How to find peace when the world could trip and fall into nuclear war
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to engage in nuclear war exercises. This was obviously a response to the United States and its NATO partners’ response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. This was understood to be a veiled threat, but did not weaken the resistance to the invasion by those countries that opposed it.
Putin had made threats of this kind before, in 2008. Because Russia was and remains a nuclear power, such threats, though perceived at the time to be a ploy or a bluff, could not be permanently dismissed as diplomacy by another name. Knowing Putin’s character, no one could say that the reality of nuclear war was beyond possibility.
Even though nuclear war even on a limited scale would ravage the planet, it could be initiated by faulty judgment or a character flaw in some one with the power to initiate such a war.
If the most dominant powers initiated a nuclear war, it is estimated that in the first few hours of conflict, 34.1 million human beings would be killed and 57.1 million wounded.
If the war continued, as it almost certainly would, it is estimated that there would be more than 400 to 500 million dead and wounded.
Roughly 348 million would later die from fallout or temperature change. In time, there would also be some 772 million deaths or disabilities caused by poisonous soot in the atmosphere. These figures could be much higher.
The United States and Russia alone, having more than 3000 nuclear bombs apiece aimed at specific targets in each country, would be the chief destroyers.
For Russia the targeted cities would be Washington, New York and military sites.
For the United States the targets would be Moscow and seven other cities or military sites. I leave to your imaginations what the breadth of the destruction would be if other nuclear powers were involved.
All of these possible lethal or crippling results from nuclear attacks could be blamed on any of the following nuclear powers: the United States, Russia, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom.
Enmities exist between some of these nations, but so far they have not risen to the level of motivating any one to attack the other.
Assuming that only the fear of devastating annihilation has deterred such attacks through the last half of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first century, it is possible to conclude that such fear is a force for nuclear peace only in the most atavistic sense.
It certainly does not have the nobility of the philosopher Kant’s hope for “perpetual peace” nor any of the sentiments expressed in Pope John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris” ( peace on earth).
What we derive from the silent weapon of deterrence is but a logical defensive reaction to man conceived as a predator in disguise. He must be contained, opposed, subdued.
As far as the United States is concerned, a policy of deterrence has certainly not turned us away from “smaller” or “chosen” wars, any of which could have had or could still have nuclear consequences. Every administration since 1950 has in varying ways and for different reasons involved us in a war of choice.
All but one of the wars in which we’ve involved — in Korea, Lebanon (twice), Vietnam, Grenada, Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq — were chosen and “declared” by the president. Constitutionally speaking, Congress alone has the power to commit the United States to war, but all the wars since 1950, except the Persian Gulf War, were given names like “police actions” to absolve Congress of its responsibility.
The only war presented to Congress for its approval and support was the Persian Gulf War. The elder Bush asked Congress for a joint resolution to use American forces to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
The cost of these wars in dollars was in the trillions. The cost to date in the lives of American men and women is in excess of 85,000. The number Americans wounded in Vietnam alone is more than 8 times the 58,000 killed there.
The numbers for the other wars will be similar. Over 7,000 American soldiers died in Iraq and Iran and other post-9/11 actions.
Over 30,000 veterans of these wars have been lost to suicide, about 22 a day since our invasion of Afghanistan.
The number of Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans and Iraqis killed in our chosen wars is astronomical. The number of North Vietnamese killed was over 2,000,000, while South Vietnam lost around 1,000,000, including those left to the tender mercies of the Vietcong after the American departure.
More than 500,000 were killed in Iraq, and that’s a conservative figure. Our wars send many into exile. Tens of thousands of Iraqis fled into Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.
The tragic irony of such chosen wars is that they invariably end in stalemate or worse. Technically, we are still at war with North Korea. Panicked flights characterized our departure from Vietnam. Ongoing strife riddles Iraq. The Taliban dominates Afghanistan.
Even if a chosen war doesn’t result in wider war or a nuclear attack, a comment by historian William L. Cohn cannot be ignored: “Endless war is the destruction of civil society.” All we have to do is look at what has become of us since 2003 to see how true this is.
As a society we have become more militaristic, more concerned with security, more intolerant of dissent, more top-heavy with wealth controlled by the oligarchic few and more inured to violence than we have ever been.
