How Do You Stop a Nuclear War?
If you are a citizen of a nuclear-armed state, and your politicians seem determined to start a war with another nuclear-armed state, please understand that that rest of humanity depends on YOU to stop the madness.
But what can you do?
1) If there’s an election, and one politician wants to escalate tensions with another nuclear-armed state, don’t vote for that politician. Vote for the one who wants to maintain peaceful relations. And don’t listen to media lies. Listen to what the politician is actually saying, and look at the politician’s personal history. Does this person have a history of starting wars? Or does this person have a history of opposing war?
2) Politicians rarely keep their promises, so if you end up with a war-mongering sociopath in charge of the country, you need to make your voice heard. Go out and protest. Spread the word. Getting hosed down and pepper-sprayed by the police is better than dying in a nuclear holocaust.
3) Get in touch with the civilians of the rival nation and encourage them to also protest their government. Coordinate your efforts. Make it known to the ruling elites that the people will not stand by and allow the ruling sociopaths to wipe out humanity. Share videos of protests in the rival country to prove that the ordinary people in the rival country also don’t want war.
4) If protests don’t work, and your politicians are set on the warpath, start a revolution. You’re doing to die in a nuclear holocaust anyway, so you have nothing to lose. On the up side, you might just save humanity. Also encourage the citizens of the rival nation to start their own revolution.
5) If the revolution fails, know that you died fighting for a good and honourable cause. If the revolution succeeds, scrap all of the nuclear weapons and convert them into fuel for nuclear reactors (or dispose of them safely, but this seems like such a waste). If the revolution succeeds, but then you lose track of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, the situation is now just as bad as when you started the revolution. Starting a revolution is a big gamble, but at least you have a chance to make things better, for the alternative is guaranteed death by nuclear fire.
Obviously, it is preferable to prevent a nuclear showdown at step 1) than to allow things to escalate to step 5). But even if you succeed at step 1), this is no guarantee that future politicians won’t start a nuclear war. Nuclear weapons will always remain humanity’s biggest existential threat as long as nuclear weapons exist. And no, the title of ‘biggest existential threat’ does not belong to climate change. Climate change is nothing compared to death by nuclear fire. Humans can live in any environment, from arid deserts to the frozen tundra of the arctic. We cannot survive massive doses of radiation.
The best way to eliminate the possibility of a nuclear holocaust is to convince the people to stop giving power to power-hungry sociopaths. Nobody has the moral right to start a war in your name. Nobody has the moral right to take your money at gunpoint to finance a war that you oppose. Nobody has the moral right to force you to pick up a gun and kill another human being. Every government of every nation gives itself permission to violate this basic tenant of morality. As such, no government deserves our loyalty. Every government deserves our contempt. Whatever benefits you think you’re getting from the government is not worth the risk that they will destroy everything in a mad grab for power. Everyone, please stop giving power to the government.
