The recently released film Countdown to Zero has sparked controversy amongst disarmament advocates. Local disarmament groups were encouraged by national arms control groups and funders to turn people out for the film, but some who have seen it believe that at best it is unhelpful, and at worst that it might do more to build support for the next round of U.S. armed counterproliferation abroad than to advance disarmament. (see Darwin BondGraham, “Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement,” MRZine.org). United for Peace and Justice has made available a leaflet, Countdown to Zero? Or fight for a nuclear free future! designed to fill in some of the key information about nuclear weapons and disarmament that the film leaves out.

Countdown to Zero is intended to be part of a broader campaign, with its main foundation funder, the Ploughshares Fund, encouraging its grantees to turn people out for the film and offering further grants “for activities that will take advantage of Countdown to Zero and help catalyze public support for a world without nuclear weapons.” I haven’t seen the film yet, but some things I have seen so far of the surrounding campaign raise troubling questions about its intentions and its likely effect.

On July 29, ex-CIA officer Valerie Plame, one of the experts featured in the film, appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. The segment promoted the film, consisting of excerpts interspersed with back and forth from Plame and Matthews with a Countdown to Zero logo running in the corner of the screen throughout. The segment began by focusing on the alleged danger that Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda might get nuclear weapons, with another expert featured in the film, Graham Allison, stating several times that Bin-Laden had expressed the desire to kill four million Americans. The accompanying images were of Bin Laden and AK47-wielding Al-Qaeda members. Most of the rest of the segment was devoted to Plame and other experts, both in film excerpts and in her back and forth with Matthews, hammering on the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. Plame asserted in an excerpt from the film that that Iran “without question” is seeking nuclear weapons, and went on at length about how good Iran is at concealing and protecting its nuclear efforts.

In the four minute and forty second clip, only about twenty seconds can be characterized as even mentioning disarmament–and then only as a far distant goal, albeit ultimately the only definitive solution to the much-emphasized ‘nuclear terrorist’ and ‘rogue state’ threats of today. The rest of the segment was devoted to the dangers posed by the possibility that bad people who are Muslims of one kind or another might get or use The Bomb.

In fact, if this segment was the first thing you had ever seen about nuclear weapons, you would have no idea that anyone on earth already has a nuclear arsenal aside from Russia and Pakistan. Russia comes into the picture only as somewhere that terrorists might buy or steal nuclear weapons or materials to make them. And in the closing seconds of the segment, when asked by Matthews what posed the greatest nuclear threat–Pakistan, Iran, or terrorists (apparently the only nuclear dangers on the mainstream media menu) Plame didn’t take issue with the framing of the question. She chose Pakistan, because it is in “such a volatile region” and “we cannot have a lot of confidence in their command and control.” Pakistan lies in close proximity to unmentioned nuclear powers China and India, shares a contiguous land mass with unmentioned nuclear powers Israel and France and barely-mentioned nuclear former superpower Russia, and is fighting a covert and overt war as client (and perhaps partial adversary) of the unmentioned nuclear-armed sole superpower, the United States, and unmentioned nuclear power and former regional colonial overlord England. A “volatile region” indeed.

There was no discussion of the thousands of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. And despite listing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as a possible consequence of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, the segment doesn’t mention that Israel has had nuclear weapons for forty years.

So one of Countdown to Zero’s experts promoting the film had the opportunity for almost five full minutes on national television to talk about the film’s message, and spent almost the whole time talking about the threat posed by nuclear weapons that don’t exist–those that might some day come into the hands of Iran or ‘terrorists’– rather than the threat posed by the thousands of nuclear weapons that for decades have posed a threat to the survival of humanity. And the only existing, state-owned nuclear weapons that were presented as a significant danger were those of Pakistan (unless ‘terrorists’ manage to steal a Russian nuke). An apt name for the segment might have been Fear the Islamic Bomb (and don’t worry about the rest).

The mainstream, Washington D.C.-centered arms control and disarmament groups seldom advocate anything these days that strays much outside the boundaries deemed “reasonable” within the discourse of the two major political parties. Both of those parties have been captured by an oligarchy that controls a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth and productive capacity, and that is committed to protecting its extraordinarily privileged status in large part by means of permanent global military dominance. Until this state of affairs begins to change, disarmament will remain a distant and constantly receding dream, promised when politically expedient but never delivered. Those who insist on having more power than anyone else will be the last to disarm.

Disarmament initiatives emanating from these circles should be examined closely to determine whether they are likely to contribute to real disarmament progress or instead mainly are aimed at preserving or increasing military supremacy for those who have it, or perhaps are stalking horses for broader politico-military strategies, such as regime change in states targeted for other reasons. In the current political context, the MSNBC segment featuring Countdown to Zero looked less likely to “catalyze public support for a world without nuclear weapons” than to catalyze support for more U.S. wars sold to the public as necessary to ‘reduce the nuclear danger.’

(based on a talk given at a protest outside Vandenberg Air Force Base, June 5, 2010).

We are now several years in to a deep global economic and political crisis that shows no sign of abating. Those in command of the world’s political systems seem capable of doing little beyond protecting the immediate interests of privileged elements in their societies. At the same time, the familiar forms of oppositional activity seem spent, unable to pose a coherent and convincing alternative to the current order of things. Movements for peace and for a society that is more fair economically and sustainable ecologically can be found everywhere, but often are fragmented by specialization or particularized grievances and mired in habitual forms of thought and action. It is essential that all of us in these movements try to develop a broader understanding of this time and its challenges, starting from our particular work and location in the world and sketching the connections, however tentatively, to the larger whole. This will be one such sketch, with its starting point in disarmament work in the heartland of the U.S. aerospace-military-industrial complex in California.

Disarmament “progress” in the United States: rhetoric vs. reality

Last month in New York, the states that are parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty met to review the status of the treaty and the performance of its parties, a review that occurs every five years. After opening the conference with general endorsements of the concept of nuclear disarmament, the United States (together with other nuclear weapons states) spent the remainder of the month doing its best to weaken or eliminate language in drafts of the Review Conference final document that would impose any substantive disarmament obligations on the nuclear weapons states, such as time limits or definite commitments to negotiate a convention for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile in Washington D.C., the Obama administration proposals for increases in nuclear weapons spending were moving through Congress, the only significant opposition coming from those who claim that the budget increases are too small.We now have a flurry of elite rhetorical enthusiasm for disarmament, and much celebration of a U.S.-Russia treaty that will have little effect on the thousands of nuclear weapons they currently deploy, and even those requirements aren’t mandatory until 2017. But a few hundred nuclear weapons can destroy any country on earth, and a thousand are more could have effects that destroy much of the world’s civilization, killing a significant portion of its inhabitants.

And in this year’s budget request, the Obama administration, if anything, seems determined to outflank its Congressional critics from the right, proposing a 10% increase in nuclear warhead research and production funding and further increases for future years. And that’s just the Department of Energy budget. The Defense Department budget also has sizable increases for nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In evaluating the level of commitment to disarmament of this administration, it might be wise to remember the observation repeated by several economists of the last century, that “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”

In early June I spoke at a protest at the gates of Vandenberg Air Force Base, a vast installation sprawling for miles along the southern California coast. Unlike the rest of the U.S. economy, Vandenberg is thriving, playing key roles in both the present and the future of this country’s war cycle, fighting endless wars in the present while striving endlessly for dominance in all imaginable wars to come. Vandenberg represents a kind of microcosm both of the gigantic U.S. military machine and of the upper echelons of U.S. society, tending ever more towards a perpetual exercise in maintaining power over others through violence while hiding behind layers of gates, guards, and guns.

