|
Nuclear weapons
are still
there
Who protests against nuclear weapons nowadays?
People seem
to have half-forgotten them. But they are still there, patiently lying
in wait.
In ,The Seventh
Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt
& Co., 2007), Jonathan Schell even speaks of a "nuclear
renaissance" in the new century.
True, there are fewer nukes than there used to be. The number of active
nuclear weapons has declined from a Cold War peak of some 65,000 to
below 20,000.
In another decade it may fall to 10,000. But this is scant consolation,
for several reasons:
* Many decommissioned weapons are not destroyed, but only partially
dismantled and placed in storage.
* The1 0,000 remaining nukes will still suffice to wipe out the human
race many times over. Even the use of 100 would cause disaster on an
unprecedented scale.
Atmospheric scientists at UCLA and the University of Colorado modeled
the climatic effects of the use of 100 Hiroshima-type bombs just
0.03 percent of the explosive power of the global arsenal in a
nuclear war between India and Pakistan. These countries have fought
four wars and now have about 75 nukes each. Direct fatalities would be
comparable with WW2, while millions of tons of soot borne aloft would
devastate agriculture over vast expanses of Eurasia and North America.
* Nuclear weapons do not serve merely as status symbols or for mutual
deterrence. Resort to them remains an option for the contingency of a
serious setback in a conventional war, and new types of high-precision
nukes, such as the so-called "bunker busters", have been designed for
that purpose. Nuclear weapons may
even be used to stop a state acquiring nuclear weapons, or to suppress
nuclear capacity that is in danger of falling under "terrorist" control
(say, in the context of a disintegrating Pakistan).
* Finally, the number of nuclear weapons states has increased and is
likely to increase further. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is
gradually losing its ability to inhibit the chain reaction. The double
standard on which it is based one rule for members of the nuclear
club, another for the rest is (as Schell argues) no longer
viable. If all states with the requisite economic and technological
capacity are not to acquire nuclear weapons, then they must all agree
to renounce them.
The numerical decline might be cause for optimism if it could be seen
as progress toward nuclear disarmament.
Unfortunately, there are no grounds for such an interpretation. Nuclear
weapon states are determined to maintain and upgrade their arsenals.
Total numbers are
falling as Russia and the US shed what they consider excess capacity,
but they are restructuring their nuclear forces, not giving them up.
Once this process is complete the decline in numbers will level off.
So why have people half-forgotten the nuclear threat?For one thing, it
has been overshadowed by another threat to the human species
global warming.
Even before people became fully aware of this new peril, however, the
end of the Cold War had largely dispelled the fear of nuclear war. A
reformist at the time,
I was closely involved in the peace and disarmament movements of the
980s. With benefit of hindsight, I realize now that these movements did
not perceive
the nuclear threat in its broadest sense because they were too
preoccupied by the specific context of the superpower nuclear
confrontation of that period. This
was especially true of European Nuclear Disarmament (END). Western
governments told us that "we" needed nuclear weapons to deter the
Soviet threat. We anti-nuclear campaigners did not believe they were
right, but we were naïve enough to believe that they believed what
they told us. We drew the logical implication that they would become
favourably disposed to nuclear disarmament if relations with the Soviet
Union could only be sufficiently improved.
So we hopefully looked forward to the new and deeper East-West
détente heralded by Gorbachev.
Not only did the Cold War come to an end; the Soviet Union itself
collapsed. No more "Soviet threat" to worry our rulers!
But did they heave a sigh of relief and rush to dispose of their
nuclear weapons? No, they started to come up with substitute rationales
for keeping the things. Thus Blair, announcing renewal of the Trident
program in 00, explained that nuclear confrontation with another major
power "remains possible in the decades ahead."
Schell sums it up nicely: "By reviving and refurbishing their arsenals,
the nuclear powers signal that they expect that great-power rivalries
will return" (p. 0).
The Cold War is dead. Long
live
the Cold War!
The unpredictability of the future, they tell us, is
itself a good reason to hold on to nuclear weapons. And the future is
always unpredictable.
The world is dominated by a system based on conflict conflict
over resources of all kinds, conflict between competing property
interests and the states that
represent them. Once nuclear weapons were discovered and became tools
in this conflict, they were bound to threaten human survival. The
threat only seemed
to have a necessary connection with the specific pattern of global
power that happened to exist at the time. That pattern has started to
change, there are new
potential adversaries, but the conflict-based system remains. So does
the nuclear threat.
Schell calls for "action in concert by all the nations on Earth" (p.
217) to abolish nuclear weapons, halt global warming, and tackle other
urgent global problems. His eloquence is moving, but his vision is only
very briefly sketched and lacks substance. True, he has some technical
and organizational proposals. Like IAEA director Mohammed El Baradei,
for instance, he would revive the Baruch Plan put forward by Truman in
1946 and place all nuclear fuel production under the
control of an international agency. But he fails to consider what
political, social and economic changes might be necessary to create and
sustain the international trust and cooperation that he seeks.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that nuclear disarmament were
somehow to be achieved within the existing conflict-based system.
Many states would still have the technological capacity to make nuclear
weapons again if they so decided. This is known as the "breakout"
problem. It is hard to imagine countries resisting this temptation when
at war or even under conditions of acute military confrontation. As we
need not just to achieve but to maintain nuclear disarmament, we
therefore also need to abolish war in general, together with all
weapons that can be used to threaten war.
A close reading of Schell suggests that he accepts this point, though
he does not spell it out. But take the argument a step further.
Wars arise out of conflicts over the control of resources. Doesn't this
mean that an end has to be put to such conflicts? And how can this be
done without placing resources under the control of a global community
that is, without establishing world socialism?
Socialists are not against nuclear (or general) disarmament within
capitalism.
We know that the world faces problems of the greatest urgency and we
know that the global social revolution is not an immediate
prospect. We have no wish to hold human survival hostage to the
attainment of our ideals. Please go ahead and prove us wrong by
abolishing nuclear weapons
without abolishing capitalism. Nothing, apart from socialism itself,
would make us happier. The trouble is that we simply don't understand
how it can be done. That is why we see no alternative to working for
socialism.
Stefan
|
|