A Global Ethic for Nuclear Weapons

Some points really need to be made clear to people who hold that the use of nuclear weapons is always objectionable.

Point 1:  Might does make right.

Whether or not you hold that the use of two nuclear weapons in WWII was legal or moral, the reality is that it was done by the victor and therefore no real judgement has ever or will ever be meted out to the participants.  This is probably the most important concept that the pacifists need to understand.  Might makes right because it is the victor who gets to set the wheels of history in motion, and it is the victor who gets to assign the moral code which will be used to for general judgement of their actions.

Let's just leave nuclear weapons aside for a moment, and consider the many genocides that have occurred in history.  If a nation commits a partial genocide of an identifiable group, it will eventually be condemned by the survivors.  If it commits a total genocide of that group, it is also free to wipe their existance from the annals of history.  No one seems to understand this better than Ahmedinejad, who made a comment implying the solution to Israel is simply to wipe them from the annals of time -- presumably with a nuclear weapon.

Look back at all of the dead societies, destroyed by empires or even just neighbouring nations.  No one pleads their case.  Who cannot sleep at night, restless because of their genocide?  No one, which brings me to the next point.

Point 2:  Propaganda works.

I was recently on vacation, where I sat by the side entrance of a hotel.  The revolving door at that entrance was not large enough for two people to walk through per segment, but apparently too large for people to be patient and wait for the next segment to roll around.  In a matter of 15 minutes, dozens of people got caught in the doors.  The feebleness of the human mind was on display.  When presented with an unfamiliar challenge, people consistently chose the wrong option, unable to accurately measure the reality in front of them.  The revolving door was made for one person to go through per segment, not two, and yet even seeing two people commit a failure in front them, the next group of people made the same mistake.

Propaganda works because people want to believe a particular viewpoint, even if irrational, and even if it is in direct contradiction to reality.  People think that propaganda works because the purveyors are cunning, but alas, this is not the case.  Propaganda works because its purveyors know which strings to pull.

People want to believe that nuclear weapons are evil, so it is easy to propagate the idea that their use is always wrong.  The reason this works so well is that it is easy to ignore the reality that there were only a limited set of alternatives.  The choices were not: kill people or do not kill people.

I ask you Paul, what would have been the consequence if the two nuclear weapons were not dropped on Japan?  I remind you that Japan had three days at its disposal to surrender between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet did not.  Many historians have asked this same question with varying conclusions, but the answer that seems to hold the most weight is that Japan would not have surrendered until it was burnt to the ground, and I mean all of it.  Hundreds of thousands of more people would have died, including those from the allies.

The allies, or at least the US specifically has only a limited moral obligation to its enemies.  Its primary obligation is to prevent domestic casualties.  Japan was not targeting only military installations.  They were committing plenty of atrocities in China on their own.  In the face of strong evidence that the release of nuclear weapons over Japan may have caused less deaths than available alternatives means that the US can consider themselves morally justified, especially considering that it certainly saved domestic lives.

Point 3:  Two wrongs do make a right.

In all societies that have ever existed, punishment is penalized with more punishment.  Are system of incarceration uses this principle.  National defense is based on this principle.  And the MAD (mutually assured destruction) is a prime consideration as to why certain proxy wars, like Vietnam or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan never expanded much outside those territories.

It is Iran's justification to "not" produce nuclear weapons because it believes it is so entitled based on some perceived threat that the US will attack it.  Who knows what their real motivation is, but sanctions against the regime, if sufficiently strong, will amount to group punishment.  But the regime will only blink if its population turns against it, and that will only happen under a system of sanctions which produce collective punishment.  The reality is that two wrongs make a right, even if you see it as progressing down a cycle of retributive wrongdoings.

The question I pose to you in particular is what do we do to prevent Iran from becoming a menace?  Once it attains nuclear weapons, can we say that it won't use them?  Current nuclear club members have demonstrated the lack of desire to use them surreptitiously, but I think Iran may be an exception here.  I have great concern that Hezbollah, Hamas or some smaller group will magically find itself in possession of a nuclear weapon on Israeli territory and will be too gleeful not to use it.  At the very minimum, this worry will sit in the back of every Israeli, including Muslim Arabs who will be caught in the crossfire.  If you actually question Muslim Arabs, you find that they are just as distrustful of Iran as anyone else in the region, Israel included.

Point 4:  The West is weak against intangible threats.

The reason that Iran is now basically free to build a nuclear weapon on its own terms is that we are weak.  The West is weak.  For some reason, we feel we are not permitted to assess the nefarious behaviour coming from Iran for what it is.  Part of it is because we don't want to look like bigots, but part of it I believe is that the threat is itself intangible.  That we don't see Iran as capable of detonating a nuclear weapon like the US did over Japan.  But I remind you that the US did detonate nuclear weapons, George Bush was looking into developing "tactical nukes" and Iran is more radical than Bush.  The threat should not be intangible, yet there it is.

We in the West, especially leftists, and specifically pacifists are blinded to the threat that foreigners pose to us.  This is a dangerous blindness and it is needs to be overcome.

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Anyway, when it comes to moral relativism, revisiting the bombings of Japan irk me.  We are free to condemn them because they were done by a western society.  And yet we sit idly by waiting for it to repeat itself with Iran, I guess only to shrug our shoulders when the inevitable deaths are realized from our shyness.  What is the point in revisiting Japan if we don't learn from it?  It seems to me, it is purely an act of judgement against the West.  It is not an act of learning.