Nuclear Weapons and Their Hand in Global Imperialism
Nuclear weapons have been launched twice in the history of warfare: Once in Hiroshima, and once in Nagasaki. No one will be able to tell the true extent of the damage of the initial hit, but conservative estimates place death tolls around 225,000. We are still reconciling ourselves with these attacks, over 7 decades later. Because of their destructive nature, nuclear weapons are often approached from a purely utilitarian standpoint: leaders know someone will die, but they attempt to minimize the losses from their own country. Viewpoints on nuclear weapons vary widely, but this paper will be framed from a justice-based standpoint. Although nuclear weapons are touted as the ultimate method of deterrence, they are ultimately unjust because they are created through and maintained for disproportionately marginalizing minority groups.
The common view amongst world leaders is that nuclear weapons are a necessary evil. They are often created and maintained, in a vicious cycle, because another country has them. This is called nuclear deterrence, or the idea that only the threat of retaliatory strikes will prevent full nuclear war. Obviously, this wouldn’t be an issue should all countries simply eliminate all of their nuclear arsenals. But the problem isn’t quite so simple. To begin disarmament, one country must eliminate their arsenal first, causing a power imbalance in the global dynamic. This is the problem with unilateral disarmament, or one country disarming without others doing so as well, and it is the reason that countries suggest they are unwilling to disarm. The truth is, however, that imperialism plays just as large of a factor. Russia and the United States on their own compose 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, and although each has reduced their supply significantly over the years, the intensity of each individual weapon is now hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Tegmark 17). Wielding such massive power serves as a significant bargaining chip in global negotiations, as it instills fear into non-allied countries who don’t have equal resources and equal weapons of mass destruction, with the United States’ bombing of Japan lingering over each treaty and deal as the ultimate don’t-fuck-with-the-global-cops reminder. Nuclear arsenals direct a power imbalance towards global imperialists who wage nuclear war, rather than protecting the rest of the world from nuclear war, as proponents of deterrence suggest — especially given that most countries don’t even have nuclear weapons.
Beyond nuclear deterrence and political posturing, however, research has suggested that nuclear weapons deter conventional war. Before the nuclear age, as Franklin Miller, foreign policy and nuclear defense expert and member of the Defense Policy Board, explains in 2016, “the major powers in Europe went to war with each other an average of seven times per century; not even the recent memory of the catastrophic losses of World War I were sufficient to deter World War II. After 1945 and the establishment of nuclear deterrence, this history has not repeated itself and the percentage of the world’s population lost to war has declined dramatically” (Miller 16). But even Miller admits that this does not prove causation, only correlation. It is entirely possible that the establishment of world alliances like the United Nations or NATO were the real contributing factor, or even the development of more advanced conventional weapons. So with most deterrence arguments refuted, what does the other side believe about nuclear weapons?
Many claim that nuclear weapons are bad because they are lethal on a large scale. This is, of course, true. But more than the simple loss of life argument, the truth is that nuclear weapons are inherently unjust. In 1954, the United States dropped its largest overground thermonuclear bomb test in the Marshall Islands, one hundred miles away from the nearest inhabitants. But even from that distance, as investigative journalist Susanne Rust reports, the Marshallese experienced severe burns, hair loss, and vomiting. Government documents came out that revealed that U.S. officials knew the damage this would incur, but went forward anyway, because as Merrill Eisenbud of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission testified, “Data of this type has never been available. While it is true that these people do not live the way that Westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.” And today, the waste from the “nuclear tomb” left behind by the U.S. is leaking into the surrounding waters, destroying the Marshallese Islanders’ living spaces (Rust 19). This is yet another example of how environmental racism hits communities of color first — and the hardest. The same applies to nuclear weapons: the United States has a long and notorious history of prioritizing imperialism over Indigenous lives. And they aren’t the only ones. In China, nuclear testing has given President Xi Jinping a convenient excuse to kill off mass amounts of Uyghur Muslims under the guise of preserving national security. Over forty nuclear weapons tests were conducted on the autonomous Uyghur land Xinjiang in China in the late 1990s. Conservative estimates put the death toll at about 194,000, with 1.2 million more being affected by solid cancers, leukemia, and fetal damage. At their peak, the radiation levels in the living area of the Uyghurs equalled that of Chernobyl directly after its explosion in 1986 (Alexis-Martin 19). Nuclear weapons provide a surefire base for a leader’s necropolitics, allowing countries to justify the deaths of marginalized communities by placing their existence in direct contradiction to public safety — in this instance with the promise of “safety” that a nuclear weapon provides.
But the million-dollar question is this: is there a way to safely eliminate nuclear arsenals without the repercussions of unilateral disarmament? During the Obama administration, a group of scientists and political experts came together to propose a program called Global Zero, a multilateral disarmament program. Theoretically, all countries would pledge to slowly and ethically disarm their arsenals through the method of deep underground disposal. Warheads are encased in tons of lead and then buried thousands of feet underground. This is the only proven method by which these weapons degrade safely. It’s clear that nuclear weapons are unjust, but it is only by a universal collaboration between world powers that they can be eliminated once and for all. And I’ll believe that when I see it.
Works Cited
Alexis-Martin, Becky. “The Nuclear Imperialism-Necropolitics Nexus: Contextualizing Chinese-Uyghur Oppression in Our Nuclear Age.” Tanford Online, Taylor & Francis, 16 July 2019, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15387216.2019.1645611?fbclid=IwAR2kOegBCd68xibNl2zakFWlK4ScQ9UUCt2wLh6MkB_byJ1vRkzVxXL06AA.
Miller, Franklin. “No First-Use Advocacy: Contradictions and Guesswork.” RealClearDefense, Princeton University, 7 Sept. 2016, www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/09/08/no_first-use_advocacy__contradictions_and_guesswork__110034.html.
Panofsky, Wolfgang K.H. “The Remaining Unique Role of Nuclear Weapons in Post-Cold War Deterrence.” National Academies Press, The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, www.nap.edu/read/5464/chapter/9#106.
Rust, Susanne. “How the U.S. Betrayed the Marshall Islands, Kindling the next Nuclear Disaster.” LA Times, Los Angeles Times, 10 Nov. 2019, www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/.
Tegmark, Max. “Why 3,000 Scientists Think Nuclear Arsenals Make Us Less Safe.” Scientific American Network, Scientific American, 26 May 2017, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-3–000-scientists-think-nuclear-arsenals-make-us-less-safe/.
Vick, Karl. “The Middle East Nuclear Race Is Already Under Way.” Times, Times, 23 Mar. 2015, time.com/3751676/iran-talks-nuclear-race-middle-east/.
Zhao, Tong. “A Response to Lewis A. Dunn’s Proposal of ‘Strategic Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.’” Nonproliferation Review, Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, 8 May 2018, carnegietsinghua.org/2018/05/08/response-to-lewis-a.-dunn-s-proposal-of-strategic-elimination-of-nuclear-weapons-pub-76307.
