalzero.org/files/gzap_6.0.pdf
Global
Zero
response
to the growing threats of proliferation and nuclear terrorism and dedicated to
achieving the phased, verified elimination of all nuclear
weapons. Global ...
www.globalzero.org/
Global
Zero
There
are more than 17000 nuclear weapons in nine countries. ...
clear: the only way to eliminate the global nuclear
danger is to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Zero_(campaign)
Wikipedia
Jump to Action plan - [edit].
The Global Zero plan for the phased, verified eliminationof
all nuclear weapons is a four-phased strategy to reach a
global ...
www.avaaz.org/en/time_to_global_zero/
Avaaz
A
citizens' campaign calling for global zero -- the elimination of nuclear
weapons in our world.
[PDF]
www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?...
European
Parliament
Sep 10,
2012 - on support for the Global Zero Action Plan for
the phased and verifiedelimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide.
Jarosław Wałęsa ...
www.valerieplamewilson.com/overview/
Global
Zero is the international movement for the elimination of
all nuclear ... plan toeliminate nuclear weapons, built
an international student movement with ...
www.baselpeaceoffice.org/.../389-members-european-parliament-suppor...
May 21,
2013 - ... have signed a Written Declaration of Support for the Global
ZeroAction Plan for the phased and verified elimination of
all nuclear weapons ...
www.baselpeaceoffice.org/.../global-zero-united-nations-diplomacy-and-...
Global
Zero promo calling on UN Security Council to eliminate all
WMD ... TheGlobal Zero plan for the elimination of nuclear
weapons has already gained some ...
1.
Google Search, July 13, 2014
www.icanw.org/
International Campaign
to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
The World Council of
Churches pushes for a prohibition on nuclear weapons. July 10th
2014. Following its week-long Central Committee Meeting, the World ...
You've visited this page 2
times. Last visit: 7/26/12
en.wikipedia.org/.../International_Campaign_to_Abolish_Nucl...
Wikipedia
The International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a global civil
society ... movement towards a process for a treaty
banning nuclear weapons.
www.sgi.org/.../celebrating-history-of-soka-gakkais-antinucl...
Soka Gakkai
Celebrating History of
Soka Gakkai's Antinuclear Weapons Movement ... SGI's global
peace movement, in which nuclear weapons abolition remains
a primary ...
5.
[PDF]
carnegieendowm...
o
Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (former...
Abolishing Nuclear
Weapons by
George Perkovich and James M. Acton, Adelphi Paper 396 ... On Stability and
the Movement Toward Abolition. 166. H. Müller.
www.thereaganvision.org/international-campaign-to-abolish-nuclear-wea...
Resistance to abolition
here was massive. These are shameful facts. Today there is a new
abomination, nuclear weapons, and a new abolition movement.
www.cnduk.org
› Campaigns
Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament
An intra-governmental
initiative to consider the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons could
lead to international movement on establishing a treaty to
ban ...
Declaration Calling for
the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons ... Although
a movementcalling for a ban on the testing of atomic or nuclear
weapons has arisen ...
www.joseitoda.org
› A Universal
Vision
The key part of the
declaration reads as follows: "Although a movement calling
for a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons has arisen around
the world, it is my ...
10.
Abolition 2000
www.abolition2000.org/
Abolition 2000 - No Nukes,
No Wars! ... Nuclear weapons sneak through Glasgow –
protestors arrested ... Posted: July 12th, 2014 under Movement News.
www.yesmagazine.org
› Peace &
Justice
Yes!
In Japan, a
Mothers' Movement Against Nuclear Power ... David Krieger:
The abolitionof nuclear weapons is our
responsibility, not a burden to pass on to our ...