The United States is continuing a broad effort aimed at developing new generations of strategic weapons and refining the techniques for using them, spending far more on high-tech weapons than any other country. This effort today includes upgrading existing intercontinental ballistic missiles and planning for work on next generation long-range missiles. For decades, Vandenberg Air Force Base has tested new generations of long range missiles, and continues to flight test those now operational.

Vandenberg is both a test range and one of the first two deployment sites for mid-course ballistic missile defense interceptors. And just a few weeks ago, the Air Force launched a Hypersonic Technology Vehicle from Vandenberg aimed at a target area at Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific. That test was part of a program to develop a new generation of maneuverable gliding delivery vehicles that will be able to hit targets anywhere on earth within an hour or two. If deployed, these systems are intended to carry highly accurate non-nuclear payloads, permitting destruction by missile at global ranges with non-nuclear weapons for the first time. And one of the sites being considered for deployment is Vandenberg Air Force Base, supposedly to avoid confusion with the launch of nuclear-armed missiles from their bases in the Midwest.

Vandenberg is where the present and future of U.S. war making comes together. Many of the military satellites used for surveillance, to target weapons and to provide communications for current U.S. wars are launched here. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg does day to day planning of missions for the positioning and use of military satellites in those ongoing wars.

According to a Vandenberg Air Force Base fact sheet,

“The Joint Space Operations Center… is a synergistic command and control weapon system focused on planning and executing USSTRATCOM’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space… mission. The purpose of the JSpOC is to provide a focal point for the operational employment of worldwide joint space forces, and enables the Commander, [Joint Functional Component Command for Space] to integrate space power into global military operations.”

It is this globe-girdling network of command centers and satellites that allows young Americans sitting at an air force base in Nevada, looking at a screen and manipulating buttons and joy sticks, to use pilotless drone aircraft to kill people on the other side of the world with no more risk, and little more existential engagement, than if they were playing a video game.

The Obama military budget also includes a ramp up of funding over the next five years for the “prompt global strike” weapons recently tested at Vandenberg. It should be noted that there are nothing but paper policy restrictions preventing the United States from using these new delivery systems technologies for nuclear weapons. Even in its conventional version, global strike underscores the aggressive global stance of the US military and its determination to maintain global military dominance, further complicating arms control efforts. It is also noteworthy that the launch vehicle used for the test was made from parts of MX missiles, nuclear-armed ICBMs decommissioned as a result of a prior round of arms agreements, another illustration of the ambiguities of current approaches to arms control.

Beyond single issue politics: understanding the connections

After decades in disarmament work, I have come to believe that disarmament initiatives unaccompanied by strong social movements for democracy, global economic equity, and a more ecologically sustainable way of life are highly unlikely to create the political conditions in which significant progress towards disarmament can occur. For those of us who work on disarmament, our goal must be to better understand what part disarmament work can play in these broader movements for fundamental social change.

We need a way of looking at the world as it now is. Our approach must acknowledge the obstacles as well as the opportunities involved in transforming the global economy and our societies if they are to become ecologically sustainable, democratic, and peaceful.

A significant part of this approach is a better understanding of the political nature of technology choices. We live in a world dominated by immense organizations that deploy particular combinations of advanced technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology. These organizations are instrumentally rationalized both within and without. They are largely authoritarian in internal structure, and deal with the world around them instrumentally–as an environment to be controlled to the maximum extent possible in order to achieve their goals.

The main goal of these organizations is to extract a privileged wealth stream for their upper echelon inhabitants from the rest of an increasingly globalized economy. They also form alliances, many of them long–running, to do so. The “military industrial complex” was only the first of these to be recognized.

The legal character of these organizations varies from place to place, with the public/private boundary and the powers of large private organizations defined differently in different countries. But similar kinds of organizations–by which I mean organizations deploying similar sets of technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology–in significant ways behave alike whether defined as “public” or “private.”

Technologies are not chosen solely because they “work” better in some abstract sense, or even because they are somehow “cheaper” in some fundamental sense related to the organization of the physical world, for example in terms of their thermodynamic efficiency. They are chosen because they work well in combination with other aspects of modern large organization techniques to gain and sustain wealth and power for those in the upper echelons of the immense organizations that dominate every aspect of global economic and political life today.

The upper level inhabitants of these organizations constitute roughly a fifth of the world’s population, and the divide between them and the rest is growing, as that top fifth and its predatory organizations insatiably seize, consume, and degrade the land, resources, and ecosystems that all depend on.

This split, I believe, is the defining political fact of our time. It limits society’s potential for adaptation to resource and ecological limits and drives the growing chaos and conflict that the dominant constellations of large organizations meet only with more militarized high–tech “security.” And providing this security at every level from executive protection to high performance strike aircraft to ever more accurate long range missiles has become one of the most dependable strategies for organizational growth and profit everywhere.

It is all of this we must understand and confront. Nuclear weapons are only a leading instance, their vivid irrationality both exemplar and metaphor for the whole.

Beyond balance sheet economics and politics: neither we nor the world are for sale

In August of 1967 Martin Luther King said,

“A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them–make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.”[1]

King understood that slavery was an expression of the social system that was and is the Western-style modernity. And he was telling us that one of its fundamental characteristics–the treating of human beings as objects, as things to be bought, sold, and profited from–was deeply rooted, and is with us still. Equally important is the same system’s reduction of the natural world to an array of things to be manipulated and controlled, seen as nothing more than a source of resource inputs and profit.

Ultimately, it is these two fundamental characteristics of the economic and political system that has come to dominate the planet that we must overcome.

These goals may seem huge and abstract, and also utterly impractical where the immense institutions of power and profit-seeking instrumentalism dominate every aspect of the political, economic, and cultural landscape. Yet we must do what we can to seek real change, even when what we can do seems awfully small.But at the same time, we are told over and over by political and NGO professionals that we must seek only incremental change, only what is “practical” and “achievable.”

So what are our guideposts? How can we tell if the incremental steps offered us by our professional and political classes even are moving in the right direction?

In that same address, King also said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

I believe that this was, and is, less a description than a prescription. Only we can be the vehicle of that justice, only we can bend that arc.

The measure of the incremental steps we are offered by our political classes today must be how much they move us in the direction of a more just world.

Unfortunately we’re not seeing much movement towards fairness and justice, on disarmament or climate change or anything else. Instead we see the further entrenchment of a political and economic order that treats both people and nature like things, as profit centers to be exploited. We are seeing what should be opportunities for reform used to mask the further consolidation of power by the most powerful institutions.

Here in the United States, an opportunity for health care reform turned into a mandate that will force Americans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to a health insurance industry whose financial interests are served by providing as little health care as possible. The clear need for an energy system transformed to prevent catastrophic climate change and to replace diminishing fossil fuels has instead been turned into a veritable Christmas tree for existing energy interests, from coal to oil to nuclear power, with a small fig leaf of subsidies for renewable energy alternatives thrown in.

As oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico from a well drilled by an industry that has successfully socialized much of its risks through liability limits for the damage it causes, the administration pushes forward with an energy plan that will encourage more offshore drilling, and that will subsidize a nuclear energy industry that also enjoys limits on its liability that are a tiny fraction of the damage that a serious accident would cause. But of course we are told that serious nuclear accidents, like massive deep sea oil blowouts, are far too unlikely to worry about.

And the much touted new START treaty, advertised as the first step on the path towards disarmament, will have a still–unknown cost, equal to whatever the powerful advocates of the nuclear weapons complex can extort. The Obama administration already has made a down payment that will postpone meaningful movement towards disarmament for a decade or more, promising to spend at least $180 billion over the next ten years to sustain and modernize US nuclear forces and the vast array of laboratories and factories that build and maintain them.

In early March, I joined thousands of people in California and around the United States, protesting rising tuitions at public universities and colleges and cuts in services at all levels of public education. Professors and students, school teachers, parents, and bus drivers organized rallies and marches large and small all across the state.The day was full of a sense that people are ready for greater change, and to take more action to get it.

Speaker after speaker called for ending California’s undemocratic supermajority requirements for budget and tax legislation, and for progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy to reverse the steady flow of wealth upward that has been a defining feature of US economic and political life for the last three decades. There were signs everywhere with messages like “Fund Schools, Not War!”

Whether or not it will develop into one, the wave of actions rippling out from the public university protests have some of the makings of a social movement. There was a sense of urgency, grounded in an understanding of how the issues affected each of us–and all of us–directly. People from different segments of society–not only students but relatively privileged university professors and the people who maintain the classrooms and laboratories they depend on, public school teachers and parents who both are burdened by a regressive tax system and need public institutions to educate their children–were starting to have a conversation directly with each other, and coming to realize that the growing crisis in institutions they all depend on in different ways has deeper causes, and may require significant social change if there are to be solutions that work for all.

Nuclear disarmament work today stands in sharp contrast to energetic new movements brimming with potential–and also stands largely apart from them. Most people don’t think about nuclear weapons from one end of the year to another, and don’t perceive nuclear weapons as constituting a concrete threat to themselves or the people and places they love. Most of the grassroots disarmament organizations are gone. For most arms control and disarmament professionals, the notion of building a social movement, and beyond that a movement that addresses not only the causes of war and entrenched militarism, but that builds a common understanding of the causes of the injustices that afflict most of humanity, has largely receded into the past. Yet if nuclear disarmament work is to avoid irrelevance, much less make genuine progress in these turbulent times, the first priority must be helping to build movements looking for new ways towards justice, and by doing so saving our world.

Beyond expert rationales for the current order of things: restoring our divided consciousness

In 1930, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Millikan wrote that “One may sleep in peace with the consciousness that the Creator has put some foolproof elements into his handiwork, and that man is powerless to do it any titanic damage.”

This statement, by one who was a leading “expert” in his time, has been proven false not only by nuclear weapons, but by the devastating ecological effects of endless accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and today by the growing ability of human beings to manipulate the most basic building blocks of the natural world itself.These threats to our future are manifestations of a global society in which most resources and most of the earth itself is controlled by a tiny minority, with the choices which affect us all dressed up as inevitable and necessary by experts who work in their service.

A common theme in all of these issues is that decisions are made at a great remove, both socially and geographically, from the places where the human and ecological impacts are felt. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that in a society that depends on the systematic analysis of cause and effect in order to control both nature and human beings, one of the main strategies for maintaining wealth and power is avoiding responsibility, whether moral or financial, for the effects of one’s actions. From the limits on liability for the BP blowout to the socialization of wealthy bankers and investors’ risk by the bank bailout to the endless PR spin employed to absolve every act of malfeasance by the powerful to the soldier fighting a push–button war, killing people he will never truly see, we have created a world that has systematically separated cause and effect. By doing so we have largely destroyed our collective moral consciousness.

It is this same eliding of consequences that allows us, through our most powerful institutions, to prepare every day for our own annihilation, an end that becomes more likely the longer we allow it to go on.

This separation of cause and effect also intensifies a phenomenon which is central to the modern order of things: the way people who work in large organizations split their consciousness, focusing only on the task at hand and on the use of their technical or professional skills, leaving at the door all other pieces of their humanity, the fact that they are mothers or fathers or sons or daughters or creatures with living bodies in a living world.

This state of affairs constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for nonviolent thought and political action. We need to find creative ways to bring this splitting to light, and make it difficult to sustain. By doing so, we may transform not only our opponents in a particular conflict, but ourselves as well. We too have been raised in this system, and fall back easily into our own ingrained training and habits, even if we are doing what we think of as work for social change.

Our task is to build a politics that can give voice and decision making power to all those who affected by the decisions of the huge organizations that now dominate our lives, and by doing so democratize the economy, and with it decisions about technology choice. We need to build a social movement that brings these themes together, starting with people where they live, from the bottom up.

references

1. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, August 16, 1967

2. Robert Millikan (Nobel 1923), “Alleged Sins of Science,” in Scribner’s Magazine, 87(2), 1930, pp. 119-30, quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 534.

]]> http://disarmamentactivist.org/2010/07/02/disarmament-work-and-justice-in-a-divided-world/feed/ http://disarmamentactivist.org/2010/04/17/civil-society-disarmament-and-the-need-for-new-beginnings/ http://disarmamentactivist.org/2010/04/17/civil-society-disarmament-and-the-need-for-new-beginnings/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:24:47 +0000 admin Disarmament Nuclear weapons--global Social movements and protest http://disarmamentactivist.org/2010/04/17/civil-society-disarmament-and-the-need-for-new-beginnings/ Andrew Lichterman

In May, disarmament organizations will assemble alongside government delegations meeting for the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. Coming together in side events between attempts to pursue and persuade diplomats has become a familiar practice among the world’s nongovernmental organizations, and should provide an opportunity to reflect and to develop strategies together. The focus on governments, however, often overshadows our own discussions, limiting their scope to what those in power might be persuaded to do in the near term and how we might persuade them to do it.

As we gather this year, humanity is confronted with several crises, each different but all ultimately intertwined. We face the decline of our natural environment, with climate change being only one of the human-induced transformations destroying natural and man-made systems from which we draw our sustenance today, and limiting our options for how we will live in the future.

These changes strike the poorest first–those who cannot afford to move, build expensive new infrastructure, or import the means of existence from afar when their locale is devastated by a global mode of production dedicated to short-term growth heedless of the long-term consequences. As competition for key nonrenewable resources intensifies, essentials of food and energy devour an increasing portion of their income, creating a rising cycle of misery exacerbated by a two tier global economy in which immensely powerful private corporations destroy local markets while ultimately raising the price of many necessities, pumping up profits by pushing costs off on ecosystems and future generations.

At the same time, the economic crisis persists, precipitated by the collapse of the latest and largest financial bubble and prolonged by the immense gulf between those few who control most of the world’s wealth and productive assets and the millions who can neither find productive work nor pay for what might be produced by others. What recovery there has been consists mainly of securing more of the world’s wealth and social product for the top 20 percent or so, the increasingly self-contained top-tier economy of government organizations and giant corporations that buy and sell most of the world’s goods to each other and their upper echelons, inhabiting fortified islands of wealth amidst a global sea of poverty.

The growing chasm between the minority who hold secure places in the economy of large–and largely authoritarian–organizations and the rest of humanity is the defining social fact of our time. Unless it is directly confronted and overcome it will define the limits of the politically possible, driving increased conflict and with it expenditure by the wealthy sectors of society on “security.” Both pervasive conflict and the misdirection of ever more resources in an effort to contain it (rather than removing its causes) will make the transformation of global energy, transportation, agriculture, and industrial systems essential for long-term human survival more difficult, perhaps impossible.

In the first decade of the new century, we have wars and threats of wars, with nuclear weapons moving ever closer to the center of conflict. Nuclear weapons and nuclear “nonproliferation” serve as the justification for wars and as the stalking horse for the economic and geopolitical agendas of largely unaccountable elites who control the most powerful states. They are already nuclear armed and have shown themselves, as in the case of the United States, ready to threaten nuclear weapons use against those who have none. And nuclear weapons–the all too real national arsenals, not the theoretical ones that the demonized states du jour or “terrorist” groups might or might not be trying to acquire–remain the machinery of ultimate catastrophe. They are still there, waiting at the end of some as yet unforeseen chain of great power elite contention and confrontation as those in power attempt to “manage” the multiple crises in ways that apply ever more technology and violence, while stubbornly refusing to address the fundamental causes of deteriorating ecosystems and proliferating social conflict. This systematic exclusion of discussion about root causes, enforced myriad ways in forums world wide, creates a pervasive feeling of inertia, a sense that political systems everywhere are not working.

