The Indispensable Shift: On Nuclear Weapons, the Pandemic and Nonviolence

Photo: Simone Busatto

This week Pace e Bene was scheduled to be in New Mexico. 

For several years we have been organizing a national conference in the state to ponder the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States—and to envision a clearer way forward to a culture of peace and nonviolence.  But, of course, the unexpected intruded. By May it was obvious that the coronavirus was cutting a swatch of destruction through many plans all over the world, including our pilgrimage to the place where the nuclear age began. 

By necessity we were compelled to imagine the vigil at Los Alamos on August 6, the nonviolence training on August 7, and the conference featuring peacemakers and scholars from around the world on August 8 as a virtual meeting space in which to remember, reflect and recommit in a new and unusual way.  Like many other live events worldwide, the Campaign Nonviolence National Conference was moved online. (The concluding journey to Los Alamos on August 9 was integrated into the remote August 6 vigil.)

Photo: Louis Manique

COVID-19, though, has not simply upended countless plans. It has made glaringly clear that what passes for “the real world” is, in fact, a searing global culture of structural violence in which interlocking systems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental destruction, and economic injustice benefit the few—especially white people and predominantly white institutions—and leave the vast majority hanging out to dry.  Contrary to what an old song claimed, it’s injustice, not love, that makes the world as we know it go round.

A World Where Everyone Counts

If the world were not the way it is, it would be prepared to respond to an emergency like the current pandemic in a much more robust and inclusive way.  There would be systemic health care for all that would be nimble and responsive; an economic order that would ensure dignified work for everyone and a financial safety net when disaster strikes; deliberately anti-racist cultures and social systems; and a bedrock commitment to justice, peace and well-being for all.  The sacredness of each person, and the planet, our common home, would be the default.

The most catastrophic consequences of the coronavirus—the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the severe economic pain for hundreds of millions more—spring from the lack of a culture that prizes each being on the planet.  Of course, even the most responsive and all-embracing social system—or system of systems—might not be fully equipped to deal with a new disease or any other unforeseen challenge.  But a planet that has prioritized, and made good on, the well-being of all is more likely to respond to such a crisis with agility and life-saving inclusiveness.

So, even as COVID-19 has thrown in sharp relief the systemic injustice of the existing culture of violence, it has laid down our marching orders: to construct a world for everyone.  It will not be easy to do this.  There will be many countervailing forces. This is to be expected. But we can join together across the planet in the long-term struggle to generate the people-power needed for this adaptive, metamorphic transition. 

The Movement for a New World Has Begun

Back in March, as the seismic dimensions of COVID-19 were dawning on many of us, I published an article which surmised that, in the face of the systemic injustices being revealed by the pandemic, “The greatest social movement in human history is coming.”  Little did I know then that the Black Lives Matter movement two months later would, in the wake of the heinous execution of George Floyd, lead the way. 

In the largest wave of protest in U.S. history, the Movement for Black Lives not only illuminated anew the historic pattern of police killings of black and brown people, it called for the emergence of a society-wide effort to dismantle a spectrum of structures, institutions, policies and practices that firmly keep the sweltering crime and culture of racism in place, including the criminal justice system; the reality of state violence; and an economic system that denies full participation and access by communities of color, but that relies on black and brown people to disproportionately be the “essential workers” who maintain this unequal system.

As we have seen in the recent dispatch of federal agents to Portland and other cities, systems will respond with disproportionate violence with the hope of smothering such movements.  This, too, is to be expected. But as allies and agents of change, it is possible to build something new—step by step, even as we support one another under the withering counter-force that will likely increase.

Photo: Fateme Alaie

Nuclear Weapons

The coronavirus has revealed, especially through the suffering of all who have been abandoned to this ravaging pandemic, the far-reaching consequences of the “unjust normal.”  Its tremendous horror, though, pales in comparison to what the use of nuclear weapons could mean for Planet Earth and its inhabitants. Dr. Ira Helfand, co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the International Campaign to Abolition Nuclear Weapons (both organizations have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), has presented in excruciating detail the impacts of a deliberate or accidental nuclear exchange, including in these two examples:

“Studies have shown that even a ‘limited’ nuclear war between India and Pakistan, using less than 1% of the world’s nuclear weapons, could kill 75 million to 125 million people directly in South Asia, and cause enough climate disruption across the planet to affect global food production and cause a worldwide famine that would put 2 billion people at risk. A large-scale war between the U.S. and Russia could kill several hundred million people directly in a single afternoon and plunge the world into a nuclear winter, a [human]-made ice age, that would stop food production across the planet and kill the vast majority of humanity, possibly causing the extinction of our species.” 

We have painfully learned comprehensive leadership and strategies are needed to end the COVID-19 catastrophe. If this is true of the pandemic, it is even more true of the existential threat of nuclear weapons systems as we mark its three-quarters of a century anniversary.  Escalating brinksmanship or miscalculation (based potentially, for example, on a false report of an imminent nuclear attack generated by hostile cyber-hacking) could spell catastrophic, unimaginable worldwide destruction. 

Just as COVID-19 needs a plan to end this crisis, so do we need a plan to, once and for all, pull back from the nuclear brink, dismantle nuclear arsenals, fund the new, global structures needed to support and sustain life on our planet, and take clear steps for a global security based, not on the threat of mass destruction, but on meeting mutual needs.  And unlike the pandemic, with its mysterious origins, human beings built these weapons.  As we know, anything constructed can be deconstructed. 

This is true of nuclear arms.

Taking “The More Excellent Way”

But this deconstruction project will not happen by magic.  It will require being one of the key goals of “the greatest social movement in human history.”  Not separate from ending racism, sexism economic injustice or the climate crisis, but an integral part of it, if only because nuclear weapons function as the ultimate weapon to keep all other systems and policies of structural violence and injustice in place.

When I was a baby activist in the early 1980s, I cut my social change teeth in the nuclear disarmament movement.  It was a transformative experience for me and many others.  It taught me the power of active nonviolence to challenge and change things.  Eventually, this global, people-power movement created the conditions for the promulgation of the Comprehensive test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which ended almost all nuclear tests. (The U.S. had detonated a nuclear weapon in its testing program every eighteen days on average for forty years.  Even though the US has yet to ratify this treaty, it has carried out an ongoing moratorium on testing in light of the CTBT since the early 1990s.)  It also compelled the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union to sign a series of nuclear arms control agreements.  As Dr. Helfand (who is a keynote speaker at Pace e Bene’s Hiroshima Vigil) reports, the anti-nuclear movement made these changes possible—dismantling up to 50,000 weapons—and it can do this again. (Here are four concrete steps he is proposing we pursue.)

We will need to dig deep—and take action. Here we are advised well by the late John Lewis, who, in his final love letter to humanity (published in the New York Times on the day of his funeral at the end of July, urged us forward in this way: "Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. …I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way.”

But time is short. The U.S. has announced a plan to spend $2 trillion on modernizing its nuclear weapons complex. That funding could, instead, be an important down payment on a world that works for everybody. To make this a reality, we will have to accelerate the growing movement for racial justice, economic equity, environmental healing—and a nuclear-free future.

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Please join Pace e Bene/Campaign Nonviolence in this week’s online events:

August 6: Online Hiroshima Vigil

August 7: Online Nonviolence Training - Soul Force: From Spirit to Street

August 8: Online National Campaign Nonviolence Conference featuring visionaries, activists, teachers, artists and scholars sharing their wisdom as they work to build a culture of active nonviolence, justice and peace.

Photo: The New York Public Library