Paper Cranes (Part Two)

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have been maintaining their construct of ‘The Doomsday Clock’ since 1947. It illustrates threats to humanity from unchecked scientific advances, nuclear proliferation, nation-state saber rattling, or the lack of addressing climate change. In 1947, they set the hands of the clock to 7 minutes before midnight. They rolled it back to 17 minutes before midnight when the U.S. and Russia deescalated the Cold War.

In January of 2020, because of the end of the INF treaty (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) between the U.S. and Russia, That Guy’s continued abandonment of de-carbonization efforts and inclusion in NATO or United Nations doings, as well as his testy relations with North Korea and China, as well as our world’s collective increased neglect in addressing climate change, they rolled the clock’s hands forward to 100 seconds before midnight, the closest it had ever been to zero hour.

Guess where it’s set now, in this year of 2024?

90 seconds before midnight.

Can you guess why?

Boomers and Gen X often remember when The Day After was broadcast in 1983. It was a first of its kind, made for television movie, about a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, focusing much of its narrative and action in Kansas. 100 million people tuned into it, we’d never seen the likes of it before, and haven’t much since. It was harrowing, although it was a television-friendly, watered down depiction of what the actual effects of a nuclear blast would wreak upon on an American city. It still scared the shit out of us, with its ground zero disintegrations, firestorms, mushroom clouds, electromagnetic pulse fritzing all our tech.

Locally, in my redneck of the woods, there was an added bonus fright later on that night, in the wee hours of the morning, when a rather impressive sonic boom woke us all up at 4 or 5 am, and thanks to the previous evening’s viewing, many of us thought a nuclear war had commenced. Turned out it was a rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, a coastal military installation not far from my childhood homestead.

My father worked at Vandenberg. He was a radar tech stationed in Seoul during the Korean War, and found a successful vocation afterward as a civilian engineer contractor. He was mostly quiet about what he did out there, per regulations and classified clearances, but I eventually sussed out he worked on the inner workings and fuselages of the Titan and Minuteman series of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

Vandenberg Air Force Base is a key component of west coast American defense. The press releases for our California central coast mom n’ pop mentalities extolled the values and benefits of local missile launches in carrying satellites to orbit, downplaying their true functions as carriers that would deliver nuclear warheads to their overseas targets.  

Be that as it may, Vandenberg kept food on my family’s plates, and my Dad was a brilliant engineer. He never talked about how he felt about nuclear weapons. I was a mouthy kid about world ending stuff, questioning the rationale of deterrence and the allocations of military resources. He was a more measured man than myself. I can be kind of a hothead about world-ending shit. I’m wacky like that. Oh, you figured that out already?

I can’t mince words about this subject with niceties and jokes. Not about nukes. They’re abso-fuckin’-lutely amoral. Along with weaponized biological agents and modified pathogens like Anthrax and Botulism, and chemical warfare nerve agents like mustard gas or VX gas, they’re hands down the most vile things we’ve ever invented in the history of mankind (tear gas, by the way, is a diluted form of nerve gas, something to keep in mind when supporting its use on peaceful protestors).

Nobody, not any leader nor any nation or body politic, should have the kind of reckless, uncontrollable power that nuclear weapons possess. They are devices whose use can only be authorized by a scant few persons, yet their consequences affect a far too disproportionate majority of worldwide human beings, both in the present and the foreseeable future, not to mention altering the ecological viability of the earth itself.

Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico and the so-called ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who oversaw the first Trinity nuclear test, most recently lionized in the Oscar-winning film by Christopher Nolan, infamously uttered a piece of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita upon viewing the fireball: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. He regretted his work, as did Albert Einstein, who, five months before his death, claimed he only made one big mistake in his life, that of recommending to President Roosevelt that atomic bombs be constructed, though he added a caveat that he only did so in fear the Germans would do it first.

Few people other than chest-beating, nationalist war hawks come away unchanged from witnessing a nuclear detonation. The movies don’t do it justice. Don’t even get me started on Indiana Jones 4 and the fucking refrigerator. No, I haven’t seen a blast in person and I never want to, and I never want you to, either.

It’s only a matter of time before nukes are utilized again. The longer a weapon sits around unused, the more likely it’s going to be used. Eventually, someone will get impatient or impulsive and justify their use for some nationalist or jingoist reason. Could be us. Could be a terrorist. Could be the French, or the Pakistani. Could be anyone. Except Japan. They know. I actually still find myself surprised they disavow the weapons, but condone the power plants.

Total disarmament is the only workaround, requiring a multinational agreement inclusive of every country on the earth, enforced by an international peacekeeping coalition that allows border access and neutral investigations of complete transparency to ensure nobody’s making them or hiding them on the sly.

It’s a wonder there haven’t been any suitcase nukes or dirty bombs set off yet in a major metropolis around the globe.

What’s truly the worst aspect about nukes is how their use would forever shape posterity. As bloody and brutal as human history has been to date, so far we’ve limited our major wars and conflicts to staying confined within one generation, more or less, excepting a few extended centuries of Crusades and perpetual religious and racial persecution, of course. Yet as rudimentary as it sounds, even those continued terrors limited themselves to conventional methods, like hangman’s nooses or AK-47s or tanks or swords or .50 caliber M2 rifles or napalm. We have no shortage of awful ways to dispose of one another, but at least they’re mostly confined to a relatively present moment of altercation.

Nukes, though, that’s Next Level Shit.

It doesn’t just wipe us off the map. It also negates the prospects of future generations, perhaps all of them. At a minimum, presuming the lands recovered eventually, the use of nuclear weapons will make successive human lives effectively Stone Age or Bronze Age in nature, for a long, long time.

They must be abolished.

Period.

End of story.

There’s an organization here in my hometown called The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  They’re a grass roots network that focuses on advocacy for nuclear disarmament, and their main foundation rests on the definition of peace literacy.

Peace literacy is a sociological framework of methods and tools for waging peace in nonviolent and non-polarizing ways, including understanding and defusing aggression, practicing three elements of universal respect (listening, leading by example, and speaking to human potential), and mastering skills related to peace building, like conflict resolution and seeking alternatives to bullying or aggressive stances in supporting causes.

In longtime peace advocate Paul K. Chappell’s book Soldiers of Peace: How to Wield the Weapon of Nonviolence with Maximum Force, the author notes the importance of developing literacy in human civilization and how, as Francis Bacon said, ‘knowledge is power,’ and that as such, there are obvious reasons why American slave owners made it illegal for slaves to read, why the Nazis burned books, why the Taliban doesn’t want their women to be educated.

Denying people literacy, Chappell maintains, denies them power, and he makes a compelling case that while older societies were often preliterate in reading, current nations around the world, perhaps in particular the American ship of state, are preliterate in peacemaking methodology. To begin that process of literacy, we must first embrace the logic of choosing to study alternative information, and then we have to learn how to apply it to influence policy and action, replacing standards of traditional reactions to differing opinions.

Peace literacy. It’s a good creed. One we all must adopt.

It’d be proactively wise to become peace literate sooner than later.

Tick.

Tock.

*Compiled from August 6th, 2020