I'm Worried About Nuclear War With Russia

In grammar school in the 1950s, we faced the ever-present threat of nuclear war with Russia. In preparation for annihilation, we had drills every Tuesday morning at 10:30, when the air-raid sirens were tested. The good nuns instructed us to get underneath our desks and put our heads between our knees. They didn’t tell us that the only possible useful purpose of this maneuver would be to kiss our asses goodbye.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson I learned in grade school was that I could be incinerated in an instant, along with everyone I loved and everything I cared about. Perhaps this contributed to my lifelong visceral contempt for authority — in particular, for the power structures that rule the world.

The fear of nuclear war set off a craze for backyard bomb shelters and public fallout shelters. In a 1961 speech, President Kennedy strongly advised Americans to invest in bomb shelters. Of course, in the event of nuclear war, such measures would have been about as effective as hiding under a desk.

Years later, scientists calculated that a full-scale nuclear war would cause a ‘nuclear winter’ by putting massive amounts of soot in the atmosphere. Those who survived the blasts and initial radiation sickness would starve from worldwide crop failures or die from ice age conditions. Russian Premier Khrushchev correctly stated that the living would envy the dead. And Einstein predicted that the weapons used in any war after World War III would be sticks and stones.

In 1962, we had a hair-raising close call with annihilation, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the United States demanded that they be removed. I was 14 at the time. I remember that adults were really frightened, including my parents.

It turns out we were even closer to the brink than we realized. Classified documents released decades later show that President Kennedy was being pressured by his generals to take aggressive military action that likely would have resulted in a nuclear war. His Dr. Strangelove advisers were eager to play Russian roulette with the fate of the world, a not uncommon urge among military leaders. The Soviet Union and the United States had enough nukes to annihilate each other many times over.

Fortunately, global catastrophe was averted through negotiations. Russia removed their nuclear missiles from Cuba and the United States pledged not to support another invasion of Cuba and to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey, near Russia.

We were saved by dumb luck. Both President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, despite significant personal flaws, were rational actors at that crucial moment in history. They negotiated an agreement because neither wanted ‘mutually assured destruction’.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD, a chillingly appropriate acronym), became the basis for the theory of nuclear deterrence, the idea that countries with nuclear weapons would not attack each other out of fear of catastrophic retaliation. MAD requires trusting in the rationality, mental health, and sound judgment of leaders such as Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Need I say more?

Defying the logic that destroying a country once would be sufficient, a multi-trillion dollar arms race gained momentum. By 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union had a total of 63,000 nuclear bombs, some more than 3000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Enough to destroy civilization and most of the ecosystem several hundred times.

How could such an insanely high number of nuclear weapons come into existence? How could trillions of dollars be spent when much of the world went hungry? Three reasons: money, fear, and cultural trance.

As usual, follow the money. President Dwight Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II — someone knowledgeable about the military — warned America about the influence of the military/industrial complex in his farewell speech to Congress in January 1961. An earlier draft of his speech contained the more accurate term, military/industrial/congressional complex, but he did not want to insult the group he would be addressing.

The phrase military/industrial/congressional complex refers to the close, mutually beneficial links between defense contractors, the Pentagon, and Congress. According to Google, it includes political contributions, Congressional approval for military spending, lobbying, contracts, and the flow of money among individuals, corporations, and defense contractors.

The arms race was a goldmine for the military/industrial/congressional complex. It bled American taxpayers for every dollar it could get. And it still does. The Soviet Union had a communist version of this complex.

Fear was the second factor behind the arms race. We feared losing any race with the Russians. Americans were terrified of communism, which the Soviet Union, at least in theory, saw as an almost sacred doctrine for an ideal society that they felt duty-bound to spread. But the Soviet Union recognized that capitalists hated communism and correctly feared destruction by the West, which tried to stomp out socialism wherever it could. This fear ginned up the Soviet side of the arms race.

The third factor fostering the arms race was cultural trance. Humans tend to absorb the worldview of their culture, then function on trance-like automatic pilot, unless they have significant reasons to question their cultural indoctrination.

After World War II, America seemed strong, competent, and generous. There was a 20-year, ‘Father Knows Best’ period. In 1958, the American Election Study found that 73% of Americans said they could trust the federal government ‘just about always or most of the time.’ For many, not trusting Uncle Sam seemed unpatriotic.

Since the American government — including military leaders, Congress, and Presidents — proclaimed that more nuclear weapons made America safer, it must be true. And as the arms race gradually became more blatantly absurd and dangerous, most people, like frogs in a slowing heating frying pan, were oblivious to reality. They remained in their culturally-induced trance.

