ROW Episode 21

In this episode we examine why it is time to create an International Intelligence and Inspections Agency that can provide accurate, shared, and reliable information to an International Executive allowing the latter to take swift, decisive, and unified action to preserve peace before it’s too late or to restore it once it’s broken, both of which are crucial in  a time where the risks of nuclear war are at an all time high.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we examine why it is time to create an international intelligence and inspections agency that can provide accurate, shared and reliable information to an international executive. Allowing the latter to take swift, decisive, and unified action to preserve peace before it's too late or to restore it once it's broken, both of which are crucial in a time where the risks of nuclear war are at an all time high. We have talked quite a bit about three important steps to change. Three key steps which I want to reiterate here. We need to see things for what they are and as they are, not worse than they are, not better than they are, but exactly as they are. The second thing we need to do is to envision the sort of reality we actually want to have, especially if it looks nothing like what we already have. And the third is bridging the gap, taking the steps necessary to get us from here, where we are, to where we want to be. Now, one of the things we see when we take this very clear eyed view of what's going on in our world, is that humanity is engaging, and has been for a while, in a lot of very adolescent risk taking behavior. We talked at length about the fact that humanity as a whole has been going through a process of growth, of collective growth, and that right now it seems to be going through a very turbulent adolescence. We all know from our own experience as adolescents that one of the phenomena associated with being an adolescent is that of risk taking and pushing the envelope. Unfortunately, some risks that we take are very high and can cause severe long term damage and can mar and blight our growth over the long term. So we actually have to pay attention and be careful. This is true both in our individual and in our collective lives. One of these very high risk types of behavior that we see humanity engaging with is it's flirtation with nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. We've been courting disaster on this front for many years now. Over the years, since we've developed nuclear weapons. 31 nations have flirted with the idea of having their own nuclear weapons, and as of today, nine countries actually have declared nuclear weapons programs. We tried to cobble together a system to control the nuclear arms race, but unfortunately the nuclear arms control system is fraying. That's another truth that we really need to look in the eye. The problem is that as these systems start to fray, the proliferation of nuclear weapons becomes contagious, very much like the coronavirus is contagious. And once it starts to unravel, we're going to start to see an escalation just as we see with the spread of the coronavirus. So why are these restraints weakening? There's several main reasons. One is that tensions amongst the nuclear weapon states, those who own nuclear weapons legally under the current international regime,the tensions amongst them are high. Just looking very quickly at some of these top areas of tension. You've got Pakistan and India, both of which are nuclear weapon states, had a lot of tension over Kashmir. We've read a lot about the clashes that happen periodically over the line of control, which is the supposed border that they agreed to. They've had three wars over this, the last one being a limited war in 1999. Then we've got China and India. They also have a line of control in the Himalayas and in 1962 they went to war over this. In 2020, we saw clashes for the first time in a long time in the Ladakh region in Kashmir, known as Little Tibet. It lies on the border with Tibet itself. This has become a very volatile area where two nuclear weapons states have tensions that run high and could explode at any time into a conflict that escalates and becomes a war in which there's a danger that nuclear weapons will be used. Then we've got Russia and the United States, right? We had a good system for arms control, but it's been unraveling quite spectacularly. In 2019, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty, came to an end. The United States withdrew because it claimed that Russia was cheating and was in material breach of the agreement. Unfortunately that treaty is now gone. We have the START treaty. The New START treaty has now been extended for another five years starting this year, but after it concludes, experts don't think that there's much of a chance that it will be extended any further. This again creates a lot of potential for danger and a nuclear clash between these two countries. Then we've got China and the U. S. Lately a lot of articles have been written about the fact that the area around Taiwan is the most dangerous place on the earth. An Economist article lately called it the most dangerous place on earth. And there have been articles, which is quite concerning which are asking questions like, will the United States and China go to war. One never wants to pick up the paper and read pieces that have these kinds of headings, right? Because if more and more people are starting to talk about this and worry about it, then you figure that there's something going on. Where there's smoke, there's fire. We actually need to stop and pay attention to these areas that could ignite and cause a war in the world That's one of the reasons why the arms control system is fraying, because of these tensions. And we've looked at a few of them, and of course we've got Israel again in the Middle East and we've seen all the tensions in Israel. You can imagine, God forbid if things escalate God forbid that nuclear weapons should be used in the Middle East region. Now, the second reason is that the non nuclear weapon states, those who have agreed not to develop nuclear arms under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, are pretty upset because they signed on to this treaty saying,"Okay, we won't develop nuclear weapons, but the understanding was that those countries that did possess nuclear weapons would make good faith efforts to move quickly towards a state of total nuclear disarmament." and that hasn't happened. That makes the non nuclear weapon states really unhappy and angry. This leads us to the third reason. Some countries who have been angry about this and have also been feeling very insecure about their own status in their regions, have been developing illicit nuclear weapons programs. We know that this was happening in Iran. We know it was happening in North Korea, because North Korea itself told the world,"Hey, guess what? We have a nuclear weapons program." That was