Peter Kuznick on the growing threat of nuclear war and the appeal to Pope Leo XIV
Glenn Diesen interviews Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, on the escalating risk of nuclear conflict and a new international appeal to Pope Leo XIV to convene an emergency peace summit.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with Peter Kuznick — co-creator with Oliver Stone of the documentary series The Untold History of the United States — about what Kuznick describes as the most dangerous moment for nuclear war since World War II. Kuznick details a new initiative, built on an appeal to Pope Leo XIV, calling for an emergency summit of the leaders of the United States, Russia, and China. He argues that a new school of nuclear planners — in contrast to traditional deterrence theorists — now believes a nuclear war can be fought and won, and that this thinking is gaining influence at the highest levels of the US military and government. Kuznick contends that Trump is under pressure from figures including Netanyahu, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Sebastian Gorka to break the nuclear taboo, and that the US has effectively already been defeated in Iran, creating a moment of dangerous desperation. He also revisits the history of the atomic bombings of Japan, arguing that the standard American justification is a foundational lie of the American empire, and that seven of the eight five-star admirals and generals in 1945 considered the bombings either militarily unnecessary or morally reprehensible. Both speakers express alarm at the collapse of arms control agreements, the criminalization of diplomacy, and the remilitarization of Europe. Kuznick also draws on the precedent of Pope John XXIII's private appeal to Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis — which Khrushchev credited as providing cover for backing down — as a direct historical justification for urging Pope Leo XIV to intervene similarly today.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the appeal to Pope Leo XIV
Glenn Diesen: We are joined today by Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University — also noteworthy, as many people might know him, from the ten- or twelve-part documentary series with Oliver Stone called The Untold History of the United States. Thank you for coming on the program.
Peter Kuznick: My pleasure, Glenn.
Glenn Diesen: You've spent decades studying nuclear weapons and the history of nuclear confrontation, and you just led an appeal to Pope Leo regarding convening an international summit due to the growing threat of nuclear war. I was wondering if you could flesh out this argument — why do you think this is so critical at this point?
Peter Kuznick: Let me give a little background on this initiative. It was actually built upon the work of Jack Gilroy. Jack Gilroy is an activist with Pax Christi and with Veterans for Peace, a longtime peace stalwart in the United States. He drafted a letter to Archbishop Wester, who is the Archbishop for the Santa Fe region in the United States. Wester is the most outspoken voice in the US Catholic Church for peace and nuclear abolition. So Jack drafted a letter that I became part of, calling on Archbishop Wester to reach out to Pope Leo to urge him to call an emergency international summit — minimally of Putin, Xi, and Trump, the three main nuclear powers — because we're at a moment of so much more risk of nuclear war than there has really ever been before.
When I was in Italy, I met with Cardinal Semeraro, who is in charge of the committee on sanctification. He and I were at the same alternative university program that meets every summer in the Italian Alps, called Tonal Estate. I spoke to Cardinal Semeraro and he promised that he would hand the letter to Pope Leo. So at that point we had gone beyond the Archbishop Wester initiative. I drafted a new appeal directly to Pope Leo, and I thought of it as working on two levels: one, to encourage the Pope to call this kind of emergency summit; but secondly, to include enough information about why the risk had grown so dangerous that we could also use it as an educational tool to mobilise the population around the world — to say, get off this insane path of warfare and potential nuclear warfare.
The escalating nuclear threat — warnings from intelligence chiefs and military planners
I start the appeal by quoting Tulsi Gabbard, who occasionally had some very lucid moments. On June 10th, 2025, Tulsi released a two-and-a-half-minute video starting off in Hiroshima, saying that what happened in Hiroshima was peanuts compared to the weapons we have today. She said we're closer to nuclear annihilation today than we've ever been before, and warmongers in capitals around the world are proceeding in that direction. Then in October, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia's SVR — the Foreign Intelligence Agency — said that civilisation today is at its most fragile moment since World War II and the risk of a new world war looms greatly. The fact that two intelligence chiefs understood this is significant. Tulsi's warning was issued two days before Israel and the United States began bombing Iran in 2025. She must have known that was coming, but she's been alert to this threat for a long time.
