This Is Not a Drill
“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
On Jan. 13, 2018, every Hawaiian woke up to this message on their cell phones. What followed has been recorded by just about every social media outlet—teary-eyed phone calls to parents, children, siblings and spouses, panicked drivers rushing down the highway to get home before their obliteration, final prayers, recited from numb memory. The embrace of a mother and her son, ready to die together.
Sure, it was a false alarm. But we should stop pretending that our stockpiles have saved humanity because it took an effective miracle to stop them from destroying it. For all intents and purposes, the world should have ended in 1962. One more misstep, one more mishandled incident, one more tech glitch and civilisation as we know it would have ceased to exist. Take it a step further. Replace Kennedy with Donald Trump. Could he have made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis?
And let’s not pretend that there was only one near-nuclear disaster. In fact, a brief Wikipedia search pulls up eleven separate close calls since 1956. That, on average, is a near nuclear disaster every six years. Proponents of the current nuclear status quo, by some perverse logic, argue that therein lies the beauty—we come close to ending the world in fiery Armageddon, but we ultimately pull our wits together and stop it. To them, I issue the same challenge. Replace Kennedy with Trump. Replace Khruschev with Kim Jong-Un.
The reality is that lack of mutually assured destruction, based on an unwavering belief in the peace-making nature of the bomb, rests on the perfection of our leaders and on their ability to never make mistakes. That premise is wrong. Our leaders, almost certainly, will make a mistake in a crisis of these proportions. It is only a matter of time before the “peace” fails and the world slips into conflict—nuclear conflict. We ought to ask ourselves whether we should be gambling with human civilisation on a clearly false premise.
And when that day comes, you will be sitting in your house, playing some game on your phone. That phone will receive a message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” First, you will panic, and then perhaps you will make some final phone calls. And then you will “seek immediate shelter,” as if your little bunker can spare you from the end of the world itself. And then you will realise that you were lied to.
I think we all agree that this is unacceptable. So, then, what can America do without jeopardising its own security today? Here’s a list: (a) we could re-enter the INF treaty, (b) we could reduce our excessive military stockpiles to genuinely manageable levels and invest in improving their reaction times, (c) we could pledge to never be the ones that start a world-ending war and lobby the world to do the same, (d) we could negotiate bilateral stockpile reductions, as we’ve done before and (e) we could re-enter the Iran nuclear deal. And in fact, we must do all of them—we’ve been waltzing on the edge of our own oblivion for far too long, telling ourselves that the world in arms will save itself from war.
I’ve debated this topic with several proponents of MAD, and every time, I am told that we simply have to accept the realities of a nuclearized world, because Russia and China and North Korea will not yield their arsenals. And to clarify, I do not advocate the elimination of the American nuclear stockpile, for that very reason. But if it is starry-eyed to suggest that we can change, I can’t imagine how to describe the lunacy of marching down the road of near-certain doom.
This is not a drill. It wasn’t in 1962, and it isn’t today. To close, I’d like you to see a verse from Do You Hear What I Hear?, a now famous Christmas song written at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis: “said the King to the people everywhere // listen to what I say // pray for peace, people everywhere // listen to what I say.”