Speak Up - Kōrerotia17 January 2018

The dilemma of the public intellectual in the nuclear age

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Today’s topic is ‘The dilemma of the public intellectual in the nuclear age’ and it’s a recording of a lecture presented towards the end of 2016 [error: should be 2017] to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs with funding from the Peace and Disarmament Education Trust.

The format of this Speak Up-Kōrerotia episode is slightly different to our usual kind of discussions; today we will hear from two prominent scholars and campaigners on the issue of nuclear weaponry in today’s world. The first speaker is Associate Professor Benoît Pelopidas who, among other titles and his accolades in relation to international relations and security, holds the Junior Chair of Excellence in Security Studies at the Centre for International Studies at the Sciences Po, Paris.

Benoît theorises and ponders the role of the public intellectual in regards to raising awareness of nuclear issues, especially when faced with public apathy or lack of political will. Following Benoît’s talk we will hear from Dr. Lyndon Burford, a research fellow at Christchurch’s Disarmament and Security Centre and one of the New Zealand representatives negotiating the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Lyndon will particularly focus on New Zealand and the United Nations’ July 2017 adoption of the Treaty, which is the first multilateral legally binding document for nuclear disarmament to be negotiated in two decades.

MUSIC BY STING – WE WORK THE BLACK SEAM

Benoît So I’ll give you a bit of a framework for this joint speaking engagement that we have. So I’d like to propose a framework for thinking about the public intellectual, its role and possibility in the nuclear age, and then Lyndon will follow and tell you much more about his dilemmas as a public intellectual who attended the latest stage of the Ban Treaty negotiation and also how he triangulates the positions of the public intellectual, the scholar and the activist.

So hopefully - and Lyndon is in charge of keeping me short - we will divide the time equally so thank you for your patience. So you already know much more about me than you would want, I just want to also acknowledge my dear friend Bastian Irondelle who is the one who basically mentored me and showed me that it was possible to be an independent nuclear scholar in France - so this is a pleasant tribute tonight that is well deserved.

So basically what I want to do tonight is basically put this issue of the public intellectual in context and make a two-part argument. So this argument is basically saying that in the nuclear age we need the public intellectual possibly more than we ever did before where I would argue it’s harder to play that role than it ever was and so this is basically all I am going to say tonight. I could actually leave it at that. If you don’t mind I will stay a bit longer.

So intellectuals as a category, we shouldn’t assume that they’ve always existed and they’ve always meant what they mean for us today. They have appeared at the end of the 20th century as such in the context of the Dreyfus affair in my home country, France, and the category was originally a derogatory one. It was from the military saying like, “Who are those people who defended Captain Dreyfus? They’re all intellectuals” - actually meaning, they’re not professional people who come from a place of expertise.

The writers who defended Captain Dreyfus - I am happy to tell you more about the Dreyfus Affair but this is not the place, this is just a matter of context - they re-appropriated this category as, “Yes this is who we are, we are the intellectuals” and from then on they created this sense that people in the humanities; distinguished writers in the humanities, had a place in the public space to speak about issues of common interest and that’s what I talk about when I talk about the public intellectual to this day. So if anyone in this room is a sociologist, I want to speak to you and say, “Yes I know, I make a massive assumption that many of you would dispute which is, I assume that there is a thing as a public sphere” and I hold that constant that yes I do for all my sense, I do assume that there is such a thing. So you have to accept that or if you don’t accept that, let’s talk about it.

Then the third thing I want to start by saying is that obviously nuclear science creates, in the words of Michel Foucault and a few others, a shift from the universalist intellectual to what is then called the specific

intellectual where it’s because of a knowledge of a particular field which is nuclear physics that you then get a particular authority because you are the unique holders of the relevant piece of knowledge that allows you to speak authoritatively.

I would want to argue that the nuclear weapons debate created that shift but many nuclear scientists including Robert Oppenheimer still claimed afterwards to be universal intellectuals and you have other voices - including the more or less, the philosophers and others - who maintain this notion of the universal intellectuals so we don’t have to just assume that the nuclear age just got rid of the call for the universal intellectual. What we need to realise is that it created an increased legitimacy for expertise and a possibility for disqualifying those who didn’t have this expertise and that’s what I’m going to talk about.