We've also got this coming from other sources. US military leaders have been talking about the threat of war with China. Philip Davidson issued that warning in 2021. General Mike Minihan in 2023 said he thinks the US and China are going to be at war by 2025. Fortunately, that didn't happen. But then Admiral Buchanan said more recently that the United States can fight and win a three-front nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea and still keep enough nuclear weapons in reserve to maintain its global hegemony.
That builds upon a discussion going on in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which had written three articles discussing the fact that there are now two schools of nuclear planners. The old school believes in deterrence theory and mutually assured destruction. But a new school of nuclear planners believes that a nuclear war can be fought and won — which Reagan and Gorbachev denied, which people have denied more recently. But they say that now, with advanced sonar technology, artificial intelligence, and other advanced intelligence capabilities, the US can actually pinpoint the location of every Chinese and Russian nuclear submarine, preemptively knock them out, knock out the intercontinental ballistic missiles in a preemptive strike, and shoot down the aircraft trying to deliver nuclear weapons. And the US could win this.
There have been people reasoning like this for decades since the start of the nuclear age. In 2006, Lieber and Press had an article in Foreign Affairs — the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations — in which they said that the US now has a first-strike capability and can wipe out China and Russia in a preemptive strike. The people in Russia thought that was official US policy. It was published in a Council on Foreign Relations publication. The Washington Post reported that heads were exploding in the Kremlin because they thought this was official US policy. Now maybe it is official US policy, because there is so much more talk about the use of nuclear weapons.
Pressure on Trump to break the nuclear taboo
We know that there is pressure on Trump. I became a columnist for Al Jazeera. The first piece that Eva Hague and I wrote — we've written six pieces there for Al Jazeera; Eva teaches at Columbia and she's the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation — the first piece we wrote was titled "Breaking the Nuclear Taboo." We reasoned that Trump, who has this massive ego and is, as you know, a pathological narcissist, is being told by some people — Netanyahu, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, maybe Marco Rubio, Sebastian Gorka — that he can go down as the greatest president in history. He's broken every custom, every norm, every tradition, US law, international law. The only taboo he hasn't broken is the nuclear taboo. And every other president has been afraid to break that for 81 years. But he can do it.
We know, as Marjorie Taylor Greene of all people just warned, that Trump is contemplating and being urged to use tactical nuclear weapons in Iran, which we can get into in a few minutes. Not only is Trump under that kind of pressure — Putin is under that kind of pressure too. We've seen Russian leaders talking to Putin about the need to escalate dramatically. When Putin met with a friend of mine a few months ago, he said that he's under enormous pressure from the hawks in Russia to act much more aggressively in Ukraine.
Then we've got the recent comments by Elbridge Colby, the policy chief at the Pentagon, who just wrote last week that if fighting breaks out in the Pacific, the US will need to resort to nuclear weapons — partly because the US has depleted its missiles, depleted its interceptors, depleted its precision-guided munitions. There is so much more of this kind of insane talk. The Pentagon has been trying to war-game a limited nuclear war for decades and they never can do it — it always ends up in a full-scale nuclear war.
Nuclear winter and the scale of potential destruction
We've known forever, but especially since the 1980s and the work done on nuclear winter, that even a limited nuclear war can trigger a partial nuclear winter. As Robock and Toon and others have studied more recently, a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons were deployed would burn the cities and create a partial nuclear winter in which the sun's rays would be blocked from reaching the earth. We would have famine, disease, and that limited nuclear war could cause up to two billion deaths. But we don't have a hundred nuclear weapons — we've got more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. And they're not Hiroshima size. Most are between seven and seventy times the size of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima. So this is a reality that, as a species, we need to think of — along with global warming — as a planetary existential threat.
We see Trump wanting to make America great again, Putin wanting to make Russia great again, Xi wanting to make China great again, Modi wanting to make India great again, Netanyahu wanting to make Israel great again. We see nationalists everywhere. Who speaks for the planet? That was the question we were posing. Sometimes Lula speaks for the planet. Lula has called — in a phone conversation with Trump just a few days ago — for a special emergency session of the United Nations to get us off this path of war. He's previously called for that in meetings with Putin and Xi Jinping. That's along the same lines of what we're calling for.
