Often, people think that the prevention of nuclear war has to be left to politicians because they are essentially the only ones who can make it happen. There is a sense that if you can't fire a gun then preventing a gun from firing does not concern you. So with nuclear weapons, the prevention of their use may only concern you at election time when the people you are voting for may end up in a position where they can use those weapons.
There are grounds to disagree with the above position but I won't make the case here because the reason for this post is to consider which ordinary person's actions may lead to a decrease in the risks of nuclear war or nuclear attacks.
Most people would think that there is nothing to do. As a Canadian, belonging to a nation that keeps no nuclear weapons, I may even boast that we're doing everything right here in voting for governments that aren't stockpiling any nuclear warheads. So, I might think that pointing my finger of accusation at other people from other nations is the way to try and shame them into some kind of action for their support of nuclear warhead nations.
Yet I really don't think that this is the way to go if our goal is to make a world safer from possible nuclear attacks. But I do think that many --if not most Canadians--would first consider such a simple line of action if they were asked what they might do.
But in some countries that are stockpiling nuclear warhead such as Russia, ordinary citizens simply do not have the option to empower a government that will rid their country of their nuclear arsenal. And if we were to suggest to them to simply go ahead and form a party that will give their country this option, they would surely inform us about an ongoing armed repression from their government preventing them from trying to go this route. If we canadians were in their shoes, we simply couldn't do anything and would have no one to blame.
Without a good answer to the question of what we should recommend that average Russians do--and I don't think there is a good answer to that question--we Canadians hold no moral upper grounds that could make us feel that we haven't got any preventive action(s) to take against the possibility of nuclear war.
So what can we do? What should we do? (And not just Canadians but everyone concerned.) The first thing I think we must all do is to try to understand how nuclear warheads came into existence: A war began around 1939 and the bomb was built as a potential means to win the war. In a nutshell an escalation of aggression between countries resulted in the drive to build the a-bomb.
So if we had wanted to prevent the A-bomb from being built in the first place, we would have needed a de-escallation of this aggression.
So why is there escalation of aggression and why is there aggression between countries? I would guess that these reasons are basically the same as to why aggression and escalation of aggression occurs between people.
So the answer is pretty simple, monitor the aggression present in your life learn to de-escallate it when you notice it. By working hard on this issue in our daily lives, we certainly would be taking the road to a reduced risk of nuclear attacks.
If I get enough upvotes on this post, I'll soon make another post about how to go about doing this. Thank you.
| Moscow | New York | Toronto | Tehran | Pyongyang |
|---|---|---|---|---|