Sleepwalking to a Collective Death-wish for the World

Prologue

I remember President John F. Kennedy when, on June 10, 1963 gave the Commencement Address at the American University in Washington, DC. Among his proposals for disarmament, he defended peace because, as he put it, “peace and freedom walk together.” He said:

“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn….

“I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men… But we have no more urgent task…. nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world…. The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920’s. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort–to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.

“The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms….

“Chairman Khrushchev [of the Soviet Union], [British] Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history–but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind. Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it…. And is not peace… basically a matter of human rights–the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation–the right to breathe air as nature provided it–the right of future generations to a healthy existence?”

Kennedy was right. But he was assassinated a few months later. We will never know what he would have done about nuclear weapons and peace. But his ideas were almost revolutionary. In 1962, he and the Chairman of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, avoided nuclear war. Kennedy learned a lot from that tragic and extremely dangerous experience. Had he lived, he would have probably led the world in abolishing the nuclear danger.

Designing death

However, Kennedy’s description of the power of a single nuclear bomb was astounding. In 2025, this awesome power exists in about 12,000 nuclear weapons owned by nine countries: the US, Russia, China, France, England, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel. That is, these nine countries have in their political and military fingertips the life and death of hundreds of millions of human beings and most if not all eons-old species of beings and supporting ecosystems in our beautiful planet Earth, which Plato described as the oldest of immortal gods.

Of course, the billions-old Earth is unlikely to die, but everything else will be crippled and probably die. Despite this fact, talked for decades since the Americans in 1945 blasted Japan with puny nuclear weapons, then known as atomic bombs, the nukes are held sacred among the states that have them.

I don’t pretend to know what exactly is behind the ownership of these lethal agents of Armageddon. Since 1945, thousands of scientists and engineers have worked on their development, increasing their monstrous destructiveness, designing missiles, submarines, and airplanes for their dooms-day delivery. But these technicians and their military and political bosses know they are handling a weapon of extinction. There isn’t a single good reason justifying its existence. They are not weapons in any understanding of a technology one uses to achieve military victory. They are very complex systems of control, maintenance, prone to accidents, and always on hair-trigger alert and potential deployment. Satellites watch these bombs but signals coming to those in charge may or may not be telling the truth about moving missiles. The President of the United States, for example, has 6 minutes to make up his mind whether or not to launch nuclear-tipped missiles against a potential enemy. But it’s impossible for a human to make such a decision that could end civilization as we know it. Besides, maintaining these bombs is very expensive, inhuman, barbaric and utterly suicidal, destined to eliminate civilization. So, why these nine states are determined to risk their own existence and that of humanity?

Risking civilization

I have always been interested in these political, ethical and philosophical issues. As a historian, I have studied the history of science and much more than Greek history. The Greek virtues of freedom, democracy, moderation, the good and the beautiful, science for the discovery of truth motivate me. I worked for 2 years on Capitol Hill and 25 years for the US Environmental Protection Agency where I learned a lot about science and politics, including confronting deception and corruption. I still don’t understand how intelligent people who know, for instance, that neurotoxic and carcinogenic pesticides harm the natural world and humans and, still, are willing to allow farmers to spray these dangerous substances over crops for people. Of course, with nuclear bombs, the danger becomes unfathomable. And, yet, as we said, nine countries are determined to keep nukes in their armaments.

Science writer, Mark Lynas, in his timely and extremely important book, Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2025), describes the effects of a nuclear explosion.

Lynas speaks of a “brilliant white light, thousands of times brighter than the desert sun at noon, floods the scene from above. Everyone who looks at it is blinded. Rebounding from clouds and within the atmosphere, the light is visible from hundreds of kilometers away… The light contains both intense heat and a flux of neutrons and gamma rays that pulverize the DNA of any living creatures not protected by several inches of concrete. Within a few hundreds of a few seconds, a fireball… spreads across the tops of the buildings… Everyone and everything – schoolgirls, trees, animals, everything except steel and concrete – is flash vaporized within a 10km area…. Within a few seconds, the blast wave has begun to level the city…. Then the fires begin… as the heated air rises, it follows the path of the fireball, which has transformed into a gigantic white mushroom cloud… a sooty darkness descends, and black rain falls…. The rain contains radioactive particles, fission particles from the bomb and dust and dirt sucked from ground zero, which will be deposited as lethal fallout.”

These dreadful facts, that could have come from a mythological narrative of the creation of darkness, of the vaporization of civilization don’t seem to bother the rulers of the nine nuclear-armed states. Is this pathology a mirror of power behind so much of the economics, religions, science and pure bravado? The US alone plans to spend trillions for the “modernization” of its angels of death.

Mark Lynas is also astonished of the bomb and why its designers constructed hydrogen bomb monsters that were 1,000 times more destructive that the atomic bomb that vaporized Hiroshima in 1945. He says psychology was part of this exuberance for death. He asked: “What could possibly motivate rational, moral human beings to dedicate so much brainpower and personal energy in developing weapons whose only possible use could be the eradication of entire cities from the face of the earth?” My response to this profound question is that those who built those thermonuclear monsters were neither rational, nor moral scientists, engineers, military officers or political leaders. War and hatred made them inhuman – in the US and the rest of the nuclear weapons states.

Gorbachev and Reagan

Yet, in the midst of this worldwide barbarism, there were some responsible voices. Michail Gorbachev, President of the collapsing superpower Soviet Union (Russia) was the only world leader who in late 1980s proposed to the President of the US, Roland Reagan, to get rid of nuclear weapons. The proposal was so startling that Reagan at first agreed the two countries could reduce the numbers of weapons. They did, but Reagan was under the influence of lunatics who convinced him to reject total nuclear disarmament because the US would be able to build a dome over the country protecting it from oncoming nuclear missiles. This delusion ended the first serious effort to free humanity from its own Armageddon weapons.

Genocidal intent

Lynas says that “genocidal intent” moves the nuclear weapons strategy of the nine countries with nuclear arsenals – US, UK, France, Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel. I would add that these countries are historically illiterate as well. They certainly have not read or taken seriously Thucydides, the Greek historian and author of “The Peloponnesian War,” the destructive Greek civil war in the fifth century BCE. Thucydides says that Sparta, Greece’s military superpower, attacked Athens because of fear of rising Athenian power. So, can one imagine what is happening today among the vast number of non-nuclear states observing the totalitarian power 12 states exercise only because they possess nukes?

Six minutes to nuclear winter

I disagree with Linas on nuclear power. He defends it because, he thinks, it helps to cut down the climate effects of coal-fired power plants. But aside from this unexpected error in judgment, I strongly urge you to read Lynas’ “Six Minutes to Winter.” The book is well written, compact with relative facts about the Armageddon weapons and those who worship them, thinking wrongly that those weapons make them secure. On the contrary, those weapons make not merely them but their neighbors and all humanity very insecure. As Lynas says, any day may dawn with the black death raining down and vaporizing life and freezing the planet for thousands of years. We must ban the bomb before it bans us. Lynas’ book, gripping and terrifying, wakes you up from apathy and the irrational belief it will never happen. The book sounds the alarm, and we better take that alarm seriously.

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