We said that sometimes Guterres speaks for the planet, but it's mostly been Pope Leo XIV who has raised this clarion call for humanity — talking about the need to end wars, the need for nuclear abolition, the need for a different course for mankind. He's got a unique kind of moral authority right now. So we're urging him through this appeal to speak out for humanity and call on at least the leaders of the three major nations — but there should be more — for an emergency summit meeting to get us off this path of war and nuclear war.
Why this moment may be the right one for diplomacy
The reason I think it is realistic at this moment is that the United States is bogged down in Iran. The Iranians have their foot on Trump's neck and they're not letting him up. Trump has been desperately trying, through either economic pressure or military pressure, to get out of this war as quickly as he can, because the US has already been defeated by Iran. There's a similar situation — not quite the same, but in some ways parallel — with Russia in Ukraine, where Russia is making some slow progress on the battlefield, but Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil refineries, Russian shipping, grain shipping. What we're seeing right now is that warfare as a means of settling disputes is increasingly irrelevant. The US, the most powerful country in the history of the world, has not really won a significant war since World War II. And even that's questionable, because Germany is leading the rearmament of Europe and Japan is leading the rearmament of the Pacific. So what did we win in World War II?
Since then, the US was defeated in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Libya is a quagmire. Syria — where has the US had a military victory? Maybe Grenada in 1983, Operation Urgent Fury. But if the US can't win in Iran and Russia has been bogged down for five years in Ukraine, maybe we need to find different ways to settle these disputes. And so this is what we're asking the Pope to do. We've been getting heads of state, former heads of state, former military leaders, former diplomats from around the world signing on, because I think there's a universal recognition that we're on a very dangerous path. The pressure on Putin is enormous, and Trump could, in this moment of desperation, actually resort to using nuclear weapons because nothing else is working in the war in Iran. That's why I'm so worried. That's why I started this initiative building on Jack Gilroy's brilliant stroke, and why we're getting such a positive response.
Dr. Strangelove, the nuclear first-strike fantasy, and the erosion of restraint
Glenn Diesen: This is all very similar to Dr. Strangelove — it feels sometimes like that kind of recklessness, and how careless they are about the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Even if a nuclear first strike can't be achieved, if political and military leaders believe it can be, they will be much more reckless. They'll be willing to go up the escalation ladder, assuming their opponent would have to fold. And even if such a nuclear first strike were possible — knocking out all of Russia's thousands of nuclear weapons, the Chinese, the North Korean — this planet is not that big. We all reside here. You would destroy it for everyone. It shocks me how things we would never have thought about doing in the past are now almost commonplace. I remember those attacks on Russia's early nuclear warning systems, the attacks on Russia's nuclear deterrent, and apparently the invasion of Kursk had the objective of seizing control of Russia's Kursk nuclear power plant to use as some kind of leverage. And as you said, there are now allegedly talks in Washington about doing a tactical nuclear strike on Iran, hoping they will fold. East Asia is a whole other story.
What I wanted to ask is: why is there no more fear of nuclear war? Listening to our governments and our media, it's as if it's a minor thing, something that belongs to the past. It's even considered sometimes immoral to be worried about nuclear war — before we called it nuclear deterrence or the nuclear peace, now we call it nuclear blackmail, in reference to Russia. If we worry about nuclear war, we're essentially empowering Putin. So we have to strip him of this by calling his bluff. I'm wondering what future generations will say about the time we live in now — the war enthusiasts, the demonisation.
Peter Kuznick: You remember the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951? A visitor arrives from another galaxy and brings a message of peace to Washington, immediately lands in Washington DC, and the US Army shoots him. But then he has these magic healing powers and ends up with this threat: "We don't care what you do on your own planet, but if you threaten the universe, we're going to turn your planet into a burned-out cinder."
You mentioned Dr. Strangelove. When my friend Oliver Stone was in Moscow some years ago — when he spent twenty hours meeting with Putin for his documentaries — he asked Putin if he had seen Dr. Strangelove. Putin said he had never seen it. Oliver showed it to him on his computer. They watched Dr. Strangelove together.
