Two pieces on nuclear weapons and militarism
I am uploading two recent pieces that I wrote, or else I’ll lose them. The second piece was stolen by a mole that was burrowing in my garden. The first piece was also stolen by a mole that got really angry before the piece was even finished. I warn the reader: the opinions expressed in these pieces are outrageous and offensive.
Another madcap idea for our confused times: the EU goes nuclear
I have to plead ignorance and tell the reader that I know as much about those old Ban the Bomb (Non à la bombe) campaigns as the reader knows about Esperanto. I don’t overlook the possibility that there might be an Esperantist reading this, someone who knows about Esperantan grammar, but I would have to assume that such a precious reader would be in the minority. Esperanto or not, it seems, sadly, that our liberal progressive political families here in continental Europe don’t speak the same language anymore, the very people who claim to be in favor of open societies, democratic accountability and environmental action. In short, peace and not war. Sanity, not irrationality.
Wikipedia, it is true, could give us plenty of information on the Ban the Bomb campaigns and one can always read books that shed light on what now seems like a crucial movement spearheaded by, one would have to assume, idealists, humanists, antiwar activists, democrats, mothers, fathers, grandparents, neighbors, teachers, guardians and all the assorted oddballs to whom we owe most of our cultural, intellectual and bibliographical treasures.
I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I think I know what these people were worried about. It’s likely that some of them might have lived through the Cuban Missile crisis or those school drills that saw schoolkids across the west run to take cover under their desks. The oldest among them might have been alive when the Enola Gay dropped its weapons over the unsuspecting citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alive and old enough to remember the radio broadcasts beside the kitchen table. They remembered the aftermath of that barbaric attack and some of them might have seen Joe O’Donnell’s heartrending pictures.
Not only that: we have to assume that these idealists, humanists or whatever we want to call them also lived in fear of Russia’s ever-growing nuclear arsenal. (The same goes for the Russians and the American arsenal.) Vladislav Zubok has written at length about those sorry times — about the pigheadedness, blindness and distrust that led to that arms race. There was more pigheadedness than distrust, if I remember correctly, but I will not bother the reader with a book review when others would do a better job of it than me.
There have always been good reasons to embark (beyond Wikipedia) on that reading project to round out one’s knowledge of the recent past. But it appears that such a project is more necessary than ever given the renewed debate here in Europe regarding these garbage weapons. I confess to the reader that I typed the word “debate” with a laugh, because there is precious little of it here in Europe outside of the usual elite, princely circles.
One would have to look at the far (and allegedly disreputable) corners of the media ecosystem in the continent to find anything like revulsion at the idea of deploying weapons of mass destruction across the largest democratic bloc in the world. (Not to get ahead of ourselves, but one would have to ask the politicians who propose this: to do what with them? What, exactly? It’s bad enough to go to a duel with the intention of using a gun. Even worse to go to one and end up dead along with your rival. This is the most likely outcome with nuclear weapons. One would expect adults to know this.)
This might be a good place to start our reading: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an artefact of those idealistic times that I referred to earlier. As the Bulletin reminds us, Sweden is ready to participate in these joint nuclear exercises. The same goes for Belgium, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, and Poland. Some want more than participation; they want proliferation. Oddly enough, Sweden, that sane, pacifist country of more enlightened times, has concluded that Russia’s economy is in deep trouble, but they still want nukes in their territory to win a place in the Kremlin’s targeting system and “accelerat(e) escalation during a potential war between NATO and Russia,” in the words of the Bulletin.
More weapons, medical supplies and monies for Ukraine? Who in their right mind would be against this? But one is inclined to think that the Non à la bombe seniors mentioned above would have called out the politicians who still think it is acceptable to come anywhere near these (redacted adjective) weapons. I know they did, and know they still do, but we don’t get to hear from them often here in the continent.
The Bulletin then delivers this masterclass of understatement, because blessed are the courteous who would rather cajole the king than to send him to the scaffold in his pajamas: “Before trading one illusion of security for another, Nordic countries should check their threat perceptions against the risks posed by the spread of nuclear weapons in the region.”
Amen to the courteous; one should learn from them. Better courtesy than stridency, but one wonders these days.
So says the Bulletin. Now I invite the reader to look at what most EU leaders are saying about this, the people who lead us here in Brussels. They’re saying little or nothing. The herd performs the quadrille and no one steps out of line. It’s all perfectly choreographed — and, in this regard, I would like to know this: where does one buy Nuke Shares to boost the portfolio and leave those red numbers behind forever? Pharmaceuticals? Life? Food? Enzymes to render plastic waste compostable (ALCRB, with the usual disclaimers)? Nah, give us the nukes. They’ll transport them safely, you see. And, in fact, we’re just too distracted to even bother with this.
The bully Putin has won and won decisively — at least the battle of nerves and temperaments — and so here in Europe we’ll have to repeal laws, dig bunkers and prepare ourselves for the Macron nukes behind the local schoolyard. The polls have spoken (or sort of), because, well, no one who is respectable would dare challenge elite power and side with, of all people, the archivists at the Bulletin. What do those people know about security?
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I think we know the answer to that. But, sadly, the politicians who support the deployment of these horrific weapons have one advantage: most Europeans don’t know what they’re up to. If that weren’t the case, Wikipedia would be out marching on the streets, honoring the recent past, the raised fists of the millions calling for the universal ban of such weapons.
If the Russian, American and Chinese bullies wish to play their imperial nuclear games, let them. We should try to do better than this and look to the beacon of history for inspiration. Set the ship’s course towards the light.
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Why EU leaders are supplicants at the foot of Sulla’s table
European leaders have reached a new low. We already knew that they were willing to kowtow to Trump and humiliate themselves, but the recent attack on Iran has laid bare their moral cowardliness and shortsightedness. Pedro Sánchez of Spain was one of the few European leaders with the moral courage to oppose the Netanyahu-led attack on Iran when he said that it would only lead to more uncertainty and do nothing to guarantee EU security.
Another thing that is known, at least to those who are paying attention, is that Netanyahu is the man who is really in charge at the White House, at least as far as Mideast policy is concerned. This was true during the Biden administration and it’s also the case with Trump. It’s true that the American emperors lose their temper from time to time when speaking with “Bibi” on the phone, but, for all the tough words and maybe the occasional scolding, the Israeli leader remains in charge of Mideast policy. He knows how to handle these dinosaurs and neocons better than anyone else and so he gets what he wants when he wants it. We can see this in his body language when he visits Washington. He is the boss, le patron. The poor ruins who sit behind the “resolute desk” might think they’re in charge, but they’re not.
Europeans leaders can see this too and, if they had a shred of courage left, would throw their weight around when dealing with Trump face to face. After all, they represent some of the oldest democracies in the world. Proud nations forged across centuries, called to show the world that it is possible to reach out to former adversaries and work together to build peace and prosperity. Instead, EU leaders show up in Washington as smiling supplicants and poor relations with no ideas of their own except “don’t abandon us.” The question is why.
One reason is tariffs. They don’t want to American emperor to wreak more havoc on their economies, with legal or illegal tariffs. But the other reason is “security”. (And I apologize for the repeated use of quotation marks, but what else can one do after so many assaults on dignity and truth from all quarters?) The presumption here is that Russia will attack the EU if the American protectors disengage from Europe or undermine the security commitments in the NATO treaty.
Putin might send his infantry battalions across the Belarusian plains to lay siege to Warsaw or Berlin, Ukrainian drone-warfare know-how be dammed. Once those cities capitulate (picture that, the Poles losing that fight in days or weeks), Putin could presumably move his infantry westwards or northwards to crush the Baltic Republics. Or he may set his sights on the Stockholm archipelago across the Baltic Sea. This is one reason why the Swedes are now willing to host nuclear weapons.
To write this again: The Swedes are willing to host weapons of mass destruction in their county, weapons which should be banned, to deter Putin’s scruffy navy from staging a seaborne attack. A navy that couldn’t hold its own in the Black Sea when homemade drones came flying at night. (And yes, the last time I checked, Sweden is governed by adults who are presumably aware of the destructive power of nuclear weapons.)
To cut to the chase then: this drive-the-sheep-over-the-precipice sense of insecurity is why our European supplicants supplicate so much when “daddy” is in the room. They might laugh at Trump behind closed doors, but Bibi and Trump still get to write the geopolitical plot. The EU supplicants have persuaded themselves that they must rebuild their armies from the ground up to prepare for the possible sieges of Warsaw and Berlin. But the kowtowing and supplication will remain the order of the day because Emmanuel Macron’s nuclear umbrella is not enough. And, as is well known, the Russian dictator has enough weapons to incinerate the European landmass and plunge the most populated part of his country, including St. Petersburg, a city he loves, into an ever-widening nuclear cloud.
To state this again: The French president wants to grow the nuclear arsenal to counter the Russian threat in case the 200-Euro drones that the Ukrainians are so ably using on the front line fail to do the job when Putin sends his Cossack hoards across the Belarusian plains. It might seem outrageous, laughable or absurd, but this is the answer to the why question.
Then there’s the notion that it’s a good idea to shovel money into weapons’ development to help the economy. No one in Europe has been as successful as Mark Zuckerberg in making baby hippos kick their little legs underwater, and this has made the supplicants here existentially nervous. Denied our AI baby hippos and quicksand data centers, we’ve thrashed our climate ambitions to make the old Franco-Prussian weapons new again.
Credentialed, college-educated adults who fail to see that there are better ways to spend the people’s money are unworthy of their credentials and learned little if anything in college and, one may argue, the School of Life. They’ve become smiling supplicants at the foot of Sulla’s table, all that love and care and parental investment gone to waste. That “good” EU leaders are willing to contemplate the increase and deployment of such weapons while the rest of us do our scrolling at the ski resort says something about our ongoing civilizational insolvency. Here’s a petit Napoléon looking for a photo-op in front a submarine that can unleash a firestorm to end all human records and dreams.
This is what has happened with a good part of our European political class: they’re out of ideas of the sort that a Petro or a José Mujica might have shared with them and are always ready to participate not in coalitions to defend international law and the values they supposedly believe in, but wartime coalitions to bomb and bomb hard. And when “Bibi” starts killing innocents in the Middle East with the help of the American Sullas, they sit there biting their nails, these grown, well-heeled Euro kids, trying to type something on X to give the impression they’re still worth the salaries we pay them. With such a crowd in charge things will only get worse for the EU.
On my reading table
Set the ship’s course towards the light — a great book on my shelves, by A.C. Grayling, Towards the Light. We don’t publish books like these anymore.
