The threat of nuclear war: Peace studies in an apocalyptic age

Rick Gladstone and Rogene Jacquette’s (2017) exhaustive February story in the New York Times’How the North Korean Nuclear Threat Has Grown’ suggests that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has grown in four related areas that demand attention: arsenal size, bomb strength, missile technology, and ability to elude detection.¹ They report the arsenal size is less than 10 nuclear weapons but they have enough plutonium and enriched uranium to build 20–25 nuclear weapons with explosive power that has increased from one to 10 kilotons in a decade and the technology to produce missiles that could reach the US continent by 2026. Gladstone and Jacquette (2017) comment on the smaller and more mobile weapons now produced that can now fit as a nuclear warhead on a missile. As of the late August 2017, missile tests carried out by North Korean indicate that Kim Jong Un is much further ahead than anyone anticipated.

For the first time since pursuing a nuclear weapon program the threat seems real rather than just another saber rattling exercise designed to win US concessions. The chorus of mainstream Western press are all pretty well in agreement—that there is now, indeed, a nuclear threat from North Korea and the rogue state is rapidly arming itself with the possibility of developing intercontinental nuclear missiles. Stories and predictions of North Korea’s nuclear threat have been commonplace since the early 1990s, but something has changed. Both Tillerston and the Trump administration are talking of a new approach and even the unthinkable—nuclear talks with Kim Jong Un.

The threat from North Korea seems to grow daily with each new test that now confirms the new perhaps historic capability to strike continental America and countries of the Pacific Rim. The ‘collateral damage’ of any US pre-emptive strike would be appalling especially to South Korea with the consequence of leaving hundreds of thousands dead and the likely destruction of Seoul and other cities. The risks far outweigh any military strategy. The war rhetoric spilling out from North Korea against the US certainly also indicates that we may be approaching an end-game. But North Korea is not the only nuclear power in Asia and some of them have not been constrained in their pursuit of increasing their nuclear arsenal.

Owen Toon, Robock, Mills, and Xia (2017) write of the concentration of nuclear arsenals and their expansion in Asia:

Of the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons, six are located in Asia and another, the United States, borders the Pacific Ocean. Russia and China were the first Asian nations with nuclear weapons, followed by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the world’s nuclear powers are reducing their arsenals or maintaining them at historic levels, but several of those in Asia—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—continue to pursue relentless and expensive programs of nuclear weapons development and production.

When, we also take into account the new arms race that began after the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1982 and the prospect of Middle Eastern states or rogue states using nuclear weapons or ‘dirty bombs’ it is clear that nuclear war is perhaps more likely now than in any time in human history. This is the view of Rupert Cornwell (2017) of The Independent who argues ‘The Doomsday Clock shows we’re closer to the apocalypse than we have been since the 1950s.’² The risks of nuclear accident have increased the probability of global catastrophe.³

Beginning in the 1950s, the rise of peace studies saw the emergence of international territorial norms, conflict management, and peace treaties. Peace and security studies began to appear as university courses. Peace education also developed mostly within international politics and as a cross-disciplinary subject, although peace as a pedagogical issue has a history going back to the American Civil War. The founding of the United Nations system in the 1950s, acted as a new catalyst and the Vietnam War provided a reformulation with a greater emphasis on ‘war as imperialism’ and conceptions of ‘positive peace’ (Dugan, 1989; Galtung, 1971; Miall, Ramsbotham, & Woodhouse, 2005). War and peace studies rarely featured in philosophy of education—a rather astounding observation given the prevalence of such political and military concerns in the twenty-first century and their ‘ethical burden’ for students. One prominent exception was the late radical educator Ilan Gur-Zéev (2001, 2010a, 2010b) a friend and scholar sadly missed. Gur-Zéev encouraged us to rethink the conceptualization of the field of peace education by examining its philosophical foundations. McGregor (2014) helpfully identifies ‘six prospective philosophical foundations for peace education,’ including Gur-Zéev’s, that are ‘mostly Western in their orientation … and, in the process, discovered and recounted a powerful counter-education to a perceived Western hegemony in peace education’ (p. 163).

Peter Pericles Trifonas and Bryan Wright (2013) edited a useful collection entitled Critical Peace Education: Difficult Dialogs that took up the challenge of understanding peace education as a normalizing project of Western ideology to work toward a deeper conceptualization of peace and social justice. In my chapter ‘The Cold Peace’ with James Thayer, I sought to understand the liberal approach to peace with its commitment to ‘Just War’ theory and to critique prevailing notions of peace and its application to issues of social justice and citizenship as it underlies peace education and peace studies (Peters & Thayer, 2013). The chapter emphasized how issues of conflict and security for the twenty-first century is embedded within a post-national and post-liberal framework that shifts our understanding of peace, security, and risk toward a post-Cold War and post-Cold Peace context. This involved not only an understanding of how philosophical underpinnings of peace can be traced to Kant, who promoted the concept of peace as a foundation for liberal society but also the origins of ‘crimes against peace.’ The modern concept of ‘war crime’ surfaced at the Versailles Conference after World War I, but did not receive a comprehensive definition until the end of World War II in the form of the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was among the first international conventions to address war crimes. In commenting on the liberal world order and the growth of the ‘peace industry’ we commented:

The peace industry is a subset of the security industry and now the basis for a considerable global bureaucracy that includes the United Nations, UNESCO and other world and national development agencies dedicated to such activities as: ‘peacekeeping,’’conflict resolution,’ ‘humanitarian relief,’ maintenance of ‘cease-fires,’ ‘comprehensive settlements,’ and ‘negotiation and mediation.’ The UN as the world’s major peacekeeping organization has been engaged in 63 peacekeeping operation since 1948 when the first peacekeeping operation was established. (p. 29)

We also briefly examined the globalization of violence, the postmodernization of peace, and the neoliberalization of security (see also Peters, 2004). Against the prevailing analysis of the age as the bloodiest in recorded human history (e.g. Brunk, 2012), Pinker (2011) has argued that the decades since the end of the Cold War are best described as the ‘new peace,’ an assessment based on declining rates of homicide, the rise of humanitarian thinking, and the decreasing magnitude of wars. Pinker’s thesis in the present age of nuclear risk requires only one counterfactual—one nuclear strike by an aberrant power is enough to upset the theoretical applecart. Peace is a creation and project of modernity, a collective endeavor to develop ‘more elaborate ideas on how justice and the rule of law can nurture the bonds between the citizens of a given [global] polity’ (Ziemann, 2012). Of course, this is very much an internal description and grandiose liberal self-image that is somewhat also self-serving.

With the turn of the Trump administration against the internationalist liberal global order that is concomitant with the rise of a kind of authoritarian populism (but quite different from the origin and application of the term first used by Stuart Hall to describe the advent of Thatcherism) it is theoretically useful and interesting to speculate on the means that Trump might contemplate to bring North Korea to heel, after giving up on the agencies of UN, NATO, and other agencies of the Western alliance. This leaves, more or less, Trumps’ tweets promising ‘fire and fury like the world had never seen’—indicating advanced planning of a US pre-emptive strike. In the mean while, we all continue to live with the daily threat but with more than a hint of apocalyptic nonchalance and postmodern cynicism. Nuclear war is only one of a series of possibilities for the ‘end times’ alongside extreme climate change and catastrophic weather events, the spread of world viruses, and the rise of military AI and robotization.

The apocalyptic tradition is deeply rooted in Judaic and Christian narratives as a source of revelatory literature that is oriented toward the ‘end times’ and mediation to the transcendent reality of a supernatural world that promises eschatological salvation. (Collins, 1979; Derrida, 1984). This genre and tradition has reasserted itself as a form of thinking strongly relevant to framing thought concerning philosophy and education in the ‘end times’ (Peters, 2011)—an Anthropocentric era that threaten by ecological, nuclear, and biological extinction. At the same time, Western culture is overrun by Hollywood zombies and blood-sucking vampires. Some argue that these apocalyptic fictional narratives provide an opportunity to work through the trauma of the breakdown of ethical frameworks after globalization, and the endless appetite for human violence demonstrated in a multipolar world with the rise of terroristic non-state actors.

If we accept these prevalent apocalyptic narratives especially the threat to our existence of a nuclear war how do we cope with the ethics of pedagogy? Do we as teachers become doom-sayers? Should we agree with Richard Pacholski (1989/2007) that ‘As nuclear holocaust threatens to end human civilization if not human existence itself, no topic is more worthy of study in these days?’ Are we to teach, for instance, with The Economist (2017) that ‘There are no good options to curb Kim Jong Un. But blundering into war would be the worst.’⁴ Ought we to argue that ‘nuclear weapons are so singularly inhumane we ought categorically to reject their use, whatever purposes they may be said to serve’ (Hayashi, 2015). Are we to teach students to prepare for the worst, to become what the American’s call ‘Preppers?’⁵ What burden of analysis of this nightmare scenario do we want students to accept and at what age? We can teach the pressing need for nuclear disarmament; we can teach about the international tensions and risks of further nuclear proliferation; we can, up to a point, critically discuss the political economy of nuclear weapons manufacture as an aspect of world production and the complicity of world science. The difficulty is when world security and nuclear risk is approached in terms of nuclear disarmament there is a tendency to rarefy agency and responsibility of individuals and nations when rogue nations, imperial states and non-state terrorist groups pay no heed to global international conventions. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have lived in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war yet the anxiety among youth today, if anything, has abated since the 1980s, rather than intensified as the threat has increased (King, 2017). Ultimately, what responsibility of care do teachers have toward their students in an apocalyptic age?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Michael A. Peters
WMIER, University of Waikato, New Zealand
[email protected]

Notes

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-threat.html.

2. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-nuclear-war-doomsday-clock-russia-putin-gorge-orwell-apocalypse-real-immediate-threat-a7550761.html.

3. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake.

4. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21725768-there-are-no-good-options-curb-kim-jong-un-blundering-war-would-be-worst-how.

5. See e.g. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/doomsday-preppers/.