{"id":1378939,"date":"2023-12-08T06:55:19","date_gmt":"2023-12-08T06:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=307064"},"modified":"2023-12-08T06:55:19","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T06:55:19","slug":"how-the-u-s-has-darkened-the-nuclear-cloud-over-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/12\/08\/how-the-u-s-has-darkened-the-nuclear-cloud-over-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"How the U.S. Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
\"\"

Photograph Source: U.S. Air Force – Public Domain<\/p><\/div>\n

\nForty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation\u00a0<\/em>magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. In a March 1983\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0to an audience of evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an \u201cevil empire\u201d and, for good measure, \u201cthe focus of evil in the modern world.\u201d Weeks later, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov\u00a0accused<\/a>\u00a0the United States of pursuing an arms buildup to win a nuclear war; in his words, \u201cnot just irresponsible, it is insane.\u201d Both countries were gunning their military-industrial engines in a feverish drive for more advanced nuclear arsenals.<\/p>\n

Such was the frightening distemper of the times. But a grassroots movement calling for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons had quickly gained wide support and political momentum since Reagan took office. In April 1982, he responded to the growing upsurge of alarm with a\u00a0radio address<\/a>\u00a0that tried to reassure. \u201cToday, I know there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war. I welcome that concern,\u201d Reagan said. He added that \u201ca nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two months later, not mollified by soothing words, 1 million people gathered in New York\u2019s Central Park at a demonstration for nuclear disarmament and peace. That protest was part of a transatlantic uprising against reckless escalation of the arms race. Activists struggled to challenge a spiraling arms contest propelled by two nations with very different political systems but mutual reliance on brandishing huge quantities of nuclear weaponry.<\/p>\n

Deeply unsettling as that era was, the specter of\u00a0omnicide<\/a>\u00a0now looms much larger. Inflamed tensions between Washington and Moscow while the Ukraine war rages — as well as between the U.S. and China, over Taiwan and the East China and South China seas — are making a nuclear conflagration plausible via any one of numerous scenarios. Meanwhile, disagreements over how to view relations between the U.S. and Russia are roiling peace groups and much of the left here at home. Fears of being perceived, if not smeared, as pro-Putin or sympathetic to Russia are palpable, with ongoing constraints on advocacy.<\/p>\n

We hear next to nothing about the crying need to reinstate the\u00a0Open Skies<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces<\/a>\u00a0(INF) treaties canceled by President Trump or the\u00a0Anti-Ballistic Missile<\/a>\u00a0treaty canceled by President George W. Bush, while the absence of those pacts today makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by their Republican predecessors.<\/p>\n

For his part, beginning with the Ukraine invasion, Putin has done much to boost atomic tensions. His threats to use nuclear weapons said the usually untrumpeted doctrine out loud. Both Russia (except for an eleven-year\u00a0hiatus<\/a>) and the United States have always been\u00a0on record<\/a>\u00a0as asserting the option to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.<\/p>\n

The war in Ukraine has thrown the world closer to a thermonuclear precipice than ever. And, while daily horrors are being inflicted on Ukrainian people by Russia\u2019s warfare, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that Putin isn\u2019t worthy of negotiations over much of anything.<\/p>\n

But if efforts for d\u00e9tente and arms control should be backburnered when a superpower is making horrific war on a country after an illegal invasion, neither Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin nor President Ronald Reagan got the memo. In 1967, while the U.S. government was escalating the Vietnam War, Kosygin met with President Lyndon Johnson in direct talks that lasted for more than a dozen hours at the\u00a0Glassboro Summit<\/a>\u00a0in New Jersey. Twenty years later, Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House, where they signed the INF treaty; at the time, Soviet troops were continuing their war in Afghanistan, which took an estimated\u00a0100,000 Afghan lives<\/a>, while the CIA provided military aid worth\u00a0billions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0to mujahadeen resistance fighters.<\/p>\n

**********<\/p>\n

Midway through 1983, at the end of the published exchanges between E. P. Thompson and me,\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Nation<\/em>\u00a0told readers that \u201cthe debate ventilates important issues, tactical and philosophical, confronting the antiwar movements in this country and in Europe.\u201d Echoes of those important issues are with us now, and the stakes could not be higher.<\/p>\n

Renowned as a social historian, Thompson was also a prominent leader of the European disarmament movement during the 1980s. He warned against \u201csleepwalkers in the peace movement\u201d of the West who, he contended, were toeing the Soviet line while blaming the arms race on the United States. \u201cNeither moralism nor fellow-traveling sentimentalism,\u201d he wrote, \u201ccan be of any service in guiding the peace movement in its difficult relations with the Communist states.\u201d The rulers of those states \u201care the ideological look-alikes of their opposite numbers in the West, thinking in the same terms of \u2018balance\u2019 and security through \u2018strength.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In my view, the history of the nuclear arms race remained significant, with the United States as always in the lead. The fact that the U.S. was a country with far more freedom had not made its government more trustworthy in terms of nuclear weapons. As the Soviet dissident historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev had written a year earlier in\u00a0The Nation<\/em>, \u201cdespite the more open character of American society . . . the role of successive U.S. administrations has been, and continues to be, more provocative and less predictable than the Soviet Union\u2019s in the global interrelationship between East and West.\u201d They added: \u201cMilitary-industrial complexes exist in all modern industrial societies, but they are under much less responsible control in the United States than in the USSR.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the close of our debate, I expressed doubt that the U.S. movement for disarmament and peace was in danger of being insufficiently critical of the Soviet Union. \u201cA far greater danger is that, eager for respectability and fearful of finding itself in the line of fire of our nation\u2019s powerful Red-baiting artilleries, it may unwittingly reinforce chronic American-Soviet antipathies . . . . We cannot reduce our society\u2019s Cold War fervor by adding to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

**********<\/p>\n

In the summer of 1985, Gorbachev announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions, and he invited the United States to follow suit. If reciprocated, the move would pave the way for both countries to end their underground detonations of nuclear warheads, closing an intentional loophole that had been left by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. But major U.S. news media were on guard. In the first\u00a0CBS Evening News<\/em>\u00a0report on Gorbachev\u2019s initiative, correspondent Lesley Stahl used the word \u201cpropaganda\u201d four times. Influential newspapers were no less dismissive. A\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial called the moratorium \u201ca cynical propaganda blast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the U.S. refused to reciprocate, Russia kept renewing its moratorium. In December 1985, when reporting news of an extension, CBS anchor Dan Rather began by saying: \u201cWell, a little pre-Christmas propaganda in the air, a new arms-control offer from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.\u201d The Kremlin\u2019s unrequited moratorium went on for nineteen months, while the Nevada Test Site shook with twenty-five nuclear explosions beneath the desert floor.<\/p>\n

Later in the decade, the cumulative impacts of grassroots organizing and political pressure helped shift Reagan\u2019s attitude enough to bring about some U.S.-Russian reproachment and genuine diplomacy. A stellar result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987. It was a triumph for activists and a wide array of other outspoken advocates who over the previous years had grown accustomed to epithets like \u201cKremlin dupes\u201d and \u201cRussia apologists.\u201d<\/p>\n

********<\/p>\n

Four decades later, such epithets are again common. American society\u2019s Cold War fervor is somewhere near an all-time high. It\u00a0doesn\u2019t take much<\/a>\u00a0these days to be called pro-Putin; merely urging a ceasefire in Ukraine or substantive diplomacy can suffice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Putin is not only thrilled by the divide over whether we continue and at what levels to fund Ukraine, I think he is fomenting it as well,\u201d Hillary Clinton said during a\u00a0PBS NewsHour<\/em>\u00a0interview in October. She added: \u201cWhen I see people parroting Russian talking points that first showed up on\u00a0Russia Today\u00a0<\/em>or first showed up in a speech from a Russian official, that\u2019s a big point scored for Putin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such smeary tactics aim to paralyze discourse and prevent on-the-merits discussions. The techniques are timeworn. Twenty years ago, opponents of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq were often accused of parroting Iraqi talking points and serving the interests of Saddam Hussein. Now, in the prevalent media and political environments, the kinds of \u201ctalking points\u201d that Clinton meant to defame include just about any assertion challenging the idea that the U.S. government should provide open-ended military aid to Ukraine while refusing to urge a ceasefire or engage in substantive diplomacy.<\/p>\n

********<\/p>\n

During Reagan\u2019s first term, the\u00a0Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em>\u00a0set its\u00a0Doomsday Clock<\/a>\u00a0at between three and four minutes to apocalyptic midnight. It is now ninety seconds away, the closest ever.<\/p>\n

Crucial lessons that President John Kennedy drew from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he articulated eight months later in his June 1963\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0at American University, are now in the dumpster at the Biden White House: \u201cAbove all, while defending our own vital interests, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

But no matter how dangerous Biden\u2019s policies toward Ukraine and Russia are, most sizable arms-control and disarmament groups in the United States have bypassed dissent. Few have pushed for serious negotiations to find a peaceful resolution. Many have, in effect, gone along with treating \u201cdiplomacy\u201d as a dirty word. Such stances are particularly striking from organizations with an avowed mission to reduce the risks of nuclear war — even though the longer the war in Ukraine persists and the more it escalates, the greater the chances that those risks will turn into global nuclear annihilation.<\/p>\n

********<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t know E. P. Thompson\u2019s outlook on the 21st century events that led to the current nuclear peril — he died in 1993 — but the core of his seminal 1980 essay \u201cProtest and Survive<\/a>\u201d resonates now as a chilling wake-up shout to rouse us from habitual evasion. \u201cI have come to the view that a general nuclear war is not only possible but probable, and that its probability is increasing,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe may indeed be approaching a point of no-return when the existing tendency or disposition towards this outcome becomes irreversible.\u201d And yet, Thompson went on, \u201cI am reluctant to accept that this determinism is absolute. But if my arguments are correct, then we cannot put off the matter any longer. We must throw whatever resources still exist in human culture across the path of this degenerative logic. We must protest if we are to survive. Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The essay quickly became the opening chapter in an anthology also titled\u00a0Protest and Survive<\/em>. Daniel Ellsberg wrote in the book\u2019s\u00a0introduction<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cwe must take our stand where we live, and act to protect our home and our family: the earth and all living beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Martin Luther King Jr.\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe madness of militarism\u201d finds its supreme expression in the routine of nuclear weapons policies, which rely on an extreme shortage of countervailing outcry and activism. The ultimate madness thrives on our daily accommodation to it.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published by\u00a0<\/em>The Nation<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The post How the U.S. Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation\u00a0magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. In a March 1983\u00a0speech\u00a0to an audience More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post How the U.S. Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378939"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1378939"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1378942,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378939\/revisions\/1378942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1378939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1378939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1378939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}