Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

^8. MAD (Mutually Assured Dependence)

Laray Polk: Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of Greenpeace, has been criticized for bringing a social agenda, not unlike King’s, to the cause of environmental issues. Naidoo has said in response to his critics: “Ever since I came into this job, I’ve been accused of selling out, but I genuinely, passionately feel that the struggle to end global poverty and the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin. Traditional Western-led environmentalism has failed to make the right connections between environmental, social and economic justice. I came to the environmental movement because the poor are paying the first and most brutal impacts of climate change.”[97]

Noam Chomsky: I presume that serious environmentalists would agree that saving whales does not get at the root of the problem, and that occupying oil rigs is at best a tactic undertaken to direct attention to deeper causes. On Naidoo, his approach seems to me fully justified, in other respects too. The poor who are (as usual) the victims suffering the most have also often been in the forefront of addressing the root problems. One striking example is the People’s Summit in Bolivia, with its call for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, an appeal voiced by indigenous people worldwide and a challenge to the predatory and lemminglike pursuit of short-term gain by the rich.[98]

Looking at Bolivia’s ecology, it makes sense why they would have the most robust protections for nature: their glaciers are melting, and they’re losing the ability to predict natural cycles of water distribution necessary for maintaining food crops. Those are conditions not unique to Bolivia or Andean glaciers, yet they’re prepared to act.[99] What aspects of cultural practice prepare some communities for addressing ecological realities head-on? Conversely, what aspects of cultural practice impair—and perhaps immunize—other communities to ecological realities?

Looking at the ecology of the rich societies—the US for example—it also makes sense to move toward robust protections for nature. These past few months provide many warnings.[100]

There are many differences between Bolivia—the poorest country in South America—and the US, which by rights should be the richest country in world history, thanks to its unparalleled advantages.

One difference is that the major political force within Bolivia is the indigenous majority. Not only in Bolivia, but worldwide, indigenous communities (“first nations,” “aboriginal,” “tribal,” whatever they call themselves) have been in the forefront of recognizing that if there is to be a hope of decent survival, we must learn to organize our societies and lives so that care for “the commons”—the common possessions of all of us—must become a very high priority, as it has been in traditional societies, quite often. The West too. It’s rarely recognized that Magna Carta not only laid the basis for what became over centuries formal protection for civil and human rights, but also stressed the preservation of the commons from autocratic destruction and privatization—the Charter of the Forests, one of the two components of Magna Carta.[101]

In contrast, the US is a business-run society, to an extent beyond any other in the developed world. Enormous power lies in the hands of a highly class-conscious business elite, who, in Adam Smith’s words, are the “principal architects” of policy and make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to” no matter how “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of their own society and their colonies (Smith’s concern) and future generations (which must be our concern). In the contemporary United States there has been an increasing growth in the power of the ideology of short-term gains, whatever the consequences. The US business classes have been admirably forthright in announcing publicly their intention of running huge propaganda campaigns to convince the public to ignore the ongoing destruction of the environment, by now quite hard to miss even for the most blind. And these campaigns have had some effect on public opinion, as polls show.[102]

As for what “immunize [the culture] to ecological realities,” in the US, it is useful to read the public pronouncements of the Chamber of Commerce (the main business lobby), the American Petroleum Institute, and other core components of the dominant business classes. Of course, that requires the contributions of the information and political systems, largely willing to line up in the same parade with only occasional hesitation.

During the Tar Sands Action in Washington, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute told the press, “the protesters are really protesting jobs.” What do you make of API’s statement?[103]

The translation of the API statement to English is easy: “The Tar Sands Action is protesting an initiative that will severely harm local environments and accelerate the global rush to disaster—while putting plenty of bucks in our pockets for us to hoard or spend while we watch the ship sinking.”

From what I know of the Tar Sands Action, it consists of people whose priorities are virtually the opposite of the API’s. They want to maintain an environment in which people can live decent lives, to protect their grandchildren from disaster, and to create far more good jobs by using the ample resources available to develop a sustainable energy future while also rebuilding a decaying society and turning it to different and far more healthy directions.[104] But, admittedly, they have inadequate concern for the bulging profits of the super-rich and their desperate need to run the world to the ground.

The lack of serious media attention seems to me to fall into the normal pattern of downplaying the threat of global warming, along with general dislike of popular activism, which might revitalize democracy and threaten elite control. As for the former pattern, it is standard. Open the morning’s paper and it is likely to be illustrated.

Today (August 17, 2012), for example, the press reports increasing reliance on Saudi oil, welcoming their increased production in response to US demands, but warning of a problem: dependence on foreign sources. Fortunately, the report continues, the problem is only temporary because we will soon have massive supplies from Canadian tar sands and expansion of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—while also accelerating the race toward environmental catastrophe, a topic too insignificant to mention.[105]

On the “big twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change” and the fallacy of a “limited nuclear war,” activist and physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote: “Recent studies have concluded that even a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, for example—involving perhaps 100 warheads—would significantly disrupt the global climate for at least a decade and would kick at least 5 million tons of smoke into the stratosphere. Estimates suggest this would potentially lead to the death of up to a billion people because of the effect of this smoke on global agriculture.”[106]

Any concluding comments on the threat of nuclear war in a world already challenged by ecological collapse?

Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned that “a major war would destroy the Northern Hemisphere.”[107] Notwithstanding his warning, a few years later President Kennedy was willing to face his subjective probability of one-third to one-half of nuclear war to establish the principle that we have the right to ring the USSR with missiles and military bases, but they do not have the right to place their first missiles beyond its borders, in Cuba, then being subjected to a brutal terrorist attack that was scheduled to lead to invasion in the month when the missiles were secretly dispatched.[108] That was the essence of the issue. We escaped that time, but it was not the last. A decade later, in 1973, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert to warn the Russians to keep their hands off when he was informing Israeli leaders that they could violate with impunity a cease-fire established under US-Russian auspices—so we have just learned from declassified documents.[109] Ten years later, Reaganite adventurism, probing Russian defenses at their borders, led a serious war scare as Russia feared an imminent nuclear attack.[110] There have been all too many cases of programmed missile attacks aborted by human intervention minutes before launch, and while we don’t have Russian records, it’s likely that their performance is worse. Right now President Obama is planning to establish an antimissile system—recognized on all sides to be a potential first-strike weapon—close to the Russian border, leading them to enhance their offensive weapons capacity.[111] According to the German press, Israel right now is loading nuclear-tipped missiles on the advanced new submarines that Germany has transferred to Israel, in the full knowledge that they are likely to be deployed in the Persian Gulf as part of the threat of escalated war against Iran.[112] And there is much more.

All of these crises can be mitigated or overcome. Many of the major barriers to doing so are right at home—a fortunate situation, because these are the factors that we can best hope to influence—hardly easy, but not impossible.

Those who choose to know, do know. The current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to the exciting prospects for science in the twenty-first century. The distinguished scientist who introduces the collection reviews these possibilities, adding, rather plaintively, “If we can manage to avoid total human disaster resulting from societal and environmental challenges (matters that in fact demand our most serious and immediate attention).”[113]

Bolivian campesinos understand.[114]