Going Ballistic
Saving L.A. from nuclear terror
By Tad Daley
An Inconvenient Choice
On January 15, 2008, four lions of the American foreign policy establishment – Sam Nunn, William Perry, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger – authored a landmark opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, calling not just for greater attention to the nuclear peril, but also for “turning the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a practical enterprise among nations.” This call to action from such mainstream figures, has, by all accounts, transformed the nuclear policy debate, and in a stroke expanded the parameters of political possibility. “The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain,” said the authors. “From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can’t get there from here.”
Yet not only has the top of that mountain been painted in fine detail, but so too has the path we might take to march upward toward the summit. In 2007, a broad coalition of scientists, international lawyers, disarmament experts, and anti-nuclear organizations issued Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention (available at www.ippnw.org). This extraordinary document contains an actual draft of a model nuclear weapons abolition treaty, with extensive commentary on both the components therein and on alternative processes by which it might come into being. It provides perhaps the best description yet both of what a nuclear- weapon-free world might actually look like, and how we might actually get from here to there.
The American government can choose to go down something like the path advocated here. If it does not, the American people will probably simply have to await their fate. Walt Kelly’s Pogo, in another context, said famously, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Today, in this context, we might say that we have met the victims of the device that we ourselves unleashed upon the world. And they are us.
We are the ones who devised these weapons in the past. We are the ones contemplating the use of these weapons in the present (several credible news reports have revealed that war planners in the bowels of the Pentagon have considered not just a preemptive military strike on Iran, but a preemptive nuclear strike). We are the ones who vaingloriously insist that we – but not others – must perpetually possess these weapons indefinitely into the future.
And now, in what must surely be one of the greatest ironies in all of human history, we are the ones who may soon feel the menis of our own invention. We are the ones who may turn out to be the authors of our own annihilation. We can get it through our thick skulls that the only long-term solution to the threat of nuclear apocalypse is the abolition of nuclear weapons. If we do not, we may well be the ones, in the end, who are devoured by our own creation.
Tad Daley, www.daleyplanet.org, is Writing Fellow with the Nobel Peace Laureate organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, www.ippnw.org, and its International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, www.icanw.org. He served in the past as a foreign policy advisor to Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Congresswoman Diane Watson, and the late U.S. Senator Alan Cranston. He lives and works in Los Angeles and finds the city terribly annoying at times, but on balance would like to keep it around.
Published: 07/16/2008
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