created in breach of its commitments under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Anyway, for reasons of insecurity, these nations have been developing illicit nuclear weapons programs. One of the problems with that is when one country starts, the other countries in the region start to get really nervous, and then they start to say,"Well, to protect ourselves, we too want to have such nuclear weapons programs." So right now, the fear amongst experts is that in, in Asia, South Korea and Japan will want to have their own nuclear weapons programs, especially if they see that that China poses a greater danger, or if they feel that Taiwan is becoming a dangerous place, and that there might be conflict between the U. S. and China over Taiwan. Saudi Arabia and Turkey, it is also feared, may want to have their own nuclear weapons programs and, in fact, have been making noises in that direction to counterbalance Iran. So it's this silly game that all the nations of the world are playing, like kids in a playground where you say,"Oh, so and so has this toy, I want one too," or"I want to feel protected and loved, so I want this, to have something that will get me what I want," a feeling of safety or security or whatever it is. We need to arrest this because it's absolutely very dangerous. In fact, lately, the U N Undersecretary for Disarmament said that the risk of nuclear detonation is at its highest peak since the Cold War. That in itself is an alarming statement. Some of you may be thinking,"Oh gosh, aren't we blowing these things out of proportion? Is this all fear mongering?" Maybe not so much. And here's why. There've been a couple of recent revelations about how close humanity came to a nuclear war over the past century. The first is the Cuban Missile Crisis. You'll all remember that in 1962, the Soviets had medium range nuclear missiles, parked in Cuba. The U. S. was upset about that, so the U. S. created a naval blockade to force them to leave. The Soviets sent nuclear armed submarines to try to get rid of the ships that formed the U. S. blockade. Then the U. S. brought in its destroyers and its air force to drop grenades and deep depth charges to try and disperse the submarines. So you've got, as I say, it's almost like child's play if it weren't so dangerous. Now what happened there that has come to light is that a particular Soviet nuclear submarine that was underwater when it came up was being attacked by the U. S. Air Force and thought,"Oh my gosh, war has started." So the commander of that sub gave the order to dive down again and for a nuclear armed torpedo to be launched. It was sheer luck that this actually didn't come to pass. Two things happened. The commander of an American destroyer that was in the vicinity realized what was about to happen and flashed an apology to this nuclear submarine for the aggressive behavior of the U. S. pilots. This flashed apology would have been missed by the Soviet nuclear submarine, had it not been for the fact that the sub's signals officer got stuck with his search light in the shaft of the conning tower. That gave the commander of the Soviet submarine task force, who was just behind the Soviet submarine, time to countermand the order that had been given by the commander of the submarine. So it was a kind of a last second thing. There, but for God's grace, we would have had the start to a nuclear war and crisis. This material only came to light lately, because the documents that were in the archives in the former Soviet areas were revealed, and historians, particularly this one gentleman, Sergei Plokhi, was able to go and do his research and write this book on it. Until now, we'd been saying,"Oh, the reason why we didn't have a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was because the two leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy. realized that it was a bad idea. Actually, it turns out that there was a lot more going on, and it was all very much touch and go, and we just barely missed having a nuclear war by the skin of our teeth. The second example that has also recently come to light is 1958 events in the Taiwan Straits. The Chinese Communist government had started bombing certain islands that belonged to Taiwan, and the U. S. was determined not to let them have the islands. So the U. S. military commanders were planning strategies for how to deal with China. One of the things that they were actually planning and pushing for was the ability to use limited nuclear weaponry, have a quote unquote limited nuclear war by bombing Chinese airfields with nuclear weapons. And if that didn't work, they had plans to move deeper into China, all the way up to Shanghai. The U. S. military was also pushing for a first use nuclear strike. We only averted a nuclear war there because Mao Zedong pulled back from continuing his bombing of these islands. Again, this material was classified and has recently been brought to light. Apparently, it's still classified, but it's now been written about in a book and has been splashed across all the media, because of this gentleman who actually made a copy of this document. The important thing, the takeaway here is that first of all, it is not unlikely that today with all the tensions being so high in places like Taiwan and between Russia today and the United States and all these other places we talked about and innumerable others that we haven't talked about, it is not unlikely that we will end up by accident or through miscalculation in a nuclear war. This is what we learned from these two crises that I talked about. Analysis that has been done shows that in both cases there was a serious case of misperception, a failure by each side to understand and interpret the other's perspective. That's classical, right? We see things through our own filters and don't recognize where the other person's coming from or the other government's coming from, including the failure of decision makers to get inside the minds of their counterparts. The second thing was miscalculations. For instance, Mr. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union had convinced himself that John Kennedy would back down when push came to shove. He thought that he was a pushover, essentially. And he also thought that John Kennedy would see that,"Hey, you know what? You Americans parked your Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey, and so we're doing the same in Cuba, and so there's an equivalency here." Meanwhile, the Americans thought, surely the Soviets, know that Cuba is our backyard, and so they won't interfere. So everyone has their own kind of miscalculations. The third thing was really dramatic intelligence failures, and this is something I really want to focus on here. There was an absence of accurate, timely, and reliable intelligence. For instance, the Americans during the Cuban Missile Crisis thought, based on their intelligence, that the Soviet force on the island was a quarter of its actual size. That is quite a dramatic kind of failure of intelligence. Also, the U. S. President didn't know until late in the day that some of the missiles, the nuclear missiles belonging to the Soviets on Cuba were operational. Nor were the Americans aware that the Soviet commanders on the ground had been given a lot of delegated authority to use tactical nuclear weapons that they had. We didn't even know for 30 years afterwards that such weapons existed. So here's the brutal reality. We simply cannot afford to play with this kind of fire. We simply cannot afford even what we call a limited nuclear war. Experts tell us that even if we had a limited nuclear war, limited in duration, very short and in a very small geographic area, it would lead to several years of crop failures around the world that would put two billion human beings at risk of starvation. That is just incredible. Imagine you've got the pandemic and global recession and if we don't keep our eye on the ball when it comes to nuclear weapons, we could very well have a limited nuclear war in one of these many hot spots around the world. We're essentially playing Russian roulette with nuclear weaponry and proliferation. And because we're so focused on the pandemic and so focused on climate change, we've taken our eye off the ball when it comes to the danger of nuclear war. We need to stop sticking our head in the sand, back to the first three things we talked about, look at reality in the eye pull our head out of the sand, and then see what steps do we need to take to change our reality. So this is what I want to propose. It is time, I believe, to create an international intelligence and inspections agency. It is one step towards a more peaceful and secure world, the kind of world we envision and want, which is what this series is about. So what is it? It is a formalized supra national system that would integrate national intelligence capabilities and responsible gathering of credible intelligence. It would be there for the Security Council to use, because right now, reliance on individual governments' national intelligence information leads to a lot of disinformation and misinformation and a lot of conflicting information. Hans Blix famously wrote about that. The goal of this supranational agency would be to work under the direction of a supranational parliament that we talked about in this series, and a supranational world executive, with the goal of preserving peace and security in the world for the benefit of the world as a whole. The goal of it would be to provide the international community with the tools it needed to take decisions and to provide an international executive as part of a world government with the information it needs that is accurate, shared information. In other words, all members have equal access to the information. They don't say,"Oh our sources are secret, and so we can't share it with you. But trust us, so and so has nuclear weapons." We know how that went in 2003 with Iraq, right? Didn't go so well. So we need shared intelligence. It has to be accurate, has to be credible and reliable. And it has to be timely. The benefit of having such a system is that it enables an international executive or, say, a security council today, to take swift, decisive, equitable, and effective action, because it has to be convinced that there's a genuine threat to the peace, a breach of the peace, or an act of aggression. Also, the benefit is that this information won't be tainted or skewed. So it's more likely to make the decision makers feel comfortable trusting it, so that they can quickly make their decisions, as opposed to postponing and delaying as we did with Iraq, because different intelligence sources were saying different things, and the nations of the world couldn't agree, especially in the Security Council, about what to do. Another amazing benefit is that it is a way of embedding into a new system of global governance, the principle of oneness. We talked about the importance of identifying a set of global ethics or principles and weaving them into a new system of global governance. This is one example, a very concrete example of how we can do that. Another benefit is that it creates greater unity of vision, and action and decision making, as opposed to the current system, where people are drawing on different pools of information and constantly clashing and not being able to come up, especially at the global level, with a shared view of what's going on, what are the facts on the ground, and therefore, what steps do we need to take to protect the human race from the scourge of a nuclear war? Creating such a system is not at all far fetched. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in London in 2005, there is a well respected non partisan think tank called the Oxford Council on Good Governance. They came out with a proposal calling for the establishment of a European intelligence and security service that would consist of merging the existing national intelligence and security services in the European Union into one strong supranational regional security service. If it makes sense to do such a thing at the regional level and it's clearly been proposed and people have been thinking about it and talking about it, why not do this at the international level? We definitely need this, so that we don't accidentally, through miscalculation, or through unneeded escalation, fall into a nuclear war. I doubt very much whether somebody would start a nuclear war deliberately, although the possibility is there. Planning as we saw what happened with the Cuban Missile Crisis and what happened with Taiwan Straits in 1958 really gives one pause for thought on that front, but putting that aside for a second, what's likely to happen is that we'll miscalculate, we'll misread the intentions of other nations, and given the number of nuclear warheads that are in existence we're likely to accidentally get ourselves into a nuclear war, which even if limited, would do untold damage to humanity, which we simply are not in a position, given especially where we are now, with the ravage of the pandemic and the economic crisis and climate change, which itself is decimating us around the world and will continue to do, we simply can't afford it. Okay that's it for today. Let me see if there are any comments. Okay, Brett, yes, food for thought. I hope that you enjoyed it. Think about this, take it away, share it with your friends. I wrote about this back in 2008 actually in my first book Collective Security Within Reach and I've been thinking a lot about it lately because it's so clear to me that we're now at the point again where it's clear that we desperately need such a system. All right if there is nothing else, I invite you all to pick up a copy of my latest book, The Alchemy of Peace, available on Amazon worldwide digitally and in paperback. Thank you for participating. Take care. Goodbye for now. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.