You might have heard that Senator Lindsey Graham has just low-key co-signed Israel using nukes against a people who don’t even have a state, let alone nuclear weapons. Comparing Israel’s war in Gaza to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said:
When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons…That was the right decision…Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war. They can’t afford to lose.
Graham is of course flattening World War II history here in a pretty counter-productive way. But it should make us revisit the fascist nuke problem I wrote about last year:
When we see nuclear powers willing to engage in such humanity-erasing practices [pogroms, ethnic cleansing, genocide], should we judge nuclear risks only on the basis of the nuclear balance, ideal-type nuclear posture, or whether a state’s arsenal is survivable?…Ethnonationalism for sure colors risk propensity…in the modern world, white supremacists are not good geopoliticians. How could they be if they have a deranged mental map for how the world works? And the dehumanization of a population is at least a favorable condition (if not a prerequisite) for wielding nuclear death over them.
In a way, nukes themselves are fascist—despotic weapons of terror whose existence perpetuates all kinds of insecurity in all kinds of ways that we often don’t account for. George Orwell seemed to think so. In the context of an ongoing state-based campaign of bombing residential areas, refugee shelters, cultural sites, and universities—sparing neither women nor children nor the elderly—we should fully expect Israel to be entertaining Lindsey Graham’s counsel. And we should be freaked the F out about it.
Also, this isn’t the first time that Lindsey Graham has been nuke-happy, and it probably won’t be the last. He plays a prominent (bad-guy) role in my book on the 2017 nuclear crisis with North Korea. Eventually I made a documentary that Politico Magazine debuted featuring some of his more outlandish remarks about the willingness to wage war against an already-nuclear North Korea.
His two most demented quotes from that crisis:
I am literally willing to put hundreds of thousands of people at risk…
and
If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim Jong Un], it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here.
Graham is not unique. There’s a way that some American officials view security that is highly divisible, fails to take account for the costs and risks of militarized violence, and has unrealistic expectations for how others will respond to uses of (especially nuclear) force. All of this is predicated on being able to see past the humanity in others, and if that’s the case, why not just nuke ‘em all?
Call to Action
If you feel compelled to voice opposition to Graham’s nuclear nonsense and the larger drift happening in global nuclear policies, consider supporting Win Without War’s advocacy against a nuclear race to the bottom.
Is everyone inside the Beltway getting nuke-happy? In their new book out entitled Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure, James Fannell and Bradley Thayer argue that nuclear proliferation (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan . . . ) is a necessary part of the US effort to defeat China. In an interview on recent podcast, Lyle Goldstein said that people in D.C. are talking about how the USA may need to use tactical nuclear weapons on PRC troops--on Taiwan (he wasn't himself arguing in favor of this idea--just saying that it is an actual topic of conversation among people who, at least notionally, play some role in the sausage-making process that somehow generates American policies and sometimes even actions).