Nuclear War, Scotland, and the General Election
On the day when Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary went on radio to say we can’t rebuild our public services if we don’t have nuclear weapons, David Mackenzie makes the case for peace, and sanity.
Labours shadow defence secretary says we can’t rebuild our public services if we don’t have nuclear weapons. pic.twitter.com/R5fuKh0ecW
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 3, 2024
My sister has been watching a Cold War series on TV and we were reminiscing about these days. She was 10 during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and I was in sixth year at Aberdeen Grammar. Jeannie remembers that our parents were in a state of fear, but at the time she did not know what was going on. She was hardly alone. I am astonished to realise on reflection that I myself knew only a little. There was a radio in our Bedford Road flat but the news usually got switched off by our father after the headlines and it may indeed have been deliberately left quiet in those days. My awakening came on during a school games session at Rubislaw, probably on Wednesday 17th October. On that day pal Willie Burt cheerfully predicted that this was the day the bombs would fall and then he filled me in. I blanked it out as much as possible but the terror was threaded through my dreams.
Then the insane stand-off of the early eighties when parenthood forced me to face the reality of the threat more squarely, though the response was largely limited to middle-of-the night half-arsed planning for emergency evacuation, sleeping bags, rations etc., tied to a kind of paralysis. Fortunately there were others who responded actively and responsibly, in the large demonstrations in the US and Europe, at Greenham Common, and in small grass-roots groups all over. Their good work did have its effect, not least in provoking films like The Day After and Threads which did so much in spreading awareness of the potential horror, even nudging Ronald Reagan towards a measure of reality so that he and Gorbachev could reach a (tragically temporary) realisation that nuclear weapons not only had to be gotten rid of, but that it could be done. And so, by a modest margin, we edged away from the brink.
And now they tell us, very plausibly, that the present risk of nuclear war is as grave as in 1962 and the early eighties. We have an escalating threat and counter-threat pattern, which has now gone as far as first-stage preparations for resurrecting live nuclear weapon testing by Russia, China and the US, plus the virtual collapse of arms control measures, the modernisation of weapon systems and the emergence of ever more unhinged leaders with access to doomsday arsenals. And there can be no doubt about the horrific and catastrophic reality of nuclear conflict.
Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War – A Scenario said
“ . . it doesn’t take but one weapon to set off a chain reaction to unleash the current (US) arsenal, which is forward deployed in launch-on-warning positions and could be fired in as little as a minute—15 minutes for the submarines. There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill an estimated 5 billion people.”
There is only a single target for nuclear weapons – humanity itself.
Existential threats are threats to the future of the human race and nuclear war is right up there with climate and bio-diversity collapse. These twin horrors should be high on the election agenda. There is talk about “managing” the risks of nuclear war, but that is a very dodgy word in its implication of a process in some kind of rational control. Moving the petrol can a little bit further away from the open fire is not managing the risk, it’s at best a temporary emergency step that might give us a breathing space. Getting rid of nuclear weapons is ultimately the only rational response to the risk they pose.
This is why all candidates in this election should be asked whether they will, if elected, sign the ICAN Parliamentary Pledge in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
This is a red line issue for progressing nuclear disarmament. At least in Scotland, we can make a choice to vote for a candidate who is unambiguous about the route to nuclear weapons elimination.
Go to our People and Parliament page to see all the candidates. More information and mo#del letter at this link.
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Well said David Mackenzie. As a medical doctor I know there is no possible medical response to even one nuclear bomb explosion let alone the likely scenario of a nuclear war. When there is no possibility of treatment then prevention is paramount. We can no longer depend on the myths of “deterrence “ before our luck runs out. The parliamentary pledge for the nuclear ban treaty is my red line too and should be a red line for all.
I will never forget the Cuban missile crisis. I was 10 years old, at school in London and we all – staff and pupils alike – believed the world was going to end at 3pm. I remember a state of complete panic with kids trying to hide behind the bike sheds.
I remember that it was the Russians who backed down. The Americans just went on building their ‘unipolar world’ anyway. After that the UK government issued its utterly ludicrous leaflet to everyone called ‘Protect and Survive’ advising us to go and sit under the stairs with a radio , a few tins of food and a torch and hope for the best. And I remember CND’s leaflet in response, the much more credible Protest and Survive. I have lived almost all my life in the shadow of this horror. And I see how the US and their puppet UK government are utterly devoid of any ethics at all. They are addicted to absolute power at any cost, how they are carrying out blatant genocide in Palestine. And I remember that the US is the only country so far to use nuclear weapons. And that trying to reason with Trump, Biden, Sunak or Starmer – or for that matter Gates, Schwab and their totalitarian mates – is a waste of effort. They are only interested in terrifying everyone into submission.
I also take seriously Johnny McNeil’s warnings that Faslane is likely to be a target for all the reasons he gives. There is a real risk that Glasgow, and much of Scotland, could be sacrificed for their utter madness. Meanwhile, of course, Scotland is told that it’s ‘better together’ with the supposed ‘protection’ of UK / US nuclear weapons. Any objection to them will be portrayed as ‘extremism’ or dangerous nationalism. Just the excuse for the arrival of NATO (i.e. US) troops to militarise Scotland. If we are not headed for immediate nuclear annihilation, freeing up the country to be ruthlessly exploited by US contractors as always happens, perhaps we can expect years of manufactured ‘troubles’ as in Northern Ireland?
Unfortunately the SNP is the epitome of the Scottish cringe. Completely incapable of standing up for us.
This is a very serious situation. It is a far more immediate threat than climate change.
We need to just take the bull by the horns and declare independence. And get rid of Faslane and all the nuclear hulks in the Forth. Otherwise we are just sitting ducks. And no doubt people will just resign themselves to the fact that ‘We’re all doomed’ anyway.
At least let’s tell all candidates to remove all nuclear weapons from Scotland, and declare Scotland a neutral country.
@John Wood, see also the recent Jeremy Corbyn article:
Stockpiling nuclear weapons? That will do nothing for national security, Keir Starmer
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/05/stockpiling-nuclear-weapons-national-security-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn
Well, yes, see also the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists etc. Ecocide will be the result of a nuclear war triggering event (for a history and categorisation of these and how accidents, belligerent posturing, individual psychological breakdown etc have so nearly produced one, saved only in couple of instances at least by the odd human wrenching their doomsday machinery back to sanity, see Chatham House’s Too Close for Comfort).
On what little we are allowed to know about the history of the bonkers British way of security through self-annihilation by royal whim, perhaps Peter Hennessy’s The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 might shed some light, but don’t expect gamma burst levels.
For a sober and self-indicting account of the sheer evil of NATO’s nuclear war plans, I recommend Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. For the relationship between State Terrorism and Neoliberalism, read Ruth Blakeley’s work on the topic. Nuclear weapons are terror weapons, and Ellsberg produced a list of when they were used as such (that we know about).
But, as a trained political philosopher, what I find really significant is the way nuclear weapons are aimed at the armed state’s natural enemy: its own people (if you don’t believe that applies to the British, read Mark Curtiss’ histories). Nobody I’ve read explains this better (although rather academically in optional chapters) than Elaine Scarry in Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom. The centralisation, secrecy, autocracy and in the British Empire making the Royal prerogatives more powerful and less accountable than ever, that is an essential feature of the nuclear-armed state, look like a feature, not a bug. Something to bring up with the next politician who straps themselves to this monstrous, radioactive assassin of democracy that is nuclear weapons. Obviously such politicians don’t want to hear “Hell, no, we won’t go.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/hell-no-we-wont-go-73293/
Too literary? I’ve been playing Fallout 4, where your character stumbles from a vault into the radioactive near-ruins of future Massachusetts. Some of the materials like the SPECIAL info materials are parodies of real ‘how to survive nuclear war’. Some black humour, lots of violence in the Hobbesian sense, yet perhaps still wildly over-optimistic. The lies, idiotic ideologies and propaganda are pretty smart features, though.
The Nuclear Fall-out map reflects a South-west wind. I live in Lanarkshire to the east of Glasgow and, for all my life until recently, the prevailing wind has been SW. This year however it has been predominantly NW (which may be due to climate change or el nino) and that changes the potential casualty rate enormously. If this is a permanent change, approximately 1/3rd of the Scottish population live downwind within 50 miles of Faslane/Coulport. This is unacceptable to most Scots and Starmer’s proposed doubling of the nuclear sub fleet will raise public risk proportionally.