Let’s Think About How to Build a More Peaceful World

by Lawrence Wittner | Aug 8, 2024 | Peace & Disarmament

Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation.  Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?

Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”

It was not only a relevant idea, but one that seemed to have a lot of potential.  The new UN General Assembly would provide membership and a voice for the world’s far-flung nations, while the new UN Security Council would assume the responsibility for enforcing peace.  Furthermore, the venerable International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) would issue judgments on disputes among nations.  And the International Criminal Court―envisioned at the time but created nearly four decades later―would try individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.  It almost seemed as if a chaotic, ungovernable, and bloodthirsty pack of feuding nations had finally evolved into the long-standing dream of “One World.”

But, as things turned out, the celebration was premature.

The good news is that, in some ways, the new arrangement for global governance actually worked.  UN action did, at times, prevent or end wars, reduce international conflict, and provide a forum for discussion and action by the world community.  Thanks to UN decolonization policies, nearly all colonized peoples emerged from imperial subjugation to form new nations, assisted by international aid for economic and social development.  A Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, set vastly-improved human rights standards for people around the world.  UN entities swung into action to address new global challenges in connection with public health, poverty, and climate change.

Even so, despite the benefits produced by the United Nations, this pioneering international organization sometimes fell short of expectations, particularly when it came to securing peace.  Tragically, much international conflict persisted, bringing with it costly arms races, devastating wars, and massive destruction.  To some degree, this persistent conflict reflected ancient hatreds that people proved unable to overcome and that unscrupulous demagogues worked successfully to inflame.

But there were also structural reasons for ongoing international conflict.  In a world without effective enforcement of international law, large, powerful nations could continue to lord it over smaller, weaker nations.  Thus, the rulers of these large, powerful nations (plus a portion of their citizenry) were often reluctant to surrender this privileged status. 

Symptomatically, the five victorious great powers of 1945 (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) insisted that their participation in the United Nations hinged upon their receiving permanent seats in the new UN Security Council, including a veto enabling them to block Security Council actions not to their liking.  Over the ensuing decades, they used the veto hundreds of times to stymie UN efforts to maintain international peace and security. 

Similarly, the nine nuclear nations (including these five great powers) refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations.  Behind their resistance to creating a nuclear weapons-free world lies a belief that there is much to lose by giving up the status and power that nuclear weapons afford them.

Of course, from the standpoint of building a peaceful world, this is a very short-sighted position, and the reckless behavior and nuclear arrogance of the powerful have led, at times, to massive opposition by peace and nuclear disarmament movements, as well as by many smaller, more peacefully-inclined nations.

Thanks to this resistance and to a widespread desire for peace, possibilities do exist for overcoming UN paralysis on numerous matters of international security.  Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to abolish the Security Council veto outright, given the fact that, under the UN Charter, the five permanent members have the power to veto that action, as well.  But Article 27(3) of the Charter does provide that nations party to a dispute before the Council must abstain from voting on that issue―a provision that provides a means to circumvent the veto.  In addition, 124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities, while the UN General Assembly has previously used “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to act on peace and security issues when the Security Council has evaded its responsibility to do so.

Global governance could also be improved through other measures.  They include increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and securing wider ratification of the founding statute of the International Criminal Court (which has yet to be ratified by Russia, the United States, China, India, and other self-appointed guardians of the world’s future).

It won’t be easy, of course, to replace the law of force with the force of law.  Only this May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court took a bold step toward strengthening international norms by announcing that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials and Hamas commanders for crimes in and around Gaza.  In response, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” legislation requiring the U.S. executive to impose sanctions on individuals connected with the ICC.

Despite the nationalist backlash, however, the time has arrived to consider bolstering international institutions that can build a more peaceful world.  And the current U.S. presidential campaign provides an appropriate place for raising this issue.  After all, Americans, like the people of other lands, have a personal stake in ensuring human survival.

The Forgotten Element in Averting Nuclear Catastrophe

by Lawrence Wittner | May 2, 2024 | Peace & Disarmament

What will it take to end the nuclear nightmare that has gripped the world since the atomic bombings of 1945?

For a time, that nightmare seemed to have abated for, in response to massive popular resistance to the prospect of nuclear war, governments turned to signing nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements.  Even previously hawkish government officials proclaimed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

In recent decades, however, nuclear-armed nations have scrapped nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties, begun the massive upgrading and expansion of their nuclear arsenals, and publicly threatened other nations with nuclear war.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has assessed the nuclear situation since 1946, has turned the hands of its “Doomsday Clock” to 90 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.

