I swear that I had planned to write something completely unrelated to politics for my second blog post. I’m a science fiction writer, after all, so I had planned to write about fiction. Or science, even. Incidentally, I had also planned to write my second blog post much earlier. But life, and the Dionysian orgy that is the “new normal” of our hectic news cycle kicked in, and… well… here we are. It’s been almost four months since my last post, and now that I’m finally writing again, I feel compelled to talk, against all polite judgment, about nuclear weapons.
In a certain sense, nuclear weapons are not political. They are bigger than politics. Anything that can, in one chaotic flash, obliterate with certainty all of human civilization, and with slightly less certainty, most advanced life on earth, is bigger than any nation or party or creed. Certainly, nuclear war is a topic far more massive in scope than the comparatively trivial, quotidian political differences between Hillary, Bernie, and “The Donald”—the political differences over which we spent most of 2016 in-fighting. Because of the laser-like precision with which nukes can be targeted at human infrastructure (including grain silos, water supplies, power plants, and your kids’ middle school), they are an even bigger threat than climate change. In fact, the word “big” doesn’t even cut it (neither, for that matter, does “yuuuge”). The word that comes to my mind when contemplating The Bomb—the one always written with a capital “B” and preceded by the definite article—is “awesome.”
I realize that every word choice comes with baggage, and this one is no exception. The word “awesome” today has a colloquial meaning situated somewhere between the pallid, ubiquitous “cool” and Homer Simpson’s “groin-grabbingly transcendent.” But its 17th century meanings of “inspiring awe” and “appalling, dreadful, weird” (Oxford English Dictionary) are the meanings that come to mind when contemplating the power of atomic weapons.
In fact, if you google the phrase “awesome power of atomic weapons,” restricting your search to precise matches, 4,170 results will instantly pop up, including one straight from Joseph M. Siracusa’s excellent Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction. And, as of this writing, the online version of the Oxford dictionary even includes “the awesome power of the atomic bomb” as the first of its example sentences listed under the entry for “awesome.” There seems to be a widely-held perception, deeply-seated in the modern Western psyche, that nuclear weapons are, in the old sense, “awesome.”
This apparently widespread association between this old sense of “awesome” and the new (in historical terms) specter of nuclear annihilation cuts straight to my point. There is something great, and cosmically terrible, about such weapons that makes nearly all of our parochial political divisions seem petty by comparison. A similar point is made by Einstein’s oft-repeated quip that whatever weapons are used to fight World War 3, World War 4 will certainly be fought “with sticks and stones.” While most projections of the aftermath of a nuclear conflict do predict survivors—see, for example, the Medicine & Global Survival report, physicist Wm Robert Johnston’s model, and this paper by scientists from Colorado—their long-term prospects are hard to predict, and, in any case, the world such survivors would inherit would be a miserable mélange of fire, famine, pestilence, poison, and disease, along with a cold not seen since the last Ice Age. Even if the human race could continue to soldier on under these unenviable circumstances (and that’s a big “if”!), the human civilization we have collectively built over the past 5,000 years would be permanently and irrevocably wiped from history. The provincial political conflicts that consume us today will simply be meaningless when the earth has been reduced to an ice-cold, radioactive cinder.
All of this leads to one inescapable conclusion. We—the one with a capital “W” that means all of us—must struggle to ensure that such a war doesn’t come to pass. Doing so is the most important political imperative, over and above literally anything else. It doesn’t matter whether you were “with her” or wanted to “lock her up”; it doesn’t matter what you think of Putin or Trump or Kim Jong-un; it doesn’t matter if you’re a neoliberal capitalist, a Keynesian “Sandernista,” a die-hard Marxist, or a vegan anarcho-pacifist—hell, it doesn’t matter even if you’re a racist—the one thing we can, and must, all agree on is that none of these political differences matter if there is no world left to fight over. As Derrick Jensen presciently stated about environmental concerns (but is even more apt, I think, in this case): “Any option is a better option than a dead planet.”
And these days the threat of a catastrophic nuclear exchange—intentional or accidental—seems shockingly real in a way that it hasn’t since the end of the Cold War. As Eric Schlosser has made abundantly clear, the ever-present risk of an accidental nuclear war is already unacceptably high without the current rise in tensions between the US and Russia, on the one hand, and the US and North Korea (and, by extension, China) on the other hand. If you’re not up-to-date on this rise in tensions, I recommend the following pieces by Norman Solomon and John Pilger (older, but still insightful) as a sort of primer.
So, please: do your part to save the world—do what you can to avert nuclear holocaust. The world quite literally depends on it.
Here are some small first steps you can take:
- Call or email the offices of your elected officials and say something like this:
“I’m contacting your office to ask that you oppose any escalation of tensions between the US and other nuclear powers. I want my representatives to work against any use of nuclear weapons by our government, and for the abolition of nuclear weapons globally.”
Find your representatives here: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
Find your senators here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
- Consider signing the following petitions:
Roots Action: Block War Funding
Roots Action: Tell Congress to Say No to Nuclear Madness
- If you’re able, form a local group to engage in direct actions. “Direct action” can mean a wide range of things; it can include forms of protest (marches, vigils, banner drops etc.) to raise awareness, forms of education (like reading/discussion groups and movie series), and forms of civil disobedience (blocking arms shipments, chaining yourself to fences, etc.). Obviously, not everyone is able to do all of these things, and I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself. But given how unfathomably destructive a nuclear conflict would be, any morally-defensible act of resistance to such a conflict would be justified.
That’s it—I’ve said what I had to say. Tune in next week (that’s my optimistic goal) for something less political, more artistic, and hopefully more fun. –OAB
Important Further Reading:
Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition
Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety and this piece in The New Yorker: “World War 3, by Mistake.”
O. A. Beckett 