Sean Reynolds works with CAPA’s Foreign Policy Working Group and facilitates Chicago’s No Iran War Coalition.
In his final year, we told my dad we were fighting his cancer so he could have that heart attack instead. He made his chemo sessions because he knew it was serious: he wasn’t immortal. His dignity and agency mattered to us whether he was immortal or not.
To disarm of nuclear weapons, we have to survive nuclear weapons until negotiations become conceivable again. We have to awaken the leaders, and in many cases the voters, of both parties to the fact that nuclear weapons are real. I’m privileged to carry forward my dad’s memory and I’m here to do so because he didn’t die in a nuclear war. Once the war has happened and there is no-one to remember how we worked for each other, it will all still matter, and might have bought us some time.
When we discuss the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we face some pitfalls:
- we are apt to focus on the undeniable racism on all sides of that war, as though greed weren’t as evil as hate, as though the fear of losing our empire, with all the wealth you see around you today in Evanston, weren’t an equally effective lure to our worst crimes.
- we are apt to forget that modern thermonuclear weapons are a thousand times more powerful than the bombs of 1945, each one containing a Hiroshima-style atom bomb as a mere blasting cap: if it hardly matters whether we kill our millions from greed or hate, then each nuclear missile is the Holocaust in a can, a Holocaust we’ve prepared to commit.
- we forget that the lofted smoke from just a few nuke-incinerated cities (as if a nuke exchange with just a few cities were possible) promises nuclear winter, a starvation omnicide for all of humanity as deliberate as the starvation genocide we today impose on Gaza, with the difference that this will be every conceivable genocide, at once. It’s the surpassing horror of our age that Western leaders of all parties so readily gamble with every conceivable genocide, at once, chasing simultaneous escalations in East Asia, West Asia, and Eastern Europe for fear the Global South might finally catch up.
If disarmament requires negotiation then we need some skepticism about the narratives that our two political parties and their captive media spin about what the other side thinks in conflicts starting with but hardly limited to the grim American political divide which must at all costs be bridged before we’ve the slightest hope of compelling a U.S. imperial elite gone mad on war to forgo its ultimate crime.
For the past four years our White House seemingly tried to cancel Russia by boycotting any communication with a nuclear-armed Kremlin, while its successor has reportedly rebuffed Russian overtures to renew START, our last remaining nuclear treaty. The recent Iran negotiations were, our leaders now openly brag, a mere feint to facilitate decapitation strikes that may finally have forced Iran to overcome muslim religious objections to the obscenity that is nuclear war and seek the bomb as its sole logical response to our empire’s implacable savagery. Our military blockade against Chinese trade seems just a few years away.
How is disarmament possible when our vision of peace is besieging every part of the world, including half of our own country, that dares to try not being us? When every war we orchestrate, like our war cynically wood-chippering a puppet Ukraine, we rebrand as a sacrament of peace? Even our leaders will terrifyingly soon realize that our sole remaining strength against eclipsing rivals is our nuclear arsenal, and when they do, how will we make them accept the loss of our empire, meaning all the wealth you here see around you, without a final nuclear gamble? How fast can we shed the comforts that lock that destiny in?
Things are very serious. Complete nuclear disarmament – in a few centuries, a few decades, a few years or months – is not just possible, but inevitable, because we’re going to launch them all, and have none left. Even if miraculously, magnificently, we negotiate these weapons away, the science to rebuild them is with us and the environment’s countdown to geopolitical collapse is inescapable as gravity. Our species faces what my dad faced, because nuclear war is a thing to delay but not to prevent. The century, the decade, the month we delay it by is that much extra time and agency for billions of precious lives and a partial atonement for our role as the world’s nuke-armed slayers. At the very least it’s time in which prepare our neighbors – no trifle – to meet the end with repentant grief instead of panic incomprehension.
Grieving an end we can delay but not prevent is a requirement of of treating life seriously. Delaying the nuclear war means grieving, then relinquishing, all the wealth we have around us today but can’t keep rivals from taking short of global sucide. It means letting our empire and our petrodollar go without further pressuring our wayward president into an omnicidal nuclear tantrum over the defeat. It requires actively ending the atrocity in Gaza that has made world populations so ready to burn if that means finally watching us burn too. It means letting BRICS win.
There is a fate worse than dying in a nuclear war, and I’ll tell you what it is: it’s killing in one. It’s clutching too hard onto comfortable, imperial lives which never required just one starvation genocide, but always every possible one, at once. Our species can stunnedly observe us warming up for the crime to end all crimes. But when I went to Iran I promised my new friends that as they were my friends, I would try not to kill them. Please undermine our empire today to help me keep that promise over the weeks, months, and – if we’re very very good – the years ahead, perhaps enough time to even rid the world of these hell weapons for a little while.