The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and
the global Religious Left are now looking to Martin Sheen for
guidance about nuclear weapons.
True, Sheen did portray a U.S. president in the 1990s television
series The West Wing. But it’s not clear what other
expertise he offers, except he seemingly shares the utopian left’s
long-time perspective that U.S. disarmament is key to world
peace.
The Religious Left, including the World Council of Churches
(WCC), was present for ICAN’s recent jamboree in Oslo, Norway. One
hundred thirty-two governments were represented, as were 500
representatives from “civil society,” i.e. mostly disarmament
groups. The focus was on the “humanitarian effects” of nuclear
weapons.
Hint: the effects are not good.
Of course, the real question is how to deter nuclear war. The
greatest threats today are nuclearized terror states like Iran or
North Korea, or al Qaeda type groups procuring nukes. ICAN-type
festivals do not typically want to confront actual aggressors who
are monstrous enough to initiate a nuclear attack, or at least to
make credible threats. So instead, such get-togethers like to
pretend that all governments with nukes are equally threatening,
and total disarmament is the key to global security.
It’s essentially global gun control writ large. Disarm the
dutifully unlikely aggressors, while the likely aggressors are
indifferent to international sanction or moral appeals.
“We strongly affirm the responsibility of all governments to
examine the impact of nuclear weapons on human health, the
biosphere and the means of life,” WCC general chief Olav Fykse
Tveit told ICAN, speaking on behalf of “Religions for Peace.”
“People everywhere have been denied rigorous, public,
evidence-based scrutiny of weapons which are too terrible for any
use.”
Surely there are no public doubts about the horrors of nuclear
weapons, or their unpleasant impact on “human health” if used.
Essentially these talking points are geared toward overall demands
for total nuclear disarmament by the West, mostly the U.S. ICAN
showed their Oslo audience a “sobering” video about nukes. No
doubt.
According to a WCC report, Martin Sheen regaled the ICAN
audience by recalling how his own Christian faith was enhanced by
watching radical nuns “dance” into a U.S. nuclear test site in
Nevada to provoke arrest. So inspired was he that Sheen went on to
seek his own similar arrest “scores of times.” So there is part of
the key to global peace and disarmament: actors and nuns getting
arrested at U.S. nuclear test sites. He also recounted how his work
on the movie Gandhi, along with meeting the anti-Vietnam
War priests, the Berrigan Brothers, motivated his own activism.
Sheen was accompanied to Oslo by and shared the platform with
leftist Jesuit priest and “peace activist” John Dear, a
pro-disarmament writer whose website boasts that he was nominated
for a Nobel Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu. Dear later enthused:
“Let’s pray that the work of these Norwegian peacemakers may bring
down the walls of fear that support our nuclear weapons industry
and that one day, the world will be free of nuclear weapons.”
The WCC report quoted a Zambian physician boasting that regions
such as Africa and Latin America have shown “moral leadership” by
renouncing nukes and helping to “free the world of nuclear weapons
and prevent the global public health disaster that their use would
create.”
Very nice, but those regions are nuclear-free either because
they are too poor to create nuclear weapons or because they live
under the shield of U.S. guaranteed security. The U.S. and other
Western nuclear powers also have actively deterred nuclear
ambitions by nations such as Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa
over the decades. Absent U.S. power, what would discourage these
nations and many others from seeking the power and prestige of
nuclear weaponry? Also remember that Cuba was nuclearized with
Soviet missiles in 1962 until the U.S. compelled their
removal.
The Religions for Peace statement that the WCC chief delivered
to ICAN was superficial and echoed virtually all Religious Left
anti-nuclear statements of the last 40 years, rehashing its themes
of moral equivalence between the East Bloc and West during the Cold
War. “As religious leaders of different traditions we firmly
believe that these weapons are contrary to our religious and
ethical principles,” it declared, urging a global treaty to ban
nukes.
For religious and other utopian leftists, the key to nirvana is
always a ratified international agreement. But successful treaties
merely acknowledge a pre-existing strategic situation. The U.S. and
Soviet Union/Russia were able to agree to meaningful reductions in
nuclear weaponry and beyond at the close of the Cold War because
communism’s collapse and U.S. predominance made those weapons far
less important. Even a growing China does not seek nuclear parity
with the U.S. as the Soviet Union once did because the size of the
U.S. arsenal deters such a hope. Wealthy Arab nations are not
nuclear armed because they depend on U.S. security guarantees. The
same is true for Japan, South Korea, and all of Europe excluding
nuclear armed France and Britain.
Treaties and international conferences will never of themselves
abolish nuclear weapons, and dreams that they will, if taken
seriously by actual policy makers, are potentially dangerous. The
real nuclear threats of today, terror states and groups, will
pursue nuclear weapons so long as they are allowed by stronger
powers to do so. There is the real issue confronting the world. But
groups like ICAN and its Religious Left supporters, plus Martin
Sheen, prefer their dreams to global and human realities.
Photo: UPI
