Week 9 Post- Nuclear Arms and the Other

Week 9 Post-  Nuclear Arms and the “Other"

In my mind, the global community shares two immediate and self-inflicted threats that supersede all others.  Second only to our egregious contribution to, and failure to date to mitigate, climate change is our similar failure to close that Pandora’s box on nuclear armament.  I am glad we are discussing it in this class.  While understandable given time constraints, I am sorry we could not discuss it further.  That Kenneth Waltz believes, and even titles an article, “More May be Better” (1995) scares the daylights out of me. I am grateful for Gustersons’ attempt to grant us perspective in dialogue. And, I am wary of solutions such as Blair’s that phase in steps that could all too easily be circumvented by actors in whose hands weapons of mass destruction are most dangerous.  So, what is the answer? 

  

Anyone who claims “more may be better,” must live in a lovely bubble.  With reductions to date, we still have 15,000 or so too many.  This does not require academic analysis.  We have something that can go “boom” and set off a series of “booms” to an end no one wants to imagine.  Dr. Suess wrote about it for young children who understood.  Please forgive my condescending tone.  I am concerned, for all Waltz’s faith in (fairly-airmed?) humanity’s constraint,  that we have at least one psychopath half a world away building the means by which to wreak nuclear havoc, and another man running for the highest office in our own country who wants to know why, if we build them, we do not want to use them - and who seems all too eager to set off a global game of “chicken.”  We have felt this game coming on before in a saner world.  And, it was not fun then.   

My generation grew up in the shadow of the Cold War.  My son was a year old when, like 100 million others, several friends and I sat rapt in my living room watching “The Day After” (please forgive my channeling an episode of The Americans – it did call up the memory).  It was my musician crowd – each had written at least one set of lyrics on the subject in his or her lifetime, most several.  We only half-jokingly talked about pooling our money and buying an island together – or moving to the Catskills.  The wife of a bass player had a huge old family home there we sometimes used as a sort of retreat.  If we were all doomed to go up in some terrible cloud, why not together in the company of friends in a place we all loved?   In our world, the “Us” and the “Them” were states, not the people comprising those, two “stupid giants,” who were bound to annihilate us all through political posturing.  By the time “The Day After” aired, tests had been conducted by, in addition to the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the U.K., France, China and India.  Israel was not on our radar. Nor was Pakistan. There was chatter about Iran, particularly through the hostage crisis –it was surreal, insane.  Nothing seemed out of the question, but the idea that they might present a nuclear threat seemed implausible.  As for North Korea, Kim Jong Un was still in his mother’s womb. 

We were in Germany the year the Berlin Wall came down. My son was seven. Celebrating the end of that Cold War fear tucked into nearly everyone’s consciousness, we thought maybe, maybe, our greatest threat now was simply in the clean-up.  It was no longer about offense and defense, but accidents.  For a moment, there was no “other,” just two players who now needed to fix the mess they had made. However, daunting the task may have appeared, it felt doable.   And, then it seemed the conversation shifted – those that did not have it wanted access to that power and the right to “deter."  

Gusterson asks us to recognize that we may not be wearing the white hats in this.  He presents arguments that are unpalatable to us from a power perspective and others we are more inclined to embrace.  It is hard to accept, but if we do not grant the rest of the world voice on a par with our own, if we cannot brace for the same judgment we direct at others, any effort to come to consensus on solution is doomed.  Granted, some are less so, but none, including us, are responsible enough to wield the power of the arsenals that exist today.  There is too much that can go awry. 

Blair lays out a plan for de-escalating risk by “de-alerting,” or extending the time necessary to employ a nuclear attack or response from minutes to days, weeks and months.  Ultimately, this would provide incentive to eliminate the weapons altogether.  The four-phase process makes sense – except in Blair’s admission that even at Phase 1, verifiability would be an issue. And, that is a big one.    

Jeffrey Lewis, in a recent FP article, suggests the answer can only lie in the elimination of plutonium.  No plutonium, no new weapons. Ideally, as a weapon is retired and dismantled, the stuff of it is properly disposed of.   In theory, this was to have happened all along.  Despite agreements between the United States and Russia in 2000, 2007 and 2010, disputes between the two countries have prevented the disposition of “tens of thousands of nuclear weapons’ worth” of plutonium.  Nevertheless, this is the only answer that makes sense.  Removing temptation, removing the key component, ultimately places everyone on an even playing field in the nuclear armament arena – those weapons still in play go away along with the means by which to build them anew. 

References

Blair, Bruce G.  2008. “Achieving the Vision of a World Free of Nuclear Weapons: Increasing Warning and Decision Time.”  International Conference on Nuclear Disarmament, Oslo February 26-27, 2008.  

Gusterson, Hugh. 2013. “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in Western Imagination.” Cultural Anthropology 14(1): 111-43. 

Lewis, Jeffrey.  2016. “The United States and Russia Are Preparing for Doomsday.”Foreign Policy Magazine.  October 7, 2016 issue.   http://foreignpolicy.com/author/jeffrey-lewis/ accessed November 3, 2016.