"Remember your humanity"
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
The following statements were published by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation immediately following President Putin’s nuclear threats. In issuing such threats, the Russian leader has put the existential risks associated with nuclear confrontation firmly on the agenda. The Russian leader now not only threatens the people of Ukraine with his illegal invasion and occupation. His nuclear threats put humanity itself in peril.
The writer Arundhati Roy said this of nuclear weapons: “It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness...” Bertrand Russell grappled with these issues many decades ago. He asked us all to “remember your humanity”.
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Remember your humanity
Humanity is confronted by increasing danger of nuclear war. Even before Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, worsening relations between the world’s nuclear-armed states and alliances made our planet a tinderbox where one false move – or misunderstanding – could result in nuclear war. President Putin’s order to invade Ukraine makes this perilous situation much worse. He publicly warns others not to interfere otherwise they will suffer ‘consequences greater than any you have faced in history’. Such nuclear blackmail must be exposed and resisted. For the sake of humanity, Russia should cease its aggression and withdraw from Ukraine without delay.
In recent years, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom have steadily lowered the ‘threshold’ to be crossed when ordering the use of nuclear weapons. They openly state that nuclear devices could be used in response to threatened non-nuclear attacks such as ‘conventional’, biological, chemical or cyber. Nuclear capabilities are closely integrated with ‘conventional’ force in current military doctrine. ‘Useable’ nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, artificial intelligence, armed drones and cyberwarfare are all part of the contemporary battlefield. Europe is at evident risk of becoming such a battlefield – even a nuclear one.
Millions of people in Russia, Ukraine and the wider world know that war is not the answer to Europe’s common and enduring need for security. Since NATO waged war on Yugoslavia in 1999, the political failure to address our common need for security has brought Europe to its current tragedy -- Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, which had embraced neutrality prior to 2014. The work to build peace and security begins again. In doing so, it is timely to recall that, long ago, Bertrand Russell confronted humankind’s peril from nuclear weapons and appealed ‘as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest’.
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
25/02/2022
Threatening megadeath
Putin publicly puts Russia’s ‘deterrence’ forces on special alert, apparently shocking his defence minister and military chief of staff in the process. He didn’t use the word ‘nuclear’, but those are the weapons he’s told them to prepare. This is the latest clinch in Putin’s long embrace of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. In breaking the nuclear taboo, Putin exposes the duplicity of nuclear ‘deterrence’, which really means threatening megadeath. In 1945, the United States twice visited megadeath on Japan, and has refined its nuclear weapons practice ever since. When the French Foreign Minister recently reminded Putin that NATO is a nuclear-armed alliance, the threat of megadeath was implicit in his few words.
Nor does the pretence that NATO is purely defensive and no threat to Russia help us to perceive clearly the acute danger we are currently in. Long ago, Putin absorbed the lessons of NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and he is hyper sensitive to any perceived aggression, even while he orders Russia’s military to mount an illegal and faltering assault on Ukraine. He publicly told President Macron that ‘there would be no winners’. He publicly threatened anyone who interfered in Russia’s war on Ukraine that they would suffer unprecedented consequences. Now he orders Russia’s high command to actively participate in nuclear blackmail. NATO’s Secretary-General decries such nuclear ‘rhetoric’, but who can be certain that Putin is bluffing? The fearful possibility is that Putin may be approaching the point where he decides he has nothing to lose by breaking the taboo and using some of Russia’s many nuclear weapons. ‘Deterrence’ will have flipped.
Who will provide a ladder for Putin to climb down?
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
28/02/2022
Where does that end?
Putin’s nuclear threats elicit changes in US military operations. Scheduled testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile is postponed in case it disturbs the delicate balance of mutual threats of mass death. Heavy US nuclear capable bombers fly west from southern England instead of eastwards towards Central Europe where one of them recently refuelled. Such caution is prudent when taboos on nuclear threats and possible use are broken. As a nuclear-armed alliance, NATO is similarly constrained in militarily assisting Ukraine in its hour of need. Stalled columns of Russian fighting vehicles present easy targets from the air, but NATO cannot dispatch its substantial air power against them for fear of engaging Russia directly and triggering Putin’s nuclear arsenal, which includes many so-called tactical warheads. His ‘deterrence’ flips to ‘escalate to de-escalate’. Where does that end?
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
03/03/2022