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nuclear war
To Stop US Wars, Saying No Is Not Enough
The US left needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
Apr 09, 2026
The US-Israeli attack on Iran put an exclamation point on the Gaza genocide. It sent a message to the world from the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv: We will do anything that our military strength allows us to do. There are no rules or international laws we are bound to respect.
Most European governments, many regimes elsewhere, and major sections of the Democratic Party leadership offer only a few “process objections” to this level of ruthlessness but go with the flow.
This is a road to global catastrophe. Despite the fragile (and welcome) ceasefire, It is accelerating a process that was already underway where every government in the world is deciding that their overriding priority must be increasing their military strength. And that security requires cracking down on opposition movements within their own countries as well.
An Interconnected World
To halt and reverse this course, it is essential but not sufficient to build mass opposition to the war on Iran and all the other evils perpetrated by Washington, The US left also needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
In today’s world, there will be security for no one unless there is security for all.
That vision starts with the reality of an interconnected world where humanity’s very survival is in doubt. Viruses and the fallout from nuclear explosions know no borders. An interruption of supply chains in the Middle East threatens food security across the globe. Destruction in the Amazon Basin wreaks havoc on the climate worldwide.
In today’s world, there will be security for no one unless there is security for all. Weaving the fight for human survival together with peoples’ struggles for self-determination and against all forms of oppression, and with the fight for working class power, workers fighting for their rights, is a complex task. Yet in a world where diplomacy and inter-state cooperation predominate, movements for democracy and social justice have more favorable conditions to achieve their goals.
Without softening our critique of the US-dominated world order that is passing away, developing a forward-looking platform entails assessing the heightened dangers faced under Trump 2.0. It means breaking down the largely artificial division between domestic and foreign policies. When militarism, racism, and misogyny is practiced abroad, these pathologies inevitably come home.
Competing Visions as the Old Order Collapses
Today this quote from Antonio Gramsci is popular throughout the Left: “The old order is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born.” The different factions of the oligarchy are rushing into this “interregnum” to shape what comes next.
MAGA-Trump 2.0 argues that considering values like democracy or human rights when formulating policy is naïve if not treasonous, and that multilateral institutions are simply shackles on US power. It sees staying No. 1 in global “lethality” as the road to safety and prosperity for the “heritage Americans” who will dominate the country after removing or subordinating the various “others” who now live here.
The anti-MAGA wing of the US elite insists that the “rules-based” world order of the last 80 years produced a great American way of life. A few “mistakes” (Vietnam, Iraq) just need to be corrected to get back on the right track. Their program is to preserve NATO and other Cold War-era alliances; keep China at bay; and use “soft power,” sanctions, and “smart wars” to remain the world’s dominant power.
The left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win popular support if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision of what the world can look like if we are shaping US policy.
Global Cooperation vs. American Exceptionalism
That vision has to address the hopes, fears, and pressing needs of the majority of US people. It has to be compelling enough to counter the American exceptionalist ideology that permeates US culture. Resting on the longstanding position of the US as the hegemonic global power and promoted unceasingly by the political class and mainstream media, the idea that the US is an inherently virtuous nation which always acts as the world’s “good guy” has long defined US “common sense.”
Anti-war and solidarity movements targeting Washington’s role in Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Iraq, and Palestine have spotlighted the destructive role the US has played in each case. At times, energetic social movements have built mass support for arms control agreements and aggressive steps to fight climate change. But we have yet to win a durable majority to a structural critique of imperial behavior and support for an alternative world order where all countries are on equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy, and a transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority.
The left has always stressed the common interest of the global majority in fighting imperial exploitation. But in a period when the most dangerous threats to human life—climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, obscene degrees of inequality—can only be addressed by joint action by all countries, the arguments against American exceptionalism and the way it makes US national sovereignty absolute become stronger and more urgent.
This is a framework that draws on the insight of Albert Einstein at the beginning of the nuclear age (“Everything has changed except our thinking”). It embraces the outlook of the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which expressed the most advanced thinking in the coalition that defeated fascism in World War II.
Amid a continuing genocide in Gaza and seeing the disaster of the war on Iran, the numbers of people saying “stop” to the guardians of empire is growing by the day. Fanning those flames of opposition and offering these millions a vision to fight for is the combination needed to accumulate the political power to transform the US role in the world.
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Can Prospects for Nuclear War Get Any Worse? Sure, We Can Put AI in Charge
How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows.
Apr 05, 2026
Can we possibly get away from AI’s ubiquitous presence in our lives? But as long as AI is now in our faces 24/7, it’s time to seriously start pushing back about its outsized and overwhelming influence. Troubling stories tumble out of the media daily. Employees in a major fast-food chain must now wear AI headsets that tell them how friendly they’re being to customers and coaching them on their work. (AI is now posing as our servant, but in the years ahead will the dynamic be reversed?)
And then there is the looming data center controversy, with Big Tech companies rapidly taking over huge swaths of land across the US to build massive and environmentally unfriendly data centers. Fortunately, this trend is now emerging as a campaign issue given early and cascading effects on electricity prices. In general, AI is having a tough year in the court of public opinion. Witness this cover story in a recent issue of Time magazine: “The People vs AI.” The article noted that “a growing cross section of the public—from MAGA loyalists to Democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers—agree on at least one thing: AI is moving too fast…. A 2025 Pew poll found… the public thinks AI will worsen our ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, and make difficult decisions.” Along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related pushback, a spontaneous wellspring of grassroots activism appears to be bubbling up against the AI juggernaut and the patently undemocratic backdoor power grab by technocrats and the companies behind them.
One of the greatest concerns in the public sphere is AI’s rapid incorporation into present and future military campaigns. This is actively being encouraged by the Trump administration’s decision to give AI companies free reign to develop their products with minimal regulation and oversight. This is an existential train wreck waiting to happen, and it came into striking focus in the monthslong dispute between AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon. Although it was already using the Claude platform, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was unhappy with the company’s refusal to use it to remove human decision-making from military operations and support accelerated mass surveillance of US citizens.
Anthropic’s move was that rarity in Big Tech circles, a strong and principled ethical stand against an administration that doesn’t seem to know what that is. Happy warrior Hegseth then branded the company as a “supply chain risk,” effectively banning further use by the Pentagon and punishing the company’s overall viability in the non-defense marketplace as well. Ever the opportunist, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, then jumped in to offer his AI platform to do what Anthropic wouldn’t. The matter is now in the courts.
Handing AI the “Nuclear Football”
Using AI to create what are called autonomous systems represents a quantum leap in the rapidly advancing business of modern weaponry. Paradoxically, weapons technology is being simultaneously downsized through the use of drones and smaller and sophisticated high-tech devices (such as mine sniffers) and upsized with the use of the AI systems designed to manage and control them.
This raises the very troubling picture of wars being conducted without much human oversight. It’s probably one reason even high- profile AI influencers and Big Tech CEOs have admitted (sometimes a little too casually) that the technology could destroy humanity given the right set of circumstances. While autonomous systems can apply to stand-alone weapons such as killer robots, the most worrying concern relates to the Pentagon’s desire to build and deploy command-and-control systems that remove military officers from the split-second decisions that need to be made in warfare. And yes, that includes nuclear weapons.
If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet.
How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows. When questioned by a reporter on the matter, one senior official in the Trump administration weakly demurred, “The administration supports the need to maintain human control over nuclear weapons.”
AI experts and strategic thinkers say that a big driver of this process is that America’s top nuclear adversaries—Russia and China—are already using AI in their command-and-control systems. These developments are happening at lightning speed and are being further propelled by Epic Fury, the first AI-fueled war in US history. And let’s not be too laudatory about Anthropic. Its Claude system has been integrated with Palantir’s Maven to identify military targets. The Pentagon is still investigating whether Maven played any part in the horrific event when a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls’ elementary school killing more than 165.
Sleepwalking Into Armageddon?
What madness is this? By what shallow calculus can a handful of powerful individuals or shadowy organizations decide or even risk the fate of humanity? How do we put all of this dangerous thinking at the highest levels of our government into some kind of perspective that correlates with common sense and basic human decency? In our trajectory toward what some have called techno-feudalism, we have this apparent plunge into barbarity coupled with a powerful array of tools to accelerate it. When nuclear activist Helen Caldicott warned that Western civilization is “sleepwalking into Armageddon,” it was perhaps this particular kind of blindness that she had in mind. And the brilliant socio-biologist E.O. Wilson’s profound observation also springs to mind: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.”
The rush to deploy AI as large-scale weaponry with every bit as much destructive potential as our existing nuclear arsenal is a tip off to the deeper motivations behind its development. In the meantime, some obvious questions need to be asked. Why aren’t government and academic institutions eager to apply these advanced AI tools to the many intractable problems that characterize world polycrisis such as global climate change or better distribution of scarce resources including food and water? Where are the urgent calls from those who serve in Congress to do so? Or why don’t we see headlines like “Harvard Inaugurates $100 Million AI Project to Address Climate Change”?
It seems pretty clear that AI justifications coming from the both the administration and Congress (not to mention that the establishment commentariat that serves them) invariably gravitate to enhancing corporate productivity or military use. And it’s equally clear that AI will also serve as yet another powerful mechanism of wealth transfer to the 1% and either knowingly or unknowingly act as a chaos agent in an increasingly unstable multipolar geopolitical world. If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet. I don’t see any evidence of this. Sadly, it looks like we may have to once again learn the hard way that information, knowledge, and wisdom all are very different things. And that while knowledge can be appropriated by powerful computers, wisdom will never be.
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Will a New Nuclear Arms Race Make Us More Secure?
Now that the last nuclear arms control treaty regulating US and Russian nuclear weapons has expired, it is possible that these two superpowers could double their arsenals in one to two years, even as China, North Korea, and France also increase their arsenals.
Apr 01, 2026
It is widely thought that the February 5 expiration of New START, the last arms control agreement capping US and Russian nuclear weapons, could usher in a dangerous and highly destabilizing new nuclear arms race. Since the Cold War peak of over 70,000 nuclear weapons in 1986, arms control treaties have reduced the number to approximately 12,200 today—still equivalent, however, to 145,000 Hiroshimas. Many of these decommissioned weapons remain in storage where they can be readily redeployed, making it possible to double Russian and US arsenals in one to two years.
If a new nuclear arms race begins between the US and Russia, the US could “upload” 800 bombs and cruise missiles stored at military bases back onto B-2 and B-52 bombers in a matter of weeks. The number of warheads on submarines could be increased by 400 to 500 by placing additional warheads on each missile and reusing the launch tubes that were closed under New START. Finally, by placing additional warheads on half of its intercontinental ballistic missiles and reloading silos on standby, it could double its ICBM warheads from 400 to 800. Similarly, hundreds of decommissioned Russian warheads could be uploaded onto its bombers, ICBMs, and submarines.
Moreover, both the US and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weapons and new, terrifying systems are being developed. Although their arsenals are much smaller, the other seven nuclear weapon states are also modernizing, and China is rapidly expanding its arsenal. France has also just announced it will increase the size of its arsenal. Several nonnuclear states are considering acquiring nuclear weapons, which would further proliferation and greatly complicate the global situation.
The development of nuclear weapons in space and dual-use technology add to the unpredictability, and the loss of verification and information exchange provided by arms control agreements contribute to greater uncertainty, misunderstanding, and worst-case thinking.
A nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic.
So, will a new nuclear arms race make us more secure?
Given the current very tense and fragile geopolitical environment and questions about the stability of the leaders involved, it is entirely possible that a conventional conflict could escalate into nuclear war. Indeed, the Russians have threatened to use nuclear weapons in the context of their war in Ukraine and they have also lowered their “nuclear doctrine” threshold for using nuclear weapons.
The book Nuclear War: A Scenario and the film A House of Dynamite both offer chilling but realistic scenarios whereby incoming ICBMs would be responded to by massive second-strike retaliation. In just over an hour, life as we know it would be shattered worldwide.
The other grave concern is accidental nuclear war; Published accounts offer multiple examples. Warnings of a nuclear attack have been triggered by a faulty 46-cent computer chip; the mistaken insertion of a training tape into a computer; moon-rise; nuclear submarine collisions; the launch of a weather rocket; and many others. There are also cyber threats that barely existed during the Cold War. Equally worrying is the slippery slope of AI, which could lead to its integration into US, Russian, and Chinese nuclear weapon systems, stimulated by competition, mutual insecurity, and the extremely short decision-making time frame. As Gareth Evans, co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, warns in his latest article: “The fact that we have survived for eight decades without a nuclear weapons catastrophe... is just sheer, dumb luck.”
A nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Scientific evidence has shown that a nuclear war would cause a “nuclear winter” where smoke and soot from hundreds of burning cities would loft into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, darkening the sky, chilling the Earth, creating massive crop failures and extreme famine for every country in the world for up to 10 years after an all-out nuclear war. Millions of deaths from the explosions and radiation would be followed by billions of deaths from starvation. It would also significantly deplete the ozone layer, threatening animal and plant life. Recently, it has been shown that even a “limited” war between India and Pakistan could cause a nuclear winter that could kill over 2 billion people.
As Jonathan Schell writes in The Fate of the Earth: “The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the ‘button’ to be ‘pushed’ by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer ship to send out the instructions to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point—that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment—is a fact against which belief rebels.”
Indeed, in January, the Doomsday Clock set annually by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was moved to its closest point to midnight in its history—85 seconds. The Bulletin’s president and CEO, Alexandra Bell, concludes: “The Doomsday Clock’s message cannot be clearer. Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time. Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”
Unfortunately, little remains of the broad-based anti-nuclear activism that was prevalent during the Cold War. Nevertheless, there is considerable public concern. A YouGov poll from May 2025 conducted in the US and five European countries shows that 41-55% of respondents think another world war is likely within the next 5 to 10 years and 68-76% believe that, if one occurs, it would involve nuclear weapons. Furthermore, 25-44% believe that it would result in the deaths of most of the world’s population.
If those who are worried about nuclear war were to become involved in a vigorous public debate to educate and activate those who aren’t aware of the magnitude of the threat (including those in power), to urge leaders to re-engage in significant, new arms control negotiations and agreements, they could surely make a difference, as they did during the Cold War, for this most existential of all threats.
As Schell notes: “Every person is the right person to act. Every minute is the right moment to begin.”
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