The atomic bombings of Japan — the foundational myth of the American empire
All these world leaders — when Obama went to Hiroshima, from the day Obama got elected I was urging him to go. Finally, at the end of his administration in 2016, he visited. NHK, Japan's public television, brought me over to do commentary during the Obama visit. And Obama says, "Death fell from the skies." Death didn't fall from the skies — the United States dropped an atomic bomb. Then he goes on to repeat the leading myth about the atomic bombings in World War II. He says World War II reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's the lie that's at the heart of the American Empire — this idea that not only were the atomic bombs necessary because the fanatical Japanese would never have surrendered, but that they were humane because they saved half a million American lives and millions of Japanese lives. That's the lie.
Because as we know, the Japanese were desperate to surrender at that point and the US knew it. The US knew that we could change the surrender terms, let them keep the emperor — which they were begging for and which their cables, which we had intercepted, were all saying — or we could wait for the Soviet invasion. US intelligence had been saying since April that the Soviet invasion would finally convince all Japanese that further resistance was futile. Truman understood that. Truman had lunch with Stalin in Potsdam on July 17th, and he goes home and writes in his journal: "Stalin will be in the war by August 15th. Fini Japs when that occurs." He writes home to his wife Bess the next day: "The Russians are coming in. We'll end the war a year sooner now. Think of all the kids who won't be killed." But he wanted to use the bomb.
The Soviet invasion began August 9th. He had been told that, but he got the dates wrong. He wanted to use the bomb to send a message to the Kremlin that if they interfered with US plans in Europe or the Pacific, this is what they're going to get — and worse, much worse. Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, said that from two weeks from the time he took over the project, he understood that Russia was the enemy and they ran the project on that basis. Jimmy Byrnes, who became Secretary of State and Truman's leading advisor, said the same thing — that they wanted to roll back the Russians in Eastern Europe.
The United States had eight five-star admirals and generals in 1945. Seven of the eight are on the record saying the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both. Admiral Leahy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Truman's personal chief of staff, said: "The bombings put us on the moral level of the barbarians of the dark ages." This kind of crazy thinking has been around for a long time, and now it's gaining a foothold again.
The post-Cold War sleep and the reawakening of nuclear awareness
The point you were making was that at the end of the Cold War, people assumed the nuclear threat was over. In the 1980s there was tremendous concern — I was on campus, I was teaching, and that was the big issue. There were all these anti-nuclear groups and all this momentum in the US, the million-person march in Central Park. In fact, we just unearthed photographs of Pope Leo when he was a young priest participating in a 1983 German or Italian march of a million people against the positioning of the missiles in Europe. Leo was involved in those protests back then.
We've had this awareness for a long time, but people went to sleep after the Cold War ended. In recent years it's happened again. One of the things I credit for the resurgence — first of all, my friend Dan Ellsberg, when he knew he was dying, really doubled down and used every ounce of strength to warn the world about the threat of nuclear war and nuclear winter. But the Oppenheimer movie also had a catalytic effect. I was teaching a course at American University unrelated to nuclear issues, right after the movie came out, and I asked my students how many had seen Oppenheimer, thinking three or four hands would go up. Eighty percent of the students raised their hands. And this is a generation whose burning moral issue is Gaza — they absolutely hated the Biden, Kamala Harris, and Trump support for the genocide in Gaza. This really galvanised them. But they're also awake to planetary climate threats and to the nuclear threat, and I'm seeing a lot of momentum again in that direction.
When I was just in Nagasaki on July 25th, keynoting an international peace conference co-sponsored by Asahi Shimbun — the leading newspaper in Japan — the city government of Nagasaki, and the Nagasaki peace movement, six of my students went with me to Japan, to Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Then when I went to this conference in Italy and keynoted that, eleven of my students came. They don't get any credit. They pay out of their own pocket, but they care. They're really passionate in their concern about the future.
That's what we're trying to appeal to. Our generation — the baby boomers — may have screwed up in a lot of ways. One of the things that Oliver Stone and I inveigh against is this idea of the greatest generation being so heroic. Yes, they won World War II, but they gave us Vietnam. They gave us planetary destruction. They gave us these huge military complexes. We need a very different kind of thinking. And Pope Leo seems to have embraced that kind of thinking. So we're giving him as much support and encouragement as we can to do the right thing for humanity. And anybody else who wants to take that leadership — like Lula's been doing — we encourage that. We want people to speak for the planet and not for this country or that country, this war or that war. We need a very different approach.
The collapse of arms control and the danger of miscalculation
Glenn Diesen: I like that the appeal was also to the Pope, because at least the Church has the possibility to take an independent position. One of the things that has been a great concern to me is how everyone has essentially been falling into line over the past few years — there's very little dissent. Any government narrative that is pushed out is no longer contested, and especially with the peace movement. It's very strange to me that even peace movements are now seen with suspicion, as appeasement, as treasonous.
On the topic of restraint — we had nuclear arms control agreements during the Cold War. We learned to establish rules of the game. Washington and Moscow eventually developed mechanisms for crisis communication, reducing stockpiles, transparency agreements, rules. All of these arms control agreements — START, INF, all of them — appear to be melting away. How does that affect the probability of miscalculation, when there are no guardrails anymore?
Peter Kuznick: There are no strategic stability talks going on either. We start with 2002, when Bush got the United States out of the ABM Treaty — and it was then that Russia began major research on new delivery systems and new weapon systems after the US abrogated the ABM Treaty. But then Trump has torn up every other treaty as you say, and right now there are no treaties between the US and Russia.
The first one was the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's speechwriter, said nothing Kennedy ever did gave him as much satisfaction as concluding the first nuclear arms control treaty. When Kennedy announced it, he cited the old Chinese proverb that a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. He said, "Let's take that step." That's sort of how we're viewing this new effort — a journey of a thousand miles has to begin somewhere.
Kennedy had a lot of wisdom. One of the things that Jack did even better in his letter was talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because during that crisis Kennedy and Khrushchev both did everything they could to avoid a war, and they both understood that they had lost control. Khrushchev wrote Kennedy an incredible letter right after it ended, on October 30th. He wrote: "From evil, some good must come. Our people have both felt the burning flames of thermonuclear war. We have to use that to our advantage. Let's eliminate every conflict between us that could cause another crisis." Kennedy was a little slow to respond, but he finally did. He asked Norman Cousins — who had gone there twice as intermediary and met with Khrushchev twice — and Khrushchev said: "If war breaks out, what difference will it make if we're capitalists or communists, if we're Russians or Americans or Chinese or Italians? Who'd be left to tell us apart?" And so Kennedy made that great speech at American University — I think it was June 10th, 1963 — his peace speech, in which he calls for an end to the nuclear arms race and an end to the Cold War. He didn't let the Pentagon see it. He didn't let the State Department see it. He didn't let the intelligence community see it. It was drafted by Norman Cousins and Ted Sorensen and Kennedy himself. I think it was the greatest presidential speech of the 20th century.
No American president has spoken with that same clarity of vision, that same moral impetus that Kennedy had in the last year of his life. Sometimes Obama said good things, but we've seen very little of that kind of vision. The American people have to demand it. We need that kind of grassroots movement again.
Pope John XXIII and the Cuban Missile Crisis — a precedent for papal intervention
The point I wanted to make was that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pope John the 23rd issued a private appeal to Kennedy and Khrushchev. He used his moral authority to say: let's end this peacefully, let's not start World War III. And Khrushchev actually cited the appeal from the Pope, saying it gave him some of the cover he needed to back down. Sadly, Soviet leaders drew a different lesson — that they never wanted to have to back down from a position of weakness — and they built up their nuclear arsenal to match the United States. By 1986 the world had 70,000 nuclear weapons.
I took students on a study abroad class in Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki for twenty-five years, and the American students travelled with Japanese students from Ritsumeikan University and Meiji Gakuin University. We studied World War II together — the US atrocities, the Japanese atrocities against fellow Asian countries. Do you know that a big part of those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese had brought over, working in the fields and in the cities, and who got no support from the Japanese government and no medical care afterwards? There were close to 50,000 Korean slave labourers in Hiroshima alone on the day of the atomic bombing.
