Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes joins Radhika Desai on Geopolitical Economy Hour

"There are signs that the nuclear escalation ladder is getting shorter."

Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes joined Radhika Desai on the Geopolitical Economy Hour on June 23rd to discuss why nuclear weapons have disappeared from public discourse in the West, the challenges for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the interconnection of capitalism and imperialism with the history of nuclear weapons.

This conversation covers a range of topics related to nuclear risk, disarmament, and who really bears responsibility for the escalating danger of nuclear war. Watch the full discussion or read the transcript below!

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Episode Sections:
00:00 Highlights
01:22 Channel introduction
01:45 Support the channel + Q&A announcement
03:04 Are we getting closer to nuclear war?
09:40 Introducing professor Ivana Nikolić Hughes
11:27 The NPT: what it is and why it has failed
19:20 The real risk: accident & miscalculation
24:42 Why is the public so apathetic?
29:53 Capitalism, imperialism & the history of nuclear weapons
38:43 US historical responsibility: from Hiroshima to the Marshall Islands
45:37 Why do the UK and France still have nuclear weapons?
50:21 Nuclear weapons as a tool of imperial dominance
54:57 Who is really responsible, and what needs to change
59:08 Closing remarks

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75th Geopolitical Economy Hour: Nuclear Scientist: They Are Pushing for Nuclear War | Ivana Hughes and Radhika Desai

Radhika Desai:

Hello and welcome to the 75th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the conversation that illuminates the fast-changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times from a socialist and anti-imperialist point of view; the point of view, that is, of the world majority. I’m Radhika Desai and you are watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist.

But before we continue with this episode, let me take a minute to remind you to please like and share this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and if you can, please donate. You can do this through our Patreon, by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack, or by becoming a member here on YouTube. It helps us to produce high-quality content and keep it free.

And there is more. Paid members and subscribers on Patreon, YouTube, or Substack will be able to participate in an exclusive question and answer session with me later this month on the 27th of June. We invite you to pose any geopolitical economic question that has been dogging you. Our range is wide; it includes themes such as de-dollarization, financialization, debt, development, inflation, and many other themes. We will hold these question and answer sessions for subscribers and members at the end of each month as a way of expressing our gratitude for supporting me and my team, and helping us produce the independent socialist and anti-imperialist understandings of our radically altering world that we have been doing for some time now. More information on the question and answer session will follow closer to June 27.

And now, back to the main topic of the day. Are we getting closer to nuclear war? Prima facie, it would seem so. After all, wars are raging around the world. At a minimum, we can count the war on Iran, the conflict in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, Israel’s war on Lebanon, and the war in Sudan. Many of them involve at least one nuclear power.

However, compared to a few decades ago when the installation of nuclear weapons could bring out thousands and even hundreds of thousands in protest, fear of nuclear war has receded from public discourse. For one thing, the slower, if sure, march of climate change and environmental disaster has trumped the fear of nuclear war. For another, Western publics at least are convinced that nuclear war, should it happen, will have been the work of some rogue state or even non-state actor, and that the only thing is to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. That has certainly been the justification of the diplomacy and military action of the West against Iran over the last decade or two, from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran nuclear deal as it is colloquially known, to the current still-unended war.

So far, the nuclear threshold has not been crossed, that is, if we don’t count the many times in which the West has used depleted uranium weapons. However, there are signs that the nuclear escalation ladder is getting shortened.

With me to discuss all this is Professor Ivana Nikolić Hughes. Welcome, Ivana.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes:

Thank you so much, Radhika. It’s really a pleasure to be with you, regardless of just how serious, difficult, and challenging this conversation is.

Radhika Desai:

Yes, indeed, we’re about to embark on a very difficult conversation, and Ivana, you are one of the very few people extremely qualified to speak about this issue today. You are President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. You serve as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group on the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a committee consisting of 15 experts from around the world who advise the state parties on scientific issues as they pertain to the treaty. Your writing on this and other subjects has appeared widely around the world in Al Jazeera Arabic, The Hill, The Nation, Common Dreams, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, Truthout, Transcend Media Service, The Diplomat, and elsewhere. And last but not least, you have a scientific background on the technical side of nuclear weapons, having conducted research on elucidating the radiological conditions at former nuclear testing sites. I’m sure that was a rather gory activity that you must undertake, and it’s an important one to undertake. So, Ivana, how do you assess the nuclear situation today? What worries you most about it?

