War Endangers Us (detail)


pentagonThere are more effective tools than war for protection.

War planning leads to wars. War making provokes danger. And war’s weapons risk intentional or accidental apocalypse.

War planning leads to wars.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” said Theodore Roosevelt, who favored building a big military just in case, but of course not actually using it unless forced to. This worked out excellently, with the few minor exceptions of Roosevelt’s mobilization of forces to Panama in 1901, Colombia in 1902, Honduras in 1903, the Dominican Republic in 1903, Syria in 1903, Abyssinia in 1903, Panama in 1903, the Dominican Republic in 1904, Morocco in 1904, Panama in 1904, Korea in 1904, Cuba in 1906, Honduras in 1907, and the Philippines throughout Roosevelt’s presidency.

The first people we know of who prepared for war — the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and his companion Enkido, or the Greeks who fought at Troy — also prepared for the hunting of wild animals. Barbara Ehrenreich theorizes that,

 “. . . with the decline of wild predator and game populations, there would have been little to occupy the males who had specialized in hunting and anti-predator defense, and no well-trodden route to the status of ‘hero.’ What saved the hunter-defender male from obsolescence or a life of agricultural toil was the fact that he possessed weapons and the skills to use them. [Lewis] Mumford suggests that the hunter-defender preserved his status by turning to a kind of ‘protection racket’: pay him (with food and social standing) or be subject to his predations.

“Eventually, the presence of underemployed hunter-defenders in other settlements guaranteed a new and ‘foreign’ menace to defend against. The hunter-defenders of one band or settlement could justify their upkeep by pointing to the threat posed by their counterparts in other groups, and the danger could always be made more vivid by staging a raid from time to time. As Gwynne Dyer observes in his survey of war, ‘pre-civilized warfare . . . was predominantly a rough male sport for underemployed hunters.’“

In other words, war may have begun as a means of achieving heroism, just as it is continued based on the same mythology. It may have begun because people were armed and in need of enemies, since their traditional enemies (lions, bears, wolves) were dying out. Which came first, the wars or the weapons? That riddle may actually have an answer. The answer appears to be the weapons. And those who do not learn from prehistory may be doomed to repeat it.

bibibombWe like to believe in everyone’s good intentions. “Be prepared” is the Boy Scouts’ motto, after all. It’s simply reasonable, responsible, and safe to be prepared. Not to be prepared would be reckless, right?

The problem with this argument is that it’s not completely crazy. On a smaller scale it’s not completely crazy for people to want guns in their homes to protect themselves from burglars. In that situation, there are other factors to consider, including the high rate of gun accidents, the use of guns in fits of rage, the ability of criminals to turn home owners’ guns against them, the frequent theft of guns, the distraction the gun solution causes from efforts to reduce the causes of crime, etc.

On the larger scale of war and arming a nation for war, similar factors must be considered. Weapon-related accidents, malicious testing on human beings, theft, sales to allies who become enemies, and the distraction from efforts to reduce the causes of terrorism and war must all be taken into account. So, of course, must the tendency to use weapons once you have them. At times, more weapons can’t be produced until the existing stock is depleted and new innovations are tested “on the battlefield.”

But there are other factors to consider as well. A nation’s stockpiling of weapons for war puts pressure on other nations to do the same. Even a nation that intends to fight only in defense, may understand “defense” to be the ability to retaliate against other nations. This makes it necessary to create the weaponry and strategies for aggressive war, and even “preemptive war,” keeping legal loopholes open and enlarging them, and encouraging other nations to do the same. When you put a lot of people to work planning something, when that project is in fact your largest public investment and proudest cause, it can be difficult to keep those people from finding opportunities to execute their plans. Read more.

War making provokes danger.










missilesWar’s weapons risk intentional or accidental apocalypse.

We can either eliminate all nuclear weapons or we can watch them proliferate. There’s no middle way. We can either have no nuclear weapons states, or we can have many. This is not a moral or a logical point, but a practical observation backed up by research in books like Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World by Tad Daley. As long as some states have nuclear weapons others will desire them, and the more that have them the more easily they will spread to others still.

If nuclear weapons continue to exist, there will very likely be a nuclear catastrophe, and the more the weapons have proliferated, the sooner it will come. Hundreds of incidents have nearly destroyed our world through accident, confusion, misunderstanding, and extremely irrational machismo. When you add in the quite real and increasing possibility of non-state terrorists acquiring and using nuclear weapons, the danger grows dramatically — and is only increased by the policies of nuclear states that react to terrorism in ways that seem designed to recruit more terrorists.

Since the 1963 limited test ban treaty, the United States has been committed to “the speediest possible achievement of an agreement on general and complete disarmament.” The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 requires disarmament.

On the other side of the equation, possessing nuclear weapons does absolutely nothing to keep us safe, so that there is really no trade-off involved in eliminating them. They do not deter terrorist attacks by non-state actors in any way. Nor do they add an iota to a military’s ability to deter nations from attacking, given the United States’ ability to destroy anything anywhere at any time with non-nuclear weapons. Nukes also don’t win wars, and the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China have all lost wars against non-nuclear powers while possessing nukes. Nor, in the event of global nuclear war, can any outrageous quantity of weaponry protect a nation in any way from apocalypse.

Summary of the above.

Resources with additional information.
More reasons to end war.
