"Denuclearization" - A Graphic to Focus the Mind

ICAN logo

I've recommended an important article in the New York Review of Books.

I featured the logo of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in my post. The post (and the article it recommended) was not about ICAN and the nuclear ban treaty -- at least not directly. But I used the image for three reasons.


Ad hominem

First: I have a strong objection to the image that did accompany the NYRB article. Oh, I think the graphic is very artistic, with its portrait of a deathly pale Kim Jong-un flanked by skulls. But I object to the use of it in connection with this article -- which is, after all, about multiple nuclear weapons states. The suggestion of death is appropriate to any discussion of nuclear weapons, but it is false to focus on the deadliness of a person instead of the deadliness of the nuclear weapons, themselves, and the nuclear weapons architecture and the roles people play in it.

Kim Jong-un by Siegried Woldhek in the New York Review of Books

This is especially true at a moment when people in the US -- that is, many of the very people who make up the readership of NYRB -- are struggling to develop a fact-based understanding of Korea, its northern and southern parts, and the role of the US in negotiations about conflict and nuclear weapons there. That's why I wrote A Checklist for Critically Reading (and Writing) About North Korea and Can You Judge a Nuclear Confrontation by Its Cover?

(By the way: you could fault me for the many times I have used pejorative images of Donald Trump to suggest the danger he poses as the commander of US nuclear weapons. More to come on this subject . . . . )


"Denuclearization"

Second, one of the essential points of the NYRB article is that the term "denuclearization" is being used by both Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, but the two mean different things when they use it.

Kim means, in essence, "we want a situation in which we're not threatened by your nuclear weapons and you're not threatened by ours."

Trump means "we want a situation in which you give up your nuclear weapons capability and we keep ours."

Anyone who is familiar with US nuclear doctrine to date understands why Trump thinks his version is the way things work.

Anyone who is familiar with the history of Korea understands why Kim is committed to his version.

And what results is a discourse. People get to dig into the issue, learn about it, try to understand it, and discuss it with others.

So: back to that graphic. I believe that the ICAN logo -- the image of a nuclear weapon being broken -- is an image that helps us focus on the core discourse: denuclearization.


A Proprietary Image?

It's debatable whether the logo of ICAN is fair game for the Korea Spring and denuclearization. ICAN is not a party to the talks, and the talks are not connected to the central project of ICAN, the nuclear ban treaty -- directly.

And yet . . . .

The discourse on denuclearization is impossible to separate from the discourse on the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which has now become impossible to separate from the discourse on the global nuclear ban treaty.

Just as "Nature abhors a vacuum," people innately sense and reject inequity. The longstanding de facto architecture of nuclear weapons -- "some've got 'em and others don't get to have 'em" -- withers a little more each time another person comes to see it and think about it and understand it and talk about it.

And right now the Trump-Kim Summit is shining a bright light on the discourse of denuclearization and that inequity.


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