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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
Arms control groups are warning the world is moving closer to nuclear war as the U.S. continues to threaten to attack Iran and a major U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty known as New START expires Thursday. Last week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its history, due to rising threats from nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and the climate crisis. This is Dan Hols of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
DANIEL HOLZ: The Doomsday Clock is now at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been in the history of the clock. Last year, we warned that the world was perilously close to catastrophe and that countries needed to change course towards international cooperation and action on the most critical existential risks. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Rather than heed this warning, major countries became even more aggressive, adversarial and nationalistic.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Dr. Ira Helfand, steering committee member of Back from the Brink, a national coalition which has organized people in cities and towns across the United States to call for the end of nuclear weapons. Dr. Helfand is a longtime member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, which received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. He’s also the immediate past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. And Dr. Helfand is co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Talk about the dangers the world faces today and what this New START treaty is all about that expires tomorrow, Dr Helfand.
DR. IRA HELFAND: Thanks for having me on, Amy.
You know, we are in a very, very dangerous moment. Things have been getting bad for some time. Tensions between the United States and Russia have been getting worse. Tensions between the United States and China have been getting worse. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have been getting worse. India and Pakistan actually fought a war for a few days last year. It’s an unprecedented situation. In the last year, five of the nine countries which have nuclear arsenals have been engaged in warfare: Russia, the United States, Israel, India and Pakistan. And China has been making very explicit threats that they want to take over Taiwan, which would probably also involve military action. And any one of these conflicts has the potential to escalate to nuclear war.
The warning that we received last week from the Bullet and the Atomic Scientists really needs to be a wake-up call. We cannot afford to live in denial about this danger any longer. At one point in our history, back in the 1980s, when the danger was also very great, we all got it. You know, millions of people were marching in the streets because everybody understood how dangerous the situation was. Well, it’s even more dangerous today. And the big difference is that people aren’t paying attention to it.
On Thursday, tomorrow, the New START treaty is going to expire. This is the last agreement between the United States and Russia that puts limits on our nuclear arsenals. And with the expiration of this treaty, the path is now for a very dangerous, very destabilizing arms race. We already have 1,500 nuclear warheads deployed. The Russians have the same number. The best science we have says that if these two arsenals are used in a war between the United States and Russia, a hundred million people here in the United States, hundred million people in Russia, maybe another hundred million people in Europe, will die in the first half-hour. And the climate disruption that will result from that war will cause global famine that over the next two years will kill 6 million people — 6 billion people, excuse me, three-quarters of the human race.
That same study that came up with those numbers also looked at what would happen if India and Pakistan went to war, and found that a war between these two relatively small nuclear powers, involving just 250 nuclear warheads, could kill a hundred million people directly and also lead to a global famine, not quite as severe as we would see in a conflict between the United States and Russia, but bad enough to kill 2 billion people, a quarter of the human race, in two years.
So, that’s the argument we have already, and with the expiration of New START, there’s talk of expanding the arsenal further. Here in the United States, there are powerful voices saying, “It’s not enough to have 1,500 nuclear warheads. We need to have as many as the Russians and Chinese put together.” Well, if the United States increases its arsenal to a size equal to the Russians and the Chinese together, the Russians are going to say they need to have an arsenal as big as the U.S. arsenal, and it’s just going to cause a spiral, as we saw in the 1980s, when we got to the insane level of 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world. Today, it’s 12,000, enough to destroy the world many, many, many times over. There is no rational reason for any country to build a single additional nuclear warhead. But with the expiration of New START, that’s probably exactly what’s going to happen. And that arms race is going to be dangerous not just because of the additional numbers of weapons that are created, but also because this is a destabilizing process. It creates increased tension and leads to a greater possibility of conflict.
AMY GOODMAN: The New START treaty was signed by Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia. Last September, Putin proposed each side should agree informally to stick to the warhead limits for another year. Why hasn’t Trump accepted this? And ultimately, because I know you have to go, what will bring down — bring us off the brink?
DR. IRA HELFAND: I don’t know why Trump hasn’t accepted this. He said initially that he thought this was a good idea, but then didn’t follow through on it at all. And his more recent comments have been, “If it expires, no big deal.” It is a big deal. It’s a really terrible thing if this treaty is allowed to expire tomorrow and nothing is put in place to replace it.
What we need to do at this point is to build a movement in this country that will force our leaders to take the kind of action that Gorbachev and Reagan took in the 1980s, fundamentally changing the trajectory that we’re on. We have a defense policy that’s based on the dangerous myth that nuclear weapons make us safe. They don’t. They make us strong. But strength and safety are not the same thing. These weapons are the greatest threat to our safety, and we need to move to a world that eliminates them. We have to understand that if we don’t do that, if you allow these weapons to continue to exist, it is not a question of if we have a nuclear war — it’s just a question of when.
We are told that there’s something special about nuclear weapons, they have this magic power. It’s embodied in the deterrence theory, that no one would ever use these weapons because they’re so powerful. The fact is that we know of at least six occasions during the course of the nuclear weapons era where either Moscow or Washington actually began the process of launching the nuclear arsenal, only to discover at the last minute that the alert, the alarm they were responding to, was a false alarm. We have not survived this far because deterrence works. We haven’t survived this far because our leaders were wise all the time, because they knew what they were doing, because they had perfect information and perfect technology. We survived because, according to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. And luck doesn’t last forever. So we need a new foreign policy, a new security policy, that takes this into account, that starts from the premise that our security demands that we seek a world free of nuclear weapons. It’s possible we won’t be able to achieve that, but we have to try, because if we don’t, we know what’s going to happen, and it’s going to be terrible.
Now, what we’ve done here in the United States is to build a campaign, Back from the Brink, that’s designed to mobilize communities around the country around this demand that the United States begin negotiations now with the eight other countries that have nuclear weapons for a verifiable, enforceable agreement to eliminate their arsenals according to an agreed-upon timetable. We also ask the United States to take a number of unilateral steps that it can do with — safely, which will lower the danger of nuclear war and demonstrate our good faith in entering into these negotiations.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Ira —
DR. IRA HELFAND: We don’t ask the United States to disarm unilaterally, but provide leadership for universal disarmament.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Ira Helfand, I want to thank you for being with us, a steering committee member of Back from the Brink, national coalition which has organized people in cities and towns across the United States to call for the end of nuclear weapons, speaking to us from Abu Dhabi, from the United Arab Emirates.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at that meeting between President Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the White House on Tuesday. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: Again, Lila Downs performing Manu Chao’s “Clandestino” for Democracy Now!’s 25th anniversary five years ago.
