In thousands of movies and tv shows, a future is imagined in which full-grown adult humans with less self-control than toddlers both get into fist fights at the drop of a hat and possess the technology to obliterate entire cities or planets at the touch of a button. The fantasy of living in outerspace certainly does not help us preserve the one place we know how to live. But the most damaging fantasy here is that of maintaining widespread acceptance of violence and continuing to exist into an age of easy annihilation by the decision of a random person or of a machine. Our current luck — the number of times we have nearly had a nuclear war and avoided it — is almost unbelievable. The luck that would be required for much of science fiction to exist is not believable at all.
Nuclear Danger
Countless observers believe that we are right now closer to nuclear war than ever before. There are a number of reasons to take this seriously:
- The weapons needed to destroy all life on Earth continued to exist right through the supposed end of the Cold War.
- Awareness of that fact, and protest of it, went away.
- Communications and education systems have been corrupted to the point of routinely discussing “tactical” nuclear weapons, “limited” nuclear wars, and “safety” steps such as going indoors.
- Governments, including in the two countries with most of the nuclear weapons, have become ever less responsive to public will.
- Knowledge has advanced of how small a nuclear war would likely end all life through a nuclear winter, but there seems to be no possible means of making most people aware of it.
- The Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons requires eliminating nuclear weapons and all other weapons too, but it is difficult to get anyone to even believe such a treaty exists, or — if it does — that laws matter at all.
- Threats of nuclear war have become more common and shameless.
- Adding to the nuclear weapons has become ever more profitable.
- More countries have nuclear weapons, and others appear intent on getting them.
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War Danger
The most likely path to nuclear war is non-nuclear war. The greatest barrier to eliminating nuclear weapons is non-nuclear war. A number of trends weigh heavily against eliminating all war. We are one-quarter through (well, we’re entering the year 2025 anyway) what will be war’s worst century if we do not abolish war, because the next 75 years is too long to continue the path we’re on and avoid nuclear holocaust. But there’s an argument to be made that this would be war’s worst century even if it were simply able to continue at its current pace. While there are grains of truth in the pinkerist panglossian view that war has diminished or is almost gone, there are also severe problems with it. That other forms of violence have diminished is simply not evidence of war diminishing. Comparing the percentage of a past society killed in war to the percentage of the Earth’s population killed in a current localized war is not meaningful. Defining imperialist wars as civil wars and civil wars as not wars at all is not helpful. We’ve seen over 5 percent of Iraqis killed. The percentage of people in Gaza killed already exceeds that and threatens to go much higher. The widespread endless U.S. wars and “actions” and “drone strikes” in Asia and Africa have killed millions, made tens of millions homeless, and done incredible environmental and economic destruction. The entire U.S. war machine is apparently at the disposal of a madman running the government of Israel, publicly committing all-out genocide, and openly pushing for more wars. Military spending, weapons sales, base building, drone murders, computer hacking, spying, threatening, and renouncing the rule of law are on the rise all over the globe. So are fascistic movements, disgust with unaccountable governments, environmental destruction, overpopulation, poverty, desperation, and permanent, normalized, saturation, war propaganda.
Peace Potential
Even while people in some countries have been lulled into believing that they can lie back and moan, hold their noses and vote, or cheer for murderers of CEOs, those same people would move massive funding from war to education and environment if it were up to them, if they were given a democracy instead of wars in democracy’s name. And people in other countries are often demonstrating — as just this month in South Korea — how to use nonviolent activism to get a democracy. Even as the rule of law is mocked and abandoned by the worst offenders, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have swung out their fingertips and gripped the very edge of the cliff in an effort to maintain some reason to exist. Both institutions have, for the first time, demonstrated a willingness to act on behalf of justice rather than of Western empire. Many nations of the world have supported a new treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, and have refused to support wars in Ukraine or Palestine. Creative nonviolent actions, boycotts, demonstrations, sit-ins, lawsuits, divestments, and educational fora are threatening the impunity of the genocidists and of the weapons merchants. World BEYOND War is growing rapidly as a war abolition network, and finding a new openness to oppose war among environmentalists, anti-poverty groups, anti-racism advocates, and others. Even while corporate media works to normalize killing, independent and social media are being used to normalize the abolition of killing, and the development of international law, local self-governance, unarmed civilian resistance, the re-shaming of war profiteering, and the celebration of a culture of peace.
One Way or the Other
There are clearly two ways in which this could be war’s last century, and I’m betting we’ll get either one or the other. In one, war eliminates us. End of story. In the other we eliminate war. Beginning of story.