Despite all of this, most of the visible “disarmament work” generated by “civil society” organizations proceeds with little change from one year, and one decade, to the next. The principal focus remains on three kinds of things:

The first is the weapons themselves: the effects of their use, their legal status, the effects on “stability” of various weapons systems when possessed by one or another combination of adversaries, the ecological effects of designing, testing, and producing them.

The second is the mechanics of disarmament: how to dispose of weapons when no longer desired, how to verify their destruction or their continued existence, how to track the materials and technologies that can be used for their manufacture.

The third is how to prevent anyone new from obtaining them. Efforts to mobilize support for elimination of nuclear arsenals concentrates on long-familiar litanies within these limits: the horrors we already know from the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan, informed speculation regarding their civilization-destroying capacity, the elaboration of convincingly plausible, and by now endlessly tweaked and refined, proposals for verifiable step-by-step elimination of nuclear arsenals, and a shifting array of related issues regarding the economic, social, and ecological costs of maintaining them.

With few exceptions, the analysis and recommendations offered by the visible layers of “civil society” stay on the terrain favored by professionals and experts: the description of social ills, and technical prescriptions for their elimination. Even moral appeals have narrowed to a kind of specialization, with only those expert in religion or who hold irrefutable status as victims qualified to be heard. When connections between issues are made, they usually are made regarding the effects of nuclear weapons and the institutions that sustain them, rather than the causes for their existence. Mirroring the top-down “management” approaches to controlling the “nuclear danger” of those who control the most powerful states, scrutiny of fundamental causes is consigned to the margins.

The questions of precisely who finds it useful to devote vast resources to maintaining civilization-destroying arsenals and the immense array of institutions that sustain them, and exactly what they find them useful for, are seldom asked. Rather than holding those in power to account for their actions, the experts and professionals who dominate “civil society” arms control and disarmament discourse look for every opportunity to take them at their word. They grasp eagerly at the latest endorsement of “disarmament” by those who hold or have held power, no matter how abstract or contradictory. This year no doubt we will hear repeated quotations from U.S. President Barack Obama echoing in the halls of the United Nations, as a few hundred miles south his administration’s proposals for massive increases in funding for nuclear weapons research and production march in bipartisan lockstep through the halls of the U.S. Congress.

Martin Luther King observed that “all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands.” We are in another moment like that now, a time of great dislocation and upheaval. We need a new conversation amongst ourselves about how we must order our societies and economies if we are going to make it through these times. We need to stop looking always upward towards those in power for what they might be willing to give us.

Moments of great social transformation are characterized–in many ways, defined–by the failure of the existing political, cultural and intellectual institutions to meet the needs of the majority of the population and to make decisions in ways we believe legitimate. Today, the professionals who inhabit these institutions have little to say about what is most important. The “practical” too often has come to be equated with asking only for what can be had within the existing institutional contexts, which means not challenging the existing distribution of wealth and power. If these constitute fundamental causes of the problems we are trying to solve or key obstacles to their solution, this is a doomed strategy.

We need to have the courage to turn our attention and our efforts away from the states and their forums and back to each other. The discussion, analysis, and political course of action that bring real disarmament will not come from refining the discourses dominated by those who currently hold power and control debate, but by rendering them irrelevant. We must focus our efforts on building and sustaining solidarity, mutual support, and a common political program amongst those who suffer from an unjust and undemocratic global order of things that is enforced by overwhelming violence. As long as that order of things remains, nuclear weapons will be there, and likely in civilization-destroying numbers. The work of “reducing the nuclear danger” needs to be less about fewer weapons and more about greater justice.

How do we accomplish this? No one person can point the way forward; the kinds of work that are needed will vary from place to place. The first step is to admit that the predominant professionalized single-issue politics is not working. In addition to beginning a new conversation, we need to redirect our time and resources to the settings and kinds of activities where that conversation might actually take place.

Here in the United States, we need to take our resources and our attention back down from the centers of power to the cities, towns and neighborhoods where the effects are felt of decisions made at a distance (often geographically and always socially). This is necessary because human scale organizations where people can build trust and support, and can practice the skills of democracy–of making decisions together about things that matter–are the essential building blocks of any larger, sustainable movement for a world that is more fair and democratic. It is necessary because propaganda thrives in social settings where people are fearful and isolated, and places where we work together to understand the world and to support one another in the face of violence and injustice are the strongest defense against the powerful institutions that ceaselessly strive to manipulate us. Finally, it is necessary because the hard questions about how we will remake a failing social order from within ultimately are felt and understood in the way they affect our livelihoods and the people and places we love.

Whether our community should accept the lure of the next military contract or the next manufacturing link in a global chain of corporate production making ecologically unsustainable products that only a minority of human beings can afford, or instead should start to discuss and plan for a future that might allow us to live well within the ecological limits of our locale, region, and planet is a hard conversation to start, and harder to sustain. But it is also the kind of conversation from which a new way forward might emerge. When the debates that matter are limited to NGO experts, corporate lobbyists and professional politicians hovering around the apex of power in political systems dominated by concentrated wealth, the first order of business is to assure that the most powerful interests will be taken care of. After that, those who claim to represent the rest of us go forth and portray the dividing up of the remaining scraps as the only “practical” steps towards a better world.

The intractable character of the nuclear dilemma is not an aberration or deviation from the “natural” or “healthy” path of the current order of things, but rather its penultimate expression. The immensely destructive wars of the last century on all sides manifested, accelerated and set irreversibly in motion processes for the pursuit and accumulation of power by large, authoritarian organizations both “public” and “private” at a pace and scale that dwarfed anything that had come before. It is the nature of these power dynamics to grow and intensify at an ever-accelerating rate, despoiling the planet and consuming its resources at a pace that has become impossible to comprehend, much less control. The development of the atomic bomb was just a loud punctuation point, a marker of a much broader process nearing totality, the beginning of an ending, whether the bomb is to be the means of our ending or not. Who will oppose these forces? That is the question we must ask.

This piece appeared originally in the Spring 2010 edition of Disarmament Times.

“Immediately the spirit of exploitation is gone armaments will be felt as a positively unbearable burden. Real disarmament cannot come unless the nations of the world cease to exploit each other.” Gandhi, Harijan, November 12, 1938, quoted in Louis Fischer, ed., The Essential Gandhi, (Random House: New York, 1962), p.326.

Over the last couple of months I have had several conversations regarding conversion of U.S. nuclear weapons facilities to peaceful uses. Many disarmament advocates who live in communities that have nuclear weapons facilities, seeking to disarm some of the opposition to disarmament, push for conversion of their local plants or laboratories rather than their closure.

I do not believe that the institutions and facilities of the nuclear weapons complex can be converted to uses that are peaceable, ecologically sustainable, and that are part of an economy and society with a fair distribution of wealth and power. I do believe that the economy as a whole must be converted to a different path if humanity is going to survive much longer. I also wouldn’t hold out much hope for developing a plan for conversion that is compatible with a world that is both more peaceful and more fair that would be acceptable to the people in the upper echelons of the nuclear weapons establishment. These are very privileged people, and will not let go of their privileged place easily. There is no plan that is for the good of all that also preserves their privilege. This is a circle that simply cannot be squared.

