Deterence and defense.
Deterence as an unlawful retaliation threat.
Replacing corporate militarism with free citizenship.
The nuclear power accessory.
A note on majority-minority consensus.
Defense is essential against the onslaught of the elements, its flora and fauna, humans and our very selves included. Defense amounts to no more than protecting ourselves against all contingencies, even protecting ourselves against ourselves.
Learning to avoid addictions, which themselves come disguised in many shapes and forms, like the legend of Proteus, is example of defending one from oneself.
Defense is also proactive, by learning to work with nature and indeed human nature.
Neglecting defense, in this broadest sense, is negligence. Sometimes, defenders, of the nuclear deterent, inter-change the two concepts of defense and deterence, as if they were the same, or amounted to the same thing.
In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate, first minister, Alex Salmond challenged No-campaign leader, Alistair Darling, on the renewal of Trident, Britains nuclear deterent.
Darling primly rebuffed him, like a vicar, propositioned by a street-walker. For him, not renewing Trident was equivalent to questioning his virtue in defending his country.
It was out of the question, for Darling the defensive dogmatist, who shut down any debate on options.
In the 2015 Labour leadership campaign, it became apparent that the token left wing candidate, Jeremy Corbyn might actually win. The convulsed Tory government had Chancellor George Osborne dangle, before the Scots, as a bribe, a multi-billion Trident renewal investment program.
When it was pointed out to him, that Parliament had not yet voted on whether to renew Trident, the rattled Chancellor aggressively responded that he wasn’t going to throw away Britains freedom and security, when so many other countries are scrambling for nuclear weapons.
Its security is the security of a police state surveillance of an unfree people. It secures a potential for mass extinction from nuclear wastes.
The new Scottish first Minister, Nicola Sturgeon objected that the Tory government was pre-empting the debate.
Up till now, sound-bites have made do for debates. Gordon Brown announced
that Britain needed Trident renewal to defend itself against rogue states, like
North Korea.
(In the same vein of inspiration, recently, he is said to have opined that if
Britain left the European Union, it would become like North Korea.
That says more about the centralist-dependence of Gordon Brown than it does
about the traditionally free-roving British people, now bound within
tariff-fortress Europe.)
The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader means that Parliament now
must behave like one, and the ruling class defend its positions on defense and
the economy and democracy.
The common ground of opponents, with supporters of Trident renewal, is that the
country needs to defend itself.
Trident is officially called a nuclear deterent, not a defense. And rightly so.
It is only careless whipped politicians, who habitually confuse the distinction
between defense and deterence. Trident doesn’t defend the country against
anything. It doesn’t physically stop, taking place, any act of aggression
what-so-ever.
A group of retired generals wrote to The Times that renewing Trident was a
useless waste of money.
It is reasonable to suppose that they know what they are talking about.
The savage superstition of Trident death-worship serves as a protecting idol
of the nation. As a superstition, the Trident cult is motivated by fear
relying, for protection, on putting fear into others. For, deterence is the
threat, or promise, of retaliation:
Any nation or regime that uses nuclear weapons against this country can be sure
of like response.
Retaliation, and deterence, as the intention of retaliating, is unlawful. The truth of this is plain to see, in a football match. If a player kicks another player, who kicks him back, the referee sends off both players, attacker and retaliator.
The promise of a violent exchange is a misguided and potentially self-defeating morality. Again, football provides a good example, when unscrupulous opponents provoke the best players, to make them retaliate, and get them sent off.
An appallingly sickened humanity, in the aftermath of a retaliatory strike,
might well muster the legalistic determination to prosecute all participating
governments as world war criminals.
Obviously, the ground rules of peace should be in place, to preclude the game
of war ever being played.
Indeed, in civil society, an analog of the national nuclear deterent has already been banned. The duel was a threat or promise to kill anyone who attacked or impugned ones honor.
The inherently criminal nature of this avowed deterent was its pretext for
murders. The partisan nature of self-administered justice, by the duel,
effectively legalised the blood feud.
Henry DeVere Stacpoole conveys the duel as a chronic perversion of justice, in
his period novel, The Man In Armour.
The nuclear deterent is just such self-administered justice on the international scale, which must be superseded by international law, if peace is to prevail.
Apologists for the nuclear deterent foster the delusions of the duel. Coming under nuclear attack is not like a duellist taking a pot-shot at one, then allowing his opponent to take a pot-shot back, in nuclear retaliation.
Nuclear attackers are liable not to present themselves in such prominent profiles. Millions upon millions of innocent people would certainly be available as sacrificial victims to the god of war. I remember Tory party conference being told that the original Trident submarine would be as big as a cathedral.
Actually pinpointing aggressors with the nuclear blunderbuss would be more problematic than duelling. One may be sure, that world-warriors would be well bunkered and supplied against retaliations to their outrages.
The mentality of nuclear deterence is that these weapons merely change the
rules of the feudal game of chess to allow all the pawns to be wiped out, at a
retaliatory stroke.
The state of play is like a nuclear up-date of TH White, in The Once and Future
King, where the knights are fully protected in battle, and the unarmored
peasants, on foot, take all the casualties.
When you unpack the assumptions of nuclear deterence, it becomes apparent that its supporters are thinking in terms of nations, like corporate bodies, whose populations are complicit in an aggression by their government, as hand follows brain. Feudal society did have some such conception of society as a functioning whole, in which everyone had their place in the hierarchy.
Yet Britains decision to join in the second Iraq war was decidedly top-down, led by its leader, or misled by its leader, and demonstrably opposed by millions of citizens.
Retaliation visited on loyal subjects of their country, right or wrong, at least serves the military purpose of disarming an aggressor. But the nation, as a military unit, above the law, is not just a threat to freedom and security but a menace to life on earth itself.
The world, if it is to prosper, has to move away from the deterers world-view that it is legitimate to mass murder people, who happen to be the subjects of aggressive national governments. Nor may a massacre of the innocents be dismissed as "collateral damage."
This does also necessitate the education of all people to be law-abiding free citizens of the world. And how many governments or their peoples respect freedom under the law?
A prime lesson of the Cold War was that closed societies brew ignorant prejudice, that their governments can turn to warlike intent. Freedom of information is a servant of peace, as well as prosperity, in exposing bribery and corruption.
Pres Reagan, for his part, ended the Cold War but he also abolished the Fairness doctrine, that had allowed the other sides of arguments to be heard, in the mass media, without which there is only indoctrination and manipulation, propaganda, not the whole truth, only what rulers want people to hear, to serve their own ends and ambitions at others expense.
The purpose of the law is to keep the peace. Retaliation is a joining of the game of war, by a first escalation of destructive conflict. The law of civil society has curtailed those personal wars, known as feuds or vendettas. International law must do the same by formally out-lawing deterence.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament seeks an international convention to end the threat of nuclear weapons, hanging over the world. CND also has a cogent policy against nuclear power.
The more countries that gain possession of nuclear weapons, the more probable that they will be used. In an increasingly unsafe world, every nation seeks to be armed to the teeth. And the likelihood is, that somewhere somehow human aggression and fanaticism will set off the nuclear powder trail.
Carl Sagan and colleagues calculated that even a regional nuclear war could shroud the globe in a nuclear winter, posing chronic crop failure, and chronic radioactive contamination, as well as reducing the chemical industry to a global Bhopal.
Sagan said that only a fool or a madman would use nuclear weapons. Of course, the more people they are given to, the more likely that is just what will happen. Sagan thought that even a regional conflict was likely to escalate, from its destabilising the balance of power.
The point to emfasise is that nuclear deterence, is the threat or promise of retaliation, that sets off the escalation, in a tit for tat series of responses.
A country cannot be conquered by reducing it to an uninhabitable waste-land. A sane person, however ambitious and over-bearing, has no motive for such a self-defeating aggression. But a normally sane ruler, seeing his country reduced to ashes, is liable to lash out with his own nuclear arsenal, to put it mildly, in an ill-advised manner.
Indeed, the very concept of nuclear deterence depends on rulers being fools or madmen enough to use them in retaliation. That is not a qualification one would seek for leaders as peace-makers.
As George Bailey said, in The Making of Andrei Sakharov, it would take only a conventional war to effect a nuclear war, in countries with nuclear power stations. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry, helped by its government pushers, is busily trying to sell them to as many countries as it can.
A Guardian article (21/07/2014) about five extinction scenarios insinuated that the damage of fallout is "often" exaggerated, which is a slippery qualification. Human motivation is a slippery thing. And our greatest enemy is dishonesty and self-deception, both in the drift of public life and in our own brief personal stays on this earth.
Sakharov urged test ban treaties, not thinking the risks of fallout were at all exaggerated. True, he urged the world not to give up on nuclear power, after Chernobyl. Kurt Vonnegut was greatly honored to deliver this message to the West. He did so in a deadpan voice, since this was anything but his view on the matter, as he expostulated, in Timequake, his last novel published before his death.
It doesn’t even take a conventional war to threaten the freedom and security of a nation, lumbered with Europes biggest nuclear waste dump. Eight hundred nuclear police were merged into a larger force.
In his visit to Sellafield, Jim Al-Khalili reaches the right conclusion, the one that the anti-nuclear protest movement has held, for more than half a century, namely the need to think for the long term, or else we have learned nothing.
Then he ignored his own advice. He favors going ahead with the government nuclear program. This, after he has just admitted, well, it might be worth trying to break up the dangerous waste, with neutron beams or something, into harmless bits.
He may be right: breaking matter into smaller particles is practically the
history of particle physics.
Well, think long term and do it then, before piling up more waste pollution
problems for future generations into eternity.
But the half-hearted way, he suggested it, is telling of its prospects.
Even Mail on Sunday, with wrong-footed journos who hailed Fukushima as proof nuclear power is safe, printed an article, a week previous to the BBC TV program, called "Damned." This didn't even mention all the nasty stuff, that Jim went into, but pretty well exposed the commercial nonsense of failed government command economy energy policy.
OECD called the British government nuclear deal with EDF the worst in the
world.
This French state firm gave jobs to two key British politicians brothers. The
nuclear industry is notorious for friends in high places.
A law of economics is that economies, commandeered by special interests, do
badly.
Solar power industry costs have dramatically fallen, and will do so further, while EDF has already admitted it will not be able to meet its schedule: the same old story of escalating costs and delays. Yet solar subsidies for an infant industry are being discriminated against, by the British government, in favor of an epic thirty-five year profit-guaranteeing subsidy to the nuclear industry. Some solar firms and the governments of Austria and Luxembourg are taking the British government to court over illegal breach of competition policy.
Note that the European Union did nothing to defend its own rules against British government nuclear imposition on its own people. So much for their vaunted environmentalism, in which respect they proved indistinguishable from UKIP.
Politicians illustrate the perversity of human nature. But I think there is a rational explanation in Britains ineffective government of elective dictatorship, whereby governments don't have to think, because there is no effective opposition from power-sharing elections with transferable voting.
And there is no second chamber of democraticly legitimate experts, who could
be elected with the legally required elections to their governing bodies.
A partnership of economic democracy with political democracy, at every level of
government from local chambers of commerce, to the UN economic security
council, could give representative specialist knowledge, from the whole
community, to prevent any special interests, like nuclear croneyism, becoming
parasitical.
Jacques Cousteau warned that our passionately aggressive species would have to live without nuclear weapons and its help-mate (uranium fission) nuclear power, if it was to live at all.
Humanity is sleep-walking into nuclear proliferation and contamination. According to Enenews, the US presidency secretly and illegally armed Japan with nuclear weapons under cover of Japans nuclear power industrialisation.
A uranium fission nuclear reactor was the essential guide to the making of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan project. Ever since, nuclear power has been sought and fought over as a prospective accessory to nuclear weapons. That was certainly Britains real motive in its supposed peaceful development of nuclear power. And why the United States has been so particular that Iran only peacefully develop nuclear power. Civilian energy needs have been made into the second class servant of military energy priorities.
Even if the world stays lucky enough not to blunder into nuclear Armageddon, there is the prospect of a world suffering from man-made carcinogenic and geneticly damaging radioactivity, from further malfunctions and break-downs among the nuclear power plants about the globe.
An early warning of a future nuclear dystopia showed itself in the aftermath of a Fukushima decontamination exercise, when people were allowed back to their town after four years. So far, only a few returned. They were issued with fallout detectors.
The personal geiger counter may yet come to symbolise government corruption
and degradation of the planet.
Relevant World Health Organisation assessments are subject to the approval of
its nuclear counter-part.
Fukushima melt-downs bankrupted the Japanese nuclear industry, making the public pick up the tab. This eventuality is precisely why nuclear power was uninsurable, and could never have been inflicted on the world but for the fraud of governments legalising private profits at social costs, in unsolved waste disposal and irreclaimable land loss to contamination.
Given that nuclear deterence threatens the peace of the world, rather than secures it, the question is how is peace to be secured? What alternatives can be credibly adopted by the governments of the world?
Establishing a world peace settlement is a world-wide task. The UN charter, and its somewhat stronger predecessor, the 1940 Sankey declaration of human rights constitute a foundation.
I confine myself to one vital ingredient, for peace to be sustained. In the relations of majorities to minorities, due regard must be given to both, and no more than their respective dues, as John Stuart Mill MP stated in his classic speeches on parliamentary reform.
Mill distinguished between maiorocracy, the tyranny of the majority, which in Britain is only a make-believe majority of seats in Parliament, and democracy, whose true nature is peace-making power-sharing.
For just that purpose, the essential system, that Mill first put before the legislature, of proportional counting preference voting, was re-introduced into Northern Ireland. (Nowadays, this election system is called the single transferable vote.)
Reformers, in the Mill tradition, have to go into the practical details of electoral reform, because the devil is in the detail.
Peter Tatchell qualified his support for Jeremy Corbyn, by insisting that human rights always must be respected. That is, after all, the golden rule of Confucius and also Jesus: do as you would be done by. It was the epic campaign of Voltaire for religious toleration.
When it comes to power-sharing, Peter Tatchell and, reportedly, Jeremy
Corbyn, are at one with the dominant right wing of their party, so antagonistic
to them, otherwise. Nigel Farage, of UKIP, that other rebel leader also falls
into line with career politicians PR.
For, they advocate the Additional Member System, a doubly safe-seat system,
which is like saying that two wrongs make a right.
First past the post is deemed unacceptable by electoral reformers. So, what
do many of them propose?
Keeping it, in combination with another generally unacceptable system of party
lists.
Party list elections are based on a corporate vote for a party, leaving
individual candidates personly unaccountable.
This vice of corporatism also allows big business and finance to avoid personal
liablity, for plundering the environment or peoples savings.
Corporatism might be defined as legalised parasitism. It is an
institutionalised corruption of the function of equality before the law.
I have written two e-books on electoral reform and research, so I won’t say any more about it here: