Peggy Mason, President of the Rideau Institute and Board Member of Canadian Pugwash Group, was invited to speak at Ottawa’s August 9 commemoration event, marking the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
She said in part: “This brings me to the recent statements by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively calling on nuclear-armed (and presumably nuclear umbrella) nations to “show courage and make the decision to break free from dependence on nuclear deterrence.”
The war in Ukraine has shown the ultimate wisdom of that message.
But the plain fact is that nuclear-armed states and their allies are not going to discard their nuclear weapons – no matter the dangers they pose – without an alternative security paradigm. Otherwise, their fear would be that without nuclear deterrence, the likelihood of war with unbelievably dangerous new hypersonic conventional weapons (enhanced by AI) would be more, not less, likely. To put this another way, our goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons will be futile if we cannot demonstrate to the NWS that it will not lead to a world where devastating conventional war among great powers is more likely in the absence of nuclear weapons to deter them.
I am sure that this is not something most of you want to contemplate. But it is an absolute necessity to face if we are to get rid of nuclear weapons. We have to restart the vital work begun at the end of the cold war but then abandoned in the frenzy of globalization and American triumphalism – to move away from a competitive, zero-sum approach to security – which leads to the security dilemma of steps by one side to enhance their defences being perceived as a threat by the other side, leading them to increase their defences and on and it goes…”
For Mason’s complete presentation, continue here: Mason_comments_9Aug2023