There are some practical reasons why much of the nuclear weapons complex can not be converted for civilian uses. Many nuclear weapons research and production facilities are not much like World War Two weapons production plants, plants designed for assembly lines with infrastructure using general use industrial inputs (e.g. various kinds of rolled and cast metal) supported by arrays of people with generally applicable industrial skills (large numbers of assembly line workers, machine tool operators and manufacturers of machine tools, etc.) Much of the nuclear weapons complex physical infrastructure is designed for the demands of handling significant quantities of very dangerous materials little used in civilian activities, and hence have high fixed costs that could not be sustained with most forms of civilian enterprise. Many of the experimental facilities also are crafted to the particular demands of weapons research (or, in some cases, highly inflated versions of those demands), and also would not have useful roles in the civilian economy that could come close to justifying either the cost of the facilities or of the cadre of specialized people who conduct experiments, maintain the facilities, and analyze the data. Maintaining such facilities and the institutions around them (which are large enough to constitute significant concentrations of economic and political power) tends to generate demand for their services, which in turn can influence the path of technology development. I don’t see the suite of facilities and research capacities within the nuclear weapons establishment as having a very useful place on the (quite different) technology development path I believe we should be on. And I see the dangers presented by these institutions as economically and politically powerful organizations as outweighing whatever marginal usefulness they may have for technology development along a more ecologically sustainable, fair, and democratic path.

The issues around conversion of the nuclear weapons complex also are distorted, I believe, by the very successful efforts of the nuclear weapons establishment to portray themselves as all-purpose purveyors of Science, the “crown jewels” of the national science and technology establishment. This is compounded by a tendency across the political spectrum, even today, to view the development of science and technology as a politically neutral process. This has tended to suppress critical analysis even of the extent to which the very particular set of institutional capacities the institutions of the nuclear weapons complex possess would really be useful for civilian purposes, much less for an alternative development path that moves away from nuclear energy and in general towards forms of energy, transportation, and production infrastructure that are more decentralized and varied, adapted once more to ecological context rather than to the purposes of immense organizations with globalized supply chains driven by the goal of endless accumulation of wealth.

The main way that people in complex modern societies today extract a privileged wealth stream is through their positions in large, powerful organizations that deploy various combinations of advanced technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology. The constellation of organizations that constitute the nuclear weapons complex sits close to the apex of global power and privilege, and the upper echelon inhabitants of those organizations are quite determined to hold on to what they have. Nuclear weapons establishments, in fact, are preeminent manifestations of how far those in power will go to preserve it–they will play dice with all humanity, even all life on earth. The nature of the institutions ultimately can not be separated from the purposes and practices that have shaped them since their inception. Born in secrecy and sequestered throughout their existence within the least accountable sector of American government, the nuclear weapons laboratories and the broader nuclear weapons complex have become powerful institutions in their own right. They have done so by using all the tools that the powerful have developed in this society for staving off democracy–control of information and technologies, propaganda, and alliances with other huge organizations in common strategies aimed at extracting a steady and expanding stream of wealth from the rest of the economy. There is no way to provide the upper level denizens of the nuclear weapons establishment–the scientists and engineers, the technocrats, bureaucrats, and propagandists–with some other pursuit that gives them a similarly “rewarding” position in society, unless we can come up with some other set of “missions” that can assure them of an equally comfortable, secure, and largely unaccountable place in the upper few percent of a national and global economy characterized by stark disparities in wealth. And why should we want to do that?

It should not be forgotten that we essentially had this conversation about conversion with the weapons labs during the nineties, when they believed their budgets and position to be under considerably more of a threat, and the power balance arguably was far more propitious for some kind of real change. From where I was sitting (which was fairly close and paying attention), it appeared that the upper echelons of the nuclear weapons complex hierarchy made a self-conscious decision to re-commit themselves to the nuclear weapons road, which they believed (quite likely correctly) represented the only way that they could assure anything like the institutional position–and the steady stream of tax-funded wealth–that they long had grown used to, and that they considered their due.

Consider the following thought experiment: What would your response be if someone suggested that conversion of Goldman Sachs should be high up on our agenda? Strip away the institutional goals of endless accumulation of wealth and power, and all you have left is some computers, a bunch of really fancy office furniture, and maybe some people who are pretty good at math. From the viewpoint of the vast majority of the inhabitants of planet Earth, the breakup productive value of Goldman Sachs is close to zero. But its social impact on most of us as a going concern is far in the negative and growing. When you read in the paper that an investment bank has imploded and that hundreds or thousands have lost their jobs, do you feel it an imperative, high priority part of a political program you would support to find a new mission for the dead bank, or to find exciting, high–paying work for unemployed brokers before their bonuses run out so they can sustain their current lifestyles? Now try thinking about the nuclear weapons establishment from this perspective. What result do you reach?

So I think phase out and closure is the truly realistic way to go. Approaches like “diversifying the weapons labs” so far have resulted in a green fig leaf or two for the status quo, and I see little reason to believe they can accomplish much more than that–while helping the labs in the near term cross-subsidize expensive facilities mainly devoted to weapons work by drawing funds from civilian science and technology budget lines. The upper echelon employees of the nuclear weapons establishment have enough skills to get by one way or another. Rather than trying to figure out how to preserve their privileged income stream, we should be devoting our efforts to assuring the basics of life–food, housing, education, health care, and meaningful work–for all those denied it due to the privilege of those who work at places like Goldman Sachs–and places like the nuclear weapons complex. Buyouts and benefits for those at the bottom of the hierarchy who really might be in need if their nuclear weapons jobs end makes more sense to me, but ultimately they deserve the same access to the minimum requisites of a dignified life as the rest of us–no more, no less.

I sympathize with those who live in communities with operating military nuclear facilities. It means that it is harder politically on a day to day basis to make the arguments that need to be made–but it doesn’t change the nature of the necessary arguments. The nuclear weapons complex, and the larger military-industrial complex, are constellations of organizations high up in the structure of privilege in this country, and even more so globally. Moving away from an economy and society in which these organizations hold great economic and political power unavoidably will result in painful transitions. This may mean that some communities need external help in moving to a different, more sustainable and fair development path. But no one should ask for more than that the risks and burden of these transitions be fairly shared across society–which may mean that some communities that depend on privileged institutions will have to adjust their expectations downward, because they have been deriving the benefits of great privilege, directly or indirectly, for a very long time. I would note, however, that those benefits seldom have been equitably distributed, and regions with high concentrations of military spending also often have very sharp disparities of wealth and general level of social well-being. Hence I suspect that even in such areas the problem is more the disproportionate political power and influence of the inhabitants of the top tiers of the economy who benefit most than the shared interests of the population as a whole. If supposedly progressive groups in communities with nuclear weapons facilities say “yes, a peaceful and ecologically sustainable path is what we want, but not until we find a way to continue the existing local structures of income and privilege generated by our local weapons plant,” we will get nowhere–in fact worse than nowhere, we will continue on the path to the abyss. And the disarmament movement, such as it is, will fail to attract people who really favor a more economically fair, ecologically sustainable, and peaceful world, and who one way or another understand this to be true.

Together with M.V. Ramana, I have written a short retrospective on the U.S.-India nuclear deal, drawing in part in commentary that appeared previously here. A pdf of the piece is available at the link below.

The U.S.-India Nuclear Deal: Violating Norms, Terminating Futures

On September 12, I gave a talk at the Alameda Public Affairs Forum in Alameda, California. The talk covered the current flurry of enthusiasm for nuclear disarmament among U.S. national security elites, including the Obama administration’s recent initiatives, and my view of their significance for disarmament progress. I attempted to put these initiatives in the context of the ongoing global economic crisis, noting that the current circumstances resemble in some ways those that have brought wars among major powers in the past. Yet most discussion of disarmament issues ignores the fact that even the more optimistic proposals for disarmament do not offer realistic strategies for reducing nuclear arsenals below civilization-destroying levels for decades or more, while the dynamics potentially driving towards great power conflict may be on a much shorter time line. I also addressed the single-issue, increasingly professionalized NGO advocacy that is dominant in arms control and disarmament work (and in work on other issues as well), and its roots in a broader set of assumptions and entrenched institutional patterns that prevent systematic discussion of the forces that drive war and conflict, and that make it difficult to move beyond single-issue advocacy to the broader social movements necessary to make meaningful progress towards nuclear disarmament.

