Dear Human of Planet Earth,
I’m almost a pacifist, though not quite - because the thought of disarming completely makes me nervous.
Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour leader (2015-2019), was a pacifist who believed in nuclear disarmament. I confess his pacifism made me uneasy, even though I admired his conviction and the moral courage he showed in sticking to his guns.
To understand why disarmament makes me uneasy, remember Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would Putin have dared invade Ukraine if it remained a nuclear equal in the battleground of nations?
Like me, you probably wish nuclear weapons had never been invented. My guess is 99.99% of humans wish the same.
Perhaps we’d be on an unwavering path to downgrading nuclear arsenals - if only every nuclear nation trusted the others to do the same.
Instead, more than 30 years after we thought the Cold War ended, nations are talking about beefing up their nuclear arsenals.
Meanwhile, a friend who almost never rings me called me up months ago, worried there might be a nuclear war.
I told her, ‘Go to sleep and see what happens in the morning.’ Whatever the threat was - I can’t remember now - things de-escalated overnight.
Over the last few days, there’s been talk of Iran attacking Israel. And in the last 24 hours (at the time of writing) Iran did exactly that.
Remember, Don’t Look Up? Nobody I encountered over the last few days mentioned Iran’s feared military retaliation against Israel, despite awareness that at its worst, such action could be an escalation with potentially devastating consequences globally.
Because why worry about what you can’t control and outcomes that, with a bit of luck, might not come to the worst?
Don’t look up!
I kept my head down in the last 72 hours: delivering a couple hundred Labour Party leaflets for our parliamentary candidate; submitting my tax return; giving two lovely people each other’s phone numbers (fingers crossed they’ll meet and fall in love); discussing hyperconsumerism; complaining about frankfurters that didn’t taste as good as they used to; making sure my ten-year-old did her SATS test practice etc etc
With a bit of luck, the worst won’t come to the worst.
But luck is the operating word.
And there hangs a tale. War is fire we shouldn’t play with because it will always take a life of its own.
The only winners are the military-industrial complex, the contractors engaged in re-building after the destruction, the investors favoured by the powers aligned with the victorious, and their shareholders. Many would add society benefits from technological interventions that emerge from military innovations. I would counter: anything invented for war could equally be developed with an alternative motivation. The difference is, the motivation of war comes with guaranteed funding for research and development.
I’ll refer you at this point to Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World for an exploration of the corruption characterising the international arms trade. I had the pleasure of meeting Feinstein himself at a recent Ruskin House Film Screening of a documentary adaption of The Shadow World. I was inspired by his optimism and irrepressible motivation to keep working towards a better world.
The Estimated Carbon Footprint of War
Who cares? I hear you ask. People are dying.
Cut me some slack, will you? I’ve been increasingly worried about climate catastrophe for all of my adult life. When I first heard Putin invaded Ukraine, my first thought was, Why now? What is this going to do for global emissions?
Even grand but popular explosions like London’s New Year’s fireworks display always leave me asking the same question, If we were serious about responding to the climate emergency, would we be doing this?
Where emissions are concerned, renovating and retrofitting buildings are preferable to demolishing and building from a new foundation.
What is war but large-scale pointless demolition?
And, if you follow my logic, while war brings some of us to a rapid and brutal end, climate catastrophe could finish us all off. Think infertility, droughts and starvation, floods, fires, civil wars, regional wars, infrastructure collapse, social cohesion collapse, an increase in pathogen-borne diseases and pandemics … So many ways to suffer and die!
I don’t mean to depress you but climate pressures in turn make war more likely.
As it is, Mike Berners-Lee, in ‘How Bad Are Bananas?’ estimates that globally, our combined annual military bootprint is 3.3 billion tonnes CO2e.
The USA leads the way, contributing the most, 200 million tonnes of CO2e yearly, making the US Defense Department the single biggest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world. Should we expect any less from the leader of the ‘free’ world?
Mike Berners-Lee says with cynical good humour, soot produced by nuclear war would have a cooling effect on the climate, and mass annihilation due to large-scale war of any kind would curb subsequent emissions.
Well, there’s no Net Zero to measure if there’s nobody left to measure it.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
This is what we live by. Still, peace eludes us.
We think and act as competing nations rather than as neighbours.
Can we even imagine an alternative?
Of course we can.
But can we dare to believe in it?
What might an alternative look like?
Wars are fought over resources. The anthropocene has ushered in climate extremes as our new normal. The twentieth-century predictions of water shortages in the first half of the next century have already come to pass. Crop failures are leading to mass migration. People who can’t afford air conditioning in South Asia die annually of heat.
Egypt worries that the dam Ethiopia wishes to build will negatively impact Egypt’s water supply, agriculture and cotton production, worsening its economy and the well-being of Egyptians. Ethiopia argues that a 1929 treaty shouldn’t give Sudan and Egypt all the rights to the waters of the Nile, to the detriment of countries like Ethopia. And so, war threatens.
If there’s less to go round on my street, and you’ve got more than enough on yours, aren’t I going to come to your street to get some?
The question is what do you do when I turn up?
War is an old answer. But it was never the only answer. Trade, exchange and co-operation are old human ways as well.
Collaboration, mutually beneficial agreements, compromises where necessary, problem-solving and an abundance mentality, even in the face of scarcity, are the elements that make for a lasting peace.
How can we work it out with benefits for both of us, or all of us?
That’s a better question than how can I beat you into submission, so you suffer and die while I thrive.
The worse things get, the harder it will become to pivot to compromise and collaboration, to win/win policies.
It’s a lot like climate action: the later we wait, the more insurmountable the challenges become. The later we wait, the closer we come to approaching tipping points of no return.
Negotiating for peace has its own parallel: as resources dwindle and desperation grows, viable paths forward narrow.
A pivot for peace in 2024, or even over the next five years, would be a spectacular and unexpected move. Other than the UN, organisations like Stop The War and demonstrators on the streets, who even believes a lasting peace is achievable?
Like nuclear disarmament, a lasting peace would depend on trust, collaboration and a genuine belief that a new path can be plotted for the future; a future that isn’t doomed to look like the past.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written to you. I was shocked to find I haven’t written since January! It felt like a month away rather than two. But I’m grateful to you for waiting for this piece, for opening it, for reading and for getting to the end.
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With Love,
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical,
Croydon,
London,
That patch of earth known today as the United Kingdom
Lat +51.51 Long, -0.118
I can only agree with you on this. The only winners to come out of the occupation of Afghanistan were the companies supplying the military equipment and the contractors on the ground. I heard this was to the tune of $1 trillion.
Over on 'The Great Simplification' podcast, there is an interview with Chuck Watson, previously an adviser to the U.S. government, who describes the concept of 'Risk Homeostatis' in relation to nuclear war. His argument is that people in general downplay the risk in their minds because a nuclear warhead hasn't been used for almost 80 years. We've got away with it so far, despite a few incidents which brought us close. The politicians who were around at the time of the cold war, when scenarios were played out showing the likelihood of all out conflict, are no longer in the game, and the current ones largely don't get it.
Personally, I don't think wars are inevitable, and given our current level of technology we need the imagination to find more evolved ways to deal with our differences. The risks are too great.