I am grateful for the invitation from The China Academy and its Thinkers’ Forum in Shanghai to shed light on the dark logic behind nuclear weapons—their possession, their use, their philosophy. (I know of no Western media that would extend such an invitation to me).
This creed of “nuclearism” is not a strategy; it’s a civilizational tragedy. So muddled is its reasoning that NATO, built on the threat of nuclear first-use—even against conventional attacks—is still called ‘defensive.’
Despite vast cultural divides, nuclear-armed states—NATO’s US, the UK, France and the countries that host nukes in Europe, India, Pakistan, China, North Korea, and Israel—echo the same delusion: that these weapons ensure peace, that security demands them, that they and humanity cannot live without them having nukes.
They tacitly deny that even possessing these weapons is a violation of international law, since we have the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) from 2021.
They also hide that nuclear-weapons states by definition subscribe to the philosophy of terrorism, namely the deliberate and unavoidable killing of civilians (in this case, in the millions) to achieve a political goal. Remember, up to 9/11, everyone talked about the Balance of Terror!
Nothing – nothing – can ever justify the use of nuclear weapons – which are also militarily useless – so why on earth do they have them – and tell others they should not have them?
It’s high time we begin to think and cut through the militarist-nuclearist propaganda. And that is what I try to do here with a select few arguments out of many:
