Bulletin 279: Thank you; no Capitol demonstration 1/19/21 obviously; Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; more

January 17, 2021

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Dear friends and colleagues --

1. Thank you

Many of you responded generously to our year-end request for financial support. Thank you very much indeed. We have been able to thank most of you by mail as we close the books on 2020. We are acutely aware of your very important support and are buoyed by your solidarity, expressed in this and other ways.

It is already a challenging year and as I am sure you also realize, one with great opportunities -- and dangers, especially if we do not respond to those opportunities. As Martin Luther King -- whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow -- said, "In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late." Let's not be.

2. Contrary to what we said in the last Bulletin, we will have no organized presence at the Capitol on January 19 or any other day that week.

For those outside the state, this was set to occur on the first day of the 2021 New Mexico legislative session, and was to have three closely-linked themes, which are worth mentioning here:

1. the local, in-our-faces part of the new nuclear arms race, with its $14 billion crash program (slide 29) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to build enough plutonium bomb cores by 2030 to enable starting production of an all-new, substantially modified warhead (W87-1) for an all-new silo-based missile (the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, GBSD);
2. the January 22 Entry Into Force (EIF) of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) (see discussion in our October 25, 2020 press release, and below); and
3. Martin Luther King Day, arguably our most important national memorial on the calendar at this point in time, with its message of nonviolence and the crying need to move national investment away from militarism and empire, to social uplift and a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach to the converging climate, environmental, social, and economic emergencies we now face.

It was always going to be difficult to organize this event safely and legally under pandemic conditions, with no more than five people allowed in one place for good reason. (FYI our plan, now canceled, was for relay teams at both ground-level Capitol entrances, despite covid-limited foot traffic.) We do think freedom of assembly -- real, face-to-face assembly -- is critically important, especially in situations of, and on issues involving, near-total failure of government, which is what we are seeing. The opportunity to discuss issues face-to-face with a wide range of other people and NGOs was and is important. All forms of virtual interaction are far inferior.

The situation has obviously changed. On Wednesday fencing went up at the capitol; Thursday the Governor declared a state of emergency; surrounding streets are closed.

We are meanwhile working intensively here in other ways, some results of which will be more visible soon.

We will soon need help -- perhaps your help, no matter where you live. We will be sending more information to this list shortly but in the meantime if you think you might like to help and want to be contacted, please drop Trish a line. As in every other human endeavor, we can invest more of our own limited time in people who want to help.

3. Here in the U.S., let's raise a glass to Entry Into Force of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons -- but not be too distracted by it.

As we said in October, the TPNW EIF is an important milestone. and also, in Bulletin 273:

Few grasp the magnitude of what is being proposed [at LANL], or how important it is to halt this particular, immediate, expansion (as opposed to some notion of nuclear expansion in general, or nuclear expansion later) and the first post-Cold War production of brand-new warheads, with all new components and some new features.

In this regard, it may be useful to remark that it is easy to fall under the spell of the abstract and ideal...Many are all for "nuclear abolition," i.e. against nuclear weapons in general. We are too, but that and $3.00 will buy a cup of coffee. Many want the U.S. to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons(TPNW), which -- please face this -- will never happen. (The TPNW is indeed very important, but not for that reason.) There is great danger in fantasies, which might be good for fundraising but are definitely not good for mustering real political power resulting in concrete disarmament. [And] [f]riends, forget trying to change "public opinion." That is a fool's errand (pp. 15-21). There is a lot of danger involved in creating attractive means for political leaders, nonprofits, and others to signal nuclear virtue without making real political commitments. (emphasis added)

What do we mean by "never?" We mean that the U.S. as we know it will never sign this Treaty. The changes that would need to take place would be so momentous that for all intents and purposes the U.S. would be a much different country. Nearly everything we think of when we say, "the United States" would be different. This implies that if we want nuclear disarmament we had better be thinking and acting in much larger terms than the narrow nuclear "stovepipe."

The Treaty can and must be made stronger, both by accession of additional states parties and by adding more powerful clauses that interfere with the actual operation of nuclear weapons forces. In addition, the passage of domestic laws by states parties that could affect the behavior of nuclear states is an important Treaty obligation.

This means a lot of political and diplomatic work outside the U.S., which international members of the ICAN network can best do, and have been doing very fruitfully. Every new state party matters!

Here in the U.S. the work of disarmament is rather different, and the danger of distraction is not just significant but paramount. Anything that draws attention away from U.S. militarism, with its inevitable nuclear component, is dangerous to the disarmament cause.

It is all too easy to grasp at straws, or to mentally invest a piece of paper with magical qualities that only real, grounded ongoing political struggle and successful outcomes can create. As Barack Obama shrewdly understood, for most Americans "hope" occupies an excessively large mental space.

The dangers of false hope and distraction are especially acute where, by virtue of location, especially powerful resistance could take place, but only if it is grounded in local specificities. Arundhati Roy called this "the power of proximity." In such cases, the TPNW can be a real distraction. The same is true for people working in other situations where there is real traction, deriving from particular political circumstances or personal commitment.

Part of the problem is, again, the mistaken belief that public opinion on a national level can be shifted by talking about a Treaty to which the U.S. is not a Party, and won't be. U.S. public opinion is a) not connected at all to policy outcomes and b) cannot be focused or any useful length of time on nuclear weapons in the midst of converging, chaotic, rising crises, as polling demonstrates and we have discussed (pp. 15-21).

The closure of the New Mexico Capitol, mentioned above, is part of these chaotic crises. Over the coming few years, they will intensify, for material reasons, as the huge economic stimulus packages fade into the past and stark, growing realities remain.

We became an ICAN partner organization early on and worked hard to bring this Treaty into being and make it as strong as possible. We contributed what we could at all the major negotiations and otherwise did all we could to help our fellow ICAN-ers. We did so because we understood that the U.S. could not achieve nuclear disarmament without coercive pressure from other states. The pressure has to be coercive, meaning it has to affect a core U.S. interest. When it comes to its core interests, the U.S. is not influenced much by "moral force" as somebody mistakenly said the other day. This fact is quite explicit in State Department planning documents of the past, if it were not obvious from a moment's historical observation. Furthermore, the U.S. does not care about international law, unless somebody has a solid means of enforcing it.

Nuclear weapons are illegal in many ways already. The U.S. is party to treaties and conventions which severely limit the use of nuclear weapons to only the most hypothetical cases (an isolated ship at sea, etc.) Existing law creates a net, or wall, that in theory bars nuclear use. The TPNW adds considerably to this wall of law for states parties but not yet for the U.S., barring also possession and threat -- i.e. nuclear deterrence. Bringing this norm to bear on the U.S. will take a lot of political and diplomatic work. Here in the world's only hyperpower, that character of that political work will obviously be very different than in a non-nuclear state.

It is total extent of U.S. power and threat -- economic, military, and covert action, all of which and more stand behind diplomatic persuasion -- which, more than any other factor, sustains the large number of nuclear weapons in the world (pp. 1-2). Yes, there are other factors. But the serious threat from the U.S., accurately perceived by Russia, creates a dynamic that accounts for most of the world's nuclear weapons.

Does that mean the situation is hopeless? Of course not! We -- each of us -- are the hope. We just can't get too distracted. So if you are in the U.S. like us, raise a glass to the TPNW, and get to work in specific ways that have specific near-term objectives we can achieve, or fail to achieve, objectives that can mobilize people and change institutions.

4. The present historical moment and our work together

We are appalled by most of what we are seeing in the U.S. political scene. The hate we see, the tribalism, the loss of reason and proportion, the censorship, are slowing us down and making communication much harder. We don't want to freight up this Bulletin with anything further on these developments, but we will write again quite soon now.

Stay safe, take care of each other,

Greg and Trish