The new abolitionists

[bananas]

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-new-abolitionists

The new abolitionists
By Hugh Gusterson | 30 March 2012

Philip Taubman's new book, The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb, recounts the story of five front-rank Cold Warriors who have become nuclear abolitionists in their old age. They are: Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon's national security adviser and secretary of state, 88; George Schultz, President Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, 88; Bill Perry, President Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, 82; Sam Nunn, former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 72; and Sidney Drell, a scientific adviser to the US government and physics professor at Stanford University, 85. In their professional careers, each contributed in important ways to the nuclear arms race.

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If there is one problem with Taubman's engaging account, it is that -- in the classic manner of a reporter who has spent too much time inside the Beltway -- he simply depicts the story of five great men acting upon the world. After reading The Partnership, one might almost think that Taubman's five subjects plus Reagan and Gorbachev were the first to think of abolishing nuclear weapons. In a 400-page book that surveys the entire history of the nuclear age, less than one page is devoted to the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s. The preeminent intellectual associated with that movement, Jonathan Schell, published a book called The Abolition in 1984. Randall Forsberg, architect of the Nuclear Freeze, is nowhere mentioned in Taubman's book; nor is Helen Caldicott, the movement's most prophetic figure. As James Carroll argued in his own magisterial history of the nuclear age, House of War, the movement led by Forsberg, Caldicott, and other activists helped shift the national discourse on nuclear weapons, making the near-breakthrough of Reykjavik possible. Since the end of the Cold War, however, there has been a revisionist effort to erase the contributions of the Nuclear Freeze -- as if Reagan campaigned on a platform of nuclear abolition rather than on a promise to intensify the Cold War.

It is clear from anecdotes in Taubman's book that, in the world of his five abolitionist statesmen, it is a mortal insult to be compared to an antinuclear activist. Still, telling the abolitionist story without discussing the antinuclear movement of the 1980s is like writing a history of civil rights without mentioning Martin Luther King and the freedom riders. In 2009, Schultz was asked at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies how he could be sure, in a world where the United States had disarmed itself of nuclear weapons, that another country would not have a hidden bomb or two with which to intimidate Americans. Sounding more like Helen Caldicott than the George Schultz who spoke in defense of deterrence following The Day After, he replied: "Have you seen what a nuclear bomb can do to a city? We shouldn't even call them weapons."

My takeaway from The Partnership is that nuclear weapons are in the process of being reframed. After decades of foundations, think tanks, and universities lavishing resources on game theorists to devise hyper-rational scenarios in which nuclear weapons could be used in war and diplomacy for national advantage, these devices are now in the process of being recoded as unacceptable instruments of terror that are of no use in war. If nuclear weapons are indeed redefined in this way, it will be not only because of the fierce second thoughts of five Cold Warriors, but also because of the mass movement those Cold Warriors reviled at the time. John Mack and I would agree on that.

Editor's note: Gusterson's column will resume in September 2012. He is currently on leave to work on his upcoming book tentatively titled Tinkering with Armageddon.

[bananas]

1. About Hugh Gusterson, who wrote that review

From the same webpage:

Hugh Gusterson

An anthropologist, Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has conducted considerable fieldwork in the United States and Russia, where he studied the culture of nuclear weapon scientists and antinuclear activists. Two of his books encapsulate this work--Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He also coedited Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005) and the sequel, The Insecure American (University of California Press, 2009). Previously, he taught in MIT's Program on Science, Technology, and Society.

[yurbud]

2. the true heroes of history are usually written out of it, like the Russian missile officer...

who didn't launch when he saw a swarm of American missiles coming over the pole on his monitor. It turned out it was false reading caused by a solar flare or something, but he literally saved the world by NOT doing his job.