Darkness at Steadfast Noon - war games make the case against NATO

In Belgium this week NATO will be testing and exercising its procedures with regard to the dropping of nuclear bombs.  Fighter-jets from at least ten NATO nations will carry out flights and exercises from the air force base at Kleine Brogel in Limburg. The exercise, titled "Steadfast Noon" is intended to familiarise pilots and crews with the techniques involved in the possible use of nuclear weapons. 

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) have recently, and rightly, pointed out that Russia’s recent threats to use nuclear weapons in the context of the war in Ukraine have heightened tensions, reduced the threshold for use of nuclear weapons, and greatly increased the risk of nuclear conflict and global catastrophe. ICAN correctly identify that the correct response to these irresponsible criminal threats is to do everything possible to delegitimise the threatened use of nuclear weapons.

This approach - of delegitimisation - was exemplified by the statement adopted this summer by the States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) when they said that; “We are alarmed and dismayed by threats to use nuclear weapons and increasingly strident nuclear rhetoric. We stress that any use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is a violation of international law, including the Charter of the United Nations. We condemn unequivocally any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances.”

ICAN have pointed out that the coming into force of TPNW has rendered nuclear weapons illegal under international law - like biological and chemical weapons, antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions. NATO however has set its face against international law and and the wider global community by its opposition to TPNW. NATO opposes “any attempt to delegitimise nuclear deterrence” (that is to say that NATO opposes attempts to delegitimise a military doctrine based upon the threatened use of nuclear weapons).

When I was a teenage peace activist (often advised to "go back to Moscow" by reactionaries opposed to our peace protests) we were told that NATO was a purely defensive alliance established, in 1949, to "protect us" from an aggressive, expansionist Soviet Union and its allies. When the Cold War came to an end it turned out that the military/industrial establishment in the United States and Western Europe still had a use for NATO as what has been described, by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, (CND) as “an ever-expanding interventionist bloc, operating on a global scale.”

We were told lies about the justification for the existence of NATO during the Cold War and today we are told new lies, that NATO supports an “international rules-based order” (almost as if the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had been in accordance with international law and had promoted global peace and harmony…) NATO states quite plainly that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.” Therefore, as long as NATO exists, the goal of universal nuclear disarmament will be forever out of reach. NATO institutionalises and perpetuates an eternal nuclear arms race. 

The war games being played in Belgium this week are a chilling reminder of the consequences for humanity if and when the military doctrine which relies upon the threatened use of nuclear weapons leads to that use (as one day it will). If we want to avoid these consequences we need to replace the institutional architecture which embeds nuclear weapons as a permanent feature of international relations - and that must mean (as I have argued here before) opposition to NATO.

Socialists, trade unionists, and Labour Party members need to oppose the ill-founded attachment to NATO expressed by the Party leadership. As long as this country remains a member of NATO we are trapped in a system which forever creates and recreates a perpetual risk of nuclear war.