Nuclear
Weapons Are
A Clear And
Present Danger To
Humanity
by Nile Stanton
March
1, 2023
In The
Most Dangerous
Animal: Human Nature
and the Origins of
War, David
Livingston Smith
maintains that “[W]ar’s
allure comes from
tendencies inscribed in
our genes over
evolutionary time, and
that violent conflict
benefited our ancestors,
who were victors in the
bloody struggle for
survival.” He
continues, “This is why
the disposition to war
lives on in us, and why
we periodically yield to
it and are drawn down
into a hell of our own
making.”
~~~~~
During the arms race
60 years ago, I
happened across an
article by Jerome
Frank, a professor of
psychiatry at Johns
Hopkins University. I
had been following the
increasing U.S.
involvement in Vietnam
and the nuclear arms
race with great
concern, and here
was an article that
presented an aspect of
war and the threat of
war that was new to me
-- a consideration of
major cognitive
factors that press
toward war.
Frank’s article was
highly controversial
at the time. In the
second sentence, he
wrote: “As a
psychiatrist, I have
been struck by an
analogy between the
behavior of policy
makers today and the
behavior of mental
patients. That is, they
see a problem or a
threat and then
resort to methods of
dealing with it
which aggravate it.
The leaders of the
world agree that
nuclear armaments pose
or will soon pose an
insufferable threat to
the existence of
humanity…. Yet
preparation for war
goes on feverishly.”
(Emphasis
added.)
Today Jerome
Frank’s analyses
strikes me as more
poignant and
compelling than
ever. He noted
that, “The
responses of
individuals to the
threats of modern
weaponry include
all the reactions
that people
customarily show
to massive dangers
which exceed their
powers of
adaptation,” and
proceeded to
explicate several
of the common
maladaptive
responses.
In highly
truncated form,
the maladaptive
responses Frank
identified are:
Apathy
or fatalism sets
in when one
contemplates
what is
perceived as
inevitable doom.
(“Better Dead
than Red” was
the fatalistic
credo of many
Americans in the
late 1950s and
early 1960s.)
“There will
always be war,
so who cares?"
Habituation
to danger.
That is, we seem
“unable to
sustain our
feeling of fear
in the presence
of a constant,
continual
danger, and we
lose our moral
repugnance
toward any evil
which persists
long
enough.”
(The use of
force to obtain
desired results
becomes
commonplace and
soon goes
unnoticed.)
Denial
of the existence
of an
overwhelming
threat is a
common
maladaptive
response to
problems.
According to
Frank,
minimizing the
dreadfulness of
nuclear weapons
seriously
impedes our
efforts to
resolve the
threat they
present.
Another form of
denial is to
believe that
nuclear weapons
will not be used
merely because
they are so
terrible.
He identifies as
yet another form
of denial the
tendency to use
reassuring words
to describe our
nuclear
predicament.
Insensitivity
to the remote.
For example, a
parent who would
get very upset
to see their
child’s finger
badly cut might
be relatively
unmoved by a
report of
thousands of
people being
killed or maimed
in an earthquake
or war on the
other side of
the globe.
(People tend to
ignore horrors
that are taking
place thousands
of miles away.)
The
formation of stereotypical
views of
“the enemy”
tends to
seriously
disrupt
communications
and, further,
makes dangers
come true
because of
self-fulfilling
prophecy. If we
are absolutely
convinced that
“the enemy” will
do wrong, our
actions and
those of the
enemy will often
prompt the wrong
to occur.
~~~~~
On June 13,
2022, Hans M.
Kristensen,
Associate
Senior Fellow
with SIPRI’s
Weapons of
Mass
Destruction
Programme and
Director of
the Nuclear
Information
Project at the
Federation of
American
Scientists
(FAS), starkly
warned,
"There are
clear
indications
that the
reductions
that have
characterized
global nuclear
arsenals since
the end of the
cold war have
ended."
Wilfred Wan,
Director of
SIPRI’s
Weapons of
Mass
Destruction
Program,
observed that,
"All of the
nuclear-armed
states are
increasing or
upgrading
their arsenals
and most are
sharpening
nuclear
rhetoric and
the role
nuclear
weapons play
in their
military
strategies."
Prophetically,
he added,
"This is a
very worrying
trend."
~~~~~
Before
addressing
these matters
further, a
short
multiple-choice
test is
appropriate in
order to
suggest a
little
historical
context:
(The choices
are China,
U.S.A., or
neither.)
1 – Over the
each of the
past twenty
years, which
country has
spent almost
four times as
much on its
military than
the other
country?
2 –
Which country
does not have
a "No First
Use" policy
with regard to
nuclear
weapons?
3 –
Which country
has over five
times the
number of
nuclear
weapons as the
other country
and has them
deployed,
rather than
have the
weapons
decoupled from
their delivery
systems as the
other does?
4 –
Over the last two decades,
which country has sent its
warplanes thousands of
miles from its shores to
bomb several countries?
5 – Over last two decades,
which country’s military
has spread “collateral
damage” over a vast area,
resulting in the deaths of
more than 100,000 innocent
civilians?
6 – Which country provides
weapons and/or military
training to over half of
the countries in the
world?
7 – Which country has
hundreds of military bases
beyond its own borders, as
compared to one foreign
base the other has?
8 – Which country has
aircraft carrier strike
groups in the Atlantic,
Indian, and Pacific
Oceans?
~~~~~
War is the
ultimate
sabotage and
maximum
barbarity. It
is Evil. It is
easy to
understand why
many religious
people think
of war as a
tool the Devil
designed to
destroy God's
creation.
~~~~~
Consider this
as the preface
to a series of
essays I plan
to present
regarding "war
profiteering,"
"aggression,"
"just war
theory," "Judaism,
Christianity,
Islam and
war," and the
like, in
examining the
causes and
consequences
of the horror
people say
they hate yet
pursue with a
passion.
___________________________
* Nile
Stanton lives in
southern Spain. He
was a professor for
the University of
Maryland University
College for 20
years, where he
taught U.S. active
duty service members
on U.S. military
bases in Spain,
Italy, Bosnia, and
(mostly) Greece as
well as online to
troops throughout
Europe and Asia. The
course he taught
most often (32
iterations) was the
upper-level
government course
called “Law,
Morality, and War.”
Thereafter, he
taught for the
University of New
England at its
Tangier, Morocco,
campus for two
years, where his
signature course was
“War and Public
Health.” He was born
and raised a Quaker
and tends to examine
the excuses for war
and lack of
diplomacy more
carefully and from a
different
perspective than
many people.
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OCCASIONAL
JUSTICE