Ivana Nikolić Hughes:

I think, Radhika, that you gave a really brilliant and very comprehensive overview. So, I’m just going to add a couple of points to it. The assessment that we are sort of in as challenging of a situation as since the dawn of the nuclear age, I think, is really on the mark. To me, the Doomsday Clock—the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ assessment—is, of course, a symbolic measure. It’s not a precise quantitative measure. People sometimes argue about whether they should have gone to 80 seconds versus 85 seconds, but that part doesn’t really matter. What matters is: how are we doing compared to last year? How are we doing compared to 10 years ago? How are we doing compared to the end of the Cold War? And really, since the end of the Cold War, we’ve just been sliding closer and closer to this hypothetical midnight; nuclear annihilation.

The reasons really are many. Again, your overview of the issues pertaining to the policy front, the current conflicts, and the general public is excellent and very comprehensive. So, I’ll just add a little bit to each of those three points.

On the policy front, I just want to underscore—and you went into this—the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is considered, as you’ll often hear diplomats talk about, the cornerstone of international security. It is not just the largest international agreement that deals with the nuclear issue; it’s one of the largest international agreements in the United Nations period. With a great number of states parties, basically all of the UN member states are party to this treaty, except for Israel, India, and Pakistan. North Korea used to be in the treaty and then left it in 2003, and South Sudan is not a party to the treaty, but we’re really talking about a very small number of states.

I just want to underscore the latest review conferences. You said they happen every 5 years, but with COVID, things got a little bit out of schedule. The latest one ended exactly a month ago—we’re recording this on June 22nd, so it ended May 22nd—and it’s, as you said, the third review conference that ended without an adopted outcome document. What this means is that since 2010, the states parties to this treaty, regardless of how much they laud its importance, have not been able to agree even on the most basic of commitments to what it is that the treaty is really supposed to accomplish.

The treaty is widely seen as covering three pillars. It’s called the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but it really has two other parts to it. Non-proliferation is about additional states pledging not to acquire nuclear weapons. Anyone who is party to this treaty and who, at the time when it was negotiated in the ‘60s (negotiations were concluded in ‘68), didn’t have nuclear weapons pledged not to acquire them. The five nuclear weapons states who had nuclear weapons at that point, actually Israel probably had them as well, but Israel never engaged with this process, were the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), China, France, and the United Kingdom. Those five are recognized by the treaty as having nuclear weapons. But they also have this obligation in Article VI to negotiate to cease the nuclear arms race, to disarm, to pursue nuclear disarmament, and in fact, to get to a point of general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. This is the ultimate anti-war treaty. This is a treaty that says you need to get rid of all of your arms.

That disarmament part of the treaty is what hasn’t been working. The third pillar is the promotion of peaceful uses of nuclear technologies, including nuclear power and nuclear energy. Depending on your views on nuclear energy, you might think this is a success or not, but the failure of the treaty is very clear, and it lies at the feet of the nuclear weapons states. The treaty entered into force in 1970, so we’re talking about 56 years of not actually making progress—except for that moment at the end of the Cold War when the US and Russia really did negotiate and had significant decreases in their nuclear arsenals. There hasn’t been a good faith effort among the five nuclear weapons states, or among what are now nine nuclear-armed states that possess nuclear weapons, to really pursue nuclear disarmament, let alone general and complete disarmament.

That’s on the policy front. I’ll just add, since you did mention that I am on the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), that this is another development on the policy front. Unlike everything else you described, which is really worrying, challenging, difficult, and backsliding, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which currently has 74 states parties and another 25 signatory states, is really a bright light in a very dark world. It’s also an effort undertaken primarily by countries in the Global South who have recognized that nuclear weapons don’t just pose a threat to cities or countries that might be attacked, but in fact, pose a threat to all of humanity and to the entire planet. They’re basically saying, “You know, we want to have a say on this.” Amid such difficult conditions, it’s not like I’m expecting this treaty to lead us tomorrow to the elimination of nuclear weapons, but I think it’s a very important effort to try to wake everyone up and build international pressure on these countries that are using these weapons for their own strategic interests while putting literally all of humanity under threat.

