UN Secretary-General Guterres warns that “Humanity is on a knife’s edge. The risk of nuclear weapons being used has reached heights not seen since the Cold War.” New Cold War bloc systems have reemerged with the “lattice-like” network of U.S. Indo-Pacific alliances, NATO, and the Chinese, Russian. North Korean and Belarussian entente.
In the US, our Supreme Court marked what may be the culmination of a sixty-year counterrevolution. Their recent decisions signal an end to constitutional democracy, replacing it with what one justice declared to be a “king above the law.” A Japanese scholar remarked that, “it is not that different from Xi Jinping in China.” With Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee who will hew to Biden’s foreign and military policies the fundamentals have not changed. And then there is Trump’s warning of a “blood bath” should he lose, as well as the danger of another attempted coup d’etat..
With the collapse of the arms control regime and the absence of arms control diplomacy, we are on the cusp of unrestricted nuclear arms races. With wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and military confrontations over Taiwan, the South and East China Seas, as well as in Korea, humanity sleepwalks to catastrophe as each of these crises risks escalation to nuclear war. The refusal of the nuclear powers and others to eliminate the nuclear and climate existential threats places the Doomsday Clock hands at 90 seconds to midnight.
Medvedev in Russia is not the only crazy urging use of nuclear weapons. In Congress, Senator Lindsey Graham tested the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by asking if he would have supported the A-bombing of Hiroshima, and Representative Walberg urged Israel to nuke Gaza. Perhaps more dangerously, the Bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Report calls for the U.S. to prepare to fight and win simultaneous wars against China and Russia and insists that the US must “increase [its] reliance on nuclear weapons.” Both Biden and Trump threaten to expand the US nuclear arsenal. Trump’s Project 2025 would consolidate fascist rule and also prioritizes “nuclear weapons programs over other security programs” with the “most dramatic buildup of nuclear weapons” in four decades.
Annie Jacobsen’s chilling new book Nuclear War: A Scenario describes how a miscalculation could trigger a civilization-ending thermonuclear exchange in 72 minutes. And there are gaps in the nuclear powers’ failsafe systems. A former senior Russian general has reported that Russia’s early warning system’s 1983 alert that US ICBMs were headed for Moscow was not cancelled by Col Petrov’s courageous action. The computerized warning made it to General Secretary Andropov’s nuclear suitcase, and Andropov was awakened amidst a nuclear emergency. With today’s nuclear weapons exercises, and with Ukraine disabling Russian radar sites, a similar systems failure could trigger a “lose them or use them” thermonuclear exchange.
Reflecting Biden’s Cold War commitments, Pranay Vaddi, of the US National Security Council, recently warned that absent changes in Chinese and Russian nuclear strategies the US “may be forced to expand its nuclear arsenal.” In Ukraine, Biden and the military are committed to Russia’s “strategic defeat”, meaning regime change in Moscow, and they oppose meaningful ceasefire and peace negotiations. The longer the war goes on, the greater the possibility of escalation. Biden is complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. And, even if it is insufficient for Trump, Biden’s trillion dollar military budget includes this year’s installment for the $2 trillion nuclear weapons upgrade.
Tragically the arms control architecture has unraveled. The START and INF treaties are relics of history. New START will soon expire, and with AI, Cyber, and other new high-tech capabilities there is no time to negotiate a follow on treaty. More, the Kremlin refuses to engage in arms control negotiations until it prevails in Ukraine.
Reminiscent of the 1950s, following Russian nuclear threats, the U.S. and NATO recently conducted nuclear battlefield exercises, and nuclear capable Tomahawk missiles are to be deployed to Europe. Putin responded with a pledge to deploy nuclear armed intermediate range missiles within range of U.S. European and Asian allies after deploying nuclear weapons to Belarus. Not to be outdone, outgoing NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg promised increased availability of nuclear weapons. And Sweden and Finland pledged that in case of wider war, they would welcome NATO nuclear weapons.
Compounding this madness, and spurred by fears of Trump and Putin’s possible territorial ambitions, Britain and France offered their arsenals as European nuclear umbrellas
In Asia, even as Beijing reaffirms its no first use doctrine, China has doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal and apparently seeks parity with Washington and Moscow. North Korea revised its constitution to confirm it as a nuclear power. And the port call of a nuclear armed warship to Busan and the new US-ROK nuclear guidance led Prime Minister Yoon to say that “for now” Seoul doesn’t need its own nuclear arsenal. Yet a candidate to succeed Yoon urges that Korea “should move…to the point of equipping ourselves with the potential capabilities to go nuclear…” And with its new centrifuges, Iran could have nuclear weapons grade uranium in short order.
If this wasn’t enough, tragically U.S. voters face a choice between the “Republican” racist, rapist, Putin-infatuated, would-be dictator Trump and Kamala Harris, the representative of Cold War military-industrial-complex faction of the “Democratic” party. More, we cannot assume election fairness. Plus, should he lose, Trump predicts a “blood bath,” and we will face the possibility of another attempted coup d’état.
A second Trump presidency will not reprise the first. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security advisor recently described Trump’s foreign and military policy commitments. His pledge to resume nuclear weapons testing garnered the headlines, but there was more: Chillingly, he explained that Trump adheres “to his own instincts,” and he reported that Trump’s 2017 “ fire and fury” threat against North Korea brought us closer to nuclear war than is understood. Trump’s mantra, he wrote, is “Ameria first is not America alone…” With China as the greatest threat to US power, the plan is to “ focus its Pacific diplomacy on allies such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea…[and]traditional partners such as Singapore… Indonesia and Vietnam.” Trump will not withdraw from NATO and will bring massive increases to U.S. naval and air forces, including nuclear capable ships and bombers, and apply “maximum pressure” against Iran. Ukraine would not get another penny from Trump.
As a friend of the Japanese peace movement, I need to say that, like Trump and our Supreme Court, your government has no respect for its constitution, especially Article 9. Spurred not only by the Japanese elite’s long-term remilitarization strategy, including the SDF’s belief that it has the right to possess tactical nuclear weapons, there has been a paradigm shift in Japanese foreign and military policies encouraged by the US. As Asahi Shimbun editorialized, “gaining possession of the ability…to hit targets in another country’s territory, would eviscerate the nation’s long-established principle of sticking to a strictly defensive security policy. Doubling the nation’s defense spending could lead to an unrestrained military buildup.”
Biden described Kishida’s recent state visit to Washington as “the most significant upgrade in our alliance since it was first established.” The summit was designed to Trump-proof the alliance and deepen military cooperation, including joint development of AI, space technology, and semiconductors. Tokyo will purchase of 400 Tomahawk missiles, and it will export weapons to the US to replenish depleted US stocks. There will also be a “joint operations command,” possibly led by a four-star US general.
This alliance expansion is a keystone of the lattice-like alliance network to contain China. It undergirds the U.S.-Japanese-South Korean tripartite alliance. The Biden-Kishida-Marcos summit reiterated Washington’s “ironclad commitment” to the Philippines and resolved to increase interoperability between the three nations’ militaries. We have AUKUS, the QUAD, and US-Australia-New Zealand joint exercises. We also have the deepening integration of Japanese and other U.S. Indo-Pacific allied military militaries with NATO, including joint naval and air force maneuvers.
Against these developments, we had openings in our campaigning for survival: the second meeting of TPNW states parties and the Oppenheimer film, which despite its flaws, increased awareness of nuclear dangers. We won increased popular and Congressional support for the Back from the Brink campaign. The New York Times gave unprecedented attention to nuclear weapons victims and the growing dangers of nuclear war. The US Conference of Mayors statement called for nuclear weapons abolition. And nations of the Global South, without whom we would not have the TPNW, are reemerging as a nonaligned geopolitical force. And as the media has reported, we have had massive US demonstrations demanding an end to the Gaza genocide. This presages the rise of a new generation of peace activists. And growing numbers are calling for ceasefires and peace negotiations for Gaza and Ukraine.
With Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee, there is hope that a full-fledged personality cult U.S. fascism can be averted. Even then, from our new Cold Wars to the rising seas, the existential threats remain and must be overcome. Hope is something we make, in the streets, the polling booths, and the halls of power.
We can overcome.
Dr. Joseph Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and Co-Chair of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy. His books include Empire and the Bomb and With Hiroshima Eyes. This article is based on a speech prepared for the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima August 4, 2023