Next Day - Who Pays?

Nations have proved unable over 65 years to eliminate nuclear weapons. We must draw a conclusion from this overwhelming fact. The peril’s longevity and the nations’ tolerance of the threat steadily enlarge the danger.

Target populations once lived just in U.S. and Soviet cities, but with proliferation and the danger that terrorists will become nuclear armed, cities world-wide are fair game. Non-urban populations are equally exposed, from fall-out and the destruction of civilized infrastructure.

Now, it seems, the cost to prevent attack and to pick up the pieces after the curtain has fallen on this nation-conceived, nation-sustained horror show should be borne in part by cities.

Tara O’Toole, an Undersecretary of the Homeland Security Department, told a university audience with reference to an unconventional weapon strike, “We do have to start thinking very seriously about what we would actually do the day after an attack” Well, yes, and she went on to call it a “continuing, nagging problem” to decide who should foot the bill, whether the federal, state, or local government. (Global Security Newswire, June 10, 2010)

Decisions are made by people with power. Power belongs to those who profit from war and weapons, and to ideologically fixated national patriots and ethnic, economic, religious, and tribal zealots. The rest of us, which means most people, have not pursued enforced law as the substitute for war, available though it now is, thanks to accessible communication and travel that make global governance possible .

That we fail to do this, that we capitalize on modern communication and travel to make money and have fun but not to achieve security, is attributable to our continuing, misplaced reliance on our nations, or whichever one we live in, to look after us. But nations answer to their power holders, and the mass of humanity has not organized itself to wield power on behalf of security. To vote once in two or four years is the mere semblance of power.

The one place where targeted humanity might obtain power and consolidate efforts to overcome the sovereignty shibboleth that so blinds us to the requirements of authentic security, is in the cities and towns of the world.

Jack Van Impe

We all have the same voting power at election time. That does not mean we all have the same responsibility for democratic decision making. Civic responsibility corresponds to one’s understanding of the issues, compared with the understanding of others. The better I understand, or think I understand, and the less I think others understand, the more compelled I am to act.

This is why, in City, Save Thyself! I call for self selection of initiators who will work to end the monopoly that nations hold on issues of peace and war.

Jack Van Impe’s television show the other night illustrated what I mean. The Reverend Van Impe is a dangerous fellow. He reminds me how many are beyond hope of persuasion that we might achieve a world of enforced law. He leads thousands of followers toward a glorious, ordained end time when Christ will lift them to perpetual glory while everyone else burns in hell. The influence of Van Impe and other extremist religionists has to be compensated for by citizens with a sense of humankind’s mutual responsibility for what happens to us.

Van Impe inveighs against weapons in space, but welcomes the holocaust that such weapons will bring, on the grounds that a space war is foretold in the Book of Revelations. He spits out a denunciation of efforts of the five year non-proliferation conference because it cannot, and apparently he thinks, should not, succeed, presumably because it would thwart God’s will.

Van Impe denounces efforts to pressure Israel to treat with Palestinians, on grounds that Israel is a democracy. When his eagerly awaited end time occurs, though, not being Christian, Israelis presumably await fiery destruction along with Muslims and atheists. He displays mockingly a color cartoon of Obama drawn like a Stepinfetchit clown, one of many blatant political comments, made absent any discernible frame of reference to issues about what is good for the country, and in clear violation of his religious 501(c)(3) tax exemption.

Followers of this demagogue cannot be expected to apply rational judgment to public decision making. Van Impe’s ministry of irresponsibility is so transparently self-contradictory, irrational, and destructive of civic discourse, that his followers have to be assumed incapable of rational political thought, due to emotional predisposition, lack of education, or whatever. If the rest of us fail to compensate for their disregard for what the nuclear arms race is likely to bring, Van Impe’s predictions will come true, except that his followers will burn right along with Muslims.

Getting To The Promised Land

No one in his right mind would start for the Promised Land unless the trip was imperative and he had a travel plan. Our counterpart to the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army is nuclear holocaust - we have to leave the Egypt of nuclear holocaust behind us. Our counterpart to Moses’ Ten Commandments, though, has yet to be drafted.

President Obama, Sam Nunn and others who advocate getting to Zero Nuclear put off describing a plan, not unreasonably, by saying that it will take decades to reach Zero. Not in my lifetime, says the President; the mountain must be scaled in stages, says Nunn. They hope that evidence of progress like the START Treaty, and improvements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, will evidence progress enough to keep momentum.

Staged progress without a plan will not be enough for some. Examples of what Obama, Nunn, et al are up against appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“The NPT Illusion” by Brett Stephens) and Financial Times (“A Nuclear-Free World? No Thanks” by Gideon Rachman).

Rachman predicts that a nuclear free world would herald the return of war between big powers. He says that only an “implausibly powerful international inspectorate” could calm the fears that produce nuclear arming. These are reasonable observations if one makes no effort to describe the disarmed world.

Stephens offers a good guys - bad guys analysis - if bad ones arm, good ones cannot disarm. True enough, but he can’t imagine enforced mutuality. He hits the target, offering no solution, by concluding that in the “second nuclear age” deterrence won’t work and “we haven’t even begun to think seriously about how to navigate those waters.”

The problem with long-term thinking like Zero Nuclear is, first, if you suggest details about how it might work you  are discredited as time passes because so much gets revised. Second, you will be called idealist, and vilified for suggesting a different world, which upsets the non-visionary, non-imaginative folk, those most wary of change, i.e., conservatives, though I do not mean it pejoratively.

The solution for this dilemma of how much detail to hazard when you preach vision, is to describe a means to make the journey - how to travel, not what the destination will look like. Tell who will have a say, how will we experiment, how the rule of enforced law will be expanded in stages, how will we retain the security of armed might while developing the security of enforced law, how targeted populations of different kinds of nations can make common cause against the violence lovers in all nations.

Rachman’s “powerful international inspectorate” must be shorn of implausibility by showing the partial models that already work, the stages of enlargement, the assurances that militarized security need not be surrendered until a safer model is available, and the cross border democracy that must be invented and gradually expanded to keep delegation of enforcement powers accountable.