On the conflict side, I want to point out one thing: people often think about these wars happening and wonder if someone will deliberately use a nuclear weapon. That’s obviously a very important question. It’s a question that many people have been asking since the onset of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the new phase in that war. And it’s a question that people have been asking over the last few months with President Trump’s repeated statements that seem to suggest that this was, in fact, something he was contemplating, threatening to bomb Iran into the stone age, threatening that a whole civilization will die tonight, threatening “a big one,” or whatever vocabulary he may have been using. Anyone who thought that he was implying he could use a nuclear weapon wouldn’t be wrong. At one point he said, “Oh, I would not use a nuclear weapon,” which is good news, but it’s also just deeply concerning that we’re engaging in this as a serious conversation.

But I want to make the point that that’s just one of the dangers with nuclear weapons: the idea that either one of these states, call them global superpowers, will use it in a moment of desperation or a moment in which they just say, “Well, I’ve done all these other things, I might as well just go for the big one,” or whether some rogue state does it, as has been sold to the general public. Those are some possibilities, of course, and real ones. What worries me even more is the possibility of some kind of an accidental or miscalculated use of a nuclear weapon because someone thinks they’re under attack. There could be a cyberattack that makes you think you’re under attack. Many states, including the US, have launch-on-warning policies.

We know from history that the times when we got really close to a potential use of a nuclear weapon, not to mention nuclear war, were actually those kinds of moments, moments where someone thought something was happening that wasn’t really going on, and they may have gone ahead and used a nuclear weapon. That’s what worries me so much about these conflicts you’ve named that have nuclear weapons or nuclear-armed states directly or indirectly involved; someone just ends up making the wrong decision, or some sort of an accident leads to that kind of chain reaction, for lack of a better word, that leads us to nuclear war. So, I think that’s something else people really need to be aware of, that we’re not just discussing here the possibility that President Trump, President Putin, or whoever makes a deliberate decision to launch the nuclear codes.

The last point I want to make is regarding the general public, which you very well and rightfully described as sort of not thinking about this despite all the dangers. When I first became interested in the issue of nuclear weapons about 15 years ago, in 2011, I would say things to people, and I’m talking about educated people, not just randomly discussing this on the street, and they’d say, “Oh, we still have nuclear weapons?” You could sort of forgive them at that time because it was out of everyone’s minds. But you can’t say that today. You actually cannot say that people are unaware that we have nuclear weapons or that they’re unaware that nuclear weapons could be used. And yet, the apathy of the general public is so deeply concerning in some sense. I find it, just as an academic question, a really curious question: how did we, as in some collective system, succeed at pushing this or sweeping it under the rug, just literally pulling it out of the public’s consciousness?

This was a general public that, in the 1980s, marched a million people strong in Central Park in New York City, as well as in cities around the world. This was a general public that really understood very deeply that these weapons threatened all of us. In the 1960s, there was a movement that helped to bring about the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which was a very important development and often not given its due. But today, the question is: why is the general public so apathetic? I think you offered two perfectly good hypotheses: that other issues have sort of taken the front seat, like climate change and environmental concerns, which are all very important issues; and this issue that somehow the danger of nuclear weapons was associated with a rogue state or a terrorist group. That was certainly a narrative that was sold after the end of the Cold War as a way of keeping this going, right? Because even in 1985 or 1986 in Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan almost agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons. So, in some sense, the system found some way of maintaining a reason why we still had to have nuclear weapons.

But I’m not fully satisfied with just those two hypotheses. I think there’s more. I think there’s a very pernicious way in which nuclear deterrence, the concept that nuclear weapons keep us safe, rather than that nuclear weapons put all of us at threat of annihilation, has played a very significant role in having the general public sort of accept nuclear weapons as a necessary evil. I think part of it is just the fact that it’s not talked about enough, not nearly enough. And part of me doesn’t understand why it’s not talked about enough.

