SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nuclear weapons
New Year, Same Old Wars
War is humanity’s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. Can we ever stop waging it?
Jan 03, 2025
I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide).
From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news—from Gaza, from all across the planet–with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?
No, no, no, it’s not.
This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill—you just have to do so within certain rules.
But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: “As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.”
The words are those of Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, quoted in a recent U.N. report about Israel’s ongoing devastation of Palestinian hospitals and its virtually total destruction of the occupied territory’s healthcare system, including the arrest—the abduction—of hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals, who often wind up being tortured and sometimes murdered.
The U.N. report was released “just days after the last functioning major healthcare facility in northern Gaza, Kama Adwan Hospital, was taken out of service after a raid by Israeli military forces, leaving the population of North Gaza with almost no access to adequate health care,” according to U.N. News:
Staff and patients were forced to flee or were taken into custody, with many reports of torture and ill-treatment. The director of the hospital was taken into custody, and his fate and whereabouts are unknown.
During the period covered by the report, there were at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics, and other civilians, and causing significant damage, if not complete destruction of civilian infrastructure.
It’s virtually impossible to absorb news like this without first reducing it to an abstraction. This is something that’s happening “over there” somewhere, to people I don’t know. And soon enough the world itself—the world in which we all live—is mostly an abstraction... an entity separated by borders. I can read about terrible things going on in distant places, but my sense of actual connection to them is missing.
The U.N. News story proceeded to point out, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”
And here’s where my internal alarm went off. I have no disagreement with the point of the above sentence, but there’s something missing. Something crucial. Its basic point is this: When you’re waging war, hey, you still have to obey certain rules, e.g., don’t bomb hospitals without a really, really good reason. If you do, you’ve done something bad. You’ve committed a war crime.
It’s not simply that acts of war are wrapped snugly in legalese, but that war itself—in the context that births the term “war crime”—is not questioned or morally challenged. War simply exists. It’s a transcultural moral certainty. It’s part and parcel of civilization itself. Various social entities across the planet are bound to disagree or get annoyed with one another from time to time, and when they do—what choice do they have?—they go to war. This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill—you just have to do so within certain rules. And mostly those rules apply to the loser, not the winner. Certainly this is true in retrospect.
And suddenly the sense of abstraction I was feeling begins to shatter. The concept of war instantly turns life itself into an abstraction. No matter that religions (see Genesis 1:27) all seem to acknowledge the preciousness of human life... of life itself. Most religions are also the first to send their troops—or, nowadays, their tanks and bombers—into battle.
A year ago I wrote:
We—by which I mean most of humanity—are still playing with the so-called ‘just war theory,’ the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.
You know, violence is morally neutral—and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers... The neutrality of violence can be used by anyone in a position of power.
And, oh yeah, before you open fire, before you start killing, you have to take a spiritual step directly into the process: You have to define, and then dehumanize, the enemy. Once that happens, let her rip! The only thing stopping you now are the so-called rules of war, which allegedly protect innocent civilians and keep the whole thing reasonable. What a joke. Violence is poisonously addictive and easily expands—anywhere and everywhere.
War, as I have noted, is humanity’s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. We have a few thousand nukes ready to go (“if necessary”) and thus the power to destroy all life on Planet Earth, aka, ourselves. Isn’t it time to start rethinking this potential Armageddon?
We are capable of creating peace! Most of us want it, at least for ourselves, our loved ones, our community, and country. We just don’t know what it is—and no, it’s not some cliché of perfect harmony. But it begins with the only rule of war that is necessary: It must never be waged again.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dems Urge Biden to Limit Presidential Authority to Launch Nuclear War Before Trump Takes Charge
"As Donald Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress's constitutional role is respected and fulfilled," wrote Sen. Edward Markey and Rep. Ted Lieu.
Dec 12, 2024
Two Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden Thursday, urging him to place more checks on potential nuclear weapons use by mandating that a president must obtain authorization from Congress before initiating a nuclear first strike.
The letter writers, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), argue that "such a policy would provide clear directives for the military to follow: A president could order a nuclear launch only if (1) Congress had approved the decision, providing a constitutional check on executive power or (2) the United States had already been attacked with a nuclear weapon. This would be infinitely safer than our current doctrine."
The two write that time is of the essence: "As Donald Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress's constitutional role is respected and fulfilled."
The Constitution vests Congress, not the president, with the power to declare war (though presidents have used military force without getting the OK from Congress on multiple occasions in modern history, according to the National Constitution Center).
During the Cold War, when nuclear weapons policy was produced, speed was seen as essential to deterrence, according to Jon Wolfsthal, the director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists, who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post last year that makes a similar argument to Markey and Lieu.
"There is no reason today to rely on speedy decision-making during situations in which the United States might launch first. Even as relations with Moscow are at historic lows, we are worlds removed from the Cold War's dominant knife's-edge logic," he wrote.
