End the insanity (Part I)
For nuclear disarmament and global demilitarization
Originally published in The Ecological Citizen
by Eileen Crist, Judith Lipton and David Barash
Eileen has written and co-edited numerous papers and books, with her work focusing on biodiversity loss and destruction of wild places, along with pathways to halt these trends. Judith is a retired psychiatrist and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, whose real work has always been the prevention of nuclear war. David is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a long-time antinuclear trouble-maker.
This is Part I of our republication of this essay. Part II will follow next week.
While the perils of climate breakdown and Artificial Intelligence garner and even monopolize attention today, humanity and its leaders neglect addressing other formidable dangers — notably, nuclear war and militarism more broadly. Not only is the existential threat of nuclear war real and pressing, but, at this historical juncture of multiple planetary crises, humanity cannot afford investing in any aspect of the military machine. Here, the authors press for the collective recognition of the imperative of nuclear disarmament and of the abolition of all war and its material and ideational infrastructures.
Keywords: demilitarization; nuclear disarmament
Citation: Crist E, Lipton J and Barash D (2024) End the insanity: For nuclear disarmament and global demilitarization. The Ecological Citizen 7(1): 46–54.
Dedicated to Daniel Ellsberg, in loving memory.1
No one believed Katrina would happen before Katrina happened. No one believed Fukushima would happen before Fukushima happened. Virtually no one believes a nuclear war will happen before it happens. But a nuclear war happening is not a disaster: it is a holocaust. Nuclear war must be averted, and most countries have already taken steps to opt out of nuclear madness. However, nine nation-states cling to their nuclear arsenals, throwing the planet and all its beings into devastation’s way.
In 1946, Albert Einstein wrote that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe”. What dysfunctional modes of thinking are most pertinent in this regard? First, denial that nuclear war is possible. Second, the wishful thinking that since a nuclear war has not yet happened, it will continue to not happen in the future. Third, blaming the foe — Americans, Russians, Chinese, Islamists, and so forth — who ‘force’ us (whoever ‘us’ is) to need weapons of mass destruction. Fourth, that nuclear weapons keep us safe. Finally, there’s the specious notion that a limited nuclear war is feasible and ‘life will go on’ after it’s over. Routing out these murky assumptions, humanity must unite to pre-empt nuclear war today through the wisdom of foresight, the clear understanding of its consequences and a realistic expectation of our own agency.
Existential threats
It is in the nature of humans to think in alignment with others, be it one’s in group or cultural trends at large. We tend to conform to social grooves of thought and concern, streaming our own voices into pre-set channels. Perhaps no concern has a bigger grip on lay citizens and scientists alike than global heating. With solid reason: anyone paying attention to climate change science and weather-related upheavals sees the writing on the wall. The planet’s energy balance is skewing catastrophically and the climate is changing too rapidly for nonhumans and humans to have time to adjust (Ripple et al., 2020).
Despite a real climate emergency, a distortion of vision occurs when all eyes focus on one existential threat. Climate breakdown is narrowly framed as the problem, bypassing its root cause, which is driving equally grave yet regularly side-lined emergencies. The root cause of today’s polycrisis is the relentless growth of the human enterprise (Ste en et al., 2015). Human expansionism has bulldozed the Earth through economic overproduction and consumerism, human population growth, the explosive rise of the über-wealthy and the global middle class, ecosystem takeover for food production, skyrocketing ‘livestock’ numbers, all manner of contaminants and the sprawl of the technosphere that now weighs more than all living things. Earth’s climate and biodiversity systems are shattering while the world is increasingly contaminated from this multiscale onslaught.
The fixation on climate breakdown as the problem skirts scrutinizing its root cause and marginalizes equally formidable crises. Four existential threats (that we know about with certainty) menace life: global heating, biodiversity collapse, worldwide toxification and nuclear war. While the breakdown of climate, biodiversity, and planetary health are occurring rapidly on a geological timescale, all three would be trumped by a nuclear confrontation that can start on a morning and be over by the afternoon (Hughes, 2023). Nuclear war (and militarism, to widen the focus) is the existential threat par excellence.
Groupthink also distorts vision by inclining people to jump on bandwagons of collective fixations. We are witnessing this with Artificial Intelligence (AI), heralded variously as a benevolent technological tool, usher of the Singularity, harbinger of unimaginable calamities and even a portal through which God’s Adversary will reign (Ribeiro, 2022; McKibben, 2019; Kingsnorth, 2023). Two commentators, keen to underscore the unprecedented dangers posed by this latest technological juggernaut, compare AI to nuclear weapons: “Nukes don’t make stronger nukes,” they state. “But AIs make stronger AIs” (Harris and Raskin, 2023). This exemplifies how fixating on the unknowns of cutting-edge technologies can blindside us to perils of more familiar ones. The comparison between AI and nuclear weapons — as a device to foreground AI’s astronomical power — is misleading. Nukes do not need to be capable of making stronger nukes: Detonating just a fraction of the currently existing global arsenal would be endgame.
The point of resisting the tendency to circle the wagons around single issues (like climate change or AI) is that we become distracted from other fateful things that are emotionally repellent or less sci-fi worthy: for example, the consequences of deteriorating planetary health from massive pollution by fertilizers, herbicides, biocides, garbage, e-waste, sewage, factory-farm sludge, mining tailings, pharmaceutical waste, plastic, lost fishing gear and industrial chemicals. The degradation of Earth’s epidemiological environment is brewing disease conditions for all beings, including boosting human chronic and infectious illness. Is the collapse of planetary health less ominous than the unfurling of AI — or just less glamorous?
The threat of nuclear war
Our specific intention is to highlight how focus on singular issues may be diverting us from pondering war, and nuclear war in particular. Aside from select news outlets and activist groups, this existential threat is not yet in collective view. There are indications this may be changing, a salutary turn we seek to reinforce (e.g. Krieger, 2018; International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 2023).
Nuclear war has had its sci-fi heyday of (by now) hackneyed narratives of billowing mushroom clouds always on some distant horizon. The blockbuster movie Oppenheimer has kept the chattering classes busy, while avoiding explicit images of the horrors unleashed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If contemplating nuclear war generates ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’, we seem to cope with our fears by projecting them onto fictions and movies, combined with selective inattention.
Unless one is in it, conventional warfare appears as a quotidian affair — a reality-TV spectacle of battles, bombings, villains, heroes, intrigues and the like. War is what few want to think about deeply or contest. “Give Peace a Chance” sounds dated if not sentimental. We gaze upon war with jaded eyes, with a shiver down the spine or a shrug of the shoulders at ‘incorrigible human nature’. Regarding nuclear war, if we think about it at all, we are prone to cross our fingers and hope that reason will prevail.
But if reason is failing to address climate change (where reason should patently carry the day) and is also failing to slow down and regulate AI (urgently called for), then why do we think that human reason will succeed at preventing nuclear war? And why do we think that reason is necessarily relevant? Just as likely as some ‘level-headed’ decision-maker setting off doomsday (to pre-empt a first strike or in deluded hopes of winning), nuclear war could be triggered by no decision-maker (computer error or false alarm) or by a madman capable of crossing the Rubicon that should never be crossed.
The moment this event occurs would be when all other existential woes (and delights) become moot. Without further ado, a nuclear holocaust will break the climate, cause mass extinction and induce global radioactive toxification for the long haul (Turco et al., 1983; Robock and Toon, 2012; Scouras et al., 2023). People who remain alive after nuclear immolation will be agonizing over survival and completely uninterested in what Artificial Intelligence might have to say on the topic of nihilism.
Bottom line: no matter how jaded we are about war and how much we hope it will not happen (or happen only on our news feed), we must put our collective thinking cap on and think wide-awake about war — the whole kit and caboodle.
The dismissal of nuclear war, and billions of people sleepwalking toward annihilation, is not only the product of unexamined assumptions but also of governmental propaganda falling on receptive ears. Human beings can only imagine limited amounts of horror. We believe in the tenacity of our everyday worlds and slip our fears into nightmares we forget upon awakening. It is unbearably painful to think of the deaths of loved ones, but it is also searing to contemplate mass fatalities; as a result, many people simply avoid doing so.
Part II of this essay will be republished on our column next week.
Kim Hightower is the associate editor for PAN Works.
Please visit PAN Works for more about our work on ethics and animal wellbeing.