Fortunately, trances are like dreams that people can awaken from. Also, truth is both powerful and contagious. If enough people point to a previously invisible 900-pound gorilla in the living room that’s eating everyone out of house and home and threatening to kill everybody, eventually a critical mass of people can see the gorilla and become motivated to take action. This began to happen in the late 1970s after Vietnam and Richard Nixon helped weaken blind trust in the government.

By the early 1980s, the Nuclear Freeze movement began putting the brakes on the nuclear arms race, which eventually led to a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons from 63,000 to 13,080. The movement consisted of an uprising of people demanding an end to the totally insane and outrageously expensive arms race.

By the mid-1980s, even war-hawk President Ronald Reagan was demanding total nuclear disarmament. But total nuclear disarmament was not achieved because Reagan refused to give up his Star Wars plan for shooting down missiles.

The reduction was good, but nuclear weapons must be completely eliminated. Nuclear disarmament will not be easy to achieve, but there are tools such as diplomacy, treaties, economic pressure, public outrage, and bribery. Nuclear disarmament can be verified by diligent surveillance, which is highly effective in detecting radiation, and would cost a tiny fraction of the price of building and maintaining these monstrosities.

As I write this, we may be closer to nuclear war than ever before. Vladimir Putin is increasingly isolated, paranoid, megalomaniacal, and perhaps taking large doses of steroids, according to many Kremlin watchers. His irrational and brutal invasion of Ukraine and the outrage it has provoked among European countries and the U.S. could spiral into uncontrollable escalation. In March 2022, BCR Research, a respected Canadian economic research firm, predicted a 10% chance that nuclear war would destroy civilization within the next 12 months.

If we muddle through Putin’s invasion without nuclear annihilation, the people of the world must rise up to demand an end to all nuclear weapons. Governments rarely do the right thing for ordinary citizens unless pressured into it. As Frederick Douglas said in 1857, “If there is no struggle there is no progress…Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Women voting? African-American civil rights? Labor reforms — including the end of child labor, the 40-hour week, increased wages, and better working conditions? GLBT rights? Environmental and health protections? These victories, though incomplete, were all the result of ordinary people rising up against existing power structures to demand change. They required prolonged struggle and now require vigilance to keep from being undone.

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In the spirit of full disclosure, I was arrested twice in the early 1980s for protesting nuclear weapons. After my second arrest, I thought I was Mahatma Gandhi, and deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. (Which, by the way, Gandhi never received.)

But my halo wilted when I realized I was complicit in the arms race by paying federal income taxes. I struggled with the notion of sending the IRS a note saying they weren’t getting my money because the government was spending it for insane and immoral purposes. An acquaintance did exactly that. He was sent to a federal penitentiary.

Pondering the consequences of taking radical action — unhelpful roommates, no Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and the lack of female companionship — I arrived at the devastating conclusion that I was not Gandhi.

Not everyone can be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or the Berrigan brothers, Catholic priests who spent a combined 18 years in prison for activities such as smashing nuclear missiles with hammers in a symbolic effort to pound swords into plowshares. Nor can we all be like my friend Kathy Kelly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Kelly), who went to federal prison for planting five kernels of corn on a nuclear weapons silo.

But we can all play a small but vital part in eliminating nuclear weapons and bringing peace to the world. Gandhi said that what we do may seem insignificant, but it is important to do it anyway. Also, working for peace — or justice or ecological sanity — provides an opportunity for heartfelt camaraderie, meaning, and joy in everyday life. Bummed out? Take action!

Practical actions include learning about the issues, voting, talking with elected officials, writing letters to editors of publications, educating others both online and off, forming support groups, participating in demonstrations, and for those with the fortitude (not me!), more radical, non-violent endeavors. All such actions help awaken society from the deadly trance of unexamined beliefs and behaviors.

However, nuclear weapons, widespread injustice, poverty, and ecological insanity are all symptoms of a disease, and not the disease itself. Although it’s necessary to treat the symptoms, there will be no deep healing until we treat the disease. We will be playing whack-a-mole. The disease is humankind’s lack of connection to the inner source of joy, wisdom, and love. Some call this the Divine Spark within.

In other essays, I’ve discussed spiritual awakening as the cure for the madness afflicting humankind. (See the link below to Spiritual Awakening In A Collapsing Civilization). I know it’s extremely unlikely that masses of people worldwide will suddenly take up spiritual practices such as meditation and begin to feel the love and sense of connectedness that is necessary to save this troubled planet. But in the long run, it’s the only thing that will.

Realists will say that spiritual awakening as a means of changing the world is totally unrealistic. But realists and realistic thinking have brought us to the brink of Armageddon. Einstein said that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

I say fuck the realists. It’s time for the dreamers. It’s time to do and encourage the spiritual practices that help us connect with our inner light. And as we find that light, we need to let it shine.

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