While nuclear tensions today may not be quite as high as they were during the apex of the Cold War, fears of nuclear confrontation have been heightened due to poor relations between the United States and Russia over the ongoing war in Ukraine, among other issues. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree lowering the threshold for potential nuclear weapons use not long after the U.S. greenlit Ukraine's use of U.S.-supplied long range weapons in its fight against Russia.
This is not the first time Markey and Lieu have pushed for greater guardrails on nuclear first-use. The two are the authors of the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, a proposed bill first introduced in 2017 that would bar a U.S. president from launching a nuclear first strike without the consent of Congress.
"We first introduced this act during the Obama administration not as a partisan effort, but to make the larger point that current U.S. policy, which gives the president sole authority to launch nuclear weapons without any input from Congress, is dangerous," they wrote.
In their letter, Markey and Lieu also recount an episode from the first Trump presidency when, shortly after the January 6 insurrection, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley ordered his staff to come to him if they received a nuclear strike order from Trump.
But Milley's ability to intervene was limited, according to Lieu and Markey, because his role is advisory and "the president can unilaterally make a launch decision and implement it directly without informing senior leaders." They argue this episode is a sign that the rules themselves must change.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Survivor of US Atomic Bombing Makes Plea to World With Nobel Acceptance Speech
"Let us all strive together to ensure that humanity is not destroyed by nuclear weapons, and to create a human society where there are no nuclear weapons and no war," said Terumi Tanaka.
Dec 11, 2024
Accepting the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the grassroots Japanese anti-nuclear group he co-chairs, Terumi Tanaka warned on Tuesday night that the world is moving in the opposite direction than the one hibakusha—survivors of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—have demanded for nearly seven decades.
Tanaka is a co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, an organization founded in 1956 by survivors of the bombings that had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki, with the death toll continuing to rise in later years as people succumbed to the effects of radiation.
The group accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, with the Nobel Committee honoring Nihon Hidankyo "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons."
The organization aims to maintain a taboo around the use of nuclear weapons, which have only been used in combat by the U.S. in Japan in 1945.
Tanaka warned that there are currently 12,000 nuclear warheads in the arsenals of the U.S., Russia, China, and six other countries, and 4,000 of those "could be launched immediately."
"This means that the damage that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be multiplied by hundreds or even thousands," said Tanaka, who is 92. "Let us all strive together to ensure that humanity is not destroyed by nuclear weapons, and to create a human society where there are no nuclear weapons and no war."
"It is the heartfelt desire of the hibakusha that, rather than depending on the theory of nuclear deterrence, which assumes the possession and use of nuclear weapons, we must not allow the possession of a single nuclear weapon," he added.
"I hope that the belief that nuclear weapons cannot—and must not—co-exist with humanity will take firm hold among citizens of the nuclear weapon states and their allies, and that this will become a force for change in the nuclear policies of their governments."
Tanaka said that "the nuclear taboo threatens to be broken," as evidenced by Israeli Heritage Minister Amihay Eliyahu's recent comment that a nuclear attack on Gaza would be "one way" to defeat Hamas.
"I am infinitely saddened and angered" by such statements, said Tanaka.
He described his experience as a 13-year-old when the U.S. bombed Nagasaki, just a couple of miles away from his family's house, which was crushed by the impact.
He said he later found the charred body of one of his aunts and saw his grandfather close to death from the burns that covered his body.
"The deaths I witnessed at that time could hardly be described as human deaths," Tanaka said. "There were hundreds of people suffering in agony, unable to receive any kind of medical attention."
"I hope that the belief that nuclear weapons cannot—and must not—co-exist with humanity will take firm hold among citizens of the nuclear weapon states and their allies, and that this will become a force for change in the nuclear policies of their governments," said Tanaka.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) applauded Nihon Hidankyo and the hibakusha "for their resilience and willingness to share their stories over and over again, so that the world may learn and come together to say 'never again.'"
"It was their courage that enabled the [Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons] to be adopted, which represents the first progress on nuclear disarmament in decades," said Melissa Parke, executive director of ICAN, referring to the treaty that's been ratified by 73 countries.
"Listening to Mr. Tanaka describe the horrendous effects on his family and city when the Americans dropped their atomic bomb should convince world leaders they have to go beyond simply congratulating the hibakusha of Nihon Hidankyo for this award. They must honor them by doing what the hibakusha have long called for—urgently getting rid of nuclear weapons," said Parke. "That is the only way to ensure that what Mr. Tanaka and the other hibakusha have been through never happens to anyone ever again. As long as any nuclear weapons remain anywhere, they are bound one day to be used, whether by design or accident."
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Nobel Committee, condemned the nine nuclear powers for "modernizing and building up their nuclear arsenals."
"It is naive to believe our civilization can survive a world order in which global security depends on nuclear weapons," Frydnes said. "The world is not meant to be a prison in which we await collective annihilation."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular