World Peace Through Law

Replacing War with the Global Rule of Law

James Taylor Ranney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351348744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book deals with the history and future of the concept of 'world peace through law' (WPTL), which advocates replacing the use of international force with the global rule of law.

WPTL calls for replacing war with the global rule of law by arms reductions, including the abolition of nuclear weapons, global alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and various enforcement mechanisms. This book sets forth a three-part proposal: 1) arms reductions – primarily the abolition of nuclear weapons, with necessarily concomitant reductions in conventional forces; 2) a four-stage system of global alternative dispute resolution (ADR), utilizing both law and equity; 3) adequate enforcement mechanisms, including a UN Peace Force. The core of this proposal is alternative dispute resolution mechanisms—international ADR. International ADR would consist of a four-stage process of compulsory negotiation, compulsory mediation, compulsory arbitration., and compulsory adjudication by the World Court. The fundamental proposition of this book is that the use of alternatives to war, global ADR, is the ultimate solution to the problem of peace. The full implementation of WPTL will entail a vast array of progressive initiatives on many fronts, including abolition of nuclear weapons, with the global rule of law being the capstone to all of these developments.

This book will be of great interest to students of peace studies, arms control, international law, and world politics.

1 The problem

It is not enough that their elders promise ‘Peace in our time’; it must be peace in their time too, and in their children’s time; indeed, my friends, there is only one real peace now, and that is peace for all time.

—Dwight David Eisenhower

Whether we realize it or not, the most important issue facing humanity—more important than the dangers of terrorism and nuclear proliferation—is how to avoid a nuclear war between the superpowers, a war with “the potential to destroy all civilisation and the entire ecosystem of the planet” in a single day.¹

It will be immediately objected that such an untoward possibility is simply unthinkable, that nobody would be stupid enough to start WWIII, so why worry about it. One problem with this objection is that it neglects our historical experience in regard to starting world wars, specifically WWI. Prior to WWI, there were several statements by the leading experts of the time that “no nation would be so foolish as to start [a war],” that “new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars,” and that given the awesome armaments in existence even then war was altogether quite “unthinkable.”² Of course, despite these authoritative pronouncements, we know what happened.³

What could possibly go wrong?

Moreover, consider the following:

1 On the evening of October 25, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an air force sentry at a military base near Duluth, Minnesota “spotted someone climbing the base fence, shot at the figure, and sounded the sabotage alarm.” As alarms at airfields all over the region were sounded, at Volk Field, Wisconsin, the wrong alarm, the one signaling nuclear war (the “P.S., we mean it, this is not a drill” alarm) went off, and pilots scrambled and headed down the runway, being stopped only at the last second by the post commander. The “intruder” was a bear.⁴

2 Also in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only two days later, October 27, 1962, on the same day that an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba: At this point, Soviet submarines were being subjected to depth charges to make them rise to the surface (we were unaware they had nuclear weapons aboard). Despite strict orders not to use their nuclear torpedoes absent authorization from Moscow, the three Soviet officers aboard Foxtrot submarine B-59 had decided to use theirs if under attack and unable to reach Moscow but only if all three officers agreed. They were, in fact, unable to reach Moscow, and in the end, one officer, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkipov, finally made the fateful decision not to start WWIII.⁵

3 In 1983, U.S.-NATO military maneuvers in Europe, called “Able Archer 83,” were interpreted for a time by the Soviets as the prelude to a—not so good—full-scale nuclear attack.⁶

4 On January 25, 1995, technicians at the Olengrosk early warning radar facility detected an unidentified ballistic missile over Norway which appeared to be heading for Russia. Because the missile was manufactured in the United States, its “signature trail” was therefore identified by Russian computers as hostile and apparently fired from a U.S. submarine in the Arctic Sea, even though it was actually only a Norwegian research rocket researching the Northern Lights. President Yeltsen’s “nuclear briefcase” was activated and Russian missile submarines ordered to battle stations. Finally, with three minutes to spare, the missile was correctly identified.⁷ Happily, for the human race, this incident took place at a time when Yeltsin was President and not earlier (or subsequent) presidents.

