Fixing a price for peace in the shadow of nuclear warheads
NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEVIL: INSIDE THE WORLD OF ARMED CONFLICT MEDIATION
Pierre Hazan Hurst, €21.99
NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO
Annie Jacobsen Torva, €22.99
An unjust world is often the price of lasting peace. This is the main argument Pierre Hazan puts forward in Negotiating with the Devil: Inside the World of Armed Conflict Mediation. The book begins in the early 1990s, when the US promised the world more peace, prosperity, and democracy. Leading the charge was the United Nations (UN), who adopted a policy of neutrality.
Genocides in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995) and Rwanda (1994), though, forced the UN to see its powers were limited when playing the role of global good cop, overseeing collective world security. “Both tragedies became synonymous with [UN] spinelessness, if not also downright cowardice,” writes the French journalist and author, who previously worked as a political adviser to the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The book’s middle section begins just after 9/11. Washington’s response was a global war on terror, which led to US military interventions in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2014). In the latter conflict, the Assad government used brutal force against the Syrian population to remain in power. With a little help from the Russian military.
The consequences of Russia flexing its muscles were twofold, Hazan points out. The balance of power across the Middle East altered indefinitely; Vladimir Putin also demonstrated to the West that he would no longer be their lapdog.
Hazan writes with passionate conviction, but not so much clarity and economy. A result of a poor French translation? Perhaps. His prose can be long-winded and favours technical political theory over personal political anecdotes. Occasionally, though, he brings personal experience to the table. Peace, he points out, is a messy business. It leaves mediators, with a strong moral conscience, to ask questions that don’t have easy answers.
Should they, for instance, negotiate with war criminals if lives can be saved? Hazan was faced with this question in 1993, as Yugoslavia was breaking apart. He was working as a journalist in Mostar, where dehumanised prisoners in a detention camp were being exchanged like cattle.
Leading the negotiations was Berislav Pusic. In 2017, the Bosnian Croat was sentenced to 10 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Set up in 1993, it paved the way for the International Criminal Court (ICC) that was established in The Hague, nearly a decade later, to try individuals who had committed war crimes, genocide, and crimes of aggression.
The so-called court of last resort was meant to represent universal justice. Hazan claims it has evolved over time into the legal arm of Nato.
Last March, when the ICC issued an arrest warrant for
Putin, the Kremlin responded by threatening the West with nuclear weapons.
“Who could have imagined that the [ICC] which was supposed to [bring] peace would one day help escalate a conflict to the point of a threatened [nuclear] holocaust?” Hazan asks.
Today, nine countries possess nuclear weapons. Western media reports often focus on the most dangerous threats: Russia and North Korea. Or Iran, should the Islamic theocracy manage to get the bomb any time soon. But a more pressing danger is often ignored: once nuclear conflict begins, it’s impossible to stop.
“There is no such thing as a small nuclear war,” Annie Jacobsen writes in Nuclear War: A Scenario. “In the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear exchange, survivors of nuclear war and nuclear winter would find themselves in a savage world.”
The US journalist likes to shock and scare, criss-crossing between science fiction and standard non-fiction. It’s an interesting literary experiment that leaves the reader confused and bewildered on some occasions. But for the most part it’s a cracking read with impressive research credentials.
The publishing date is aptly timed, too, following the seven Oscars Oppenheimer scooped at the 2024 Academy Awards.
The film documented the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the US theoretical physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The top-secret science research project created the world’s first ever nuclear bomb, which the US detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, killing an estimated 80,000 on the first strike, but many thousands after.
Jacobsen gleans much of the book’s data from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives. She also quotes from numerous documents that have only recently been declassified by the US. There are also several interviews with presidential advisers, cabinet members, nuclear weapons engineers, intelligence analysts, and nuclear war survivors.
Setsuko Thurlow is one of them. She was just 13 years old when a mushroom cloud lit up the sky over Hiroshima. “Parts of people’s bodies were missing,” she remembers. “Some were carrying their own eyeballs.”
Jacobsen concludes with evidence published in Nature Food last year. The scientific paper claimed five billion could die from a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. “After nuclear winter, nothing new grows in the cold and the dark,” Jacobsen writes. “Those [that survive] will envy the dead.”
When the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin responded by threatening the West with nuclear weapons