The talk can be heard in its entirety by clicking the link below.

Andrew Lichterman, talk at the Alameda Public Affairs Forum, September 12, 2009.

On August 6, I spoke outside the fence at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the main U.S. nuclear weapons labs, at a commemoration of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I received many requests for copies of my talk–which at that point consisted of pages of notes and quotes. I have reduced it to a text which should be fairly close to the talk as delivered. A pdf of that talk can be found by clicking here.

This spring, powerful politicians joined U.S. Department of Energy officials and nuclear scientists to celebrate the dedication of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s most powerful laser. The dedication was part of a well-orchestrated PR campaign aimed at sustaining support in hard economic times for the huge laser fusion project. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hailed the multi-billion dollar project as having “the potential to revolutionize our energy future,” opening the way to new nuclear plants that can “generate an endless amount of megawatts of carbon-free power.” Thomas Friedman of the New York Times flacked the NIF in a column headlined “The next really cool thing,” describing it as a possible “holy cow game-changer.”

Despite the hoopla over this century’s version of “energy too cheap to meter,” the NIF is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — a nuclear weapons design lab. NIF’s main purpose is to conduct nuclear weapons-related experiments. A 2000 Government Accountability Office study estimated that 85 percent of NIF’s experiments would be for nuclear weapons physics. NIF’s role in weapons work is controversial, with many independent experts believing it to have little relevance for maintaining the well-understood designs of weapons in a nuclear arsenal that the United States is legally obligated to eliminate under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. NIF’s advocates mainly are those who believe that the United States will need to keep nuclear weapons for decades to come.

Viewed as an energy project, NIF is a monument to a vision of the future that is firmly rooted in the past. It conjures images from science-fiction magazine covers of the 1950’s, of monolithic nuclear plants dominating a rectilinear landscape of factory-farmed fields, with transmission lines marching off to high-rise cities built without regard to the costs or effects of the energy they consume. But wait — that future looks a lot like our present — and it isn’t working. The pursuit of unlimited growth powered by unlimited energy has resulted in a society that is ecologically unsustainable, armed to the teeth, and that has levels of economic inequality that resemble those of 19th century robber-baron-style capitalism. Fission nuclear energy has proved far more technologically challenging, risky, and expensive than anticipated, and remains linked to the capacity to make nuclear weapons.  Fusion too was viewed optimistically in the 1950’s, with some leading scientists then predicting controlled fusion energy within two decades. But the physics, engineering, and economic challenges of fusion energy dwarf those posed by fission power.

A half century later, fusion power remains a distant, and very expensive, dream. Even if it proves workable, commercial deployment is at best many decades away, and hence unlikely to provide a significant contribution to solving problems posed by diminishing fossil fuel supplies and climate change caused by burning them. And despite being sold as a more “proliferation resistant” nuclear energy technology because it does not require uranium or plutonium fuel, any country that is capable of building and operating inertial confinement fusion-based power facilities likely will have the know-how to build and deploy hydrogen bombs. By any stretch of the imagination, it will be a capital-intensive, high-risk energy path, requiring as well extensive — and expensive — environmental controls and security throughout its fuel, power, and waste cycle.

Rather than gambling on a future powered by unknown physics and unproven technologies, we should be investing in what we already know about physics and technology. It will cost tens of billions of dollars to find out if fusion electricity generation will work, and hundreds of billions more to deploy it in significant quantities. Our energy dilemmas can be solved more quickly and safely by reducing the work that energy does — moving people and things less far, less frequently, in larger capacity vehicles, designing our buildings so they can be heated and cooled more easily, and growing our food closer to where it is eaten, in ways that stay within nature’s energy cycles rather than depending on industrial inputs from afar. At the same time, we can pursue renewable energy technologies like wind and solar power that can be deployed in smaller increments, crafted to fit this less fragile and more sustainable development path.

Ultimately, our goal must be to end the endless pursuit of more, to build a society where we no longer chase bigger homes stuffed with more toys, but instead value a life lived in balance with the world we all share. Doing so is the only path to fairly sharing the risks of the difficult energy and economic transitions humanity now faces. With global tensions driven by economic inequality and resource competition on the rise, it also is central to the task of ridding ourselves of the world-destroying weapons that both NIF and the pursuit of endless power help sustain.

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

The headlines tell us that President Obama is committed to working towards a nuclear weapons-free world. As is always the case in such matters, we would do well to look at the fine print. We should not expect that the United States, or any other country, will give up its nuclear weapons anytime soon. “This goal,” Obama tells us, “will not be reached quickly–perhaps not in my lifetime.” Further, he says, so long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain an “effective arsenal to deter any adversary.” In this, the justification for nuclear weapons remains the same: the elites of every nuclear-armed country always have insisted that nuclear weapons are only for “deterrence.” With enough nuclear weapons still in existence to destroy civilization and to damage irreparably all life on earth, its time to take a closer look at “deterrence.”

In significant ways, the discourse of nuclear “deterrence” resembles the discourse of torture. We can understand this parallel better if we substitute the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture,” as the Bush regime attempted to do (with some success, as manifested in widespread use of the term, often without criticism, in the mainstream news media).

The difference is that the success of those in power at placing the notion of “deterrence” at the core of nuclear weapons discourse has been far greater than the Bush regime’s effort to place the notion of “enhanced interrogation” at the center of discourse about torture. This is likely so because torture has existed for a very long time across a vast range of human experience, and hence is a well-known and relatively well-understood horror–opaque only to those in populations that have not in living memory been on the receiving end of it. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, still are a new part of the collective human story, and were created and remain closeted still within powerful, secretive, institutions. Hence their perceived character and meaning have been subject to planful manipulation from the very moment of their creation. Elite efforts to define nuclear weapons–and to limit permissible meanings we may give to them–have been so successful that we have no easily available alternative to “deterrence.” We don’t even have our own word for the permanent presence of nuclear weapons in our lives.

So we must first solve the equation: “enhanced interrogation techniques” is to “torture” as “deterrence” is to “_______.” The horrors of nuclear weapons use are so great that it is hard to come up with an appropriate phrase. Constant threat of genocide and ecocide? (too clinical, lacks the deep reference in the concretely rooted collective imaginary of “torture”). “Hell on earth?” (Too abstract and theological, also completely omits the element of human intention that is at the core of whatever the permanent, constant brandishing of nuclear weapons by largely unaccountable elites for decades on end really means).

We can find our starting point, perhaps, in clues that suggest my analogy is appropriate. The intention of the Bush regime’s rhetorical move–calling torture “enhanced interrogation”–was to encapsulate the justification for an inherently awful, degrading, and unjustifiable practice in its new name. If this “move” is successful, then the purpose, the intention, behind torture will simply be assumed, rather than discussed. The “purpose” of “enhanced interrogation” obviously is to “obtain information.” Once this is accepted, the metaphorical battle is quite nearly won. And if the “information” to be obtained can be portrayed as essential to “national security” (another self-justifying phrase in great need of disaggregating), the battle is virtually over.

