60th
Anniversary of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
August 3, 2005
LONDON - We were standing in
Hiroshima looking at a stonewall. All there was to see
was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall
at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light
of the first atomic bomb. Olof Palme, prime minister of
Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later he had to give a
speech as head of the Independent Commission on
Disarmament of which I was a member. "My fear", he
remarked, "is that mankind itself will end up as nothing
more than a shadow on a wall."
Charles de Gaulle once observed,
"After a nuclear war the two sides would have neither
powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles,
nor tombs." Nikita Khrushchev, who presided over the
Soviet Union in the days of the Cuban missile crisis,
later wrote, "When I learned all the facts about nuclear
power I couldn't sleep for several days". And one of his
successors, Mikhail Gorbachev, once recounted how during
training to use his "nuclear suitcase" he never pretended
to give the order to fire.
Yet against this sense and
sensibility is arrayed popular inertia on one side and an
extraordinarily deeply embedded culture of "nuclear
deterrence" on the other. As former West German
chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, (ex nuclear hawk, now a dove)
has analysed it, "there is an enormous body of vested
interests not only through lobbying in Washington and
Moscow but through influence on intellectuals, on people
who write books and articles in newspapers and do
features on television." And, in a shrewd afterthought,
he added, "It's very difficult as a reader or as a
consumer of TV to distinguish by one's own judgement what
is led by these interests and what is led by rational
conclusion."
There are two main issues in any
discussion on nuclear weapons, moral and political For
some, nuclear armaments are so wicked, so evil, in their
capacity to execute life as we know it that there can be
no talk of modifying or controlling them; they must be
banned, if necessary unilaterally renounced. Deterrence,
even if it could be proved to have kept the peace, is
profoundly immoral in concept and tone, for the threat to
destroy is as wrong as the act itself.
This latter observation is true.
But equally it can lead to the conclusion that we have to
deal with the problem by multilateral means - by
agreement between the antagonists. The means of getting
rid of them is as important a moral issue as the means of
deterrence. If a reduction of a part of the stockpile
were done in such a way as to increase instability and
the likelihood of war this would be as reprehensible an
act as one which provoked war by initiating a new round
in the arms race.
Thomas Nagel in his essay, "War and
Massacres", has suggested we are working between two
poles of moral intuition. We know that there are some
outcomes that must be avoided at all costs and we know
that there are some costs that can never be morally
justified. We must face the possibility, Nagel argues,
"that these two forms of moral intuition are not capable
of being brought together into a single coherent moral
system."
Yes, but. We have to be careful not
to be carried away with the tortuous logic of such an
argument. I suspect that John Mearsheimer, America's
pre-eminent balance of power theorist, might find comfort
in this rather fine moral balancing. He has called
nuclear weapons "a powerful force for peace". Today he
advocates, "well managed proliferation" and he would like
to see Germany and Japan armed with nuclear
weapons.
The title of Herman Kahn's book on
cold war nuclear strategy, "Thinking the Unthinkable",
captured the dilemma perfectly: that it is unthinkable to
imagine the wholesale slaughter of societies, yet at the
same time it appears necessary to do so, in the hope that
you hit upon some formulation that will preclude the act.
But then in the process you may wind up amassing forces
that engender the very outcome you hope to
avoid.
Nevertheless, I think Kahn would be
amazed, if he still lived, to see how little enmity there
is today between the old superpower rivals and indeed
between both of them and the up and coming superpowers,
China and India. Not since 1871-1913 has there been so
little active hostility between the big powers or so few
wars around the globe. This must be the time to get our
grip on the urgent necessity for big power nuclear
disarmament, for without that there is simply no
credibility when dealing with would-be proliferators in
the Third World. Many of them are quite as capable as the
original big powers of one day creating the "shadow on a
wall".
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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