The Twin Brother of Annihilation

"As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right."

Pastoral rhetoric? This, from a writer who later refers to a "nuclear umbrella"? The words are those of David Von Drehle, an editor at large for Time magazine, who couldn't resist a faint note of mocking arrogance as he announced his own winner of the Nobel Peace Prize: Little Boy, Fat Man and their progeny, the doomsday weapons that (not counting Hiroshima, Nagasaki and all those cancer deaths in Utah, etc.) have kept us so safe for the last 60 years.

Von Drehle's complaint was that the committee that awarded Barack Obama the prize did so primarily for his initiatives toward nuclear disarmament, which, he says, is a terrible idea because the only reason our suicidal species hasn't fought the Big One, World War III, is because the leaders of the West, the ones who brought us the industrialized slaughter of World Wars I and II, and between 62 and 78 million dead in three decades, saw the light, so to speak, when they began stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and manacled their bad behavior with the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD.

Thus, while further millions of Planet's Earth's residents have died in the wars of the last six decades -- the reign of nuclear weapons hasn't been, strictly speaking, benign -- and innumerable others have been displaced, impoverished, wounded and emotionally shattered, Von Drehle and the entire military-industrial establishment for which he speaks argue that, without nukes, those numbers would have been higher by some millions of people. As Winston Churchill put it many years ago, while the logic of MAD was still in its formative stage: "Safety will become the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation."

What the MAD minions tend not to add, but what is implicit in their argument, is that most of those millions spared by our avoidance of World War III are Americans and Europeans. We've found a different way to work out our issues, minimizing our own risks. The wars instigated by the West since 1945 have been proxy wars, guaranteeing that, in the reign of nukes, the war dead are primarily Third Worlders.

Nevertheless, the argument still holds: In a world held hostage by nuclear weapons, there are smaller aggregate numbers of war dead; therefore, God bless nukes.

Or maybe not. There are almost as many holes in this viewpoint as there are Western lives hypothetically saved from untimely termination by the nuclear blessing, beginning with the absolute unverifiability of the premise.

For instance, war historian John Mueller, in his book The Remnants of War, argues that if nuclear weapons had not been invented, "the history of world affairs would have turned out much the same as it did. Specifically, nuclear weapons and the image of destruction they inspire were not necessary to induce people who have been running world affairs since 1945 to be extremely wary of repeating the experience of World War II (or for that matter, World War I)."

Well, who knows? Whether the underlying premise is faulty or valid, the nuclear weapons industry is here to stay as long as people believe in sufficient numbers that our survival is "the twin brother of annihilation."

And this belief is where I take my most serious issue with Von Drehle et al, because its embrace is instantly stagnating. Human cruelty and self-destructiveness are enshrined as given: We have invested our future in their inalterable permanence. Suddenly the only way left in which humanity can grow is technologically. The possibility of moral and spiritual growth ceases: We will never govern ourselves wisely, learn collective impulse control or move to a new level of consciousness.

"You cannot solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them," Albert Einstein famously said. Shortly before his death in 1955, he signed his name to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which includes this passage: "Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?"

This and only this is the imperative that emerged from the carnage of World War II, and the world's greatest thinkers saw it then and still see it. They also saw that you cannot renounce war and remain committed to the development of nuclear weapons. The abolition of this stopgap horror, this mega-disaster still waiting to happen -- the Doomsday Clock is still set at five minutes to midnight -- remains crucial.

And this brings me back to the faint, biting edge of mockery in the Von Drehle essay: that peace and disarmament initiatives are wishful, naïve thinking, harmless fantasies at best, but under no circumstances to be taken seriously. We must, instead, continue investing in our own annihilation.

This is the cry of a multi-trillion-dollar industry that teeters on a toxic premise: that the human race can never grow up.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at [e-mail] or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

© 2009 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Comments

[TonyMbutu]

The notion that, absent nuclear weapons and MAD, that world history would have been no different is ahistoric nonsense. It is not unlikely that most of continental Europe would have been run by Communist parties by 1950. The Red Army was the dominant force in Europe in 1945. The allies were spent, the UK broke, the US was pulling out to go fight Japan. Without nuclear weapons, Olympic and Coronet would have been bloodbaths, resulting in a US population in no mood to commit troops to counter Soviet moves, especially since fighting in Japan would probably have lasted into 1946. The Soviets, moreover, would have been actively fighting in Japan and that country would likely have been split into zones of occupation like Germany was. So, as a result, the Communists probably would have taken half of Japan, all of the Korea penninsula and maybe all of Indochina. Those changes, alone, would have had profound effects on world history.

What Meuller fails to consider is that the lesson Stalin took from the Great Patriotic War was not "don't repeat the mistakes that led to the war and to WWI," [which, in any event, would have been much different to him than to, say, Clement Attlee] but, rather, "expand the land controlled by the USSR, so that when the conflict with the capitalist enemy comes (and he had no doubt that it would) it would occur there, and not in the main body of the Soviet Union."

[MajorKong]

Who here's actually commanded live nuclear weapons?

Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! (waves hand frantically) Pick me! Pick me!

[TJCole]

The Nuclear stand off between the two great powers prevented war, I know this stuff, as much as people hate them...

Were there no Nuclear Weapons, there would have been a great unbelievably costly war in lives between America it's main allies and the Soviet block...

Now with these new players everything is in flux and the old rules do not apply..

That is why all proliferation beyond the current level is unacceptable and a threat to this entire world...

We already have a nuclear potential major crisis with Pakistan and that's means India and Israel and if they could reach it Rome and also Saudi Arabia...and targets or participants or others...

We are living in more dangerous times than during most of the Cold War with a few exceptions such as the Cuban Missile Crisis when we came much closer than people really knew, until just a few years ago...Th Berlin Air Lift maybe as well..

We could see nuclear weapons used somewhere in the next five years, ground bursting nukes at any time really...in Iran...

[MajorKong]

You don't realize just how close we came, on several occasions, to nuclear conflict back in the day.

We played a very dangerous game and we got lucky. Very lucky.

[eileenflemingWAWA]

If THAT DAY, we call 9/11 taught us anything, it should be that America's nuclear arsenal cannot defeat 'terrorism' or provide security from the actions of a few violent mad men who target and murder innocent ones.

"We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living."-General Omar Nelson Bradley, Armistice Day, 1948

War can not stop terrorism because war is terrorism.

American taxpayers provide over $54 billion annually to maintain WMD's.

“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK

America has a nuclear arsenal of over 10,000 weapons and nearly 2,000 remain on hair-trigger alert ever since the end of the Cold War.

Many Americans live under the delusion that the USA is a Christian nation. If that were true, we would lead the way in nuclear disarmament and abolish war.

The rest of "The 64th Anniversary of USA Terrorism Enlightened by the Wisdom of Nonviolence"

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1354&Itemid=222

[AmericanSon]

Very thought provoking article. Judging by our current activities, it seems unlikely mankind will ever renounce war. We have not evolved highly enough.

[eileenflemingWAWA]

"In all of earth’s sixty-five­-million-y­ear history, we are living in the most dangerous of times. The fact that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and two hundred thousand lives were vaporized within twenty minutes has not prevented man from dreaming up more ways to fill space with weapons of mass destruction. We were not created for militarism, but to turn our swords into plowshares...As the Dali Lama said, the radicalism of our age is to be compassionate human beings."- Franciscan Fr. Louis Vitale, July 20, 2005, Berkeley, California at TIKKUN’s first annual conference for spiritual progressives:

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1305&Itemid=221

And it is Religiosit­y/Fundamen­talism that is holding up Evolution:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=825&Itemid=195