Searches
related to Nuclear Weapons Abolition Movement
TWO
REVIEWS OF ELAINE SCARRY’S NUCLEAR
MONARCHY:
Craig Lambert
Richard Rhodes
Harvard Magazine
Nuclear
Weapons or Democracy
“Out of
ratio” weapons are essentially ungovernable.
by
Craig Lambert. Photograph
by Jim Harrison, Elaine Scarry
March-April
2014
Share
on email Email
KEYWORDS democracy, Elaine Scarry, nuclear weapons,
U.S. Constitution
[I read
this in The War Crimes Times (Summer
2014). –Dick]
THE
MOST FATEFUL OBJECT yet to appear on this planet could be the “nuclear
briefcase,” or “nuclear football,” a 40-pound titanium case containing
top-secret information and tools that enable the president of the United States
to launch a nuclear strike. The president carries authentication codes to
assure recipients that the source of any nuclear orders is actually the
Commander in Chief. When the president is away from the White House, a military
officer with the nation’s highest security clearance (“Yankee White”) always
remains nearby with this doomsday device, at times cabled to his wrist.
Due to
the extraordinary secretiveness surrounding nuclear matters, Americans have no
idea how many times presidents may have opened the nuclear briefcase or its
equivalent. We do know that Eisenhower considered using nuclear weapons twice,
during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954 and a flare-up over Berlin in 1959;
Ike also delegated the power to launch a strike to certain military commanders
if he were unavailable. Former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, M.B.A.
’39, LL.D. ’62, said, late in his life, that John F. Kennedy ’40, LL.D. ’56,
came “within a hairbreadth of nuclear catastrophe” three times—this in a
presidency lasting only 34 months. Lyndon Johnson contemplated deploying
nuclear arms to prevent China from building them. Richard Nixon considered
using them three times—other than in Vietnam—including one case in which North
Korea shot down a U.S. reconnaissance plane in 1969.
“The
crucial point is that there’s an interval of 30 or 40 years between those
incidents and our learning about them,” says Elaine Scarry, Cabot professor of
aesthetics and the general theory of value. “We wrongly assume that the Cuban
missile crisis is the model: ‘when the world is at risk, we know it.’ Well, we
don’t know it. In eight of these nine cases, we didn’t have a clue. Do we want
to simply guess about something like this, where millions of people stand to be
killed? We assume there would have to be a huge problem for us to contemplate
such a thing. Like, for example, shooting down a reconnaissance plane?
“It’s
widely acknowledged that nuclear weapons are incredibly susceptible to
accidental use or to seizure by a non-state actor or terrorist,” Scarry
continues. “But what has been insufficiently recognized is the biggest danger
of all: the belief that there is some ‘legitimate’ possession of these weapons,
that we are safe as long as there’s government oversight of them. In fact, they
are utterly incompatible with governance.”
In her
new book, Thermonuclear Monarchy:
Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (W.W. Norton), Scarry argues
that the very existence of nuclear arsenals is irreconcilable with the U.S.
Constitution and in fact betrays the basic purpose of the social contract that
governs any civil society: forestalling injurious behavior. “Nuclear weapons
undo governments, and undo anything that could be meant by democracy,” she
says. “They put the population completely outside the realm of overseeing our
entry into war—or having a say in their own survival or destruction. We have to
choose between nuclear weapons and democracy.”
IN HER BOOK, Scarry asserts that the United States, “…a country
formerly dependent on its population, its legislature, and its executive acting
in concert for any act of defense—has now largely eliminated its population and
its legislature from the sphere of defense, and relies exclusively on its
executive.”
Nuclear weapons are monarchic. Along with other weapons of mass
destruction, they are what Scarry calls “out-of-ratio” weapons: ones that give
a very small number of people the power to annihilate very large numbers of
people. “An out-of-ratio weapon makes the presence of the population at
the authorization end [of an attack] a structural impossibility,” she writes.
“New weapons inevitably change the nature of warfare,” she says, “but
out-of-ratio weapons have changed the nature of government.”
In a
practical sense, the speed and scale of an incoming nuclear attack make the
notion of congressional authorization of war ridiculous; such arms are fundamentally
beyond democratic control. “We had a choice: get rid of nuclear weapons or get
rid of Congress and the citizens,” Scarry explains. “We got rid of Congress and
the citizens.”