The message that the Pope issued in 1962, that Pope Paul VI issued, that popes have made repeatedly — the Catholic Church has been in the forefront of this effort since 1962. That's why this is something Pope Leo could do. He's shown great judgment — aside from being a Chicago White Sox fan in American baseball. He's shown a lot of really good judgment on different things, and I think he could respond. Maybe Trump and Putin are looking for a peaceful way out of these wars right now, because the military solutions are really not working at this point.
The remilitarisation of Europe and the madness of nuclear escalation talk
Then you've got people like Elbridge Colby going around threatening China with nuclear war. The US just sent another ship through the Taiwan Strait. The behaviour is so erratic. Trump threatens allies with a trade war, threatens to bomb Oman, cancels next month's war games with South Korea — I think that's fine, but it's the crazy way that Trump does things that makes everybody nervous.
As you see in Europe, this remilitarisation — the statements from European leaders, Macron, Starmer, Merz, Burnham — over and over again. You've got Nawrocki, the president of Poland, saying Poland needs its own nuclear weapons. Zelensky saying either let us join NATO or give us nuclear weapons. Tusk. Macron extending a nuclear umbrella over Germany and other countries. This militarisation in Europe is also mad. France's leading military figure, General Fabian Mandon, telling French generals recently that the French have to be willing to lose their children again in order to stop Russia. We see these crazy statements, this remilitarisation. Where are they getting the money for this? Now they want to spend up to 5% of GDP. Trump is pressuring Taiwan to spend 10% of GDP. Take the money out of housing, health care, education, food programs, and put it in the militaries.
Why isn't anybody out there talking about diplomacy? Why does it have to be people like us talking about the need for diplomacy? Why aren't the leaders out there — other than Lula and sometimes Xi Jinping — talking about development and diplomacy rather than warfare? It became crazy during the Biden administration. This is bipartisan warmongering in the United States, although now the Democrats have gotten off the war path in Iran to a large extent — not entirely, but for the most part.
The Munich analogy, false historical reasoning, and the criminalization of diplomacy
Glenn Diesen: The criminalisation of diplomacy doesn't go very well with this kind of nuclear escalation. I'm shocked by this militarism, because a lot of this was predictable — many predicted that the whole post-Cold War world order would break down, that hegemony would be temporary, that we would exhaust ourselves eventually, rivals would appear, conflicts would break out, panic would set in, everyone would begin to arm themselves to the teeth, willing to take greater risks, even war. But there's no willingness to discuss the fundamental problems in the international system and how to reorganise it. Instead, all we do is demonise and come out with cheap emotional rhetoric of the virtuous us versus the belligerent other.
I just wonder if this is a curse of humanity — that each generation needs another big war in order to learn to fear war. We had thirty years of small wars, far away, against inferior opponents, where in the worst case we could just pull away and leave them in a messed-up situation. But now we're transitioning into great power conflicts again — China, Russia, and Iran, which is certainly a formidable power on the southern end of the Eurasian continent. Whenever one talks about diplomacy, the only page in the history book people seem to have these days is the appeasement of Hitler — that we cannot under any circumstance have peace, so we have to confront. Where are the Kennedys today?
Peter Kuznick: All the European leaders use the Munich analogy — why we've got to arm Ukraine to the teeth and stop Russia, because if Russia gets a win in Ukraine it's coming after the rest of Europe next. Some years ago I had Robert McNamara come into my class. McNamara is known as the architect of the Vietnam War. He was there with Paul Warnke, and the two of them said part of the problem was false historical reasoning — that all the leaders were using the Munich analogy, that we've got to stop Vietnam or else there's going to be this domino effect and communism is going to spread throughout Asia. McNamara said that false reasoning was what really got the United States to think that Vietnam was so crucial. When McNamara was in my class, he said he accepted that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war. Last year I was in Hanoi meeting with Vietnamese leaders, and they said the figure they now use is 5 million Vietnamese died in the war with the United States. The number is so beyond comprehension.
The point you're making is that in the nuclear age we don't have the luxury of war, because in the nuclear age war is the enemy — if war spreads and turns nuclear, the chances of humanity surviving are scant, if at all. So especially in the nuclear age, war is obsolete and diplomacy has got to take over. The Pope calls for that, and Lula, and Guterres, and academics like us, and a lot of people have been signing our appeal. But we don't have the world's leaders today making steps. Why, instead of spending billions and trillions of dollars on rearming, aren't we trying to figure out a way to live in peace? It's in Russia's interests and China's interests as much as it's in America's interests and Norway's interests and Germany's interests and Brazil's. It's in all of our interests.
Back when the Cold War ended, Arbatov said something really important. He said: "We're going to do the worst possible thing that we can do to you. We're going to leave you without an enemy." And the US quickly manufactured new enemies — Iran, North Korea, Libya, Iraq. We have a lot of enemies. We don't have wisdom.
It was back in 1929 when Freud wrote his brilliant though very depressing book Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he talks about the human death instinct — maybe we have it in a planetary way. He says we need to construct civilisation to curb this death instinct. He said it's a battle between Eros, the life instinct, and the death instinct. Like others, he was so demoralised by World War I that they had a very pessimistic view of human nature in the 1920s and 30s.
We have to get off false historical thinking. We need to stop using this outworn Munich analogy. It's crazy to think that Russia — which cannot even easily defeat Ukraine, which has a fraction of its military might, its armaments, its population — would be crazy enough to want to go to war with NATO. Putin has dismissed this as lunacy. Tulsi Gabbard, again in one of her lucid moments, said that this was lunacy. We need to recognise that we need to figure out a different path. China's Belt and Road Initiative is a step in the right direction, even though it's been denounced by the West. We need peaceful development. The fact that the richest six people have more wealth than the poorest four billion people shows how much we need in terms of peaceful development on our planet. Green development. China produces more green energy and infrastructure than the rest of the world combined. The United States has gone exactly the opposite direction, especially under Trump.
We just need this kind of rational wisdom as a planetary civilisation. What divides people here from people in Korea or people in China is so tiny compared to what unites us, what our common interests are. And that's a message the Pope has been articulating very effectively.
The demonisation of adversaries and the call for personal responsibility
Glenn Diesen: Regarding the historical analogy — every time we go to war, whether it's against Serbia, Iraq, Libya, or Russia, it's always against another Hitler. I think it's a very dangerous historical comparison because the conclusion is always that negotiation is appeasement, and peace essentially demands that we choose war — the opponent must be defeated, there is no other way, you cannot reason with them. It also gives our leaders an opportunity to act sanctimonious as they beat the drums of war. I hope your appeal gets the attention it deserves and more people get involved in some kind of peace movement that pushes against this march to war, because all the evidence shows clearly that's the direction we're marching, yet I'm not seeing any pushback. I'm not sure if you have any final thoughts.
Peter Kuznick: The point you're making about demonising everybody as a new Hitler is exactly the crucial point, because you can't reason with Hitler — you've got to stop him militarily. So Putin becomes Hitler. George H.W. Bush turned Saddam Hussein into Hitler during the first Gulf War. George W. Bush did it again during the second Iraq War. We have to demonise these people.
What I'm asking the viewers to do is go to the Nuclear Insanity Substack, read and sign the appeal to the Pope, and spread it out. Get the word out to everybody. We need to make this multiply in such a way that the pressure is on the leaders so that they feel they can't deny it, they can't ignore it. But people have got to take personal responsibility to get the word out to everybody they know.
One of the other great nuclear war movies — and I teach a whole course on this — is On the Beach, the 1959 movie. It shows the last pocket of humanity in the southernmost urban centre, Melbourne, Australia. Gregory Peck and the US submarine crew are down there, waiting for death to come from the spreading fallout. They have these rallies — Salvation Army rallies downtown Melbourne — with this big banner: "There is still time, brother." And in the last scene of the movie, they show the banner. There is still time, brother. And there's nobody left.
While we're still here, there is still time to turn this around — to end the war in Ukraine, to end the war in Iran, to have peaceful development in Asia, to abolish nuclear weapons. We can do it, but we need everybody to mobilise, to take personal responsibility. Not say somebody else needs to do this — each of us needs to do this.
Glenn Diesen: Well, thank you. I like that message of personal responsibility, because I don't think there's necessarily anyone behind the wheel at the moment who is steering us in a different direction. I would recommend everyone go to the Nuclear Insanity Substack, and I will leave a link in the description. Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Peter Kuznick: Thank you, Glenn, for the work you do.