roachboy

the assertion--it's not an argument---that mutually assured destruction, which was the american nuclear "strategy" during the cold war, the "winning" scenario within which was a bunch of military types wandering bunker system beneath the surface of some irradiated wasteland every once in a while pausing to congratulate themselves on having won---is somehow responsible for the fact that we've not all been vaporized is the kind of claim that could be made about anything, really: since the middle 1950s, people have consistently sat in chairs and we've not been vaporized so sitting in chairs has contributed to our not being vaporized. you could say the same thing about any action. and it'd be no more absurd than the claim that the rationale behind nuclear proliferation has somehow made us safer.

i don't think that disarmament is necessarily "feel-good bullshit"---it's more a problem for the extensive patronage networks that have taken shape around the nuclear procurement systems of the national security state. by extension, what disarmament poses a direct challenge to is the national security state, which has no ongoing justification, which is an incredible drain of resources and which really should be dismantled.

dismantling nuclear weapons systems is a desirable goal and is in principle entirely within the realm of possibility. of course to do that, those rational actors who sell such technologies would have to do something else. or be stopped. which is also doable. it would not be a simple matter, particularly at the level of enforcement, so long as obsolete notions of nation-states persist--but even there, nothing about the difficulty of disarmament leads to a metaphysical claim as to impossibility.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite