DREAM IS REALLY A LETHAL NIGHTMARE
THIS year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to an Australiancreated anti-nuke group with a dream that could get us killed.
And to make its dream come true, this International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is telling us dodgy scares even about our own nuclear weapons tests.
Someone should award the Nobel Committee a prize for stupidity.
It last week honoured the ICAN “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons”.
The first half is great: yes, let’s terrify people about nuclear weapons. That’s exactly why these weapons work so well at keeping us safe.
The fear they inspire has stopped the big powers from directly attacking each other for more than 60 years — an almost unprecedented period of peace. They cannot risk being hit with what they believe will be a nuclear Armageddon.
The North Korean crisis, perversely, shows how this works.
The United States, the world’s greatest superpower, does not dare attack even this tiny nation because it knows dictator Kim Jong-un is just mad enough to destroy South Korea’s nearby capital with either one of his new nuclear bombs or even just a conventional bombardment.
Having nuclear weapons makes you less likely to be attacked, at least by a sovereign power. Ask Israel, surrounded by enemies. And being at war with a nuclear power makes you very scared. Ask Japan, which surrendered fast in 1945 after having the first two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since then, not one nuclear bomb has been fired anywhere in anger.
No need to, you see. The fear is what keeps the peace.
So Beatrice Fihn, the ICAN boss, was completely wrong in saying after winning the Nobel: “We can’t threaten to indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians in the name of security. That’s not how you build security.”
In fact, that’s exactly how security for the great powers has been built after centuries of warfare.
Meanwhile, though, millions have been blown up, shot, slashed and gassed by countries without nuclear weapons attacking each other.
But now get real. If the US and Britain did scrap nuclear weapons, does anyone seriously think China, Russia or Pakistan would do the same? Would Iran or North Korea give up plans for their own nuclear weapons, or work even harder?
And would Australia be safer or more exposed to, say, an aggressive China in a non-nuclear world?
I’m betting such calculations turned Barack Obama into a nuclear hypocrite. In 2009, newly elected, he said: “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Yet the Pentagon’s last publicly released audit, in 2015, shows the US has 4571 nuclear warheads. Obama did mothball more than 700, but he also ordered an upgrade of warheads, delivery systems and command networks the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost $448 billion by 2024.
But none of this was mentioned in excited media coverage of ICAN’s Nobel prize. Instead, we got yet more of the scares and myth-making that have made everything nuclear a bogeyman here. The ABC, for instance, repeated as fact an ICAN claim that Yami Lester, who died in July, was an Aboriginal elder who “spent a lifetime raising awareness of the dangers of nuclear weapons, having been blinded during British weapons testing in Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s”.
In fact, the McClelland royal commission into those tests took evidence from treating eye specialist Dr David Tonkin that his blindness was more likely caused by trachoma, measles and poor nutrition. Lester, who had been 175km from Maralinga, had “a long history of red, sore eyes since childhood”, with “evidence of trachoma scarring”, and his blindness in his right eye two years after the blast seemed linked to “ulcers during a severe attack of measles”.
Curiously, it said Yami lost “the left eye in 1957, the eye having been blind for nine years previously” — as in, six years before the blast.
But keep up your scares, guys. The more we freak about nuclear weapons, the better they work.
But to work best, they must exist.