Today’s problems increasingly overlap in their causes, and consequently, in their solutions. This is why we need to introduce a novel approach to combating nukes. We need to portray nuclear armament as a power game by drawing parallels between other types of power games, such as racism, patriarchy, and the destruction of our environment.
This section provides an intersectional perspective on nukes, which aims to draw attention to the underlying ideologies that keep nuclear weapons in place. In turn, the production phase and use of nuclear weapons reinforce these very ideologies, embedding exponential threats to our societies.
The racism section introduces evidence that nuclear testing has deliberately and disproportionately harmed non-white communities, while the section on climate crisis lays out the environmental consequences of using nukes. The section on patriarchy portrays how gender roles and rhetoric weaken our fight against nuclear weapons and violent conflict in general.
Using the resources provided by each section to educate ourselves on the intertwined threats of these power games, we not only further our ability to come up with more creative and effective solutions, but by relating nuclear weapons to harmful ideologies, whose effects are more visible in daily life, we also gain the opportunity to carry the discussion on nukes to everyday conversation. And this is crucial for our consistent fight.
RACISM & NUKES
As a way to avoid publicity and lessen the political consequences, nuclear states often tested weapons in areas home to foreign subjects or minority populations. The United States located its test sites in the Marshall Islands and on land claimed by the Western Shoshones in Nevada. The Soviets located their major test site in the land of the Kazakhs, near Semipalatinsk. The British conducted their tests on native lands in Australia and on Christmas Island in the Pacific. The Chinese located theirs on minority lands in western China, where the Muslim Uyghur population lives. The French test sites were in the colonies in Algeria and Polynesia.
Indeed, uranium for nuclear weapons was mined in many non-nuclear-weapon states. France got its uranium in large measure from its colonies, where working conditions in mines were insufferable. The United Kingdom got its uranium partly from Namibia. The Soviets got much of their uranium from vast operations in Eastern Europe, notably in East Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. Health and environmental problems have typically been serious, so far as independent evidence indicates, but have usually been officially denied.
Find more here:
- A Readiness to Harm: The Health Effects of Nuclear Weapons Complexes
- Nuclear weapons test: what's the damage to people and places?
- To make and maintain America's nukes, some communities pay the price
- Start reading African Americans Against the Bomb | Vincent J. Intondi
The Kakadu National Park uranium mining area. Credit: Bidgee/Wikimedia Commons
CLIMATE CRISIS & NUKES
Less than one percent of the nuclear weapons in the world could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine. The thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia could bring about a nuclear winter, destroying the essential ecosystems on which all life depends.
Moreover, as nations compete for resources even more desperately due to climate change and other environmental catastrophes, the possibility of violent conflict and the use of nuclear weapons increases significantly.
Find more here:
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change
- Environmental Effects of Nuclear Testing
- A Global Perspective
- Critical Issues
- Climate Disruption and Famine
Image Credit of Pixabay
SMASHING THE PATRIARCHY
The tendency to treat women as vulnerable victims, usually grouped together with children and the elderly, reinforces persistent constructions of women as the “weaker sex” in need of protection by “powerful” men and enable women’s continued exclusion from authoritative social and political roles. Meanwhile, the framing of all military-aged men as “potential” or actual militants entrenches a tendency to support “violent masculinities” -- a social construction in which masculinity is linked with preparedness to use military action and to wield weapons.
The framing of women as weak and vulnerable is also often used to construct a feminized and devalued notion of peace as unattainable, unrealistic, passive, and (it might be said) undesirable. The devaluation of certain perspectives, ideas, and interests because they are marked as “feminine,” coupled with the equation of masculinity with violence gives war positive value as a show of masculine power.
Find more here:
- Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy
- Gender and Nuclear Weapons
- A Feminist Critique of the Atomic Bomb
- The Nuclear Ban and the Patriarchy
- Women and Multilateral Disarmament Forums: Patterns of Underrepresentation
- Sex, Gender, Nuclear Weapons
- Gendered Impacts
- Advocacy Brief
- The Nuclear Weapons Sisterhood
Image Credit of Giulia Sagramola
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