Since
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, American presidents have been
well aware that having a finger on the nuclear trigger gives them monstrous
power that dwarfs the petty squabbles of day-to-day political life. During the
1974 impeachment proceedings of Richard Nixon, he told the press, “I can go
into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people
will be dead.”
The
concentration of such outsized violent force in the hands of the American
president (and of the leaders of the other eight nuclear powers) has, Scarry
argues, largely undermined the three-part design of government that the framers
of the Constitution created to separate legislative, judicial, and executive
power. Instead, Washington has become like a three-handed poker game in which
one player holds all the high cards and billions of chips.
In
Article I, Section 8:11, the Constitution insists on a congressional
declaration for war to take place, Scarry says, yet, “since the invention of
atomic weapons, there has not been a formal congressional declaration of war.”
(The closest case was Congress’s conditional declaration for the Gulf War.) Thermonuclear Monarchy describes the
five cases of declared war in American history: the War of 1812, the Mexican
War of 1846, the Spanish-American War, and the two World Wars. Scarry remarks on
“how majestic Congress was in those cases.”
THE
AWESOME POWER that nuclear weapons invest in the executive branch essentially
disables the legislative one, she writes. “[O]nce Congress was stripped of its
responsibility for overseeing war—as happened the moment atomic weapons were
invented—it was, in effect, infantilized….Now, six decades later, book after
book has appeared describing Congress as ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘dead.’ Once
Congress regains its authority over war, however, there is every reason to
believe it will travel back along the reverse path, reacquiring the stature,
intelligence, eloquence, and commitment to the population it once had.”
Civic
stature and military stature are intimately linked. Scarry points to the
passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised African-American men. It
came on the heels of the Civil War, in which 180,000 black soldiers fought;
given this, blacks could hardly be denied the right to vote. Similarly, the
Twenty-Sixth Amendment, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, was ratified
after many teenaged soldiers had fought and died in the Vietnam War.
“It is
tempting to think that a country with monarchic arrangements in the realm of
nuclear war can maintain a more attractive form of government throughout the
rest of its civil fabric,” she writes. “That would be a mistake. A country is
its arrangements for national defense….”
The
Constitution and, more generally, the social contract, purposely make it
difficult to go to war. Scarry’s book makes clear that the social contract
arises from the need to prevent the injuries that people living in groups so
often cause one another. The solution involves putting brakes on the
concentration of power. “The only way you can civilize force is to distribute
it: give everyone a small share,” she says, adding that the Second Amendment’s
insistence on the citizens’ right to bear arms underlines this principle.
Urging that military powers be held within the social contract, John Locke
similarly warned, she notes, that anyone is “in a much worse condition, who is
exposed to the arbitrary power of one man, who has the command of 100,000, than
he that is exposed to the arbitrary power of 100,000 single men.” Nuclear
weapons eliminate individual soldiers; they condense the injuring power that
formerly depended on thousands of soldiers into a single weapon, and place it
at the disposal of a solitary leader.
“Actions
that cause major injury, like going to war, require collective
decisionmaking—which gives a great braking power,” she says. “You don’t want to
put impediments in the way of the good things in life—things like liberty,
lovemaking, party-going, studying, helping others. The social contract puts
impediments in the way of one thing: injury.”
War
surely causes more injury and death than any other action arising from human
intentions, and the Constitution (written in the wake of the Revolutionary War)
puts a double brake on warfare. War must pass through two gates to become a
reality. One is Congress, with its responsibility (now shirked) to declare war.
The second brake is the general population. “The mere fact that you required
the citizens to fight meant that the citizenry could say yes or no,” she
explains. “A war doesn’t get fought if the population doesn’t want it fought.
“People
like to say, ‘Soldiers obey—they do what they’re told,’ ” she continues. “It’s
not true. Soldiers do what they are told, but they do it thoughtfully—and
sometimes they don’t. The War of 1812 ended when it did because the population,
including soldiers and sailors, did not feel strong support for it. There were
soldier strikes all over England and Canada at the end of World War I; Winston
Churchill wrote to Lloyd George saying he wanted to go into Russia to support
the Whites against the Reds, ‘but the soldiers won’t let me.’ A big reason the
South lost the Civil War was that 250,000 soldiers deserted; every time Robert
E. Lee looked over his shoulder, he saw a smaller army. Soldiers ratify a war.”
THE
SECRECY that cloaks nuclear policy and the technical aspects of nuclear
arms—what happens in the private huddles between a president and his advisers,
for example—keeps these policies insulated from any genuine, searching
critique, she believes. Even the weapons themselves remain sequestered in deep-sea
waters, high in the sky, or at remote land locations in Wyoming, Montana, or
North Dakota, for example. It can be difficult even to communicate with the
military personnel trusted to oversee them.
The USS
Rhode Island is one of 18 Ohio class submarines armed with nuclear ballistic or
guided missiles that patrol the world’s waters. Its armaments can destroy all
human, animal, and plant life on a continent. When deeply submerged, as in
wartime or any moment of high political tension, Scarry writes,“…it can
o-n-l-y-r-e-c-e-i-v-e-t-i-n-y-a-m-o-u-n-t-s-o-f-i-n-f-o-r-m-a-t-i-o-n-v-e-r-y-v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y.
In fact, the first three letters of the hyphenated message would have taken
fifteen minutes to arrive, and the submarine would have had no way to confirm
its receipt of the letters.” The information gets conveyed, she explains, “…in
Extremely Low Frequency (or ELF) waves, giant radio waves each 2500 miles in
length that can (unlike any other band of the electromagnetic spectrum)
penetrate the ocean depths. Until 2004, ELF waves were launched by a giant
antenna in Michigan and Wisconsin that is eighteen acres in size.” (The Navy
has not disclosed the successor to ELF.)
The
nuclear-armed submarine, then, is an obscenely powerful engine of destruction
and death that, at the most critical moments, seems all but incommunicado.
Thermonuclear Monarchy builds on this: “…to say nuclear weapons are
‘ungovernable’ is to say that they are unreachable by the human will, the
populations of the earth can have no access to them.… The membrane that
separates us from their lethal corridors is one-directional: the weapons may
suddenly unzip the barrier, erupt into our world, eliminate us; but we cannot,
standing on the other side, unzip the barrier, step into their world, and eliminate
them.” She elaborates: “People say, ‘Once something is invented it can’t be
un-invented.’ What are we talking about? These things we’ve invented can kill
and destroy the whole earth, but we can’t get rid of them? Of course we can.”
The
Ohio class submarines nicely epitomize the furtiveness of the nuclear world.
Eight new ones were launched between 1989 and 1997, during the years of the
so-called “peace dividend.” Each of these subs carries nuclear weapons with
eight times the total blast power expended by all Allied and Axis countries in
World War II. The 14 Trident II SSBNs (ballistic-missile launching submarines)
have, among them, the firepower to kill all life on 14 continents. “There are
only seven continents,” Scarry dryly remarks. Even so, news reports did not
cover the launching, christening, and commissioning of any of these submarines,
even in the states whose names they bore.
The
shroud of secrecy keeps the general citizenry ignorant of basic facts about the
nation’s nuclear arrangements. Most Americans do not realize that the country
has a first-use policy. A 2004 poll found that the majority estimated that the
United States has 200 nuclear weapons; the actual current figure is 7,700.
Meanwhile, 73 percent of Americans say they want the total elimination of
nuclear weapons, as do similar proportions of Russians and Canadians.
The
United States and Russia are now reducing their stockpiles of nuclear warheads
in accordance with negotiated agreements. This is a positive step, Scarry says,
though she cautions that the reductions in forces “may simply be a way to
retire obsolete weapons to make way for newer ones.” (Twelve more Ohio class
submarines are slated for construction between 2019 and 2035.)