Why has this renewed flirtation with nuclear Armageddon occurred?

One reason for the nuclear revival is that, in a world of independent, feuding nations, governments turn naturally to arming themselves with the most powerful weapons available and, sometimes, to war.  Thus, with the decline of the worldwide nuclear disarmament campaign of the 1980s, governments have felt freer to engage their natural proclivities.

A second, less apparent reason is that the movement and government officials alike have ceased thinking systemically.  Or, to put it another way, they have forgotten that the motor force behind nations’ reliance upon nuclear weapons is international anarchy.

In the late 1940s, during the first wave of the popular campaign against the Bomb, the movement recognized that nuclear weapons grew out of the centuries-old conflicts among nations.  Consequently, millions of people across the globe, shocked by the atomic bombings of 1945, rallied around the slogan “One World or None.” 

In the United States, Norman Cousins, the young editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, sat down on the evening of the destruction of Hiroshima and wrote a lengthy editorial, “Modern Man Is Obsolete.”  The “need for world government was clear long before August 6, 1945,” he observed, but the atomic bombing “raised the need to such dimensions that it can no longer be ignored.”  Becoming a key writer, speaker, and fundraiser for the cause, Cousins turned the editorial into a book that went through 14 editions, appeared in seven languages, and had a circulation in the United States of seven million copies.  He also became a leader in a new, rapidly-growing organization, United World Federalists, which by mid-1949 had 720 chapters and nearly 50,000 members.

Around the world, the atomic bombing provoked a similar response.  Atomic scientists, horrified by the prospect of worldwide destruction, published a book titled One World or None, organized international antinuclear campaigns among scientists, and emphasized the need for a global solution to the nuclear problem.  Many, like Albert Einstein, became prominent world federalists or, like Robert Oppenheimer, viewed international control of nuclear weapons as a task that necessitated overriding national sovereignty.

The antinuclear uprising of the late 1940s had some impact upon public policy.  Major governments, previously enthusiastic about nuclear weapons, grew ambivalent about their development and use.  Indeed, the appearance of the Baruch Plan, the world’s first serious nuclear disarmament proposal, owed much to the postwar agitation.

Nevertheless, as the Cold War emerged, the officials of the great powers rejected the new way of thinking about relations among nations championed by Einstein and other activists.  Instead of restructuring international relations to cope with the unprecedented peril of the Bomb, they incorporated the Bomb into the traditional framework of international conflict.  The result was a nuclear arms race and a growing sense that agitation for transforming the international order was, at best, naïve, or, at worst, subversive.

These narrowed political horizons meant that, when the antinuclear movement revived in the late 1950s, it championed more limited objectives, beginning with a call for ending nuclear testing.  And this goal proved attainable, at least in part, because halting atmospheric nuclear testing did not seriously hinder the great powers, which could move tests underground and, thereby, upgrade their nuclear arsenals.  The result was the passage of the world’s first nuclear arms control agreement, the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. 

Admittedly, ban-the-bomb movements also sprang up in numerous countries.  But, although they were sometimes headed by long-time proponents of world government, including Norman Cousins (chair of America’s National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and Bertrand Russell (president of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), they, too, focused on weapons rather than on reforming the international system.  The result was a welcome surge of nuclear arms control treaties in the late 1960s and early 1970s that quieted the fears of activists and led to the movement’s decline.

When the Cold War revived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so did an outraged antinuclear campaign.  Indeed, this third wave of the nuclear disarmament movement proved the largest and most successful yet, securing substantial decreases in nuclear arsenals and significantly reducing the danger of nuclear war.

Of all the major actors of that era, though, only Mikhail Gorbachev seemed ready to move beyond weapons cutbacks to advocate the development of a new international security system.  But with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was swept from power.  And, in recent decades, rising international tensions have swept away the antinuclear campaign’s hard-won gains, as well.

Those gains, though evanescent, were important, for they helped the world to avoid nuclear war while giving it time to press on toward a nuclear weapons-free future.

But this history also suggests that, in the struggle for survival in the nuclear age, confronting the continued anarchy of nations cannot be avoided.  Indeed, given the severity of our current international crises and the escalating nuclear menace that they generate, the time has come to revisit the forgotten issue of strengthening the international security system.

