End the insanity (Part II)
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 II of our republication of this essay.
The planet has come terrifyingly close to nuclear war at least 33 times since 1950, due to computer errors, human malfeasance or carelessness, and failed communication, all of which have been documented (see https://is.gd/I9xc3e). Some of us recall the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, probably the closest humanity has come to nuclear conflict. One of the results was the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty signed in Moscow in 1963, which has benefited all Earthlings (Alvarez and Mangano, 2023). Yet the non-visibility of nukes has also given a sinister spin to the adage ‘out of sight, out of mind’, fostering an illusory surety about the absence of threat. The atmospheric test by the United States on 17 July 1962 was the last time people could watch a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere.
The pro-nuclear political and military establishment holds that, however dire the consequences of their potential use, nuclear weapons deter adversaries and that their deterrence utility has been demonstrated. To be sure, all out nuclear war has not happened: this could well be because there was no issue su ciently grave to trigger it, no leader foolish enough to instigate it or simply due to luck, as former US Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara believed (Blight and Lang, 2017). More pointedly, logic suggests a problem in congratulating nuclear weapons for the fact that we have not blown ourselves up with them: Had we done so, we wouldn’t be around to thank them. The logic that nuclear weapons provide deterrence parallels the sick joke of the person falling from the Empire State Building, exulting en route “So far, so good!”. The clearest perspective on nuclear policy rationalizations was o ered by Daniel Ellsberg: “What is missing is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral” (quoted in Hughes, 2023).
What is striking is the number and kind of wars that nuclear deterrence has failed to prevent. Nuclear-armed states have engaged in numerous wars with conventionally armed countries; in many cases, the latter have won. Moreover, states lacking nuclear weapons have not been deterred from attacking nuclear armed opponents: for example, China’s incursion against US forces in Korea in 1950, Argentina’s attack on the Falkland Islands / Malvinas in 1982, and Iraq’s lobbing missiles against Israel in 1991. In short, the myth of nuclear deterrence conveys great risk and no benefit (Barash, 2020).
The insanity of the military machine
During the last decade, global military investments have been eerily on the rise, including military budgets, arms production, expansion of autonomous weapons systems and nuclear warhead upgrades. According to the latest publication of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the world’s nuclear-armed states “continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons systems in 2022”. Their press release headline warns: “States invest in nuclear arsenals as geopolitical relations deteriorate” (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2023). It’s a sentence not to gloss over.
Why is the world — especially academic, media, political, environmental and spiritual leaders — paying virtually no attention? Do we feel so impotent before the military machine that we are unwilling to even think about it, let alone push for its abolition?
The military machine enjoys two dominant frames that serve it brilliantly: invisibility and normalization. As long as warfare is not conspicuous in the global arena (and wars are often made invisible if they occur ‘peripherally’), all of warfare’s prerequisites (budgets, corporate contracts, research, conscriptions, etc.) are not deemed knowledge-worthy developments. The military machine gets partially unveiled when a newsworthy war breaks out (as in Ukraine and Gaza), at which point war becomes normalized. In other words, when the military machine is unveiled (through war), it is immediately re-veiled by being processed for consumers through ‘normal’ and even exciting streams of reports on battles, strategies and other machinations.
We call for ending the conventional invisibility and normalization of the military machine. Organized warfare has always been irrational: No person in their right mind wants to die prematurely or to kill without grave cause. Warfare, moreover, has always been unjust: outsourced to dispensable people enrolled by force, enticed by pay or bullied by propaganda. War has also been unjust to uncountable and unmourned nonhumans forced into the terrors of battle — horses, dogs, elephants — or suffering and dying as bystanders (Nibert, 2013).
While historically war has been irrational and unjust, today it is full-blown insanity. For example, the price tag of the US military budget (the world’s largest) is in the ballpark of one trillion US dollars a year. Yet not only should the United States come to terms with its dire national deficit, but a bill of one trillion dollars must be judged against the urgent demands and costs of climate breakdown, public healthcare, refugee crises, species extinctions, as well as education, pensions, family planning and other social services. Humanity must loudly deplore the dissonance of allotting exorbitant resources to death technologies in this time of reckoning.
We can no longer afford the pseudo-normality of the military machine and its inevitable wars, nor find solace in nuclear deterrence. There are eight billion people on the planet, bustling to make ends meet amidst climate disasters and nature destruction. The basic resources humans need — arable land and freshwater — are maximally exploited and polluted. In this world historical situation of looming scarcities, nation-states contend — with ludicrously bad manners — cheek to jowl as they have parcelled Earth up like a cookie-cutter. Hundreds of millions of people will be dislocated in this century by mega-fires, droughts, floods, sea-level rise, conflicts and other threats. Present circumstances have humanity, along with all Earthlings, perched on a pyre. A spark from any direction — the Middle East, South Asia, Russian borders, China, the Koreas, or elsewhere — can set off an inferno. It is therefore utterly irrational to maintain the military machine, never mind escalating it. The machine itself cannot perceive the spurious nature of its quest for ‘security’. The rest of us, however, know that our safety and well being, and the lives of our nonhuman kin and future generations, are on the line.
Given that every large-scale Earth system is in crisis, how dare the global political military machine chug along with its demonic research, obscene budgets, armament trading, modernization of nuclear weapons and patriotic drivel? The immense waste of lives and resources, malfeasance in allotting taxpayer money, and Orwellian rhetoric of homeland security, motherland or fatherland glory, and global empire building, is a travesty. Life is imperilled. Humanity must look to what is real — the splendour and joy of living — which is being defiled under our jaundiced watch.
There’s never been a better time than now to jettison the military machine. The extreme precarity forecast by socio-ecological upheavals (Miller and Heinberg, 2023) offers the clearest backdrop of war’s obsolescence: We simply can no longer afford any war or preparation for war, even discounting World War III. We call for the global recognition of this slim historical window to abolish the military machine.
We understand that this sounds like a pipedream. But the abolition of slavery — an institution as ancient as militarism and deeply entangled with it — also once sounded like a pipedream. Ditto for the divine right of kings, duelling and apartheid. We are profoundly capable of recreating ourselves when human conscience lights up with understanding and an unambiguous mandate. War is neither a social nor a biological necessity — it is a millennia-old historical custom that prevailed through conquest and imitation. It can no longer continue without endless bloodshed, ruination of nature, perpetual cycles of trauma and hatred, and ultimately holocaust.
We must eliminate the military machine. The convoluted equation of the 21st century will be difficult enough to solve without it. We know that what is coming — regardless of sociocultural identity or economic status — is coming for all of us. We need to gather together to keep each other and all Earth’s beings safe. That will be impossible so long as we tolerate the military machine and shelter it in invisibility and normalization.
Call to Action
We who love this planet, love life, and are astonished at the splendour of existence, rise against the military machine.
We call for immediate military de-escalation. All nations’ military investments can be slashed by half for starters (Klein, 2019). Nations can, moreover, choose the path of complete demilitarization (Lipton and Barash, 2018). Freed resources must be repurposed toward education, family planning, healthcare, preventative medicine, law enforcement against child trafficking, child marriage, and child labour, enforcement against wildlife poaching and trafficking, universal basic income, meaningful employment, pensions, protected areas of nature, conservation projects, ecological restoration and regenerative agriculture. These endeavours will catch human and nonhuman worlds in safety nets, avert a mass extinction event, soften the blows of climate upheaval and start to undo Earth’s contamination by agrochemical and industrial pollutants.
We celebrate the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by nearly half the world’s countries in 2021, and urge all countries to join. Knowledge of this treaty should become widespread and act as a thorn in the side of the nuclear-armed states. Most especially, we single out the Big Three, the wannabe empires. Big Three, you should know what you look like from out here in the bleachers. You look like the Three Stooges auditioning for a Game of Thrones: neither funny nor entertaining, but preposterously unreal. The international community and its leaders (environmental, scientific, political, business, religious, academic) can join their voices to compel global nuclear disarmament. Research into modernizing nuclear weapons — and upgrading them with AI — must stop (see https://is.gd/430pSL).
We appeal to news media to break frame with business-as-usual journalism: cease reporting on war in the guise of ‘dry facts’, as spectacle, and in pseudo moral idioms of ‘bad guys’ versus ‘good guys’. Also cease the pseudo-morality of decrying ‘war crimes’ — as if war is not the crime and as if war is not the cause of war crimes. Free your thought and recognize the ringleaders of war — most especially the nuclear-armed ones — as forces holding us captive and threatening all life.
We call on conscientious objectors worldwide to refuse military summons. It’s a question for all of us: which reality do we choose — ephemeral nationalistic divisions, illusions of security and power or timeless Earth unity? We should all jump ship from a system whose core identity has been conquest and militarism — for see, now, where it is taking us.
The advocacy movements for ecological sustainability, social justice and world peace need to unite for the realization of our common aim: to chart a new human history through substantially downscaling the human enterprise and reorienting it in harmony with Earth (Rees, 2023; Krieger, 2018; Hickel, 2021). Such a coalition for peace refuses all weapons: weapons of war, weapons of hate, weapons against plants, forests, and animals, and the weaponized extraction of energy sources from Earth’s crust and seabed. We call for a broad, grassroots Peace Movement that gathers to safeguard humanity, nonhumans and nature’s places from the hardships here and coming.
Kim Hightower is the associate editor for PAN Works.
Please visit PAN Works for more about our work on ethics and animal wellbeing.