When I was talking to some colleagues in the disarmament movement and criticizing the conventional media outlets like the New York Times, someone told me, “Oh, but remember what the New York Times published a year and a half ago, they published this great thing.” And I said, “Yes, I do, and it was great, but they need to have an article every single week on this issue, fine, maybe not every day.” It’s not an issue they should be addressing once a year and patting themselves on the back, saying, “Oh, we’re so great, we’re telling people about the danger of nuclear weapons.” It’s an issue that needs to be talked about nonstop. And that’s the million-dollar question: how do we do that?

Radhika Desai:

Yeah. I mean, and this is really fascinating because what you are saying prompts me to introduce a further hypothesis about why we’re not talking about nuclear weapons. But that’s connected with something else I wanted to say, which is, you’re absolutely right, of course, that the possibility of a nuclear accident or some miscalculation leading to nuclear war is very real. That was the premise of Stanley Kubrick’s famous film Dr. Strangelove, if people haven’t seen it and are interested in nuclear issues, they must see it. It’s an oldie but goody. You’ve got to see it. It’s from 1964 but as relevant as ever.

But there is another way of thinking about it. As you know, I’ve shared this article with you, some years ago, maybe ‘21 or ‘22 thereabouts, I wrote a piece on capitalism and nuclear weapons, in which I managed to sustain the argument that capitalism, of course, is inherently connected with imperialism, and the history of nuclear weapons cannot be separated from the history of the imperialism of the capitalist states. So, in this, I make a number of points.

One of them is that the United States is the one and only country to have used nuclear weapons, and it also did so without real justification, because the justification it trotted out, namely, that somehow half a million lives were saved which would have been lost in the invasion of Japan, is false. Japan was already suing for peace when they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My conclusion, and this by the way is not my research, I merely cite other highly authoritative research by leading US historians who have pointed out that the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that it was in possession of these astonishing weapons of mass destruction, so as to have the upper hand in the post-war negotiations that would ensue.

So that’s one thing. In that sense, it’s definitely tied up with imperialism, with the United States taking up the imperialist baton from the European powers who over the course of two world wars destroyed themselves. All of this stuff is going on.

Then I also show that, in fact, the United States has been making the running all along in terms of escalating the nuclear war, while the Soviet Union, which was the leading counter-power at that time, and to a lesser extent China, was simply trying to take a defensive posture. China has a no-first-use policy. The Soviet Union tried for years to get the United States to adopt a no-first-use policy, and then having failed, in the early ‘80s Brezhnev just said in the United Nations, “We renounce the first use of nuclear weapons unilaterally.”

All of this stuff is going on. So I think that we have to really try to say that there is a certain connection with capitalism. This idea of “a pox on both your houses,” that all the big powers are the same, it does not work.

Now, here’s my connected hypothesis: basically, as long as the Cold War lasted, it was legitimate discourse, certainly in the United States, that if the public was convinced the Soviet Union was a threat, then you needed nuclear weapons, you needed to keep modernizing nuclear weapons, and so on. The last president to really trumpet nuclear weapons and nuclear defense was, of course, Ronald Reagan. On the one hand, he was pursuing these arms control treaties, as you rightly pointed out, in Reykjavik, he and Gorbachev practically agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons, but he also launched the Strategic Defense Initiative and so on.

Anyway, the point is that was the last time. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a certain shamefacedness on the part of Western countries. They actually cannot justify the astronomical expenditures behind nuclear weapons, and so they’d rather just do it without discussing it in public. Effectively, in Western countries in particular, nuclear weapons have become depoliticized. We don’t discuss them; we just assume that whatever the state is doing is correct.

But of course, in Russia and China, these things are more widely discussed because these countries can make a legitimate case that what they are doing is pursuing nuclear defense. They have nuclear weapons because anybody can see that Iran got bombed and had a war conducted on it, but not so North Korea. North Korea, no matter how few weapons it has, sits inviolate. The Trump administration, in its previous incarnation, even launched talks. As everybody will remember, “Rocket Man” and “dotard” and what have you, they launched these talks with North Korea because just prior to Trump being elected, North Korea had demonstrated that it now had missiles that could reach the West Coast of the United States. So, it then became even more urgent for the United States to pursue some kind of Iran-like agreement with them, but it failed because actually, Trump is not such a great negotiator; The Art of the Deal is a work of fiction, if ever there was one. So, I think that, you know, I wonder what you might want to say about all that. Sorry to have gone on for a bit, but...

