Bulletin 280: Human survival, and nuclear disarmament, require revolutionary change

January 25, 2021

Permalink for this bulletin (tomorrow). Please forward! 
Home page; Press Releases; Bulletins; Letters; Pit production
To subscribe to our Activist Leaders listserve send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
To subscribe to this, our main listserve send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
Please endorse the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production."Twitter: @TrishABQ.
Contribute. Volunteer. Contact us.

Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope this note finds you all well.

Now that the new administration and Congress are in place and the excitement of the entry into force of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is more or less past it is time to remind ourselves, and for this organization to remind whoever may need reminding, that for all of us, our work, whatever it may be and however we conceive it, is taking place in an environmental and human context of converging existential crises for the human species, civilization, and the earth's higher life forms.

If business as usual continues -- in the powerful developed countries and the largest developing nations especially -- there is an increasing likelihood, and if continued a certainty, that the earth's climate, ecology, and physical processes will shift from their present, livable condition into a "hothouse earth" state.

This graphic may be helpful:

(from "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene," Steffen et al. 2018).

A solid, quickly-readable, reliable summary of our climate situation can be found in the Climate Reality Check 2020 report from David Spratt et. al.

Climate is just one aspect of our predicament. According to a review by 17 leading biologists of 150 prior studies, a "ghastly future of mass extinction" (link is to Guardian article) currently awaits us because the world, "even well-informed experts," are "failing to grasp the extent of threats posed by biodiversity loss and the climate crisis."

Like these authors, we don't want to sugar-coat this:

The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition, reigning in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women. These choices will necessarily entail difficult conversations about population growth and the necessity of dwindling but more equitable standards of living.

We have summarized predictions of a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations) and resource conflicts this century. Yet, our goal is not to present a fatalist perspective, because there are many examples of successful interventions to prevent extinctions, restore ecosystems, and encourage more sustainable economic activity at both local and regional scales. Instead, we contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future. While there have been more recent calls for the scientific community in particular to be more vocal about their warnings to humanity (Ripple et al., 2017; Cavicchioli et al., 2019Gardner and Wordley, 2019), these have been insufficiently foreboding to match the scale of the crisis. Given the existence of a human “optimism bias” that triggers some to underestimate the severity of a crisis and ignore expert warnings, a good communication strategy must ideally undercut this bias without inducing disproportionate feelings of fear and despair (Pyke, 2017; Van Bavel et al., 2020). It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and “tell it like it is.” Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst. (emphasis added)

This is not exactly new information for some of us, but the fact that some of us have been working on these issues for decades doesn't mean we should stop or shirk now.

Yet in our nuclear work I have not encountered a single scientist, policy analyst, congressional staff member, or political appointee, either in academia or government, who appears, in their words and actions, to grasp the scale or urgency of the climate crisis, or the environmental problem overall.

To speak out in the face of the stubborn, stovepiped silence from nuclear policy peers is likely to be fatal to careers in government and academia, and very few if any do it. Where colleagues do grasp the problem they remain weirdly silent -- which is the same thing politically as being an ignorant climate change denier, and rather worse morally I should think.

It is likely that we may have only this decade to bring human society to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, as you can read in the references above and many others. In any case the commonly-heard "2050" timeline -- seemingly selected by politicians and their followers in order to leave difficult actions to future generations -- is much too late. Already, large planetary feedbacks are being activated. Natural processes are taking over. The reins are slipping from our hands. The animal and plant brothers and sisters that have accompanied us through the later Pleistocene and Holocene are vanishing, as is the climate that has supported us all.

(Is this clear? For we who live in New Mexico, this means there will be no real economic growth and development. That's over. We are in the beginning years of a megadrought of indefinite duration. We cannot grow our way out of our social inequities. Growth will be the cause of more problems and exacerbate all the problems we have, rather than be any kind of cure or palliative.)

THIS is the context in which we are working to increase international cooperation and bring about nuclear disarmament.

P. M. S. Blackett (who taught a young Robert Oppenheimer and whom the latter apparently tried to poison) observed, "Once a nation pledges its safety to an absolute weapon, it becomes emotionally essential to believe in an absolute enemy." By definition, one cannot cooperate with an absolute enemy, no matter what the common danger.

Some of our colleagues, and many members of Congress who have parroted anti-Russian propaganda, and the Russia-haters that now fill some of the higher levels of the new Administration, now need to find religion about international cooperation. To be frank, they never understood what was going on, vis-a-vis Russia. We must help them.

This country has been painfully living the reality of having an "absolute enemy" for decades -- and doing so in an especially stupid way these past four years, with all the made-up propaganda narratives about Russian interference in U.S. affairs, so politically useful for our national security agencies and their political allies, and so lucrative for defense contractors and the news media -- and when examined, so empty of substance.

The real target of all that propaganda was and is any nascent formation within the U.S. polity for real, substantial, humane, democratic change.

We want to be clear to you -- and we think you should be clear about this as well -- that we are not aiming at nuclear disarmament absent a profound change in our civilization and way of life -- a sufficient change to protect human civilization and living nature. To do so would be quite foolish.

We are not going to get nuclear disarmament without massive changes in our society and polity. And we don't want just nuclear disarmament, because if we don't also get those massive, protective changes, human civilization will come to a crashing end soon, in just a few decades, from environmental exhaustion, resource depletion, and climate collapse.

Regardless of what we do, huge changes are coming. There is going to be a decline in living standards, no matter what. This has begun but it is far from over. It may not be monotonic and it will certainly not be equitable. It will have gradual and sudden aspects. What is somewhat up to us is the nature of that decline, the environmental effects, the social and political consequences, and so on. We may thrive, in important ways.

So it's a serious intellectual and strategic mistake to seek nuclear disarmament without revolutionary social and political changes. It won't happen, and it wouldn't save "the world" if it did. 

An even worse mistake is to seek nuclear reductions and arms control while tacitly supporting U.S. hegemony, through our silence (or more politely, the "rules-based international order," quite different from an international order based on international law and national sovereignty). That has failed, hasn't it? There have been no significant arms control successes, only reversals, since the successful negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996 (which the U.S. failed to ratify in 1999). That year -- 1996 -- was also when the commitment was made by candidate Bill Clinton to expand NATO eastward, which was one of the most fateful steps leading to today's nuclear arms race (the other principal one being U.S. abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by GW Bush in 2002). It's been downhill since 1996, stumbling from one bad deal to another. A good surrogate measure of the growing post-1995 power of the nuclear weapons state is the nuclear warhead budget, expressed in constant dollars, which has almost tripled since 1995.

One way or another, we are all headed into a very different world. Being nuked should frankly be the least of our worries, unless of course "we" bring that particular Goetterdaemmerung down on ourselves and the world through an overabundance of our own folly, greed, ignorance, and passivity.

What does this have to do with pit production? Well, everything.

This is the context for what this organization is trying to do in the arena of plutonium pit production. We explained it not too long ago in just that context, in “The Great Transformation: Nuclear Weapons Policy Considerations for the 116th Congress.”

The bottom line remains the same: we want to delay pit production as long as possible so our (largely wretched, captive) federal government can come up to speed on the overarching crisis we face (or converging crises -- you decide whether you want a singular or plural formulation).

Of course we are not confident the federal government will become enlightened to any significant degree, in any timely way. We therefore also wish to engage in education and more populist activities on a regional and human scale, which also happens to have the "power of proximity" (Arundhati Roy) as far as nuclear weapons are concerned.

At the federal level, where the pit decision will largely be made in the short run, our hope, in which we are investing ourselves, is that an as-yet-unknown combination of education and reason (logic, science, and engineering, in other words), assisted by popular outcry as well as by forces majeure from nature, finance, and international relations (including, among others states, parties to the TPNW), will awaken enough practical wisdom on the federal level to abandon the most foolish policies.

There is no shortage of those. Among the most foolish policies is to build and operate two pit factories, one of which is:

• starting up in the 2020s, at least one and probably two decades before new pits are needed;
• much costlier to build and operate, by a factor of roughly 6;
• highly unstable and risky;
• not needed for any deployed or replacement warhead unless a multiple warhead upload option is required for the proposed new silo-based missile;
• inflexible as to production, with little or no spare capacity;
• inadequate as to the quantity of pits that can produced;
• not an enduring capability;
• comes with an insufficient supply of regional housing and skilled workers; and is
• risky to essential stockpile programs that take place in the same small, old facility.

That is far from a complete list of problems, but these should suffice to form practically the canonical definition of a stupid program from any perspective -- except that of the ever-yawning New Mexico pork barrel. Black hole, more like.

It is quite amazing, but far from from amusing, that many arms control and other nuclear policy organizations are tacitly approving building and starting up a pit production plant in the 2020s, while at the same time arguing that a) pits are not needed any time soon, and b) the warhead and missile for which the pits are needed are themselves not needed.

We are nearly done with a fairly detailed briefing on pit production, so you will see that soon. It seemed important meanwhile to send this reminder of the wider context of our work.

Thank you for your attention,

Stay safe, take care of each other,

Greg and Trish