Plotting Peace: A Shared Challenge to Create a Sustainable Global Future

Abstract

Has Peace broken out? Has the war psychosis that has governed most of international life since 1945 been finally terminated? How stands that greatest of all threats to the health, indeed the existence, of mankind - nuclear weaponry? Amidst all the momentous convulsions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union we need to carefully reassess the nuclear and other threats to humanity and attempt a fresh perspective of both the global danger and the global opportunities. Only so can we hope to create constructive policies towards what must be a new political agenda. Nor will such policies easily emerge from Ministers and officials with political and psychological investments in the tough-minded approaches suitable to the Stalinist era. A constructive internationalism will be brought to birth primarily through the persuasions and pressures that we, the opinion-formers, can bring to bear. However ‘non-political’ we may be, we all bear responsibility for what happens -and must all show some interest. There are both positive and negative aspects to the immense changes we have been seeing in Europe. The dangers of instability are probably larger than they were before, even if the huge reduction of tension between the rival alliances, not least in central Europe, is also very real. But to take nuclear danger as such, it is dreadfully easy to become complacent. The global armoury still amounts to something like 50,000 warheads, of which only a fraction could extinguish all of us. There is, it is true, good prospect of the START negotiations succeeding in cutting the intercontinental missiles by about a half. The INF Treaty had already shaved a few per cent off the global total. These reductions will still be essentially marginal however. Half of ten fatal doses is five fatal doses. And meanwhile not only is research and development being pursued hard (on ‘Star Wars’ too) but there are no present negotiations at all to reduce the number of arguably the most dangerous nuclear weapons of all - the hundreds of short-range ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons that NATO still declares it is prepared to use even against a purely conventional Soviet attack. Ronald Higgins is an independent writer and lecturer on international security and human ecology. He is the Director of the Dunamis open forum, a Board Member of the International Security Information Service and a member of other bodies including the Council for Arms Control, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Pugwash.