Verse of the week:
“Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!/ Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for/ But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known/ Arouse! For you must justify me
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,/ I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness” – Walt Whitman, “Poets To Come”
I’ve been writing posts on armscontrolwonk for thirteen years. During this run, I’ve tried to make the posts about ideas rather than about me. This post is about me.
I’ve been living on bonus time since Large B Cell Lymphoma first came to call in 2007. I was traveling in India when I felt a lump in my chest – a lump that felt malignly alive. Heavy duty chemo gave me a new lease on life. Then in 2011, I was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer. Surgery didn’t help, but I caught another break as the cancer metastasized slowly. In 2017, Large B Cell Lymphoma reappeared. Once again, chemo produced remission. More bonus time.
Until last fall when discomfort prompted another set of scans. In February, I was diagnosed with a fast-progressing cancer of unknown origin. My oncologists gave me a year to live, “more or less” – a pretty safe bet. This time around, my family and I have decided not to seek more bonus time, a quest that is likely to do more harm to my body than good.
Too much medical information, I know. But there’s your explanation for why future posts will appear irregularly. The ideas will henceforth be filled in or cast aside by others.
The initial concept behind these posts was to curate my shoe boxes full of 4X6 cards. The cards were my Maginot Line of Defense against memory loss. I assigned interns and research assistants the task of compressing books and articles into spare summaries. The author’s thesis, strongest and weakest supporting argument and logic train, along with clarifying quotes. All on the front and back of a 4X6 card. An exercise in concision. And training for a lesson that too few who work in and around Washington have mastered: If you want to be heard more, speak less.
The blog posts often dwelled on nuggets of history. If we don’t study the history of nuclear weapons and arms control, how do we get ourselves out of this complicated mess? And who shall the newest among us to learn from?
We’d be lost, literally and figuratively, without a sense of history about nuclear weapons and arms control. How did historic achievements happen, and why were some of them torn down? Why are the lessons of success and failure not obvious?
The next step for me was to write a full-blown history, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control.
Many challenges lie ahead because essential truths are contested, even though these truths have been revealed, time and again. If enough of us remember and fight for these essential truths, we can rebuild what has been torn down.
One essential truth is that a mushroom cloud will make the world far more dangerous and that prospects to reduce these dangers will become more remote. Everything we hold dear hinges on extending the norm of No Use.
A second essential truth is that nuclear deterrence is dangerous by design; otherwise, its designers believe that deterrence will fail.
Because nuclear deterrence is dangerous by design, deterrence requires forms of reassurance to help prevent nuclear use. We call these varied means of reassurance arms control.
Deterrence strategists widely presume that deterrence and reassurance work at cross purposes. Some arms controllers hold a similarly bleak view about deterrence. The historical record demonstrates otherwise — that deterrence and arms control can coexist, and that they must coexist to avoid mushroom clouds.
We become safer by filing down the sharpest edges off nuclear weapons while adding new means of reassurance. This is the heart of the matter. This is how we continue to avoid crimes against humanity and nature.