So too with “deterrence.” The word itself presumes not attack, but defense. It is implicitly passive, unless one linguistically and politically disaggregates it to reveal its terrorist roots. And if one accepts that the purpose of nuclear weapons is only to defend against attack, the purposes of nuclear weapons (and the intentions of those who control them) are already assumed, and assumed to be in the general interest of the nation-state that “possesses” the nuclear weapons. The only question left is whether deterrence “works,” and actually makes a country or the world (again assuming without scrutiny or debate that everyone has the same interests) “safer.” Here too, if this rhetorical move is successful, the argument is nearly over, and readily subject to pacification (another neologism whose real meaning is its opposite) via traditional rhetorical moves and tools of the powerful: deployment of legions of experts claiming privileged access to knowledges too complex and obscure for ordinary folk to understand and to secret “information,” and if necessary attacks on the “patriotism” of any who nonetheless persist in raising questions.

There are other parallels between the discourses of torture and constant- nuclear-weapons-threat (my clunky temporary stand-in for “deterrence”). Both abound with–and place at the center of popular discourse justifying these practices–empirically unlikely, even fantastic, narratives of existential threat, and protection against it by selfless (if secretive) public servants (yet another self-justifying phrase). For torture, there is the captured terrorist who has hidden the ticking time bomb, for nuclear weapons, there is the ever-present possibility of a bolt from the blue nuclear attack. And today, these two narratives converge: the ticking time bomb is nuclear, and anyone who would oppose our nuclear weapons with their own presumptively is a terrorist–and might give them a bomb. Actual, everyday uses of torture and constant-nuclear-weapons-threat–to intimidate and silence entire populations, to provide what American generals call the ultimate ‘top cover’ backing world-wide wars of aggression to sustain a global empire–remain largely unmentionable in a discourse where “reasonable” experts and politicians talk of “enhanced interrogation” and “deterrence.”

And even the central–and continuing–confrontation among nuclear-armed states is misrepresented in an increasingly dangerous and contradictory kind of circular reasoning unconsciously engaged in even by many advocates of nuclear disarmament. The possibility of wars among the most powerful states–the kind of wars that in modern times have been precipitated by the kind of broad, complex, economic and political crisis that we face again today–are treated as extremely unlikely, largely because most policy experts believe at some level that “deterrence works.” And yet we have not faced a moment in which the fundamental drivers of conflict among the most powerful states have been present–competition over key resources, intensifying political tension within states over wealth distribution, and general collapse of a prevailing “normal” order of international economic and political relationships–since before the dawn of the nuclear age. Wars among “great powers” are presumed to be largely obsolete–but this assumption is due in large part to a belief in deterrence rooted in the particular geopolitical conditions and experience of a Cold War nuclear confrontation rooted largely in ideology and the existence of the weapons themselves. The dangers presented by thousands of nuclear weapons in the hands of “great powers” thus are implicitly discounted, and most in the “arms control and disarmament community” remain comfortable talking about plans for nuclear disarmament in which truly meaningful progress–reduction to global nuclear weapons numbers below civilization-destroying numbers–is largely aspirational, a hazy distant goal many years, or even decades, in the future.

The result is that dominant opinion among experts and political leaders generates policy debate that viewed with even a smidgen of historical perspective appears increasingly absurd–and absurdly dangerous. President Obama’s White House web site tells us that “the gravest danger to the American people is the threat of a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon and the spread of nuclear weapons to dangerous regimes.” White House Web Site, “The Agenda: Foreign Policy,” accessed March 25, 2009. In this view, nuclear weapons that don’t yet exist are more dangerous then the thousands that already are in the hands of elites who today face growing threats to their hold on power–concrete social conflicts that also are euphemized myriad ways, from “global instability” to “populist anger” –unseen for a generation.

The hand that controls nuclear weapons is no different from the hand the tortures. The hood of the torturer and of those who threaten us all with death by nuclear annihilation must be removed, their true faces revealed. The legal historian Robert Cover wrote that “The torturer and victim do end up creating their own terrible ‘world,’ but this world derives its meaning from being imposed upon the ashes of another. The logic of that world is complete domination, though the objective may never be realized.” Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” (1986) 95 Yale L.J. 1601,1603 The practice of constant-nuclear-weapons-threat carries this logic to its existential, its apocalyptic, limit, a world in which those who strive to wield absolute power impose their will by threatening to reduce the world of all who stand in their way to literal, rather than metaphorical, ashes. This will to absolute power is the abiding purpose of those who wield both torture and nuclear weapons. Both torture and nuclear threat are intended to emphasize through terror that transcends all reason that the victim–or potential victim–is utterly vulnerable, and that the hand that wields the power of ultimate violence is not, is invulnerable, all powerful. The intention–and the effect–is to sustain a world in which most are powerless but some hold great power, most are poor but a few hold great wealth, most are vulnerable but a few can at least convince themselves that for the duration of their time here on earth they are not.

It is a story that those who wield this power tell us is as old as human history–implying as well that it will be with us always, that it is our inescapable fate. Insisting upon the eternal presence of boundless violence in that way only obscures the immense scale and reach of the particular horrors of our chosen modernity. “But even if things have always been so,” Theodor Adorno observed, “although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its forms outdoes the old.” Adorno concludes that “He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, E.F.N. Jephcott, trans. (London: NLB, 1974) pp.234-235.

Adorno wrote in the wake of a cataclysmic global war, with the age of nuclear weapons just beginning, and a world of constant-nuclear-threat still in the future. What has become clear is that humanity can not long survive a global order of things in which “terror without end” lies at the center of power, with those who rule most of us in most places still deploying limitless violence to keep things as they are. The conditions for another global cataclysm are quickening. Our technologies have brought us to the point where we can destroy ourselves and much of the chain of life that sustains us either quickly with nuclear weapons, or slowly simply by staying on the course that those in power insist upon, and insist on “defending” with a spectrum of violence that extends from the midnight knock on the door through the torture chambers to the incineration of cities, lands, and peoples. Even Martin Luther King’s call for “nonviolence or nonexistence” no longer is enough, now it also must be democracy or nonexistence, a full and final recognition of our collective vulnerability and our interdependence, one world, with every voice heard equally, or none.

In the October 2 vice-presidential debate, moderator Gwen Ifill ventured into a crucial area rarely touched by regular media. She asked:

Governor, on another issue, interventionism, nuclear weapons. What should be the trigger, or should there be a trigger, when nuclear weapons use is ever put into play?

Sarah Palin responded:

Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.

Our nuclear weaponry here in the U.S. is used as a deterrent. And that’s a safe, stable way to use nuclear weaponry.

But for those countries — North Korea, also, under Kim Jong Il — we have got to make sure that we’re putting the economic sanctions on these countries and that we have friends and allies supporting us in this to make sure that leaders like Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad are not allowed to acquire, to proliferate, or to use those nuclear weapons. It is that important.

When it was his turn, Joseph Biden did not answer the question, instead referring to John McCain’s vote against ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1999, and to Barack Obama’s work on “keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.”

But Palin really did not answer the question either. She claimed that U.S. reliance on nuclear forces is “safe” and “stable” deterrence. One major question that comes to mind is whether Palin believes the eight other countries in the world with nuclear weapons also practice safe and stable deterrence. Her answer is no with respect to North Korea, and Biden also talked about the danger posed by Pakistan’s arsenal. That leaves six other countries (China, Russia, India, France, United Kingdom, Israel). Palin also said that “dangerous regimes,” Iran being one, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. But if deterrence works for the United States, why not for current nuclear have-nots?

More fundamental, though, and at the heart of the question posed by Ifill and not addressed by either Palin or Biden, is this: Deterrence is based on the will and capability to use nuclear weapons when deemed necessary. If you embrace deterrence, you embrace the possibility of use. Similarly, you can’t support the death penalty as a deterrent to horrendous crimes without supporting actual executions. Biden knows this. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in June 2007 entitled “CSI: Nukes,” he stated that the “U.S. has long deterred a nuclear attack by states, by clearly and credibly threatening devastating retaliation.” He went on to argue that the United States should accelerate work on capabilities to trace the origin of fissile materials used in a terrorist nuclear attack, in order to be able to deter the country where the materials originate. He did not rule out U.S. use of nuclear weapons against such a country.

