Turning Back the Clock From Doomsday to Global Peace
Aaron Kirshenbaum
Each year, at my summer camp, we memorialized the U.S.’s horrifying use of nuclear weapons during World War II, which completely destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and left survivors with long-term radiation sickness. We held an annual ceremony to remember these war crimes while trying to educate one another to create a better world. The poems and stories from those days have remained seared into my head just as the literal shadows of victims were seared into buildings from the bombs.
After two of the greatest war crimes of all time, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created the “Doomsday Clock” to measure how close we are to “midnight,” or nuclear/climate apocalypse, based on world events. This might be your first time hearing about the clock. But I’d imagine that it’s not your first time feeling the emotions it evokes: the helplessness, the grief, the anger, the impending sense of doom. It can feel all-consuming; if we’re less than “90 seconds to midnight,” what hope do we have? What pathway can we follow to build and inspire? That’s why we want to change the direction we’re looking at, from “midnight” to “dawn.” Instead of counting down by imagining doomsday, we want to build peace. We’ve created a new Peace Clock, unveiled around the country today that outlines actionable steps to turn the clock’s hand toward a livable world.
The steps that lead to catastrophe are not abstract; neither are the steps that lead to peace. Every day that the U.S. has produced and provided weapons to Israel to wage its genocidal campaign in Gaza is another day spent trying to dominate the region: whether through Israel’s expansion into a now increasingly unstable Syria to clear a pathway toward Iran, the US’s continued bombing of Yemen, or the bombing of Lebanon. The U.S. continues to supply weapons to Ukraine, with the Biden administration making a terrifying decision to approve long-range missiles to be shot inside of Russia. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues its decades-long campaign to build up its poisonous military in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines and deploy troops to Taiwan for the sake of meaningless escalation with China that prevents cooperation on green technology. The U.S. must take its troops and weapons out of the SWANA and Asia-Pacific regions and engage in diplomacy to stop its proxy war in Ukraine. If Trump actually wants to be a “peace president,” he will engage with willing partners. And if not, his hypocrisy will continue our march toward a nuclear doomsday.
I could write more about the impact of today's nuclear bombs, which reinforce the sense of invincibility felt by countries like the United States and Israel. I could say that their impact would be tenfold the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We could dwell on the fact that there is even a conversation on whether the “earthquake bomb” Israel dropped on Syria could have possibly been a tactical nuke. And we do need to understand what we’re up against. But the sense of helplessness and stagnancy that many people feel talking about nuclear weapons, World War III, climate change, or even just surviving the war economy here in the U.S. will consume us if we let it.
Some of the steps that our government can take to work towards denuclearization are crystal clear foreign policy changes, while others are steps that create unity amidst our movements and sectors. And regardless, we will continue to educate on how to dismantle the war economy and create a peace economy. We will continue to shed light on the interests of power to bring clarity and direction to us all.
It feels like every conversation I’ve had lately is about the choices that we can make in the coming weeks and years. This makes sense when we are in a moment where dynamics that have been present for decades are now at the surface of U.S. governance and lack thereof. The performance of the democratic party yielded failure in the election. The growing right-wing reactionary presence is now in power. The war machine is as present as ever. So do we react to our current moment by screaming into the sky about how doomsday is rapidly approaching? Or do we take steps to expose and dismantle the war machine while actively creating a Peace Economy? Personally, I can only go forward if we’re creating something new, bringing together the movement, and working toward our collective safety and liberation.
Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK's War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based in, and originally from, Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also hold a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark. During their time in school, Aaron worked on internationalist climate justice organizing and educational program development, as well as Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing.