Keywords

This book is optimistic in explaining why simple institutions and principles societies can strengthen to help humankind control complex catastrophes that endanger the planet. Security realities of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) do compel pessimism. Yet my argument is that it is possible to abolish WMDs. The journey of a revived peace movement toward achieving that will increase institutional capabilities to conquer climate catastrophe, pandemics, economic crises, and to secure peace from smaller wars. Nuclear calamity is an ugly topic. Denial and forgetting are natural human responses. My pitch to readers who care about environmental politics, policies to prevent the globalization of disease, and the dominations of the financialization of capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism is that pathways to transformation there can be unblocked by a peace movement that makes progress on WMD abolition.

A human species that has survived thousands of generations is likely to exist for no more than a century or two unless nuclear weapons are rapidly minimized, followed by progress toward abolishing them completely, alongside all WMDs. No strategy of abolition, no enduring survival. Yet with a strategy that falls short of full success, sustainable human development, human flourishing, and survival of humankind are probable. By destroying most (not all) nuclear weapons can we prevent weapons from destroying most (not all) of us. A world with fewer than 100 nuclear weapons is a threat to the planet but not an existential one; it would take at least 100 nuclear weapons striking urban areas to cause nuclear winter.

Payne (2020) documents huge numbers of generals, admirals, and defense secretaries enmeshed in the nuclear deterrence regime who came out in retirement to say that nuclear deterrence was irrational, ridden with logical flaws and contradictions, assumptions that were untested, untestable, implausible. These generals, admirals, and defense secretaries emerged from the closet as nuclear abolitionists. Even generals who are not WMD abolitionists often show how dubious they are about nuclear deterrence doctrines, for example saying: ‘Firing off 1000 or 500 or 2000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes’ consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war’ (General William Odom in Payne 2020, 104).

People say abolition is a pipe dream because the defense establishment of great powers always resists giving up their weapons. The historical record suggests quite the opposite (Payne 2020; Holloway 2011; Neuneck 2011; Rydell 2011). During the periods of US history when incumbent presidents said publicly that they would get behind a move toward total abolition, as Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama did very explicitly in their time, dozens of former generals, defense secretaries, national security advisors and secretaries of state, including formidable hawks like Henry Kissinger, came out publicly in agreement, arguing that new realities, new evidence, made the old arguments for nuclear deterrence obsolete. Old generals have grandchildren too. The pipedream analysis grew even after these surges in strategic support for abolition because Stalin would not support Truman’s abolitionism, Putin would not support Obama’s even though Putin’s predecessor did support Obama’s step by step abolitionism before President Medvedev was replaced by Putin’s return to the Presidency, Kennedy was assassinated, Reagan’s term ended and a coup terminated his Moscow partner, Gorbachev, who advocated abolition before Reagan advocated it. One day, hope and history will rhyme, and abolitionist incumbents of the great powers will together ratify the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The alternative historical possibility, this book argues, is that the great powers will wipe each other out before that day arrives.

I argue that we owe our descendants no less a guarantee than step by step progress toward abolition of WMDs; social movements we join can deliver it; and although the challenges are complex; they are not impossibly complex. I conclude that prioritizing Sustainable Development Goal 17 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) by preventing wars and rebuilding justice with strong institutions after wars, opens a wide path to other Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Climate Action (13), Affordable and Clean Energy (7), No Poverty (1), Zero Hunger (2), Good Health and Wellbeing (3), Quality Education (4), Gender Equality (5), and Reduced Inequalities (10).

Movement has sadly been in the opposite direction since the politics of peace unraveled after the ill-fated Arab Spring in 2011. A problem is the propensity for wars to cascade to other catastrophes—economic, famine, pandemics, Ozone hole reopening, and climate change. Notwithstanding these realities, a politics of hope works better for humankind than nihilism. There are realistic strategies for containing war and tempering the other crises that cascade with it. By tempering these other crises, international society can reduce risks of them cascading to nuclear war.

At the time of writing, we see the problem with the war in Ukraine. Cooperation between Western and Russian university scientists on what great carbon powers like Russia and the United States need to do to tame the climate crisis has ceased. Instead of the United States, Europe, and Russia collaborating to assist each other to achieve the kind of reforestation of their large land masses that China has been achieving, Russia, the EU, and United States pour ever more weapons into Ukraine to blow ecosystems out of the soil. Tanks, aircraft, and other military materiel worldwide exhale carbon dioxide at scale onto the climate crisis, 2,750 million tons in 2022 according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Both sides are responsible for shelling at the largest nuclear plant in Europe, setting fire on one occasion to this dirty bomb waiting to happen. The oppression and anxiety of Ukrainians forced to work at the plant and live nearby under such threat by the Russian occupation was a war crime. Cooperation between NATO and Russian epidemiologists on future pandemic prevention ground to a halt since that war started in 2014.

This book argues that war and environmental destruction have been deep-rooted causes of pandemics in the era of the globalization of disease. Not only has collaboration between NATO and Russian regulators ceased toward financial crisis prevention, the talents of financial regulators have been conscripted to causing global financial crises that start in the enemy economy, but that have already spilled to global inflation, debt, and food insecurity for the planet’s poorest people. Ukraine is no more than a tragic contemporary illustration of a general principle that peace is generative; it turns off taps that fuel the fires of crises; peace reconnects taps of crisis prevention knowhow.

My approach is first to understand the complex connections among crises. Then I argue that the best starting point for containing crises is to identify some simple principles and institutions that are generative of better control of the complexity of catastrophes. The first of these is peace itself. The book advocates not only soft diplomacy, but super-soft diplomacy, a diplomacy that abandons containment of Russia and China, replacing this with nourishing cooperative, collaborative problem-solving among competing great powers. At the same time, I advocate a kind of super-intelligence among intelligence agencies to detect cheating on treaties that ban WMDs, treaties that require carbon emission reductions, combined with a distinctive kind of responsive deterrence. That deterrence goes to reform of the international law of extradition to protect whistleblowers. Those who treasonously disclose illicit WMD programs and other programs to game treaties that protect us against WMDs must be revered. We can protect them. It is proposed that intelligence agencies of all states share knowledge on covert WMD programs (super-intelligence) and that states commit to a duty to support chokepoint sanctions and to a last resort of conventional military attacks on the WMD programs of states that cheat on anti-WMD treaties. Collaborative commitment to this against a rogue WMD user should mean that this last resort is never needed.

The combination of extradition reform, a large enough temporary coalition to control a diverse array of contextual chokepoints, plus diverse conventional weapon capabilities might assemble a novel kind of super-deterrence executed by a temporary UN-sanctioned super-alliance. It only needs to hold together for long enough to secure WMD destruction in a rogue state. Put another way, the imperative for averting an irreparable cascade of many catastrophes might be for states to cooperate with their enemies on these solutions. This, after all, is what Churchill and FDR did in cooperating with Stalin to defeat the existential threat of fascism. That coalition lacked the chokepoint capabilities enabled by the coupled character of today’s networked complexity. Chokepoints are chancy for aggressive single powers, however great they are. The complexly coupled flux of the world economy means that it is hard for any single great power to be sure that closing a chokepoint to another great power will not cause the other power and its allies to surprise it with their control of what turns out to be a more devastating array of chokepoints. The world economy can disengage from corporations that apply chokepoints against enemy states. Hence aggressive powers can stumble by cutting off the chokepoint branches on which they sit. Responsive regulation of WMD threats with chokepoints has therefore become potent but is most potent as a weapon of a large coalition of states, riskier as the weapon of a rogue great power.

My argument is that there are some simple solutions that go to the heart of how to tame complex catastrophes. We must also cultivate institutions that allow us to comprehend complexity. This is a book about the dialectics of movement between simple solutions and complex responsiveness to crises. The best path to pandemic prevention is to start with consensus on a simple preventive institution—a pandemic preparedness agency, as the European Union has recently institutionalized. The idea of such an institution, however, is that it will help societies to grapple with the complexity of pandemic response. The successful Taiwanese prototype of a preparedness plan swung into action in January 2021. It had no fewer than 124 discrete measures it was ready to mobilize against covid’s complex evolution. The thesis of a simple imperative for a pandemic preparedness institution has the antithesis of a 124-point plan of some complexity. Wicked problems do require design thinking like this Taiwanese plan. The paradox here is that a simple institutional idea creates an institution that is generative of multifaceted responsiveness to complexity.

Please dear reader help by writing to me when you find any of the howlers that doubtless lurk in a book that ranges widely over terrain that I know quite well, but other terrain that I do not. My thanks to endless support from my beloved partner Valerie Braithwaite who engaged me on this book since 1972, for the support of all the family, including Brian, but especially Sari. Thanks to a hundred other co-authors, friends, former colleagues, and students across the world. My conversations with you helped in ways I hope you might see. Special thanks to my Palgrave editor Josie Taylor for being so helpful as she saw some vision in the book and to anonymous reviewers.

John Braithwaite