[ The first UN General Assemblys first resolution set up a
commission to bring back proposals to eliminate atomic weapons and all
other weapons of mass destruction and to control atomic energy. That
was seventy-seven years ago.]
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NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND NATIONALISM: AN INCENDIARY MIX  
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Andrew Lichterman
January 26, 2023
Andrew Lichterman
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_ The first UN General Assembly's first resolution set up a
commission to bring back proposals to eliminate atomic weapons and all
other weapons of mass destruction and to control atomic energy. That
was seventy-seven years ago. _

Members of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in Princeton,
New Jersey, on November 18, 1946, which included Albert Einstein and
several of the physicists who had participated in developing the
atomic bomb. , Copyright 2014, Special Collections & Archives Research
Center, Oregon State University Libraries and Press. (InDepthNews)

 

Seventy-seven years ago, the United Nations General Assembly passed
its first resolution. The subject the governments represented there
thought important enough to be first on their agenda was the
establishment of a commission to develop proposals for the control of
atomic energy and “for the elimination from national armaments of
atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass
destruction.”

In a joint statement proposing the Commission, the three governments
that had participated in the development of the atomic bomb, the
United States, Great Britain, and Canada, stressed that the tasks of
controlling atomic energy and eliminating the threat of nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction could not be achieved by
monitoring and control measures alone.

“No system of safeguards that can be devised,” they wrote, “will
of itself provide an effective guarantee against the production of
atomic weapons by a nation bent on aggression.” To end the threat
posed by rapidly developing technologies that could yield ever more
destructive weapons, they emphasized that a far more ambitious goal
must be sought:

“Faced with the terrible realities of the application of science to
destruction, every nation will realize more urgently than before the
overwhelming need to maintain the rule of law among nations and to
banish the scourge of war from the earth.”

A number of the most trenchant commentators of the early atomic age
argued that the inquiry must go deeper, focusing not only on the
horrific effects but on the causes of modern war. In 1946, journalist
and disarmament advocate Norman Cousins wrote,

“Let us have a National Concentration Week, during which we can
ponder not only the implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, moral and
political but the problem of competitive national sovereignty in an
atomic age.”

A year later, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which
included Albert Einstein and several of the physicists who had
participated in developing the atomic bomb, warned that

“Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought
into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's
discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted
into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.”

These insights were clear to many in the immediate aftermath of a
catastrophe brought on by competing nationalisms. World War II was a
global conflagration of industrialized warfare and genocidal
extermination, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only
being the culmination.

The United Nations and the broader system of international
organizations constructed at the close of World War II was crafted to
bring competing nationalisms under control and also to manage the
economic forces that had played a central role in driving the
underlying conflicts that had led to war.

With the rapid onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the focus on
the dangers posed by nationalisms in the atomic age faded into the
background. The Cold War brought a different kind of competition, a
global confrontation between competing political and economic systems
with different dynamics and potential flashpoints.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought both the Cold War political
confrontation and the Cold War arms race to a stunning close. With the
Cold War confrontation seen as the reason for the existence of vast
nuclear arsenals and the risk of nuclear war, mass movements for
nuclear disarmament disappeared.

And in the first two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
dangers of competitive nationalisms leading to conflict among
nuclear-armed states foreseen by Cousins and the atomic scientists
were not immediately apparent. One of the two most powerful states had
collapsed and was significantly diminished geographically,
economically, and militarily.

China’s emergence as a first-rank economic power still lay in the
future. The other leading states were preoccupied with the project of
integrating much of the Eurasian continent into the global neoliberal
circuit of trade and investment.

And yet, despite these decades of momentous change, nuclear arsenals
and the institutions that sustain them carried on, largely without
sustained debate by the government or publics. Although their
magnitude was reduced in comparison to immense Cold War stockpiles,
enough nuclear weapons remain to inflict irreparable harm on humanity
and the ecosystems that sustain us.

At the same time, the threat of militant nationalism was slowly
growing once more to the point where all of the world’s
nuclear-armed countries have authoritarian nationalist parties in
power or exercising significant influence in their politics.

Today we find ourselves confronted once more by the extreme danger
that many believed had been safely consigned to the past: war driven
by identity-based nationalism and involving the world’s most
powerful states. And this time around, as prophetic voices warned at
the dawn of the nuclear age, the aggressor is nuclear armed.

In a world bristling with high-tech weapons of all kinds, nuclear
weapons are unlikely to be eliminated until the forces driving
military competition among nuclear-armed countries are eliminated.
Meaningful progress towards disarmament will require social movements
broad and deep enough to address the causes of high-tech militarism
and war.

Movements of this kind also will be needed to stave off catastrophic
wars in the near term. These movements will need to bring together
work for peace and disarmament with the disparate strands of work
against environmental breakdown, polarization of wealth and economic
injustice, erosion of democracy, and the targeting of migrants,
national minorities, and other vulnerable people.

The connections between these issues will have to be understood at the
level of their common causes in a global economy whose central dynamic
for centuries has been endless material growth driven by ruthless
competition among authoritarian organizations of ever-increasing size
and power.

To avoid catastrophe, we will need new movements and politics broad
and deep enough to transform our economy, our technology, and how we
conceive “the state” and its purposes. Nuclear disarmament will
come only through the vehicle of such movements, such as politics.
This same path also is our best hope for reducing the risk of war.

_[ANDREW LICHTERMAN is a policy analyst and lawyer with the Oakland,
California-based Western States Legal Foundation
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* nuclear weapons
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* Nuclear war
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* atomic energy
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* atomic weapons
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* arms control
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* nuclear arms race
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* disarmament
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* Nuclear Disarmament
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* Nationalism
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* Nationalism
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* global economy
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* United Nations
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* Russia
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* China
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* Iran
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* Israel
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* Ukraine war
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