So all of this is obviously happening in a broader intellectual landscape where I realise that you don’t talk about the public intellectual everyday but if you did there is this usual nostalgic sense of you know, there’s this decline of the public intellectual. In the US, the idea is that the 1920s were the real moment when it was a peak. So what does that mean and can the nuclear age allow us to make a more specific intervention in this issue of the fate of the public intellectual?

OK enough of an introduction. First part of my argument is: We need the public intellectual in the nuclear age. Why is that? Not because I want to have a job - I already have one, thank you very much - but mostly because scientists often treat technology as neutral and leave it to the public and policy makers to decide what to do with it. This is how Robert Oppenheimer leaves the Manhattan Project, saying, “I’ve done what I was asked to do; up to you guys.” So if that’s the case given the potential for damage of nuclear technology we need people who do better than this and that’s what the public intellectual could be there for. Another reason is that nuclear secrecy requires someone who can talk about it in the name of the public if we still want to live in democracy and I assume that we do.

What do I mean by that? First, the awareness of the vulnerability created by the weapons is still lacking in large parts and that’s something that we can talk about because I’m also doing separate research on that very point. Nuclear weapons programmes - a basic point but still an important point - absorb a lot of resources. Few evidence, few bits of evidence, on the cost of US nuclear weapons so that’s a lot of money.

Then because just in terms of appropriation of budget lines we should be able to have informed debates about where this money goes and what is it good for. Then the problem is, there is very little democratic control over the allocation of those resources, I’ll be specific about that and that’s true across the board. The powers of parliaments - so here I’m going to be old fashioned and I’m going to accept that representative democracy is acceptable. I’m not going to say, “Oh we all need to go

back to the right democracy”; let’s say that we all accept that representative democracy is good enough and therefore that parliaments are a valid institution to dispute, to debate what democracies do with their resources - even if we accept that, it turns out that legislative trajectory and debating powers of parliament are very limited in that respect.

The strongest combination of those powers is the US Congress - and we can talk about exactly what they did - but obviously this role is reduced due to presidential decrees that determine aspects of particular policy and management that’s particularly true in France and Pakistan and in the United Kingdom. British, French and Indian parliaments can debate and exercise budgetary control but then the question becomes, who braves the parliamentarians about what’s at stake? And in the French case we could talk about it further. I have some interesting pieces of evidence.

In China, Israel and Pakistan parliamentarians are simply prohibited from addressing nuclear issues at all so that’s one reason why we really need one institution that could talk about those issues for the public interest and that’s what the public intellectual is there to do.

Then comes the bad news; Lyndon likes to say that I’m the one who always brings bad news. So the bad news is, if we move to a higher level of requirement then we end up looking at the Swiss case as the case of direct democracy. So that’s a rare case but that’s a paradoxical case where direct accountability leads to the Swiss people basically abdicating its voice. There were two referendums in Switzerland, one in 1962 and one in 1963, about a nuclear weapon option. We can talk about the details of the Swiss nuclear weapon programme - which actually not such a thing - but we can talk about what exactly it was. Interestingly here in 1962, 65% of the voters opposed the initiative to ban nuclear weapons absolutely and they wanted to keep supposedly the option. In ‘63 they simply say, “Next time, don’t ask.” And so that’s a case that would kind of go against this idea. But the way we can sustain the need for the public intellectual is because basically, I would say with all due respect, the Swiss popular will in ‘62 and ‘63 doesn’t hold the truth of the needs for democracy forever.

So in spite of this exception, another reason is that simply nuclear weapons create pockets of secrecy. Accordingly we still only know very little about it; we know mostly about the US and the Soviet Union. I’m still a multiyear project on the consequences of the institutionalisation of nuclear weapon programmes and whether or not those programmes are completed. So this additional secrecy creates an extra need for the public intellectual because after all it’s a problem of right to know on the side of the citizen and a problem of duty to tell the truth on the side of the democratic state. Abel Cohen, who wrote one of the best books on the issue, concludes this way - I don’t know his exact words, I’m not going to appropriate them, you can read them - but this is basically a good claim

in terms of nuclear secrecy is an additional requirement for the public intellectual.

Another reason is that nuclear arms states tend to call up experts who narrow down the scope of possible worlds and possible debates. So rarely think about that problem and I would say we don’t think about that problem because the way we think about policy impact is human error. We tend to think about policy impact in terms of impact on policy making elite uniquely, and we tend to think about impact in binary terms: If a policy maker turns your idea into policy then you had impact; if they don’t then you don’t have impact. What I’m asking is basically we need to think about impact beyond decision makers alone towards the general public and beyond this idea to turn your ideas into policy. Narrowing down the scope of acceptable debate is impact and that falls outside of the realm of the way scholars usually think about impact. If you have spare time I would invite you to have a look at my essay on self-censorship which basically makes this particular case; otherwise, you can just discuss it over a glass of wine afterwards.

Now let’s get to the second half of the argument which is that a nuclear armed world requires an institution like the public intellectual but it’s really hard to play that role because you’re going to fall into that dilemma that you’re going to be either a competent traitor or an incompetent servant of the public and I’m going to talk about those in three men: Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Teller and Andrei Sakharov.

Teller is often considered as the cool father of the US thermal nuclear weapon who is [inaudible] and Andrei Sakharov is his Soviet counterpart. What is interesting is that the two men met and on this fateful day of November 1988 to honour Sakharov’s contribution to human rights. So Sakharov was asked to give a speech and he spoke against the Reagan’s sponsored strategic defence initiative which was supported by - Guess who?! - Edward Teller. So Sakharov gives his speech and then Teller is asked to reply and basically Sakharov makes a case in terms of this is destabilising, this is not a good idea, this is dangerous.

According to at least three different sources, Teller did not engage with Sakharov; he just was dismissive and he said - and he writes in his memoirs - literally Sakharov didn’t have the right level of access, didn’t really know what he was talking about. Granted this is Teller’s usual way of dealing with openness, but that tells you something more which is that in a nuclear armed world being disqualified for incompetence because you don’t have access and you’re not an insider is an unavoidable criticism. Even Andrei Sakharov, the founding father of the Soviet thermal nuclear weapon, doesn’t escape it - so no-one can. That is basically the point I am trying to make. If he can’t escape it, no-one can.

Then the other bit is: If you’re an insider and you speak out whatever you say, but if you speak out then you’re incompetent because you’re an insider and if we say you’re an idiot then we have to say we shouldn’t

have hired you. So we say, “Yeah you’re competent but you speak out therefore you are a traitor because you pledged not to.” In a way that’s what happened to Dan Ellsberg - even if he didn’t really speak about the nuclear bit of his role as a nuclear war planner; he spoke mostly by leaking the Pentagon papers - but the point which is interesting here is then the public intellectual doesn’t have to be a scientist. Think about precisely Ellsberg and his fellow game theorists. You could think also about the moralist and the philosophers, Bertrand Russell, [?] and others - what that shows you is that you have to be seen as competent, you have to have institutional recognition as an insider. It’s the inside versus outside that matters.

In that respect, Ellsberg was attacked repeatedly, precisely as a competent traitor. And this is where I am basically concluding, by restating the arguments so that Lyndon can actually take the floor. When nuclear science can affect everyone but is understood by only a few, most of whom have pledged to remain silent, the public intellectual is needed. This is what I have tried to convince you of if there was any need, maybe there wasn’t. The rise of nuclear science generalises the disqualification for incompetence and as a result of that, the current dilemma that we face as public intellectuals is between a competent traitor and a servant of the public delegitimised as incompetent. Thank you.

MUSIC BY A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS – TELECOMMUNICATIONLyndon Kia ora koutou, it’s a real privilege to be here and thank you all for being

here. For me this is quite a special moment, this is the last public talk that Benoît will be giving on his tour around New Zealand. The talk was organised to mark the 30th anniversary of New Zealand’s nuclear-free law which was June 8th of this year [2017] and for me that’s special because for me this is where I got the nuclear bug here in Christchurch.

So in terms of what I’m going to be talk about today, I’ll be talking in three sections. The first thing I am going to do is talk about a bit of context so where have we come from in terms of New Zealand policy in the nuclear world and where are we today in terms of global nuclear dynamics. Secondly to talk about some recent dynamics in international nuclear politics and in particular to look at this what Benoît mentioned, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons - commonly known as the Ban Treaty - so I’ll look at that, what it is and New Zealand’s policies around that Treaty. Then thirdly I will return to this issue of the dilemma, and as Benoît said for me I’m clearly an outsider to the nuclear world; I’m a New Zealand nuclear disarmament researcher so an outsider to the nuclear world - but even in that context I find myself in somewhat of a dilemma as Benoît said between a nuclear scholar, an activist of sorts and perhaps a wannabe public intellectual.

So in terms of that first issue of just context and where we’re at. I think there’s a common perception in the public that with the end of the Cold War the nuclear threat went away or at least we don’t have to worry

about that anymore and I’m sure that all of you sitting here today won’t be under any illusions about that but certainly there’s just a general lack of… I find in my work there’s a general lack of engagement with these issues, a lack of awareness of them and a lack of awareness of the vulnerability that still exists as a result of nuclear weapons.

In actual fact there are still some 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, about 95% of those in the Russian and US arsenals, 2,000 of those being nuclear missiles that are on what’s known as ‘Launch on warning’ alert which basically means that at every moment of everyday those missiles are only ever 30 minutes away from being fired and in the middle of that 30-minute segment there is a period of somewhere between maybe five to seven minutes in which either Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump is tasked with making a decision about whether to start World War Three.

So that has continued to be the case every moment of every day since the end of the Cold War. So basically what we’ve seen is that weapons numbers have come down dramatically since the end of the Cold War but the nuclear deterrent doctrines and the deployment patterns of those weapons hasn’t really changed a lot. There have been some removal of tactical nuclear weapons but the problem is still huge, it still remains.

In addition we’re also dealing with an expanding range of threats today. I’m sure in the media and popular discussion you would have heard about the possibility of nuclear terrorism which certainly is something to be concerned about but equally we also now face this issue of cyber-attacks and as I’m sure you will all be aware there is now multiple ongoing congressional investigations in the United States about this question of whether or not the US Election was basically hacked by Russian hackers supported by the Russian State. Which makes you question: If the US Election process is not immune to hacking, what about these other critical issues, like for example, nuclear weapons and basic… A think tank recently put out a report about the trident nuclear system in the UK saying it’s absolutely hackable and the British Government says flat out it’s not, everybody calm down there’s no problem, we’ve got this covered, it’s not something you even need to think about and independent researchers are saying really that is a big problem and we need to talk about it.

Another issue that’s really critical in this area is the issue of modernisation. So basically what we see is, as I said, is that although weapons numbers have come down significantly since the end of the Cold War, all of the nine nuclear weapons states today are either modernising and/or expanding their nuclear arsenals and those modernisation programmes have implications that will last for several decades at least. And so, far from the nuclear weapon states pursuing their obligation to engage in nuclear disarmament in good faith, they’re actually modernising their arsenals well out into the future and the US example alone… And I know Benoît gave examples about the US as

well. One of the things to say about that is it’s not just about beating up on the US because they’re the bad guys, it’s about actually they’re the only nuclear state or in many sense the only nuclear state that actually publishes material so they cop a lot of flak simply because we know what they’re doing - we don’t even know what the others are doing - but in the US alone they have plans to spend up to in the latest estimates $1.3 trillion USD over the next 30 years on the nuclear weapons programmes. So clearly there’s a huge problem there.

If you turn from those more technical issues to the political side, at the international level we have the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the core agreement around these weapons which is basically they call it a grand bargain, it’s a trade-off where the non-nuclear states say OK, we’ll sign the non-proliferation treaty, we agree never to get nuclear weapons by any means and the trade-off is that the nuclear states say OK, if you agree not to get the weapons, we will agree to work in good faith to get rid of our weapons. The difficulty there is that, while we have overwhelming compliance among non-nuclear weapon states who in the vast majority of cases have abided by their obligations and have kept that pledge, there is a deep and wide dissatisfaction among non-nuclear states in that the nuclear states have not kept their obligations, they haven’t acted in good faith to move towards disarmament - and as I just expressed there are modernisation and expansion programmes for the nuclear weapons programmes in all nine nuclear weapon states. So that’s created this extreme dissatisfaction among non-nuclear weapon states.

In the most recent example which I will return to shortly, the issue of the Ban Treaty, far from engaging in good faith to disarm they boycotted the only multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations that were seen since the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons] was signed in 1968. In terms of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was signed in 1996 but has yet to enter into force because several critical states haven’t ratified it. The nuclear weapon states will say yes we’re working on disarmament, you guys should just leave us to it, we’re working on this thing called a fissile material treaty or a fissile material cut-off treaty which is basically about cutting off production of nuclear bomb fuel. And so whenever you go to these international meetings, the nuclear weapon states and their allies will say yeah, we’re working on disarmament, we are working in good faith, we’re working on this thing called a fissile material treaty. The trouble with that is since the last agreement that we had on it which was in 1995, we haven’t actually managed to even start negotiations let alone agree on a negotiating agenda or the issues that we’re going to negotiate on. So there’s a total failure in that regard.

As I mentioned with regard to the Ban Treaty which was just completed, not only do the nuclear weapon states and their allies - with the exemption of the Netherlands who did come and join negotiations - not only have they refused to join the negotiations, they’ve publically derided

the Treaty and said it’s dangerous and destabilising, a terrible thing, so there’s a real problem there.

If I then look at the New Zealand domestic context, what’s happening in New Zealand policy and in New Zealand politics and actually I should say more broadly to the New Zealand public. As many of you will be aware due to your personal commitments in the mid-1980s there were 350 local area peace groups in New Zealand working on nuclear weapons issues, advocating for disarmament, advocating for the New Zealand Government to take a stronger role in promoting disarmament internationally. Today there’s a handful, at best, of those peace groups still active.

The general point I’d make there, what I’d use that to demonstrate is that in general terms the New Zealand public is extremely disengaged from this issue. There isn’t a level of awareness off the threats; there isn’t a level of engagement. I’m not sure why that is exactly, I’d hazard a guess. And in that regard I’d turn to Benoît’s works and one of the things that Benoît has done in his research programme is survey 10,000 young people from across all 28 European states and through those surveys and the interviews they’ve done what they find is not that those young Europeans are not aware that this is an issue, it’s that they feel utterly disempowered, they feel like there’s nothing they can do about it and the result is they’re not engaged. I don’t know if the same is true in New Zealand, I’d love to work on some opinion polling and hopefully we can move in that direction in the near future.

The result of this total lack of New Zealand public engagement is that there is basically zero political pressure on the New Zealand Government or New Zealand politicians to work actively in this area. So a great example of that is the New Zealand Nuclear-Free Zone law states in it that there will be a Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control and that that Public Advisory Committee is a couple of… Well, a former member and current member here, Angela Woodward, sitting in the audience and that that Public Advisory Committee will be chaired by the Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control.

So the law basically establishes that there will be a Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control and from the late 1980s until 2011 we had such a Minister. It brought all kinds of diplomatic advantages in that when you send a minister to an international negotiation the minister gets to speak first under diplomatic protocol and all the countries that send along officials or diplomats have to speak second. New Zealand loses that ability because we no longer have a Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control - in 2011, shortly after the election, the newly reconstituted National-led government disestablished that position. They claimed at the time that the portfolio was now rolled into the portfolio of the Foreign Minister but I can say, having followed the issue closely since 2011, the words ‘disarmament’ and ‘arms control’ don’t appear on the Foreign Minister’s page anywhere. They’re not on a private National Party page,

they’re not on the ministerial page, they simply disappear. So there’s a real lack of engagement there.

I just want to talk quickly to a couple of issues that with regard to that issue that came out of my PhD research and basically what’s interesting there is I looked at three different segments of society and their relationship to this issue of nuclear weapons and nuclear policy . And the framework that I used was this idea of national identity and what I found was that there was massive public support for the nuclear-free policy but in the public that support is latent. So there’s a strong sense of identification with the policy but it’s not an active sort of a thing and I have described some of the dynamics in that regard already.

With regard to the politicians - again, I’ve described that lack of engagement - and I’d say in a large part because of the lack of public engagement. What’s interesting is that despite that lack of engagement New Zealand has continued to play a very strong leadership role on this issue internationally and so where’s that coming from? The answer is that’s coming from the Foreign Affairs Department and what’s interesting about that is, whereas the Foreign Affairs Department were strongly critical of the nuclear-free law when it was passed, the fact that they have had to be the ones that go out year after year after year for the last 30 years and defend New Zealand policy in this area, they’ve basically had a change of heart. Their sense of identity around these issues is now driven by the fact that they’re the ones promoting these norms every year and so that’s a really significant shift in the way that policy is developed.

So if I turn now to the second section of the talk which is basically looking at recent developments and in particular I’m just going to outline some of the dynamics around this Treaty and the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (or Ban Treaty). This Ban Treaty is historic for a number of reasons that I’ll touch on. In the New Zealand context what’s really interesting about it is it basically takes the principles of the New Zealand Nuclear-free law which says there’s no legitimate reason for having nuclear weapons and it lifts them up to the international legal level and it embeds those principles in an international treaty.

The Treaty is historic because it shifts the international discourse around nuclear weapons away from what I call a techno-strategic kind of language towards a humanitarian language. So if I were to extrapolate wildly I think perhaps one of the reasons that the general public doesn’t feel empowered to talk - or actually one of the means that the elite use to disempower the general public in these areas - is to make everything about expertise and expertise defined by you have to know all about the techno-strategic realities these geopolitical forces and strategic stability and deterrents and all of its many different nooks and crannies and most of the public don’t know that stuff. So as Benoît has outlined tonight, it’s a very simple task to then dismiss people who don’t know and their opinions don’t matter.

What the Ban Treaty is, it completely flips that on its head and it says let’s talk about the weapons and how they relate to human beings and the reality is they’re weapons of genocide. They’re weapons that are designed to cause massive casualties instantaneously but also have intergenerational effects, long term environmental effects, all kinds of horrific effects that we never talk about if we just stick to this techno-strategic language. And so one of the reasons the Ban Treaty is historic is it’s an opportunity to re-empower the public. It’s an opportunity to say to young people actually you can engage with this stuff because you know about humanitarianism, you know about human rights, you know about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and maybe you know about the bans on antipersonnel landmines which were also driven by this humanitarian language.

So the Ban Treaty has the potential to re-engage the public, to re-empower people and in that regard it’s historic. So as I mentioned earlier it’s the first multilateral treaty that deals with the issue of nuclear disarmament since 1968 when the Non-proliferation Treaty was signed and in that regard it’s historic. It’s also historic in that it recognises all the victims of the testing of nuclear weapons, development of nuclear weapons and use of nuclear weapons explicitly in the text and there’s some really interesting stuff I want to draw out there in terms of the New Zealand legacy and in particular the World Court Project which was born here in Christchurch with Harold Evans and with others such as Kate [Dewes] and Rob Green and Peter and others who were deeply involved in that campaign.

So the World Court Project was a project designed to have the International Court of Justice, the highest legal body of the United Nations, give an advisory ruling on the legal status of nuclear weapons and it began here in 1986 with a visitor, Richard Fork, to Christchurch and over the better part of a decade campaigners reached out internationally, got three large international organisations on board including two Nobel prize-winning organisations, and the result of it eventually was that those NGOs managed to convince the United Nations General Assembly to request an advisory opinion from the World Court.

The World Court advisory opinion picked up on these ideas of humanitarian issues around nuclear weapons and it was historic in that it was the first time that we had evidence from survivors of nuclear testing, survivors of nuclear use actually brought into the United Nations into a legal proceedings.

Also there was the second aspect to that, which was there was also a request from the World Health Organisation to the International Court of Justice, now that in the end of the Court decided it wasn’t going to rule on that but that also looked at the issues of health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons. The Ban Treaty picks up on both of those issues and it explicitly in the text addresses environmental remediation

and victim assistance for all those that were affected by the development, testing and use of nuclear weapons and also was historic in the sense that for the first time in history we actually had survivors of nuclear bombings and survivors of nuclear tests speaking to the negotiating conference and then having their evidence used as a basis for negotiations for the text.

That draws on the legacy of the World Court Project and other humanitarian campaigns. It also drew strongly on the model of the ban on anti-personnel landmines which made some similar connections and both of those things also worked on a model of cooperation between the civil society movement and supportive governments and all of that comes out in the nuclear weapons Ban Treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

To talk to the politics of this Treaty very briefly: What is really interesting about this is that the nuclear weapon states will dismiss the Treaty and say it’s irrelevant, they don’t care, they’re never going to sign it so it has no force and it doesn’t matter. But if you actually look at what they’ve said about it, it shows that they really do care and they really are concerned. So before the negotiations began, the United States put out a public document calling on all of their allies to oppose the negotiations and then to boycott the negotiations and they said explicitly the reason they wanted them to do this is because the Treaty threatens to undermine nuclear deterrence and for a lot of people pushing the Treaty that’s exactly why they wanted a treaty.

So the US was concerned about that. What I think is interesting about the dynamics between… The difference between what happened before the Treaty was signed, or before it was negotiated, and what happened afterwards gives me a little bit of hope and here Benoît maybe differs from me on this but where I see scope for progress.

So the challenge we have is we have a comprehensive Ban Treaty - and I should have said earlier actually, when I say it’s a comprehensive Ban Treaty it doesn’t flat-out ban nuclear weapons, it bans a whole series of activities related to nuclear weapons for those that become parties to the Treaty - and those are it bans the use, development, testing, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling or transfer of nuclear weapons and it bans states, parties, from assisting any other country from undertaking any of those activities. And more than that, it bans the use - but not just the use - of nuclear of weapons, it bans the threat of use of nuclear weapons which essentially speaks directly to the issue of nuclear deterrence. And so that was debated in the negotiating conference. The first draft of the Treaty did not include that ban on the threat of use; it was debated and then later included in subsequent version of the Treaty. So the countries that adopted the Treaty were absolutely aware that by including this ban on the threat of use they were directly challenging nuclear deterrence doctrine and that’s why they did it. So there’s just a bit of a word on the actual prohibitions in the Treaty.

Returning to this issue of does it matter? The nuclear weapon states that said well actually before the Treaty was negotiated the western allies led by the United States, they all got their representatives to the UN to line up outside the room that the Treaty was going to be negotiated in and had a public boycott. They actually had an official boycott of these negotiations which, for one, shows an abrogation of their responsibilities of their obligation because one of the findings of the International Court of Justice in the 1996 advisory opinion was that there is an obligation for all countries to negotiate in good faith and to conclude negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects and so here we are with a nuclear disarmament negotiation opening and the nuclear weapon states not only didn’t join but they publically boycotted it. So it’s an abrogation of the… But at any rate, they did that, led by the US, and they all lined up outside of the room saying we thoroughly oppose the Treaty, it’s a terrible idea.

What I find interesting is when we arrive at July 7th this year [2017] and we had a text that was adopted by 122 countries, three countries put out a press release - the UK, US and France - and that press release said we totally reject this Treaty, it’s dangerous, it’s destabilising and we will never sign it and never become a party to it. Which leads me to ask the question: Well, what happened to the other couple of other dozen states that you had with you at the start of the process who were opposed to the Treaty? Is it that they weren’t willing to sign that piece of paper that says we will never sign this Treaty and we will never become a party to it? Maybe it does but I think in the interim they’ve realised that they can’t say things like that. So there’s a gap there already between the nuclear weapon states and their allies and that’s the wedge that we need to start working on, targeting the allies and saying hey do you really want to be engaged with these weapons which are inhumane and discriminate and have been outlawed by, at this stage, 122 countries have adopted the Treaty, it still remains for them to sign and ratify it before the Treaty will come into force which requires 50 signatories.

So enough about that, I’ll move onto my final section which is basically to look at this issue of the public intellectual, insider, outsider and the dilemma for me. One of the things that any academic - or I would say, any intellectual - needs in order to be taken seriously as a researcher is a degree of credibility. What you say in public has to be credible in order for it to be believable and for you to have any sense of any impact whether that’s policy impact or influence on public opinion etc. or defining the scope of the debate.

In order to do that there has to be a degree of remove from the subject, you have to be able to say I’m not deep in this stuff, I’m standing back from it and I can look at it objectively and I can do an analysis and tell you what I think is going on. So the first thing there for me as an academic is I need to be able to do that and stand back from it but then as a public intellectual that looks at the bigger problem of what are the

challenges of the nuclear age and how are we addressing them and clearly there’s a huge challenge which is that we have this existential threat threatening the very survival of the human race and that threat is only ever a maximum of 30 minutes away from being realised, as I said, with this whole ‘Launch on warning’ policy.

So that’s the challenge and that’s just one of the challenges, there’s a whole bunch of research which Benoît has done which I really encourage you to look at and in particular if you’re interested simply by listening to Kim Hill who interviewed him last Saturday on the Saturday Morning Show, Vulnerabilities with Nuclear Weapons. So there’s the problem: As a public intellectual, what do I do when I look at that? How do I make sense of that and how do I make sense of my role in trying to address that? So I then put the Ban Treaty in that context and I say OK well this is the first thing we’ve had since 1968 so it’s decades and decades since we’ve had any real progress in negotiations towards nuclear disarmament so clearly it’s an important development so what do I do with that?

Then this is the third aspect of it, so if I just start promoting the Ban Treaty and saying this is a great thing, we should all get behind it - immediately the nuclear reestablishment and the nuclear security state and all of its allies dismisses me as an activist, they say you’re not a credible commentator, you’re clearly engaged in this but of course it’s the typical response of those who advocate the status quo can stand back and be like, “See, I’m not advocating change so I can be objective.” And of course they don’t admit or acknowledge in public that by advocating the status quo that doesn’t absolve them of a position on the issue, it just means that they support the current power structure.

Coming into that and saying, “Well I actually advocate change” you immediately get dismissed as a radical or an activist. So where do I fall on that issue? I basically say, “So what can we draw on in terms of precedent, in terms of whether this is a good idea or not because the nuclear weapon states are saying this is a terrible idea, 122 countries at least have adopted the Treaty to say we think it’s a good idea. Where can we draw our lessons from?”

And the most immediate lesson I’d look at is the example of the Antipersonnel Landmine Ban Treaty. When that Treaty was signed, all of the major producers of landmines opposed it, they didn’t sign it and the critics of the Treaty said. “Therefore your Treaty is worthless. You’ve got all these countries that produce the landmines and distribute them and they’ve completely opposed it and said they won’t sign it so what’s the point of it?” But if you actually look at what’s happened since then, because that Treaty created such a strong global norm rejecting the weapons on humanitarian grounds, since the Treaty was signed the production, sale and deployment of landmines has gone almost to zero and you have countries like the United States who although they haven’t joined the Treaty have basically started to abide by its guidelines. And so

I think that’s a great example of what can be achieved through the development of treaties like this.

The second - and moving towards concluding - the second point that I’d make in that regard is because international treaties only apply to the countries that sign them, a country can’t be bound by something that it never agreed to be bound by. The Treaty doesn’t have official legal force for the nuclear weapon states or their allies but it certainly has political force and in that regard what we have with the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty is a political tool and in that regard it’s up to us what we do with that tool. We can pick it up and use it as a means of promoting norms around nuclear disarmament - and I would suggest that it’s our responsibility as concerned global citizens to do that and in particular in the New Zealand context. So I would encourage you all to contact your local MP, to ask them if they’re aware of this issue and if so they support New Zealand signing and ratifying the Treaty as soon as possible and that would certainly be the position that I would take.

So I thank you for your attention.

Sally You’ve been listening to Speak Up-Kōrerotia, today featuring a recorded lecture by Benoît Pelopidas and Lyndon Burford discussing the dilemma of the public intellectual in the nuclear age. We had a couple of musical interludes, snippets of songs which reference the concept of a nuclear age: Sting’s ‘We Work The Black Seam’ and ‘Telecommunication’ by A Flock of Seagulls. We’ve got one more song to conclude this Speak Up-Kōrerotia episode - another song from the 1980s, actually - Van Morrison’s ‘Rave On, John Donne.’

This is Speak Up-Kōrerotia. Find us on Facebook and Twitter and download our transcripts.

MUSIC BY VAN MORRISON – RAVE ON, JOHN DONNE