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Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Section E – Violence, war and the threat of nuclear annihilation It is impossible to conceive of a world at peace when the poorest 60% of humans live on just 6% of the world’s income. Mohammed Yonis, winner of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize The 21 st century is the time for us to give up war and learn non-violent ways of resolving conflict. War diverts us from the urgent need to focus all our collective efforts on tackling climate change and other threats to the future of humanity. The dire consequences of war are greater than ever. Waging war increases the risk of unleashing worldwide nuclear devastation and nuclear terrorism. A leaked Pentagon report spoke of the dangers of nuclear conflict arising from climate change and pressures on dwindling resources. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists expressed the same view. The costs of war – lives The 20th century accounted for 95% of over 120,000,000 war deaths since 1700, 40 million from 1945 to year 2000. State violence far exceeds that committed by individuals. Nearly 20 million died in WW1. Total WW2 deaths are estimated at 52 million. The Atomic bombs killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945 but many more died later. There are indications that this outrage was unnecessary. Japan was ready for peace. Mark Curtis estimates British foreign policy from the end of WW2 has been directly or indirectly responsible for around 10 million deaths worldwide. He adds that New Labour continued to make claims about the morality of its foreign policies, wishing to be a “force for good in the world.” Yet never in British history, had there been such a gap between government claims and reality. In today’s wars over 80% of deaths are civilians. At the end of the century, despite “precision weapons” demonstrated on TV, over 95% of these deaths were civilian compared with 52% in the 1960s. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars created almost half of the world’s 11 million refugees by the end of 2007. In Iraq, in addition to over 4,000 US military deaths, 100,000 to 650,000 civilians have died. 4 million people have been uprooted from their homes, 2 million displaced inside their country and 2 million have fled to other countries. A relatively advanced society has been reduced to poverty. Iraq’s infrastructure was partly destroyed. A third of Iraqis are said to be in urgent need of aid. The children have been described as a stunted generation. The more troops there are in Afghanistan, the more aerial attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the more civilians are killed and the more people are pushed into grief and anger, the more are driven into the hands of extremists. What if such so-called surgical strikes had been inflicted on London, Paris or New York or your home town, destroying the infrastructure leaving people without water, heat or power and destroying their livings? Imagine British people fleeing their homes, migrating to the North or across the Channel, Irish or North Seas. Is it that we regard people in other lands, or of other races, as less important, less human than ourselves? Do we fail to identify with others who are further away? Many believe the Iraq war was illegal, its initiators guilty of a war crime. The loss of over three hundred British soldiers in Afghanistan is tiny compared with the large numbers of Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani civilians killed, wounded, displaced from their homes or driven into exile. In 76
Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Afghanistan many thousands of civilians have been killed as a result of the US led invasion, many as a result of US air attacks. There are no official figures for civilian deaths but upper and lower estimates of 8,000 to over 30,000 are given on Wikipedia, though caution about these numbers is advised. The UN News centre reports some 2 million people displaced in Pakistan by the fighting between government forces and militants in the northwest of the country. In Afghanistan, nearly three hundred British soldiers have died since 2001. Earlier this year, the media showed pictures of British soldiers, women and men, killed in Afghanistan. Many more have been severely injured and there have been 51 amputations. Wounded and maimed have soared by 300 percent in the past three years. We now know that injured soldiers often need considerable support. Large numbers of returning soldiers suffer combat stress or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. The MoD reported 3,181 new cases of “mental disorder” in 2008. Some fall into alcoholism and drug addiction, and marital difficulties are common. The NHS is ill-equipped to deal with this. Pictures and accounts of these gallant soldiers and their grieving families and friends and scenes of funeral processions on the streets of Wootton Bassett bring home to us the full personal tragedy of war. Probably the worst thing that can befall a family is the loss of a child, parent or sibling. It is especially tragic when a young person in his/her teens or early twenties, at the beginning of adult life, nurtured for years by loving, proud parents, is killed in war. It takes years to come to terms with such avoidable tragedies. Many families never completely recover. These accounts give meaning to the otherwise incomprehensible numbers affected by war in other countries. In total, there are millions of deaths and injuries, not to mention the destruction of homes, communities, towns, cities and livelihoods, the mass displacements of people within their own countries or to other countries. What will be the effect of generations of children growing up surrounded by violence, loss, destruction and insecurity? Deaths in civil wars are equally appalling. For example, 5 million people died in civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dreadful atrocities were committed. In Kenya, following a disputed poll in December 2007, at least 500 people are dead; over 200,000, mainly extremely poor women and children, were forced to flee their homes. Livelihoods and food growing in a continent where so many people go hungry were destroyed. The economic consequences are dire. The costs of war – financial World spending on war Global military spending, now over $1trn per annum, is approaching the highest level reached in the depths of the Cold War. G8 countries spending on arms exceeded $1trillion in 2004. Only $79bn was spent on development aid by the 22 biggest donor nations in 2004. According to the OECD Departmental Assistance Committee, USA spends $455.3bn on arms and $19bn on aid; UK $47.4bn and $7.8bn. The cost of the Iraq war is now estimated at over $3trn including compensation for deaths and injuries and debt repayment and interest. That is nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in USA. Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, once said the true cost of oil, including wars and subsidies, was $200 per gallon! 77
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