Ivana Nikolić Hughes:

These are all excellent points, and your article was really brilliant. I really enjoyed reading it and thinking about it from your geopolitical economist perspective. So, I think there’s really a lot. I want to say something just a little more general, and then I’ll come back to a couple of points you just made.

To me, the issue with nuclear weapons is it’s a little bit like we have a very sick society, whatever term I want to use for society worldwide, or Western countries, or wherever we want to turn our focus. It’s like comparing it to a very sick patient. That sick patient may need to exercise more, may need to have more disciplined sleep habits, and may need to stop eating dessert or fast food. But if that sick patient also does something that literally threatens their life every single day or every single time they do it, and I’m not to single out drug use, but let’s say they use heroin, and every time they use heroin there’s some probability that they could just die, then the sleep habits, the dessert, the exercise, and all of this other stuff isn’t going to help fix that.

To me, I fully recognize that there are so many deep problems, and so many are serious and need to be addressed and require systematic solutions and initiatives on many different levels. But on this issue, Radhika, I mean I’m not exaggerating. People sometimes listen to interviews that I give, and they think I’m making this stuff up. Like, I’m not making this stuff up. This is scientific data we’ve had for decades, and it has only gotten better over time because of our ability to model things, things like nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, and the spread of radiation. Not to mention the fact that we have over 12,000 nuclear weapons, most of which are far more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and would flatten hundreds of cities around the world. In those cities, people would be incinerated, or if they survived, would suffer such serious injuries, including third-degree burns and so on. This is not something that is made up. Even President Trump, whom one doesn’t want to give credit for much of anything, has said over and over again, “We could destroy the Earth 50 times over, maybe a hundred times over.” That level of quantitative detail is not necessary, but the message stands. This is like just something that you, as a sick patient, do every day that puts your life at risk. And that’s what we’re doing to humanity. It to me is sort of incomprehensible, just to go back to the older point, that the general public is not up in arms, saying, “Stop threatening our lives, the lives of our children, our grandchildren, and all future generations.” This is just not acceptable. So that’s kind of my general point: let’s fix this, let’s not put ourselves at annihilation risk every single day, and let’s address this issue as soon as possible.

On the broader issue of the United States, on the one hand, it has the most clear historical responsibility to deal with this issue. It’s so obvious; it’s the country that brought nuclear weapons into the world. We really don’t know what would have happened if all the Manhattan Project physicists had walked away when Germany surrendered. They all joined the Manhattan Project because Germany was pursuing an atomic weapon as well, and I think they were all, rightfully or wrongfully, it doesn’t even matter, convinced that it was the right thing to do. But once Germany was defeated, only one scientist, Joseph Rotblat, walked away. He said, “I thought we were building this against the Germans, so what is the point now?” There is a whole history there.

In fact, Peter Kuznick, who is one of the historians who talks a lot about this, and I published an article not that long ago in Al Jazeera Arabic in the context of the conflict regarding Iran. This was when some voices from Israel, as well as the United States, were saying things like, “Well, we could use a nuclear weapon on Tehran, and that would save lives compared to a ground invasion.” They were trying to use that false historical narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claims those bombings were necessary to get Japan to surrender. They were not. Even at the most basic level, what the United States could have done is change the surrender terms to allow Japan to keep the Emperor, which they ended up doing afterwards anyway. That was the simplest way.

Furthermore, a group of scientists in something called the Franck Report had recommended that the explosion be conducted as a test demonstration and that foreign dignitaries be invited so they could see the United States possessed this weapon, rather than dropping it on a city. But the US didn’t do that. You also could have evacuated the cities if you were strictly determined to destroy whatever military installations existed in Hiroshima.

Instead, the United States dropped the bombs and immediately embarked on a legacy of testing. Six months after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States went to the Marshall Islands, where we have conducted the majority of our research. They told the people of Bikini Atoll to leave their island, and those people still have not returned. Our research shows that Bikini is still radiologically contaminated at levels where I wouldn’t want my children growing up. My husband and I have done this research together, and we always felt that that is your ultimate safety standard: would I want my children to live there?

After that, among the nuclear-armed states, there have been more than 2,000 nuclear explosions around the world, most of them far more powerful than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US started that; I often describe it as writing the playbook for the nuclear testing era, so the historical responsibility is really grave. Not to mention, as you said, the “no first use” policy, that’s something the US has resisted for decades. I think even Biden was considering doing something like that, but they say things in campaigns and then they get into office and nothing happens.

The irony, of course, is the US has all this responsibility, and yet it also has the most to gain from a world free of nuclear weapons. I’ve been recently reading some of the old interviews and writings of physicists from the Manhattan Project generation who repeatedly pointed this out. The US has geography on its side, nestled between two oceans, and it has this massive conventional military. On paper, who could in a significant way harm the United States on its own territory? Whereas in a world with nuclear weapons, while I’m not saying all eight other nuclear-armed states would attack the United States, in principle, all eight possess the means to destroy the United States, including North Korea.

To me, that’s the ultimate craziness of spending a trillion dollars, and now Trump wants to spend $1.5 trillion on defense, and you’re totally, utterly, and completely vulnerable in a matter of minutes. This is Annie Jacobsen’s book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. It takes 32 minutes for a nuclear war to take place in a way that completely destroys the United States. So, what is your defense money doing? What are you gaining for all of this? You’re really just gaining the total and complete threat of destruction.

I’ll just make one more point, moving away from the United States to the United Kingdom and France. France is really getting deep into this right now by talking about increasing their arsenal and sharing their nuclear weapons with the EU and so on. But for decades, they’ve both had on the order of 200 to 300 nuclear warheads each, and the question is why? When you look at a globe, you see just how small Europe is; it’s just so tiny. In any kind of a nuclear war, even if we talk about India and Pakistan, the global impacts of something like a nuclear winter would lead to starvation in Europe, so it doesn’t even matter. But if European cities were attacked in a nuclear war, the entirety of Europe would just turn into one big Hiroshima. It’s not possible to localize it at all in the European context.

The question is, what are these countries doing with these weapons? To me, the UK and France quite simply have nuclear weapons as a continuation of their colonial past and present. It’s a way of signaling that they are still superpowers, that they still matter, and that they are still somehow important in the world. If I were looking at it, I guess the big news today is that Starmer is leaving or has resigned, the question is, what would real leadership for those two countries look like? Is real leadership having weapons that threaten to destroy the world, or would it look like engaging in initiatives for peace and recognizing their own historical responsibility? The UK and France bear a lot of responsibility for trying to fix things in the Global South, and that would be a much better way of projecting superpower status than claiming to be important just because they have nuclear weapons. The main point I’m trying to make is that this whole thing of imperialism and nuclear weapons is deeply intertwined.

Radhika Desai:

Let me elaborate because you raised some really excellent points. We need to bring this to a close soon because I don’t like going much over an hour, but maybe we should come back and discuss specifically the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, let me just respond to the general points that you made.

First of all, the research that you cited showed that the United States has the most to gain from losing nuclear weapons because it has a lot of natural protection. Are Mexico and Canada ever going to attack the US? On the other two sides, they have two large oceans, so what has the United States got to be afraid of? But saying that misses the whole point of our discussion about imperialism. United States foreign policy is not based on national interests as if it were the interest of ordinary Americans. American foreign policy is made from the point of view of the interests of an ever-shrinking elite. Once upon a time, we talked about the corporate capitalist class; today, we can only talk about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and people like that. You can count the number of these people they can’t number more than a couple of dozen. That’s what an imperial foreign policy is about. It’s not about ordinary people. In pursuit of its imperial policy, the United States has flung ordinary Americans’ lives into this. The Vietnam War was fought with the draft, so they don’t give a whit.

The United States wants nuclear weapons so that it can threaten the rest of the world in order to cow other countries and governments into doing the bidding of the Americans. As far as economic policy is concerned, they want the rest of the world to open up their economies to the activities, needs, and demands of American corporations, allowing them to have their way with the rest of the world. The most successful developers in the history of capitalism outside the traditional homelands, which developed through imperialism, have been socialist countries and countries like Iran that really had to stand up to the power of the West and defend themselves. For China, North Korea, or Russia, nuclear weapons have largely been defensive.

