Are We Sleepwalking Our Way Into a Nuclear War?

by Sovaida Maani Ewing | Jun 18, 2024 | Disarmament

The threat of nuclear war is at the highest level it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. However, there is a crucial difference: in 1962, most of us were alert to the threat and its existential nature. Today, by contrast, many of us are oblivious to our history or have simply forgotten it, which poses a huge danger: that of sleepwalking our way into a nuclear war with catastrophic consequences for our country and all of humanity.

This danger is exacerbated by three factors.

The first is the proliferation of nuclear arms and the renewed interest on the part of non-nuclear weapons states to acquire nuclear weapons. The war in Gaza has stirred fears that Iran will race for the bomb and join the nuclear weapons’ club. There are good reasons for such a fear: Recent reports quote the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as saying that Iran is now enriching uranium up to 60 percent, considerably more than the 3.67% permitted under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The IAEA also believes Iran already possesses enough fissile material to make three nuclear weapons. Moreover, the breakout time (the time required to produce enough fissile material at the 90 percent concentration needed for nuclear weapons, not taking into account the time needed to build a deliverable nuclear warhead) is now zero. The fact that the Iran has prevented the IAEA, the world’s nuclear watchdog, from properly monitoring its nuclear activities since early 2021 only exacerbates these concerns. Added to all this are Iran’s own threats that she will reconsider her nuclear stance if her nuclear facilities are threatened.

These fears have a potentially cascading effect: they are likely to spur other countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to seek nuclear capabilities of their own starting with civilian capabilities. Indeed, Saudi Prince Mohammad has already stated that were Iran to build nuclear weapons, Saudi would follow suit. Alas, the more nuclear weapons the world has, the greater the chance they will be used intentionally or accidentally.

A similar scenario is playing out further afield in Asia where China’s assertion of territorial claims to disputed islands in the South China Seas like the Paracels and Spratlys and their adjacent waters rich in reserves of natural resources and its claims to the islands of Senkaku/Diaoyu in the East China Sea, coupled with China’s stated desire to absorb Taiwan, are making other countries in the region fearful of China’s power. Japan and South Korea are particularly nervous, especially given the nuclear threat from North Korea. Their fears have been exacerbated by America’s uneven support of Ukraine in the face of Russian territorial aggression. Even though the United States is bound by a trilateral cooperation agreement to defend Japan and the Republic of Korea under its nuclear umbrella they are worried that the support they have been promised may not be forthcoming. These factors taken together are leading both countries to float the idea of acquiring their own nuclear weapons.

The second factor exacerbating the threat of nuclear war is that the guardrails in the form of a treaty regime so painstakingly crafted by the international community designed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons have been crumbling. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty collapsed in 2019. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is defunct; and while the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START Treaty) — the last Treaty governing nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia– is theoretically in effect until 2026, Russia has suspended its participation in the Treaty and has allegedly not complied with her obligations under it since 2023.

The third factor enhancing the threat of nuclear war is the escalating rhetoric of countries like Russia. In early May of this year, Russia sent a clear warning that its arsenal of nuclear weapons was always in a state of combat readiness and announced that it would be holding military drills with troops based near Ukraine to prepare for the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. This was Russia’s most explicit threat to date that it might use such weapons in Ukraine.

The combination of these three factors should serve to wake us up to the reality facing us before it’s too late. We can no longer afford to be complacent about the dangers of nuclear war, especially as we know, from past experience, that conflicts can escalate rapidly, spin beyond our control and lead to unintended consequences. It’s time we stopped and considered the price humanity would have to pay if we had even a “limited” nuclear war – limited geographically or in time. Experts suggest that using even one percent of our nuclear weapons would have a severe impact on the world’s climate, leading to a nuclear winter and a global famine in which 2 billion people―a quarter of the world’s population―would be at risk of starvation. These are unacceptable costs. Are we really willing to pay them?

As we stand on the precipice of unprecedented horror and untold suffering, we have a choice to make: we can continue our self-destructive dive into the abyss or work assiduously as a community of nations to build a global system of collective security that will ensure global peace and security. Such a system should be grounded in collectively agreed-upon international rules which are enforced even-handedly against any nation that threatens the peace using an international standing force that acts at the behest of, and in service to, the international community.

Image source: Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Forgotten Element in Averting Nuclear Catastrophe

by Lawrence Wittner | May 2, 2024 | 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 | 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

From the Partial Test Ban Treaty to a Nuclear Weapons-Free World

by Lawrence Wittner | Sep 14, 2023 | Disarmament

This September is the sixtieth anniversary of U.S. and Soviet ratification of the world’s first significant nuclear arms control agreement, the Partial Test Ban Treaty.  Thus, it’s an appropriate time to examine that treaty, as well as to consider what might be done to end the danger of nuclear annihilation.

The Rise of Public Pressure

Although the use, in 1945, of atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki unleashed a wave of public concern about human survival in the nuclear age, it declined with the emergence of the Cold War.  But another, even larger wave developed during the 1950s and early 1960s as the nuclear arms race surged forward.  At the time, the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain engaged in testing a new nuclear device, the H-bomb, with a thousand times the power of the atomic bomb.

Many people found this situation alarming.  Not only did the advent of H-bombs point toward universal doom in a future war, but the testing of the weapons sent vast clouds of radioactive “fallout” into the atmosphere, where it drifted around the planet until it descended upon the populace below.  In 1957, Professor Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, predicted that, thanks to the nuclear tests already conducted, a million people would die early, and 200,000 children would be born with serious mental deficiency or physical defects.

In reaction to this growing menace, millions of people around the world began to resist nuclear weapons.  They formed new, activist organizations, including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better known as SANE) and Women Strike for Peace (in the United States), the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), the Japan Council Against A & H Bombs and the Japan Congress Against A & H Bombs (in Japan), and the Struggle Against Atomic Death (in West Germany).  Even in the Soviet bloc, concerned scientists pressed for an end to the nuclear arms race.

Governments Reluctantly Begin to Alter Public Policy

Government officials in nuclear-armed nations, troubled by the rising agitation, as well as by opinion polls showing widespread popular distaste for nuclear testing, nuclear weapons, and nuclear war, gradually began to adapt their policies to the demands of the public.  Meeting with top scientists in the U.S. nuclear weapons program, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower told them that the U.S. government was “up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation” and that the country “could not permit itself to be ‘crucified on a cross of atoms.’”  If U.S. nuclear testing continued, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned the president, “the slight military gains” would be “outweighed by the political losses.” 

Accordingly, in 1958, the Soviet, American, and British governments halted nuclear testing while beginning negotiations for a test ban treaty.  Failing to secure an agreement, they resumed nuclear tests in 1961, which led to nuclear testing remaining a very hot political issue for people and governments alike.

Into this controversy stepped Norman Cousins, the editor of a widely-read public affairs magazine, the Saturday Review and, also, ardent world federalist and founder and co-chair of SANE.  During a lengthy meeting at the White House with President John F. Kennedy in November 1962, Cousins inquired if the president would like him to meet with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to try to smooth the diplomatic path toward a nuclear test ban treaty.  Kennedy responded affirmatively and, in the following months, Cousins shuttled back and forth between the two world leaders.  Ultimately, Cousins overcame Khrushchev’s suspicions of Kennedy and, then, convinced Kennedy to deliver a major speech with “a breathtaking new approach” to Soviet-American relations. 

This American University address, partially written by Cousins, proved an immediate success with Khrushchev.  Test ban negotiations commenced in Moscow during July 1963, resulting in the Partial Test Ban Treaty―banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.

The Significance of the Treaty and Its Successors

From the standpoint of ending the nuclear arms race, the treaty had its limitations.  Because the treaty left unaddressed the issue of nuclear testing underground, the nuclear powers and aspiring nuclear powers simply shifted nuclear tests to this new locale.  Furthermore, with nuclear fallout no longer a major public concern, popular pressure to halt nuclear testing―and, thereby, choke off the arms race―declined.

Nevertheless, the Partial Test Ban Treaty proved a turning point in world history.  Together with the nuclear disarmament campaign that produced the treaty, it reduced Cold War hostility and ushered in a period of détente between the U.S. and Soviet governments.  Furthermore, widespread nuclear proliferation, which seemed imminent at the time, failed to materialize.  Even today, sixty years later, there are only nine nuclear powers. 

Most important, the treaty demonstrated that nuclear arms control and disarmament were feasible.  And so a host of treaties followed that substantially reduced nuclear dangers.  These included the Nonproliferation Treaty, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.  Through these treaties, as well as through unilateral action―both spurred on by popular pressure―the number of nuclear weapons in the world dropped sharply, from 70,000 to roughly 12,500.  Meanwhile, nuclear war became increasingly unthinkable.

Nuclear Revival and Resistance

Of course, in recent years, with the decline of popular pressure against nuclear weapons, the prospect of nuclear annihilation has revived.  Disarmament treaties have been scrapped, a new nuclear arms race has begun, and reckless leaders of nuclear nations have publicly threatened nuclear war.  Although a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force in 2021, the nine nuclear powers have resisted signing it.

Even so, it remains possible to get nations back on track toward international security.  Citizens for Global Solutions has signed on to a joint statement for the forthcoming Nonproliferation Treaty conference that calls for a Common Security framework approach as an alternative to nuclear deterrence.  The statement was presented at the recent NPT preparatory conference by the chair of the World Federalist Movement and has been endorsed by 170 organizations.  In a few weeks, CGS will also co-host a parliamentary delegation from Japan and the Republic of Korea that will be welcomed by U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), one of the staunchest congressional advocates of nuclear disarmament. 

Furthermore, the treaty process provides a useful route toward a nuclear-free world.   As the Partial Test Ban Treaty and its successors show us, arms control and disarmament treaties have helped to curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.  The revived march toward nuclear catastrophe can be halted and reversed by a treaty finally banning nuclear weapons―if people will demand it.

Daniel Ellsberg Remembrance (1931-2023)

by Anne Zill | Sep 12, 2023 | Disarmament

One of the most wonderful qualities about Daniel Ellsberg, (1931-2023), is that unlike too many of us he got better and better as he grew older.  Maybe we all hope we will — even if we fail to fully meet that goal — but he is a genuine hero in American history who truly got wiser and wiser throughout his long life.

For many years during my working life in Washington, D.C. when I was running an idea salon and representing philanthropist Stewart Mott in a historic building just behind the Capitol between the Supreme Court and the Senate Office buildings, Dan Ellsberg was a frequent visitor to 122 Maryland Avenue.  During the 1970’s and ’80’s I would encounter him walking the halls on the first, second and third floors, meeting with Morton Halperin, Admirals Gene laRocque and Gene Carroll and others who were running Fund for Peace Projects which were our tenants in this four-story 1820 building.  He was intense, focused and friendly.  Everybody around here was engaged in peace efforts, military reform, national security and foreign policy rethinking.  It was a veritable hotbed of good ideas for policies to make our country more open, honest, accountable as well as instrumental in getting us to a better world.  The US Pentagon’s first famous cost overruns whistleblower, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, another frequent visitor liked to joke that this was the House of Un-American Activities — but it was in fact exactly the opposite.

Dan Ellsberg had not always been an anti-nuclear analyst and advocate.  After Harvard (summa cum laude in economics), a stint at Cambridge University in England and a PhD from Harvard, he worked for the US State Department as a nuclear war planner, and went to South Vietnam and then to the RAND Corporation, contributing to a 47-volume study of classified documents on the conduct of the Vietnam War that was completed in 1968.

I was privileged to know two of his associates who influenced his later life.  Anthony (Tony) Russo who was also employed by RAND when he worked with Ellsberg to make multiple copies of the Pentagon Papers as that huge 1968 study had come to be known.  Randy Kehler, also a member of Citizens for Global Solutions  National Advisory Council (CGS NAC), first influenced Ellsberg at a conference in 1969 when he said he was going to prison for draft resistance against the Vietnam War.  He said it was the right thing to do.  And Ellsberg wrote later that ‘if I hadn’t met Randy Kehler it wouldn’t have occurred to me to copy (the Pentagon Papers).’  Later that year the deed was done.  But it was made public by The New York Times in 1971.

Among his several books, his most recent, The Doomsday Machine was first published in 2017.  Dan Ellsberg asked me to read it and see what I thought in 2019.  A wonderful read!  We had a number of deep conversations and that was when I thought he would be a great member of the CGS NAC.  He readily agreed.  In this last book he discusses the intolerable dangers to the survival of a civilization that nuclear weapons pose if used.  In all the years since the end of the Cold War, Ellsberg points out that we still have these Doomsday systems in place.  He quotes Martin Luther King observing that ‘There is no such a thing as being too late.’  He also offers a lead quotation from Albert Einstein in 1946 (another former NAC member), ‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.’

Ellsberg was awarded the Ron Ridenhour Inaugural Courage Prize in 2004, among numerous other honors.  We were fortunate to have him with us on our CGS National Advisory Council in his last years as he symbolizes a big, influential thinker for our time and our future.

Photo credit: Edward Kimmel from Takoma Park, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons