JULY 4, 2017
Any truthful way to say it
will sound worse than ghastly: We live in a world where one person could decide
to begin a nuclear war — quickly killing several hundred million people and
condemning vast numbers of others to slower painful deaths.
Given the macabre insanity of
this ongoing situation, most people don’t like to talk about it or even think
about it. In that zone of denial, U.S. news media keep detouring around a
crucial reality: No matter what you think of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin,
they hold the whole world in their hands with a nuclear button.
If the presidents of the
United States and Russia spiral into escalating conflicts between the two
countries, the world is much more likely to blow up. Yet many American critics
of Trump have gotten into baiting him as Putin’s flunky while goading him to
prove otherwise. A new barrage of that baiting and goading is now about to
begin — taking aim at any wisps of possible détente — in connection with the
announced meeting between Trump and Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany at the
end of this week.
Big picture: This moment in
human history is not about Trump. It’s not about Putin. It’s not about whether
you despise either or neither or both. What’s at stake in the dynamics between
them is life on this planet.
Over the weekend, more than
10,000 people signed a petition under the heading “Tell
Trump and Putin: Negotiate, Don’t Escalate.” The petition was written by
RootsAction to be concise and to the point: “We vehemently urge you to take a
constructive approach to your planned meeting at the G-20 summit. Whatever our
differences, we must reduce rather than increase the risks of nuclear war. The
future of humanity is at stake.”
A war between the world’s two
nuclear superpowers could extinguish human life on a gigantic scale while
plunging the Earth into cataclysmic “nuclear winter.”
“Recent scientific
studies have found that a war fought with the deployed U.S. and Russian
nuclear arsenals would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable,” wrote Steven Starr, a senior
scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility. “In fact, NASA computer
models have shown that even a ‘successful’ first strike by Washington or Moscow
would inflict catastrophic environmental damage that would make agriculture
impossible and cause mass starvation.”
The Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists explains why, since last year, it has moved the risk-estimate “Doomsday Clock”
even closer to apocalyptic midnight — citing as a major factor the escalation
of tensions between the U.S. and Russian governments.
So, the imminent meeting
between Trump and Putin will affect the chances that the young people we love —
and so many others around the world — will have a future. And whether later
generations will even exist.
I put it this way in a
recent article for The Nation: “Whatever
the truth may be about Russian interference in the U.S. election last year, an
overarching truth continues to bind the fates of Russians, Americans and the
rest of humanity. No matter how much we might wish to forget or deny it, we are
tied together by a fraying thread of relations between two nations that possess
93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Right now it is not popular to say
so, but we desperately need each other to enhance the odds of human survival.”
In that overall context, stoking
hostility toward Russia is, uh, rather short-sighted. Wouldn’t it be much
better for the meeting between Trump and Putin to bring Washington and Moscow
closer to détente rather than bringing us closer to nuclear annihilation?
More articles by:NORMAN SOLOMON
Norman Solomon is executive director of
the Institute for Public Accuracy, where he coordinates ExposeFacts. Solomon
is a co-founder of RootsAction.org.
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