We average 46 homicides per day, greater than any other developed nation. In 2021, the homicide total was almost 25,000.
What about the cost in dollars required to support troops committed abroad and the depleting effect this has on civilian needs at home? Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle cabal believed it had the right to change regimes because it had the power to do so.
For moral and other reasons the American public disagreed. Informed public sources supported the protesters. They knew that benefits of the invasion would give American corporations access to Iraqi oil (the largest oil fields in the Middle East, apart from Saudi Arabia’s) and would remove Iraq as a threat to Israel.
Iraq was duly invaded, and the authors of the invasion retired to their sequestered estates. Brown University’s estimate of the cost of the war to America is $1.1 trillion.
Why is this desire to impose our will on another country (if the imposition is possible) so persistent in American foreign policy? It’s national egotism in its most naked form, and the costs created and debts incurred are gargantuan. Iraq and Afghanistan are two of the most recent examples of this propensity, but Vietnam was the precursor of both, and the great cost in lives and funding was not bad enough to deter further adventurism.
The wealthy who want to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare as a way to restore the budget deficits caused by these wars would only make the situation worse. They feel less and less concern for the best interests of all. Why? One reason might be that the indebted, who constitute all but the wealthy, are too busy paying off their debts to worry about the nation’s.
The late Tony Judt, who has few peers as a historian, addressed himself to this same condition in his last book “Ill Fares the Land”: “Much of what is ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980’s obsession with wealth, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor, and, above all, the rhetoric that accompanies the uncritical admiration for unfettered markets … and the delusion of endless growth.”
The root of the problem is spiritual. As a people and as a government, we are less altruistic, more self-centered, more acquisitive and less generous.
This has distracted us from facing an ultimate nuclear threat and from enhancing our social life, as America has done in the past.
In the 1960’s, building on the New Deal’s creation of Social Security and the GI Bill of Rights, there was the Kennedy-initiated and Johnson-shepherded agenda.
They created Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, food stamps, Headstart, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Peace Corps, the Student Loan Program, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Against this historical background, what should be done and how should we think now to forestall a nuclear disaster? My first suggestion is that we should ally ourselves with the nuclear treaty that Kennedy induced Kruschev to sign in the early sixties and that we explore the implications for further disarmament.
Second, we should encourage alliances between nations on the basis of a need for a common defense. In the interim, these alliances would provide a way of sharing information that could lead to improvements in private and public life and even diffuse minor conflicts before they evolve into secondary wars or the ultimate war.
There is one laudable precedent for this. A singular effort was made after World War II to forestall future wars, primarily in Europe, when the Schuman Plan was initiated by Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. The overall thrust of the plan was not a pious plea for peace on earth to men of good will.
It was an official agreement between France and Germany that would make them economically and even militarily interdependent in ways that would make war something in the worst interests of both. Schuman was even said to have taken a vow of celibacy so he could devote himself totally to finding ways that would make the plan possible for both countries.
In specific terms, the plan would eventually make Germany reliant on France for the coal needed for the production of steel. With steel being central to the economies of both countries, the results of such cooperation would place national interest above all else.
Other European countries were gradually attracted to form similar alliances and partnerships, and this eventually created the European Union. What is important to take from this one example is to see how much its success supported peace — peace in the most realistic and interdependent sense.
This was a creative peace and not a dicey peace following successive wars. It was similar to the visionary courage that created the European Recovery Act or, as it is historically known, the Marshall Plan.
The United States allocated the equivalent of $ 13 billion (about $135 billion today) to help in the economic recovery of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. Peace between them has prevailed since 1945.
Such alliances are no final guarantee against nuclear wars initiated by suicidal dictators. But deterrence is built into their very purpose. They show that alliances rooted in need, not greed, are difficult even for despots and dictators with nuclear ambitions to ignore.
Samuel Hazo, Pennsylvania’s first poet laureate, was a professor of English at Duquesne University and the founder of the International Poetry Forum, which brought some of the world’s major writers to Pittsburgh. Born in Pittsburgh to refugee parents from Lebanon and Assyria, he served in the Marine Corps before earning his doctorate at Duquesne and teaching there for 43 years.