RECENT
SCIENTIFIC WORK on the “nuclear winter” (the hypothetical climate change
following a nuclear exchange), Scarry reports, indicates that any country
launching a nuclear attack would be committing suicide—rendering the weapons,
in effect, unusable. An exchange that exploded as little as 0.015 percent of
the world’s nuclear arsenal—say, between lesser nuclear powers like India and
Pakistan—could leave 44 million dead immediately—and one billion more people
likely to perish in the following month, given the effect on food supplies and
the disruption of agriculture.
During
the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy stated that the United
States had no quarrel with the Cuban people or the Soviet people. But, Scarry
says, “These weapons are not designed for a showdown of political leaders. They
are going to massacre the citizens. No weapon ever invented has remained
unused. Does anyone think that in the next 100 years, one of these governments
that has them, won’t use them?”
In a
2005 Foreign Policy essay, “Apocalypse Soon,” Robert McNamara bluntly declared,
“U.S. nuclear weapons policy [is] immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and
dreadfully dangerous.” Scarry agrees, and declares, “Nuclear weapons have to be
gotten rid of, worldwide. But this cannot be done if the United States is just
sitting there with this huge arsenal, which dwarfs what any other nation has.
We worry about Iran and North Korea and the huge existential threat if these
countries get nuclear weapons. What is mysterious, though, is that we fail to
see the huge existential threat that we pose to the world with what is by far
the most powerful nuclear arsenal anywhere.”
In
1995, 78 countries asked the International Court of Justice to declare nuclear
arms illegal. In response, the U.S. Departments of Defense and State jointly
argued that using, and even making first use of, nuclear weapons does not
violate any treaty regarding human rights or the environment. Nor would the
death of millions via a nuclear attack violate the 1948 UN convention on
genocide; they asserted that “genocide” applies only to the annihilation of
national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups.
Scarry
instead suggests that the United States act in concert with other nuclear
nations, all using their constitutions, to dismantle and permanently eliminate
these weapons. The first step, she says, is “reanimating our awareness that we
are responsible—we are in control, or should be in control, of our
self-defense.” Restoring the military draft would help return responsibility
for decisions about war to the whole population, and make political leaders far
more accountable to the citizenry. “Little by little, the importance of the
Constitution has been obscured,” she states. “We should require Congress to
oversee our entry into war. A president who does not get a congressional
declaration should no longer be president. That is absolutely an impeachable
offense. The population has to see how important this provision is.”
Furthermore, in negotiations for nuclear disarmament, “if those who are
negotiating know that the population is insisting that these weapons be
eliminated—rather than just leaving it up to a handful of negotiators—that will
help them as negotiators.
“There
is no transparency if you’re waiting 30 or 40 years to get the information,”
she continues. “Presidents ought to report about close calls, for example.
Maybe each year in the State of the Union address, the president should have to
say how many times a nuclear option was considered in the past year. And we
ought to feel that it is our responsibility to ask about these things. History
has to show that we tried.”
In an
earlier book, Scarry analyzed the events of 9/11, showing how the citizens on
Flight 93 were able to act effectively to disrupt the terrorists’ planned
mission. “They deliberated, they actually voted, and they acted to bring down
that plane,” she says. “Whereas the Pentagon could not even defend the
Pentagon, let alone the rest of the country: their habits and training were all
directed toward this idea of war with a foreign country. The fighter jets at
first flew off away from the coast, in the wrong direction. But terrorists like
the shoe bomber—undone by fellow passengers. The so-called Christmas bomber in
Detroit—undone by passengers. The Times Square car bomb—an ordinary vendor noticed
something wrong.”
Perhaps
millions of citizens will find something wrong with a far greater bomb threat,
and defuse it. Scarry ends the first chapter of Thermonuclear Monarchy with a
challenge. “The two artifacts, the social contract and the nuclear array, are
mutually exclusive,” she writes. “To exist each requires that the other be
destroyed. Which one will it be?”
Craig
A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of this magazine.
Absolute
Power
‘Thermonuclear Monarchy,’ by
Elaine Scarry
By RICHARD
RHODES MARCH
21, 2014
Photo
CreditRussell
Edling/Andrew Shearer
Continue
reading the main story Share This Page
The
problem posed by nuclear weapons — that they work by holding their possessors
hostage, with the threat of catastrophic retaliation if used — has confounded
thinking about them since the beginning of the nuclear age. One of its earliest
analysts, the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of
the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb,
once compared the two dominant nuclear powers of his day and ours, the United
States and Russia, to “scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the
other, but only at the risk of his own life.” Oppenheimer chose not to note
that scorpions, a species almost as well known for belligerence as Homo
sapiens, would sooner or later take that risk. We humans have not done so, at
least not so far. But while circling each other warily during the Cold War, the
United States and the Soviet Union occupied themselves with stockpiling enough
weapons to freeze out food production with nuclear winter and destroy the human
world.
With
the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was some expectation that
nuclear weapons might be recognized as Cold War relics, irrelevant in a less
polarized world and a common danger to all. Encouragingly, four nuclear states
— Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and South Africa — voluntarily disarmed. But
these most destructive of weapons turned out to have apparent value as
guarantors of national security and tokens of national prestige. The
superpowers negotiated reductions in their arsenals even as a secondary wave of
proliferation began or continued in Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea,
while Iran and Iraq have so far been restrained from going nuclear with either
a combination of threats and rewards or actual invasion.
Today
there are still about 17,300 nuclear weapons in the world, most of them
American or Russian, with a combined destructive force equivalent to 1,500
pounds of TNT for each and every man, woman and child on earth. The detonation
of even a fraction of this stockpile could produce a worldwide Chernobyl,
followed by a new ice age of dark starvation. Not even Dante imagined a fate so
cruel for humankind.
“Thermonuclear
Monarchy” is only the latest in a long series of efforts to think through the
question of how to eliminate these terrible and useless weapons, efforts that
go back all the way to the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, prepared by a group
of experts led by Oppenheimer himself for submission to the newly formed United
Nations. Elaine Scarry’s book is perhaps most famously preceded by Jonathan
Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth” from 1982. Scarry is a literary critic and
social theorist who teaches at Harvard, best known for her highly original 1985
book, “The Body in Pain,” an examination of the role of wounding in the
authentication of belief.
That
earlier work broke new ground. From it I learned to understand why wounding and
killing in war might lead to victory or surrender even well short of the total
annihilation of the enemy. There are useful insights in “Thermonuclear
Monarchy” as well, but over all it fails to persuade. It explores the baleful
political consequences of limiting the control of nuclear weapons to a select
few, and the authority to launch them to even fewer — in the case of the United
States, to the president alone in what amounts to his monarchical power.
Scarry
illustrates her point most effectively early on, quoting Richard Nixon in 1974,
when he was threatened with impeachment. Revealingly, he told reporters, “I can
go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million
people will be dead.” Well, he didn’t dare, and no one has dared since Harry
Truman in 1945, in the last days of a long and terrible war, the worst in human
history, hoping to put an end to it.
Why no
one has dared, so far, is probably the crux of the matter, but that is not a
story Scarry chooses to tell. Why we Americans collectively agree to tolerate
concentrating world-destroying power in the hands of one fallible human being
is another story Scarry bypasses, though it goes a long way toward explaining
the peculiar logic or illogic of accumulating weapons so destructive that our
only hope of surviving them has been to prepare to strike first and destroy an
enemy’s weapons before he has time to launch them against us. Why our elected
leaders continue to believe that such genocidal weapons are legitimate and
moral in our hands, but illegitimate and immoral in the hands of our enemies,
rather than eradicating them from the earth, as we did smallpox, is yet another
mystery Scarry chooses not to investigate.
I am
not reviewing the book Scarry didn’t write. In a 1999 interview she said she
had already spent 13 years working on the subject of “Thermonuclear Monarchy,” and
she has previously rehearsed most of its arguments in shorter essays and books.
Twenty-eight years is surely a gestation sufficient to justify expecting a
comprehensive examination of a problem, even so world-scale a problem as
nuclear weapons.
Instead,
Scarry constructs a legally interesting but highly abstract argument about the
consent of the governed. She clarifies what the Second
Amendment was about before it was trivialized into merely a guarantee of
personal pistol-packing. That amendment, she says, provided a second level of
consent by the people, after the consent of both houses of Congress, to a
president’s taking the nation into war, a level enforced by tens of thousands
of personal decisions about whether to shoulder one’s rifle, don one’s kit and
field cap, and muster strong. It’s an inspiring picture, but Congress long ago
ceded most of its war-making power to the imperial presidency, and the
termination of the draft after popular resistance to the (undeclared) Vietnam
War mooted the “well regulated militia” of the amendment. A professional army,
however often and obsequiously we thank it for its heroism, ultimately answers
to the commander in chief, not to the people.
Scarry
also explores some curious corners of the nuclear issue. The description of how
Switzerland has prepared its citizens to survive at least the initial effects
of a nuclear war, retreating into shelters and drawing in their national
treasures behind them like the epiplastrons on a turtle’s shell, is charming,
however futile it would be against the long, toxic darkness of nuclear winter.
How emergency personnel, through training, prepare themselves to react quickly
where the untrained might panic or freeze seems less than relevant with regard
to a Congress hardly capable these days of reacting at all, much less moving
rapidly enough to authorize a war under threat of nuclear attack.
It
comes as no surprise, then, to arrive at the final page of this long-gestated,
often eloquent if also often tedious book and find in its last paragraph the
claim that the constitutional provisions for declaring war and mustering the
militia only look like inadequate tools because “they are at present lying
unused on the ground,” that “we should use whatever tool” — unspecified — “can
best accomplish the dismantling,” and that “if there is a better tool, please
tell us what it is, and help us to see how to use it.” I would have thought the
rich literature of nuclear disarmament had already done that. The difficulty
isn’t that the kit of tools is missing the right wrench. The difficulty,
despite several close calls, is that no one in authority believes the damned
things will go off, and so everyone wants to play with them, like treasure
hunters wallowing in a vault of golden coins laced with guardian scorpions,
like children discovering the loaded gun their parents thoughtlessly neglected
to lock away.
THERMONUCLEAR
MONARCHY
Choosing
Between Democracy and Doom
By
Elaine Scarry
Illustrated.
582 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
Richard Rhodes is the
author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and three other volumes of nuclear
history. His most recent book is “Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough
Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.”
A
version of this review appears in print on March 23, 2014, on page BR17 of
the Sunday Book Review with the
headline: Absolute Power. Order Reprints|Today's
Paper|Subscribe
Call Your Senators
CONTACT ARKANSAS
|
Boozman,
John - (R - AR)
|
Class III
|
|
320 Hart Senate Office Building
|
|
|
(202) 224-4843
|
|
 |
|
|
Pryor,
Mark L. - (D - AR)
|
Class II
|
|
255 Dirksen Senate Office Building
|
|
|
(202) 224-2353
|
|
|
Contents Nuclear Weapons #19
Anti-Nuclear Organizations
WAND in Action
Council
for a Livable World
Latest
No. of Nukewatch Quarterly
Catholic Opposition to Nuclear Weapons
Transform Now Ploughshares
The Catholic Worker, (May 2014)
Pax Christi
Wellen
on Masco, Nuclear Weapons Scientists
The New Yorker, a
Recent Assessment of Dr. Strangelove
Glenn
Alcalay, Radiation Experiments in Pacific, Marshall Islands
Robert
Alvarez, US Military Radioactive Wastes
|
|
END NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION NEWSLETTER #20, July
20, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment