Please Join PSR on Saturday,
April 15th, from 6 to 9 PM to
Hear Dr. Ira Helfand at Its Annual
Dinner
at
MedChi, 1211 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD
Just a reminder that if you have not RSVP'd, our Annual Dinner is April 15th from 6-9pm at the State Medical Society at 1211 Cathedral Street in Baltimore (please note this is a location change from some earlier announcements). This is one of our favorite events of the year. For some, it is a time to say hello and visit with old friends. For others, it is a time to learn more about Chesapeake PSR and the issues that we care most about. All are welcome at this event.
If you have RSVP'd, thank you and we look forward to seeing you there.
This year we are delighted to welcome as our guest speaker, Dr. Ira Helfand, co-President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Dr. Helfand is one of the most informed and dynamic speakers in the world on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. He will have an important message that we all need to hear, to think about, and to act on. Just look at the news today and you will know why this is the most important issue of our time.
Drinks and social time are from 6:00 -7:00. A buffet dinner will start at 7:00. Dr. Helfand will begin speaking around 7:30.
More information on this dinner can be found here.
We hope you can join us at this special event!
Sincerely,
Tim Whitehouse
Our
Nuclear Folly
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, 10 April 2017
Winslow Myers | PeaceVoice – TRANSCEND Media Service
10
Apr 2017 – The well-established assumption that North Korea is our most
difficult and dangerous foreign policy challenge is worth a little
dispassionate examination.
North
Korea is not a fun place. If ever a nation had earned the right to be labeled
collectively psychotic, it would be the Democratic Republic of North Korea
under Kim Jung-un, who apparently just outsourced the bizarre assassination of
his own brother. The country possesses neither a viable judiciary nor any kind
of religious freedom. Famine has been a cyclical presence. Electrical power is
intermittent. In 2015 North Korea ranked 115th in the world in the size of its
GDP according to U.N. statistics.
Yet
nothing the United States has tried to do, including decades of diplomatic
negotiations and the application of severe sanctions, has stopped this isolated
conundrum of a country from strutting proudly through the exclusive doors of
the nuclear club.
But
let’s get real. As odd and alienated as North Korea may be, their leaders
know perfectly well that even if the United States had not a single nuclear
warhead at its disposal, if provoked we could bomb North Korea until there was
nothing left but bouncing rubble. The idea that they would be so suicidally
unwise as to use their nuclear weapons to launch an unprovoked first-strike
attack upon the United States, or South Korea for that matter, seems utterly
remote from reality.
Instead,
they are pursuing a policy—the policy of deterrence—which is a mirror image of
our own. But by a collective trick of the mind, our use of weapons of mass
destruction to deter is rationalized and justified by the fact that our
intentions are good, while from our perspective both their intentions and their
weapons are perceived to be evil—as if there were such a thing as good nuclear
weapons and bad nuclear weapons. In this particular sense, there is not a
whit of difference between our otherwise two very different countries. North
Korea took careful note of what happened to Libya when they agreed unilaterally
to give up their nuclear program. Their motive is self-protection, not
aggression.
It
is one thing to say that deterrence was a temporary (now nearly three-quarters
of a century) strategy to prevent planet-destroying war. But can we go on this
way forever, with all nine nuclear powers committed to never making a single
error of interpretation, never having a single equipment failure, never
succumbing to a single computer hack? If we think we can, we’re just as out of
it as Kim Jung-un. Our bowing to the false idol of nuclear deterrence as the
ultimate and permanent bedrock of international security is in its own way as
delusional as the way the brainwashed citizens of North Korea give absolute
obeisance to their dear leader.
If
the United States, as a responsible world player, does not move beyond the
obsolete paradigm of endless paranoid cycles of we-build-they build; if it does
not begin to think in terms of setting an example; if it does not begin to
participate authentically in international conferences to ban these weapons,
there is going to be a nuclear war in our future.
We’re
uneasy with Mr. Trump’s finger on the nuclear trigger, but this is a bigger
problem than who specifically is commander in chief. When the moment comes and
we begin to slide down the slippery slope of deterrence breakdown because of
some completely unanticipated dissolution of “fail-safeness,” it won’t matter
how experienced the human parties to the disaster might be.
Whoever
is left on this small, no longer so beautiful planet, freezing under the ash
clouds of nuclear winter, uselessly nursing their boils and pustules from
radiation poisoning, will hate and despise us for what we didn’t do for
decades, and they will be quite right.
Because
we know. We know and yet we do not act on our solemn obligations under the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In fact the United States actively undermines
legitimate efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons. We just boycotted a recent one.
North
Korea is a pariah nation led by a greedy Stalinist family. No one can say with
any certainty whether they could be brought to the table to discuss
abolition. Why can’t we admit that we ourselves harbor a similar
reluctance? The process of building trust, agreement and verification among the
nine nuclear powers would be the most difficult diplomatic challenge ever
undertaken. The only thing more difficult is the unthinkable agony of the
alternative.
________________________________________________
Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of
“Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.” He also serves on the Advisory Board of
the War Preventive Initiative.
This
article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 April 2017.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated
on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background
material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Our Nuclear Folly, is included. Thank
you.
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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