Einstein’s Postwar Campaign to Save the World from Nuclear Destruction

by Lawrence Wittner | Mar 2, 2024 | Peace & Disarmament

Although the popular new Netflix film, Einstein and the Bomb, purports to tell the story of the great physicist’s relationship to nuclear weapons, it ignores his vital role in rallying the world against nuclear catastrophe.

Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation.  In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, about nuclear weapons, Einstein contended that, “as long as nations demand unrestricted sovereignty, we shall undoubtedly be faced with still bigger wars, fought with bigger and technologically more advanced weapons.”  Thus, “the most important task of intellectuals is to make this clear to the general public and to emphasize over and over again the need to establish a well-organized world government.”  Four days later, he made the same point to an interviewer, insisting that “the only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.”

Determined to prevent nuclear war, Einstein repeatedly hammered away at the need to replace international anarchy with a federation of nations operating under international law.  In October 1945, together with other prominent Americans (among them Senator J. William Fulbright, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and novelist Thomas Mann), Einstein called for a “Federal Constitution of the World.”  That November, he returned to this theme in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly.  “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem,” he said.  “It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. . . .  As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.”  And war, sooner or later, would become nuclear war.

After the creation, in early 1947, of United World Federalists, the U.S. branch of the growing world federalist movement, Einstein served on its Advisory Board.

Einstein also promoted world federalist ideas through a burgeoning atomic scientists’ movement in which he played a central role.  To bring the full significance of the atomic bomb to the public, the newly-formed Federation of American Scientists put together an inexpensive paperback, One World or None, with individual essays by prominent Americans.  In his contribution to the book, Einstein wrote that he was “convinced there is only one way out” and this necessitated creating “a supranational organization” to “make it impossible for any country to wage war.”  This hard-hitting book, which first appeared in early 1946, sold more than 100,000 copies.

Given Einstein’s fame and his well-publicized efforts to avert a nuclear holocaust, in May 1946 he became chair of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, a fundraising and policymaking arm for the atomic scientists’ movement.  In the Committee’s first fund appeal, Einstein warned that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Even so, despite the fact that Einstein, like most members of the early atomic scientists’ movement, saw world government as the best recipe for survival in the nuclear age, there seemed good reason to consider shorter-range objectives.  After all, the Cold War was emerging and nations were beginning to formulate nuclear policies.  An early Atomic Scientists of Chicago statement, prepared by Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, underscored practical considerations.  “Since world government is unlikely to be achieved within the short time available before the atomic armaments race will lead to an acute danger of armed conflict,” it noted, “the establishment of international controls must be considered as a problem of immediate urgency.”  Consequently, the movement increasingly worked in support of specific nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.

In the context of the heightening Cold War, however, taking even limited steps forward proved impossible.  The Russian government sharply rejected the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy and, instead, developed its own atomic arsenal.  In turn, U.S. President Harry Truman, in February 1950, announced his decision to develop a hydrogen bomb―a weapon a thousand times as powerful as its predecessor.  Naturally, the atomic scientists were deeply disturbed by this lurch toward disaster.  Appearing on television, Einstein called once more for the creation of a “supra-national” government as the only “way out of the impasse.”  Until then, he declared, “annihilation beckons.”

Despite the dashing of his hopes for postwar action to end the nuclear menace, Einstein lent his support over the following years to peace, nuclear disarmament, and world government projects.

The most important of these ventures occurred in 1955, when Bertrand Russell, like Einstein, a proponent of world federation, conceived the idea of issuing a public statement by a small group of the world’s most eminent scientists about the existential peril nuclear weapons brought to modern war.  Asked by Russell for his support, Einstein was delighted to sign the statement and did so in one of his last actions before his death that April.  In July, Russell presented the statement to a large meeting in London, packed with representatives of the mass communications media.  In the shadow of the Bomb, it read, “we have to learn to think in a new way. . . .  Shall we . . . choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels?  We appeal as human beings to human beings:  Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

This Russell-Einstein Manifesto, as it became known, helped trigger a remarkable worldwide uprising against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in the world’s first significant nuclear arms control measures.  Furthermore, in later years, it inspired legions of activists and world leaders.  Among them was the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, whose “new thinking,” modeled on the Manifesto, brought a dramatic end to the Cold War and fostered substantial nuclear disarmament.  

The Manifesto thus provided an appropriate conclusion to Einstein’s unremitting campaign to save the world from nuclear destruction.

Image courtesy of US Govt. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons