By Joseph Gerson
The following article was initially written at the request of Oleg Bodrov, a Russian physicist with commitments to peace and environmental sustainability and safety. I met Oleg about a decade ago during the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima, and today we both serve on the board of the International Peace Bureau, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient organization. In addition to serving on IPB’s board, Oleg is chairman of the Public Council of the South Coast of the Gulf of Finland. He lives outside of St. Petersburg and does what he can given the limits of the possible in Putin’s Russia. When he and I last spoke, Ukrainian drones had devastated a massive Russian oil refinery, spewing toxins into the Baltic Sea and across many Russian communities. With Ukrainian drones flying overhead he hadn’t slept the previous night, making Oleg one more innocent caught in that mutually disastrous war.
In our exchanges, Oleg came up with a proposal to take a small step toward bridging the divisions of the new US-Russian Cold War and building for the time when the missiles, drones, and guns of the Ukraine War have been silenced. His idea: I should write an article that shared US peace movement thinking and named actions that can reduce the increasingly perilous military tensions and serve as foundations for a future era of US-NATO-Russian Common security. Oleg would translate the article and arrange for its publication in a Russian scientific journal. As we corresponded about the article’s publication, it occurred to us that it might also prove helpful for US readers, hence its publication here in Common Dreams. Where this will lead, only time will tell. But the truth is that both the US and Russia are going to be around for a long time, and a just and peaceful Common Security order will be essential for this and future generations.
Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock report warns us that we face Cuban Missile Crisis level danger. Back then, in 1962, senior officials in the Kennedy administration thought the odds of the missile crisis leading to a nuclear war were 50-50. In the aftermath of the eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation, Daniel Ellsberg, a senior Kennedy nuclear adviser, became so pessimistic about humanity’s future that, not expecting to live to an old age, he ceased paying into his pension fund.
But both President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, along with their ruling circles, were sufficiently sobered by the specter of nuclear annihilation. They moved quickly to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Their successors built on this foundation, constructing the six-decade-old arms control regime. They negotiated treaties from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the SALT and START agreements. They limited, but failed to erase, the dangers of nuclear annihilation.
The Collapse of the Arms Control Architecture
That arms control regime is now history. First came the loss of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty almost 25 years ago. Then came the expiration of the New START Treaty. Now, President Donald Trump is obsessed with resuming nuclear-weapons testing, and both the US and Russia are moving to deploy new nuclear-capable missile systems.
Adding to nuclear dangers, Beijing is increasing its nuclear arsenal in pursuit of parity with Moscow and Washington. We are becoming three nuclear-armed scorpions in a bottle. This, together with Russian concerns about the French and British nuclear arsenals, complicates any possible future arms reduction diplomacy. The inability of the US, Russia, and China to find common ground—or even to agree on a least common denominator consensus document—was a major factor that dictated the third consecutive failure of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference this past May.
The geopolitical landscape is further complicated by the US-Israeli-Iran war. During that conflict, President Trump speculated about possible low-yield nuclear attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal. Political pressures for nuclear-weapons proliferation are therefore building in threshold nations from Seoul to Stockholm, including Iran, Poland, and Japan, among others.
“Human Beings and Nuclear Weapons Cannot Coexist”
Political realism and the survival of our species point in two complementary directions. As the Japanese A-bomb survivors and their organization Nihon Hidankyo (awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize) warn, it should be obvious: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
We have already had too many close calls with extinction: false nuclear alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and geopolitical miscalculations. And as Nobel Peace Laureate Joseph Rotblat, the founder of the Pugwash Conferences and the only senior Manhattan Project scientist to quit for reasons of conscience, explained, humanity faces a stark choice. We can either completely eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, or we will see their proliferation and eventual use. Why? Because no nation will long tolerate what it perceives as an unjust and threatening imbalance of power—in this case, the imbalance of nuclear terror.
Even in the best of circumstances, it will take valuable time—possibly more time than we have—to build the trust and to conduct the negotiations needed for a nuclear-weapon-free world. This, in turn, forces us to learn another lesson from US-Russian history: the possibility of Common Security. In crisis, as our Chinese friends remind us, there is opportunity as well as danger.
The Lesson of Common Security and the Palme Commission
In the 1980s humanity faced a similar situation. The two great powers flirted with triggering a catastrophic war that could have caused a nuclear winter. The US and the Soviet Union brought the world to the nuclear brink with the planned deployments of SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II missiles.
The combination of popular movements calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race, and President Mikhail Gorbachev’s understanding that military spending had to be reduced if the Soviet economy were to be salvaged, led Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to convene the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues.
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Originally posted on Common Dreams: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-russia-dialogue