The reason I wanted to write that article is because I went to a conference about nuclear weapons. And while the technical and scientific discussion was very illuminating, it took place as if you can discuss all this without discussing the history of capitalism and imperialism over the last 300 years. No, you cannot separate these two things.

Finally, as far as the United Kingdom and France are concerned, what do they want? Given that the structure of imperialism has changed, their corporate capitalist classes cannot get advantages in the wider world unless they hitch their wagon to the United States. They have done that, but at the same time, their retention of nuclear weapons gives them a pass to say they must be present at all important tables and talks. I entirely agree with you, but it is not just about their past imperialism; it’s about the advantages that their corporations and the wider US-European-British capitalist class get from their attachment to the world system.

Perhaps in a future discussion, we could discuss the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself and how it has been politicized. If a power is friendly to you, like Germany, they can do all sorts of things with their nuclear program and nobody interferes. But the slightest misdemeanor, which can even be an entirely imagined misdemeanor on the part of an Iran or a North Korea, would bring down hell on that country. To me, the most important provision in the NPT is actually the commitment for the nuclear powers to give up their nuclear weapons and negotiate an end to them. It is precisely because this commitment has not been kept that we are where we are today with the escalating dangers of nuclear war. In this failure, the primary responsibility is on the part of the capitalist imperialist powers. It’s not the responsibility of Moscow or Beijing; it’s the responsibility of Washington, London, Paris, and of course, Tel Aviv. But that’s another story altogether.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes:

Yeah, those are all excellent points. As a US citizen, I often stress the US’s responsibility because of all that history we discussed, as well as the fact that the US acts as if it wants to lead the world. Well, then lead the world in something good, lead the world in nuclear disarmament. It really is a legal obligation according to the treaty. In the United States, when the US ratifies a treaty, as it did with the NPT, it becomes the supreme law of the land according to our Constitution. This is not just something that the US should be setting aside.

I just want to make one final point about the lesson that countries are learning. Not just from the vulnerability of Iran to being attacked, but from the fact that North Korea is not being attacked. The lesson then is, “Oh, you better have nuclear weapons if you want to have a sovereign state and do things your own way.” Of course, if everyone had their own nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t be here; who knows how long the Earth and humanity would last.

This was actually what John F. Kennedy was very concerned about. He was specifically concerned about the Israeli nuclear program because he thought, “If we can’t convince an ally to not pursue nuclear weapons, how are we going to convince others who are less friendly?” His nightmare was that there would be 15, 20, or 25 nuclear-armed states, and that this would lead to nuclear war before you could even count to 10. So, the key issue is as long as you keep claiming that nuclear weapons keep you safe, and as long as you keep refusing to meet your obligations on disarmament, you’re going to be giving others the idea that they should acquire nuclear weapons, and then we will really continue to be in trouble.

Radhika Desai:

Yeah. I mean, Kennedy is such a complex character because while of course he feared all these things, he also campaigned on a missile gap.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes:

He did, but he really seems to have had a change of heart after the Cuban Missile Crisis. In my mind, that’s fairly well documented.

Radhika Desai:

That’s another thing that perhaps we can discuss in a future episode, because it seems to me that the high point of nuclear arms control actually came in the 1970s and spilled over a little bit into the ‘80s. The Soviet Union acquired its own bomb a mere four years after 1945, which the United States had not imagined. So much for trashing Soviet science; it could get up to a lot of things. But the point is that it initially lacked delivery capacity. It was only in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, once the Soviet Union began to be more or less on par with the United States, that the deterrence factor clicked in, and then there was nuclear arms reduction.

Anyway, that is another set of imponderables, but we should probably end it here; otherwise, we’ll try our audience’s patience too long. I hope everyone has really enjoyed this fascinating discussion and gained a better understanding of this matter from Ivana’s great experience. If you did, again, please like, subscribe, and donate if you can. I’m sure Ivana will be back, and we’ll be discussing other aspects of the nuclear issue. If you have any suggestions or questions you particularly want us to discuss, please put them in the comments. Having said that, thank you very much, Ivana, and thanks to the audience. Until next time, goodbye.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes:

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.