My organization, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, this year released a statement, summarized here, that does answer Ifill’s question. In brief, the answer is it is never lawful, moral, or wise to use nuclear weapons, and therefore the United States should abandon the policy of deterrence premised on possible use and work hard for the global elimination of nuclear forces. We emphasize that nuclear use is incompatible with the present-day U.S. conduct of military operations in accordance (in the U.S. understanding) with legal requirements of necessity, proportionality, and discrimination. That is true in all the myriad circumstances (certainly not only in response to a nuclear attack) in which the United States holds out the option of use of nuclear weapons: preemptive or responsive use against biological and chemical as well as nuclear capabilities or attacks; in response to overwhelming conventional attacks; and even in response to “surprising” military developments.

Here are key passages from the summary:

Nuclear weapons cannot be used in compliance with the fundamental rules of discrimination, proportionality, and necessity acknowledged by the United States as requirements for lawful military operations. Nor is it lawful to threaten to use nuclear weapons. Further, rather than ongoing reliance on nuclear weapons, the United States is obligated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to negotiate their elimination in good faith.

By recognizing the unlawfulness of nuclear weapons and working for their elimination, the United States would both fulfill its legal obligations and foster our security and that of nations and peoples throughout the world. In addition to reducing the risks arising from existing arsenals, taking this course of action would give a powerful boost to diplomatic and law-enforcement efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and their acquisition by terrorists.

Established Rules of Law Prohibiting the Use of Nuclear Weapons

The rule of discrimination prohibits the use of weapons that cannot discriminate in their effects between military and non-military targets. It is unlawful to use weapons whose effects cannot be controlled and therefore cannot be directed against a military target. The effects of nuclear weapons, including powerful and prolonged ionizing radiation with its continuing genetic and environmental as well as immediate effects, and the blast, heat, electromagnetic impulse, and escalation effects, are uncontrollable in space and time. They are not subject to the control of the user and cannot discriminate between lawful and unlawful targets. The use of nuclear weapons is therefore barred by the rule of discrimination. The rule is not subject to any balancing test and applies in every circumstance. As stated by the International Court of Justice in its 1996 advisory opinion, states must “never” use weapons incapable of meeting the “fundamental” and “intransgressible” requirement of discrimination. (Emphasis supplied.)

Under the rule of necessity, a state may only use that degree and kind of force as is necessary to achieve the military objective of a particular strike. Under the rule of proportionality, it is prohibited to use a weapon whose potential incidental effects on non-combatant persons or objects (civilian infrastructure) or damage to the environment would likely be disproportionate to the value of the military advantage anticipated from the attack. If the state cannot control such effects, it cannot ensure that the collateral effects of the attack will be proportional to the anticipated military advantage or that the force applied will only that necessary to achieve the military objective. The effects of nuclear weapons being uncontrollable, the weapons cannot be employed in compliance with the requirements of necessity and proportionality. If in extraordinary circumstances a contemplated nuclear attack is nonetheless deemed to meet those requirements, it remains barred by the requirement of discrimination.

Reprisal is not a justification for use of nuclear weapons. To be lawful, reprisals must be limited to a level of force necessary to cause the other side to cease its unlawful attack and must be proportional to that attack and necessary to address it. Due to their uncontrollability, nuclear weapons are not subject to being limited to such a level of force, nor could their effects be limited to what is proportional or necessary, nor could the effects meet the requirement of discrimination.

It may be news to some readers that the U.S. military follows, or claims to follow, the requirements of necessity, proportionality, and discrimination in its military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that is indeed the case; lawyers are even involved in approving particular strikes. This is laid out in some detail in the Human Rights Watch 2003 report, Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq. At p. 94, for example, the report states (footnotes omitted):

The Third Infantry Division established another layer of review by sending lawyers to the field to review proposed strikes, a relatively recent addition to the vetting process. “Ten years ago, JAGs [judge advocate general attorneys] weren’t running around [the battlefield],” said Captain Chet Gregg, Second Brigade’s legal advisor. The division assigned sixteen lawyers to divisional headquarters and each brigade. Lead lawyer Colonel Cayce, who served at the tactical headquarters, reviewed 512 missions, and brigade JAGs approved additional attacks, which were often counter-battery strikes. Although less controversial strikes, such as those on forces in the desert, were not reviewed, Cayce said, “I would feel pretty confident a lawyer was involved in strikes in populated areas.” Commanders had the final say, but lawyers provided advice about whether a strike was legal under IHL. Cayce said his commander never overruled his advice not to attack and sometimes rejected targets he said were legal.

Another passage provides insight into how targeting decisions were made (pp. 18-19, footnotes omitted):

Collateral damage assessments are a key way for the military to fulfill its obligations under international humanitarian law. International humanitarian law requires an attack to be cancelled or suspended if it is expected to cause loss of civilian life or property that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” Assessment of collateral damage is necessary to perform this proportionality test adequately.

U.S. air forces carry out a collateral damage estimate using a computer model designed to determine the weapon, fuze, attack angle, and time of day that will ensure maximum effect on a target with minimum civilian casualties. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reportedly had to authorize personally all targets that had a collateral damage estimate of more than thirty civilian casualties.

Asked how carefully the U.S. Air Force reviewed strikes in Iraq for collateral damage, a senior U.S. Central Command official responded, “with excruciating pain.” He told Human Rights Watch,

[T]he primary concern for the conduct of the war was to do it with absolutely minimum civilian casualties. . . . The first concern is having the desired effect on a target. . . . Next is to use the minimum weapon to achieve that effect. In the process, collateral damage may become one of the considerations that would affect what weapon we had to choose. . . . All of the preplanned targets had a CDE done very early in the process, many months before the war was actually fought. . . . For emerging target strikes, we still do a CDE, but do it very quickly. The computer software was able to rapidly model collateral effects.

Strikes with high collateral damage estimates received extra review. According to another senior CENTCOM official,

CENTCOM came up with a list of twenty-four to twenty-eight high CDE targets that we were concerned about. . . . They had a direct relationship to command and control of Iraqi military forces. These [high CDE targets] were briefed all the way to Bush. He understood the targets, what their use was, and that even under optimum circumstances, there would still be as many as X number of civilian casualties. This was the high CD target list. There were originally over 11,000 aim points when we started the high collateral targeting. Many were thrown out, many were mitigated. We hit twenty of these high collateral damage targets.

Of course, it is subject to dispute whether U.S. forces in fact do comply with legal requirements. Human Rights Watch, in a fairly conservative approach, did find violations, especially with respect to use of cluster munitions and to attacks against “leadership targets.” Others are much more critical. One can also challenge current rules of warfare as too permissive in relation to the kinds of regime-toppling, counterinsurgency wars the United States now engages in. (On this point, see “You Don’t Get the War You Want,” 16 Peace Review, Fall 2004, by Andrew Lichterman and myself, unfortunately not available online except for a charge.) Further, in Iraq at least, U.S. military operations were carried out to prosecute an illegal war of aggression.

The point here, though, is that it is inconceivable that nuclear attacks can be carried out within the framework of military operations now employed by the U.S. military. Nuclear explosions, as the one-time weapon designer and later nuclear abolitionist Ted Taylor used to say, are “off the human scale.” Though a natural process, they are supernatural in their effects. As the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy statements explain, it is well past time for the United States to come to grips with this reality, and wean itself and the world from the addiction to nuclear weaponry and the illusory safety of “deterrence.”