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Amputating Realism
In May of 2000, 187 governments agreed that "the total elimination of all nuclear arsenals" is the goal. After 55 years of blah blah about "eventually" and "ultimately" getting rid of nuclear weapons we finally got an "unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament." Hooray.
Getting rid of the 35,000 nuclear weapons will be a lot of work, but we have certainly taken the first steps. Getting rid of the Realists was one very important step in the right direction. What a pest they were!
Perhaps we will one day be ashamed of how much we teased the Realists or perhaps one day we will get nostalgic about their fuddy-duddy silly confusing ways. Perhaps we will think of them as little diplomatic-NGO-UN secretariat hobbits, remembering fondly how we called them the Closeted Disarmers, or the Ones Who Probably Need Therapy For Their Cynical Depression.
Perhaps when the Realists are fully relegated to history, we will see patterns in their bizarre intellectual olympics that sought to qualify disarmament into the ground, to perpetually postpone the decision. They tried to convince and appease the hyper-militarists (also usually needing a fair whack of therapy themselves) by pretending that disarmament didn’t imply some kind of agreement, or set of agreements, on paper.
Instead the self-proclaimed Realists and their cohorts used the R word as a kind of shorthand in this pretending game. Perhaps in the hope of being invited to conferences or to tea, or perhaps because they thought they were being clever to distance themselves from the loony dangerous people who wanted governments to do what they promised within a 30 year time frame, the Realists would say, "Oh, its too soon to start talking about a Nuclear Weapons Convention, even though we said in 1970 that we would disarm. It’s just not realistic yet." Oh how sweet and naive of them to pretend that the weapons would just disappear and pieces of paper wouldn’t be necessary!
It was hard for the Realists to face the fact that getting rid of the category of nuclear weapons will require first a decision, an undertaking. But they did. It wasn't realistic to think that the NPT would actually succeed. But it did. It wasn’t realistic to think that a group of countries would stand up and decide to challenge the big nuclear weapons powers, but seven countries have, and they have catalysed change, a bit of evolution. And while it may not be "realistic" to predict the precise details of evolution, it is inevitable, and its direction is usually pretty clear.
Because the obvious is so obvious, especially after a 55 year conversation, the Realists issued a statement after the NPT under the heading "Sorry For Wasting So Much Of Your Precious Time." It read:
The axis upon which the new political undertaking for total nuclear disarmament turns is an abandonment, an amputation of a politically defeatist and unimaginative code of thought from the disarmament discourse, a politically motivated form of realism, which we have generated from a false notion of useful compromise.
We hereby declare our intention to Get Real and drop this self-important procrastinating blah blah that for too long amputated the disarmament goal from the means of achieving it. In order to get rid of those nuclear weapons that symbolise the Cold War’s suicidal tendencies, genocidal intentions, and ecodical possibilities, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a set of agreements, a framework of agreements is just as "realistic" and possible as a nuclear war. It would seem more sensible, and we admit it, realistic, to begin working towards the Convention rather than the war.
In conclusion, we now realise there is nothing unrealistic about describing and discussing and scoping out the logical routes to a new non-nuclear reality, walking directly down the route of transgression, towards the solution. Again, sorry for wasting so much of your precious time.
And history will record that we teased them one last time for being such a pack of hopeless losers, then we forgave them and began the business of taking apart the nuclear weapons.
Felicity Hill
Director, United Nations Office
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
New York, NY, USA
www.wilpf.int.ch www.reachingcriticalwill.org
777 UN Plaza - 6th Floor - New York, NY - 10017 - Ph: 212.682.1265 - Fax: 212.286.8211 - info@reachingcriticalwill.org
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