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Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation by Helen Caldicott – review

A collection of essays that focuses on the US president as the source of our greatest danger

Julie McDowall Wednesday 6 December 2017 09.01 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/06/sleepwalking-to-armageddon-helen-caldicott-review

When Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2009 there were grumbles, later justified by an insider who admitted they had made the award in the hope of “strengthening” the new US president. The prize was an inducement rather than an acknowledgement. Perhaps the same tactic has been used with the 2017 award, which went to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Is the prize being used to bestow hope on a chosen cause?

Hope has no place in the nuclear debate: this dreadful issue is far beyond such intangibles. In trying to reduce the threat we need pragmatism, not ceremony and celebration, but in these days of lurid discourse and blunt opinions, cool, hard pragmatism just doesn’t pull in the retweets.

This book, a collection of essays about the nuclear threat edited by the veteran campaigner Helen Caldicott, includes many discussions of hope, of letter-writing campaigns and peace walks, which almost suggest the nuclear issue is more about personality than practicality. You will find references to dreams, hearts and “our spiritual connection to Mother Earth”.

Such language conjures images of flower-power protests, hashtags, placards and face-paint. What matters more than peace movement self-expression is to change the opinions of those in power, who are cosy and unconcerned, either at home or in the House.

Sleepwalking to Armageddon focuses on Donald Trump as the source of the current nuclear danger. When it comes to nuclear weapons, however, Trump seems to me more ignorant than malicious. His desire to revive tactical nukes, and his horribly naive questioning of why we have nuclear weapons if we can’t use them, both suggest, at least on this issue, a stupid man rather than an evil one itching to unleash the apocalypse. After all, a nuclear winter would not be kind to the velvety turf of his golf courses.

Trump seems unable to grasp why nuclear weapons are different from the conventional kind, yet some of the book’s essayists share his view: they argue that chemical and biological weapons have been made illegal, so why not the nuclear type? But nuclear weapons actually threaten the whole of civilisation; it is right that they are held to a different standard.

The book dwells on the plight of the Marshall Islanders, victims of America’s nuclear testing. Yet there is nothing about the people who suffered from the Soviet tests in Kazakhstan. These took place in an eerie landscape known as the Polygon, where some children have appalling deformities and live in neglect. If you want to demonstrate the horror of nuclear testing there can be few stronger examples. And what of Britain’s tests in Australia, or those of the French in Algeria? The reluctance to look beyond the US weakens this collection, especially when we consider Odd Arne Westad’s recent The Cold War: A World History, which showed the conflict’s global scale.

In my view the main flaw in the fight against nuclear weapons isn’t Trump hysteria, or anti-Americanism, it’s the fact that nuclear disarmament is currently impossible. Possession of nuclear weapons locks their host into a vicious circle: the weapons cannot be laid down while the ability to create them exists. America will not disarm while North Korea has a nuclear capability. And if the US won’t, then why should its old enemy, Russia, especially when Putin is determined to restore Soviet pride? The unpalatable truth is that we cannot disarm because of the threat of nuclear blackmail. Disarmament would put the world at the mercy of any rogue state that acquired nuclear weapons. We are, as Robert Oppenheimer said, scorpions trapped in a bottle. Logic demands we turn our attention to the practical matter of control, not the utopian dream of elimination.

Peace activists talk of disarming by means of conferences, treaties and “humanitarian pledges”, but no one explains how we might lay down nuclear weapons without becoming hostage to them. Disarmers focus instead on what a good thing it would be to get rid of the Bomb. It’s like demanding a cure for cancer without requiring medical research, relying instead on coffee mornings and fun runs.

Until science produces a way to neutralise nuclear weapons, we’re stuck with them, so perhaps we should look to technology and AI – as one of the essays suggests: Kennette Benedict concentrates on democracy, and argues that a formal declaration of war should be required before a president can press the button. The US president can launch nuclear weapons without a state of war, without provocation. There is no formal check on his power, although there are informal measures, such as when defence secretary James Schlesinger questioned Richard Nixon’s mental state and had a quiet word with the military commanders. There is also the prospect of launch officers simply refusing a presidential order but that, although technically possible, is most unlikely. In one famous case, an officer, Harold Hering, asked how he could be sure an order to fire came from a sane commander in chief. He was dismissed.

That missiles are still on hair-trigger alert was regarded by Obama as “a dangerous relic of the cold war”; he promised to reform it, but didn’t. (Had he achieved that then he would certainly have merited a Nobel peace prize). The efforts of a single person can have an effect. Consider Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who averted armageddon one September night in 1983: the early warning system alerted him to an incoming American nuclear attack. He suspected it was an error and did not respond. Mercifully he was right: the computer had misinterpreted sunlight on clouds as Armageddon.

We must attend to practical specifics and not fall prey to emotion. Instead of talking of utopia, let’s look to the unromantic but eminently pragmatic question of control.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/06/sleepwalking-to-armageddon-helen-caldicott-review