Pre-War, Post-War, Anti-War? Defence, Disarmament and Deliberative Democracy

While defence is one of the dominant issues in the 2024 general election campaign, discussion of the appalling implications of a next world war is absent. With politicians unable to grasp the possibility and necessity for change, Sean Howard argues that genuinely deliberative democracy such as citizens’ assemblies is essential to let the people decide on the UK’s future defence posture.

As Owen Jones recently lamented, “the truth is that this country cannot have a sensible discussion about defence.” It certainly isn’t having one during this election, featuring widespread worshipping at the feet of a Trident-brandishing Britannia, wrapping the flag around unrealistic and unnecessary spending commitments.

There is, of course, a general problem with the level of debate during campaigns that are, as George Monbiot recently argued, “a travesty of democracy” in which “vast questions,” including “the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned.” One way to “give the people a real voice”, he argues, is Citizens’ Assemblies, currently ‘trending’ in many countries, randomly selecting a socio-economically and culturally representative cross-section of ‘ordinary people’, 100 or less, to deliberate on a wide range of issues.

To my knowledge, that range has yet to include foreign and defence policy. Last year, Ireland convened a Consultative Forum on International Security Policy, ably reviewed by Andrew Cottey for this blog. Since the disastrous collapse of its ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, popular faith in Irish democracy has been partially restored by regular doses of citizen input, with Citizens’ Assemblies now a permanent and cherished feature of political life. Yet when it came to matters of war and peace, ‘the people’ were invited merely to attend a series of panels and pose questions to ‘experts’, an ‘assembly-lite’ format itself raising questions about the motives of the exercise, particularly at a time of increasing uncertainty about the future of Irish neutrality.   

At the opening, heckled session at Cork University, the Chair of the Forum, Dame Louise Richardson, declared: “This is actually participatory democracy with all its strengths and weaknesses in action.” Yet while the Forum did have strengths and weaknesses – accurately summarized in a report by Richardson to Tánaiste (Foreign Minister) Micheál Martin –  it actually had nothing to do with participatory democracy as customarily understood in political studies. 

When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made his snap election call, I was working on an analysis of the Forum’s deliberations, arguing it should have been the kind of authentically deliberative engagement that the UK stands in even greater need of. While there seems no chance of a Conservative or Labour embrace of anything of the kind – or anything other than the reinforcement of the peace-through-thermonuclear-strength status quo – might it not be possible to build progressive support for such an Assembly before the next election?

Anxiety and apathy

Assuming, that is, that we get that far. As Jones points out, the vacuum where debate should be is currently being filled by “creeping fatalism over a coming war”, with 53% of respondents to a February YouGov poll believing World War Three is either very or somewhat likely in the next 5-10 years, and 59% of them believing such a war would go nuclear. Earlier this month, a poll of Russians found 57% very or somewhat sure world war was coming soon. The two publics, in many ways, live in different political worlds – a flawed democracy and a stultifying autocracy – yet both share an impotent sense of a world monstrously imperilled with imminent mass destruction, a suicidal slide they have no power to arrest.

In part, this toxic combination of anxiety and apathy perhaps reflects the understandable emphasis in recent decades, since the nuclear threat supposedly ‘went away’, on global warming. Demanding a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate and Ecological Justice , Extinction Rebellion argues cogently that with the planet “spinning toward catastrophe”, only participatory democracy can “break the deadlock and … put fairness and justice at the centre of decision-making.” But if preventing extinction is our theme, why not expand the remit of such an Assembly from decarbonizing to – precisely as a matter of climate and ecological justice – denuclearizing?

Let it burn?

We live, we are now routinely told, in a ‘pre-war world,’ in which ours is ‘not to question why’, but patriotically get ‘ready, aye, ready’ (in the WW1 recruitment cry) to fight and die – until ‘the free world’ somehow ‘prevails’. Astonishingly, the YouGov poll managed to ask “which side do Britons think will win in the event of a third world war?” – between ‘Western nations’ and either or both Russia and China – rather than whether they think humanity will survive? Nearly half of respondents opted for “don’t know,” perhaps the nearest they could get to “no one!” For as General Robert Kehler, former Commander of US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), recently told defence journalist Annie Jacobsen, at any time in our nuclear now “the world could end in the next couple of hours.”

In her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Jacobsen shows in devastating detail just how credible this incredible claim is, how easily hundreds of thousands of years of human development could “get zeroed out” in a day. In a recent contribution to Rethinking Security, Brian Martin suggested that such a scenario is far-fetched, that planning for a post-nuclear-war world makes political and moral sense, not least as an opportunity to “bring about changes now…to make societies more resilient, self-reliant and participatory”. I would hope he would agree that Citizens’ Assemblies can help create such societies: but they would not survive first contact with nuclear reality.

Claiming that billions would survive even an all-out exchange, Martin is dismissive of a wealth of nuclear winter science, which, he suggests, fails to appreciate that most targets will be military, and that “many” of the weapons “might fail to launch, miss their targets or not detonate”. Alas, there is no reason to expect such a miraculous reprieve, and in the context of large-scale first and second strikes, few meaningful distinctions between military and civilian targets exist. As further support for his claims, Martin adds that, for all their atrocious health and environmental impacts, hundreds of nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere were “hardly the end of the world.” But nuclear tests, high above and underground, don’t suggest the effects of nuclear war: nuclear winter will start with hundreds of ground zeroes, turning incinerated towns and cities into fast-rising, long-lasting, sun-blocking black carbon.

Deterrence after annihilation?

Herein, of course, lies the tragic irony of seeking to prepare entire societies to fight a third world war much like the first two, claiming millions of lives over years, in denial of the reality that they would soon be swept aside by shockwaves erasing cities in seconds, killing millions in moments, billions in the cold, dark and hunger to follow.

There will be no histories of such a war, except pre-emptive ones like Jacobsen’s. But if by some miracle there were, surely a first question would be: “what were they thinking?” That conventional rearmament in the nuclear age made perfect sense? That if ‘deterrence’ failed it could always be ‘restored,’ in what the Pentagon calls a “post-NUDET [nuclear detonation] radiological environment”?

But there are deeper questions: why did no one ‘in charge’ of British national security, back in the pre-war day, ever think to ask ‘we, the people’ what we thought? And why, given that nearly one-third of Britons expected a nuclear war within 5-10 years, was nuclear disarmament, or at least the avoidance of nuclear annihilation, not a pressing issue in the 2024 electoral campaign?

Any properly-conducted Citizens’ Assembly dealing with issues of nuclear weapons and disarmament should have the chance to hear from nuclear winter scientists as well as their sceptics. Lifting the veil from vague, loosely-bandied terms like ‘pre-war,’ ‘world war,’ and ‘post-war’ would be an important part of the exercise: and lifting veils, after all, is what real democracies do.

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The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.

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Image Credit: Stefan Mueller, via Flickr. Extinction Rebellion protesters call for a Citizens’ Assembly on climate policy, 2019.