Driven to mass distraction

Driven to mass distraction

When I was a kid, I was afraid of anything mediaeval (because it had the word "evil" in it; I was easily confused), footballs coming near my face, lurking dogs, and words with too many vowels. Like "mutation", "radioactive", "Geiger" and "nuclear". They were sickly with vowels, pale and smeary with them. I didn't know what they meant, I didn't know why adults looked so serious when they said them, but I knew they were bad and I thought we were all going to die.

I no longer associate with footballs, but the word "nuclear" still gives me the heebies. Despite this, I'm coming around to thinking that nuclear power in other countries might be a necessary emollient to carbon emissions (though don't press me on this). But another word with many vowels is "weapon". Put the two together and you have something that is so incredible in its horror most of us have forgotten to worry about them because the end of the world in a phosphorescent flash can hardly be conceived.

Nuclear weapons have not gone away. Despite the end of the Cold War more than 20 years ago, and the recent calming discussions between Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, which promise to reduce their active weapons, our world still contains these sinister little objects that can, in one moment of panic, fallibility, belligerence or reflex, deliver us into the nothing.

There are 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world. At any given time several thousand are on hair-trigger alert. They kill indiscriminately, enormously and devastatingly, to put it gently. It doesn't matter if you always helped old ladies across the street, if you have a new baby or are about to get a promotion or you're on your way home to eat Thai takeaway. The weapons don't care.

What's amazing is we know this, and yet we can't quite believe it. Whole cities? Millions destroyed just like that? Pfffft. As if. The adults wouldn't let it happen. We have to have the bombs because the others have them. They promised they wouldn't use them. We need them because. Because. Because. What is this, a playground?


Opinion polls show a majority of people all over the world disapprove, unsurprisingly, of having unimaginably cataclysmic weapons in existence. The Dalai Lama, the Pope, John Howard (the actor) want them gone. Concerned groups of all shades and political persuasion want them gone. My mum wants them gone, and she's always right.

Of course they're not gone. Forgive me for having grown jaded since I was an eight-year-old toiling up Bourke Street in the Palm Sunday anti-nuclear march. Comprehensive multilateral disarmament would be, I don't know, sucky. It would all have to be organised so no one was left out on a limb looking vulnerable, so much paperwork, and whatever would the US do with the $US50 billion-odd it spends on its nuclear program every year?

For more than 10 years a Nuclear Weapons Convention has been supported by the United Nations as the best chance the world has for comprehensive disarmament. It treats nuclear weapons with the same distaste as biological and chemical ones and would prohibit use, development or possession. Unfortunately, as we saw in Copenhagen last year, even the best and brightest of world leaders seem unable to put the well-being of the entire globe ahead of short-term politics.

It may be argued the deterrent factor has worked: no power has launched a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki; nevertheless more than 2000 tests have been detonated. The more they linger — and it only takes one — the more probable it is that there will be an accident, a terrorist theft, a rogue state, or some moron showing off. Talk about a risk. But, as we know from climate change inaction, we don't do risk-management very well.

Australia recently launched the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, but the ALP is soon to negotiate the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 through Parliament, apparently similar to the Howard-era bill that it campaigned against in opposition. It will contentiously seek to place a waste dump in Aboriginal-owned lands at Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory. We don't like nuclear power or nuclear weapons in this country, but as we have 40 per cent of the world's uranium reserves, Pine Gap, the Lucas Heights reactor and a complacent trade with nuclear powers, nuclear is not someone else's problem: it's ours, and our children's.

June 5 is global Nuclear Abolition Day — to find out more about events in Australia and internationally see

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