Afghanistan

The following piece was written by David Krieger, founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. It was published on the website Great Transition Initiative, https://www.greattransition.org/publication/nuclear-abolition, and appears here with permission from that site and from Mr. Krieger. It is also considerably longer than other pieces appearing on the Psychology Today website - perhaps longer than any other! - but is also considerably more important (and thus, likely to be more controversial) than any other. It ends with a memorable original poem by Mr. Krieger.  Here goes: Civilization at Risk Nuclear weapons, unique in their power and capacity for destruction, pose an existential threat to humanity. Although the peril of living at the precipice of nuclear devastation is clear, progress toward nuclear abolition has been slow and uneven, and the issue of nuclear weapons appears distant or abstract to many. And yet, nuclear abolition remains vital to … [Read more...] about Nuclear Abolition: Armageddon to Transformation

      I recently posted an important and inspiring essay by  David Krieger - founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation - and originally appearing on the Great Transition Initiative website (which, btw, is an excellent resource for PT readers searching for stimulating and timely essays in these days of excessive - and often un-curated - internet babble.  He hit the hard nail of nuclear weapons right on the head, and for adroitly managed both suitable emotion and needed intellectual rigor. It is the policy of the Great Transition Initiative website to publish commentary on their lead essays ... and here is mine, published with the GTI's permission.         It is with a sense of appreciation and hope that I urge all readers of this marvelous compilation to disseminate the original essay and the comments as widely as possible. Everything – literally everything – is at stake! … [Read more...] about Deterrence Is a Sham

“Something there is” wrote Robert Frost, “that doesn’t love a wall.” Yet, as the poet was painfully aware, many people love walls. And something there also is, in human nature, that loves – even more than walls – the idea of the hero, the Savior, the rescuer who arrives in the nick of time to rescue the rest of us from a horrible fate. In my childhood, it was Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Superman, Rin Tin Tin running at the head of a troop of cavalry; for today’s children it’s Mad Max, RoboCop, or one of the various X-People or other clownish and make-believe savers of the galaxy. And for today’s ostensible grown-ups, still childish in the most dangerous way imaginable, it’s nuclear weapons. Self-styled nuclear “realists” like to claim that their embrace of these thermonuclear walls is necessary to prevent the use of precisely these same weapons against the Free World, or in some other way to promote peace through … [Read more...] about The Delusion of a Savior Nuclear and Otherwise

The bizarre possibility exists that under President Trump, the United States may at last get some leverage out of its nuclear arsenal. Oy vay! When President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, was waiting to begin serving a prison term for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, he wrote a memoir. In it, Haldeman described how during the 1968 presidential campaign, at the height of the Vietnam War, Nixon shared his plan to get the North Vietnamese to bend to his will. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob[…] We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris begging for peace.” It didn’t work. “It” has never worked; that is, no country’s leadership (including but not limited to the United States) … [Read more...] about Our National Nuclear Nightmare

In 1948, psychologist B. F. Skinner conducted an experiment in which hungry pigeons were fed on a random schedule. Soon three-quarters of them were behaving in unusual ways, depending on what each had been doing just before getting food: one rotated her body (always counter-clockwise), another swung his head like a pendulum, a third wiggled her feet, and so on. The resulting research report was titled “Superstition in the pigeon.” We’ll never know what if anything Skinner’s pigeons were thinking. But there’s no doubt that it’s time for us to think – or rather, rethink -  our reliance on the most dangerous superstition of all: deterrence. (What follows is an unusually long post; you've been warned!) Although conventional deterrence has existed for a long time – think of China’s Great Wall (deterrence by denial), Rome’s use of its legions (deterrence by punishment) or even the roars of a lion, and thorns of a rose bush … [Read more...] about Deterrence Is a Superstition