But this is the mere tip of the iceberg of close calls known to experts. There have been literally hundreds of false alerts of a nuclear attack in this country alone, triggered by such things as a flock of geese, the rising of the moon, the sun’s reflection on a cloud, a strong solar storm, and space debris re-entering the atmosphere.⁸ And of course, there have been who knows how many similar or worse incidents in other countries, with their less than adequate detection and warning devices.⁹ In short, it is only because we have been incredibly lucky that we have not already had an accidental nuclear war thus far.¹⁰ Anytime you can come as close to WWIII as we have come on more than one occasion, it is only a matter of time before nuclear weapons will be used—either by accident or miscalculation or in what might be called a “pre-preemptive preventive strike.” Famed Cold War warrior Paul Nitze explains the danger of such a strike, where one country is anticipating a pre-emptive first strike by another,

might well feel it should strike even sooner than planned to head off [the other country’s] preemptive blow. I could foresee the possibility of a situation arising in which there would be such an interaction of fear that it would be almost impossible to conceive how statesmen could prevent the situation from deteriorating into war.¹¹

For those who think that all these concerns are now quite dated after the alleged end of the Cold War, consider this recent news item:

MOSCOW—A senior Russian general [Nikolai Makarov] on Wednesday threatened preemptive attacks on missile-defense sites in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe in the event of a crisis, underscoring the Kremlin’s opposition to the Obama administration’s plans [for missile defense] and further undermining relations between the countries.¹²

Even though this statement is most likely only a bluff, it nevertheless points out the kinds of dangers that could easily lead to an all-consuming humanity-annihilating world war.¹³ These are some of the reasons that people like former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said that “[t]he danger of a nuclear catastrophe today… is greater than it was during the Cold War.”¹⁴

In sum, if one looks objectively at (a) the things we have done incompetently over the years (e.g., WWI, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi, Gulf Oil Spill, Katrina, Challenger, etc.)¹⁵ and (b) the things we have done deliberately (e.g., just in the years surrounding WWII: Guernica, the Rape of Nanking, Katyn Forest, Einsatzgruppen, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.¹⁶), it leaves one with little confidence in our ability to avoid what would be the ultimate disaster: a pointless Clausewitzian Vernichtungsschlacht (“battle of [mutual] annihilation”).

Perhaps this paints too stark a picture of our prospects. Indeed, we will argue in a future chapter that there are many positive trends which counterbalance the above facts from our recent past. In any event, it strikes many of the most thoughtful and perceptive thinkers of the Nuclear Age that our current posture of “mutual assured destruction” is simply “too frightful and dangerous a way to live indefinitely.”¹⁷ For just as “ordinary deterrence” fails on a regular basis, so too nuclear deterrence is likely to someday fail.¹⁸

A little perspective

We need to be clear about what is at stake: all human life. Humanity is the culmination of an awesome evolutionary process that makes us kin not only to all other humans but also to the rocks and trees. We are told that the so-called Big Bang took place 13.8-billion years ago. Our Earth coalesced into existence about 4.58-billion years ago. The first life on earth—possibly, scientists now think, inside of the microporous membranes of alkaline hydrothermal vents—appears about 3.5-billion years ago.¹⁹ The wildly diverse life forms of the Burgess Shale (in Canada, and now similar finds in Africa and China) are dated to around 560-million years ago. The first amphibians climbed onto dry land 365-million years ago; the first “true mammals” appeared about 200-million years ago; the earliest hominid: 4.5-million years ago. A new find, Australopithecus Sediba, believed to be an early ancestor of humans, with ape-like arms, but human teeth and legs, were dated 2-million years ago. Homo Sapiens: 300,000 years ago. The first human settlements and agriculture: 10,000 years ago. The first use of writing: 5,000 years ago.²⁰ And only in the last few hundred years: all the products of the great scientific and enlightenment revolutions (and the follow-on industrial and nuclear revolutions).²¹ It appears that a succession of miracles were necessary for us to get where we are today, e.g.: the recently-discovered “Theia Collision Event,” occurring during what scientists call the 30-million-year Titanomachean (“war of the planets”) Period. During this period the Mars-sized planet Theia collided with the early Earth, eliminating Theia and almost destroying Earth while ejecting what became the moon, thereby adding just enough iron to the Earth’s core to create the magnetic fields which prevent the solar winds from wiping out Earth’s atmosphere and water. The moon itself, which stabilized Earth’s axial tilt, thereby allowing a moderate climate to develop. Next came the “Water from Outer Space Era,” starting several billion years ago, when water and ice-laden comets and meteorites jarred loose from their orbits by destabilization of the outer planets were caught by Earth’s gravity and inundated the planet with just enough water to sustain life but not so much as to create a Water World that would have precluded a technological civilization. The Great Oxidation Event, was next, starting 2.4 billion years ago, when, for whatever reason or reasons, oxygen levels gradually increased from almost nothing to where it now constitutes 21% of our atmosphere, allowing complex life forms to exist. The Ozone Layer Creation Era, came about 600 million years ago, when oxygen high up in the atmosphere absorbed energy and split into single oxygen atoms, which then combined with regular oxygen to form ozone, which has the happy characteristic of blocking 98% of ultraviolet radiation, thereby allowing plants and animals to survive. Next was the “Mexican Meteorite” event, 66 million years ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs and allowing mammals to flourish. Finally, the Domestication of the Fire Revolution; cooking causing bigger brains, increased male-female bonding, and sociality.²² In short, for all our faults, we are nothing short of a miracle of evolution, standing at the edge of history, a history which should be allowed to continue.²³

Notes

1 Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, ICJ Advisory Opinion, para. 36, UN Document A/51/218 (July 8, 1996). While politicians spend most of their time talking about the threats of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, consider the relative threats from these dangers vis a vis a human-life-terminating WWIII. While the former threats realistically threaten at most hundreds of thousands of lives, the latter existential threat threatens not only the billions of existing lives but all the literally trillions upon trillions of future lives which would be occasioned by human extinction. It’s true that one needs to factor in the likelihood of such an event occurring. But let’s do that. If the odds of the former kind of attacks (terrorists and proliferators) are even as high as 100% over the next decade, when you multiply the projected deaths (rounding upward to an even million) times the odds, you get an overall product of 1,000,000. Since the risk of nuclear Armageddon cannot be less than one in a thousand over that same time period, cf. Martin E. Hellman, “How risky is nuclear optimism?,” 67 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 47 (2011), multiplying projected deaths (rounding down to a mere one trillion) times the odds (.001) yields a product of 1,000,000,000, which happens to be precisely one thousand times as great as the former product. But which topic is more often discussed by public officials? The former. In sum, the existential threat is a very serious one that needs to be seriously addressed.

2 Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August, at 10 (1962). Cf. also “The world in 1913: The year before the sky fell in,” Economist, June 8, 2013, at 85 (The Economist in June of 1913 found world trends “slowly but surely making war between the civilized communities of the world an impossibility”). Some political science/international relations scholars argue once again that major war is now obsolete. See, e.g., John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989). For the reasons which follow in the text, this thesis is every bit as wrong as the pre-WWI predictions.

3 See G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918, Chapters 3–6 (2006) (an astonishing tale of miscues, miscommunications, misunderstandings, and blunders lead to war) and Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2013) (definitive work). Cf. Margaret MacMillan, “The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War,” Brookings Brief (December 14, 2013) (uncanny parallels between 1914 and now). Cf. also Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, at 57 (1961) (“Thus, by a tragic combination of ill luck, stupidity, and ignorance, France blundered into war….”).

4 Michael O’Hanlon, A Skeptic’s Case for Nuclear Disarmament, at 36–37 (2010). The author, born and raised in Wisconsin, did not learn of this incident until 2012.

5 Michael Krepon, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The problem
• 2 The answer
• 3 Bentham (1789)
• 4 Roosevelt and Taft (1910–1918)
• 5 Kelsen (1944)
• 6 Eisenhower and Kennedy (1961)
• 7 Our trajectory
• 8 Abolition of nuclear weapons
• 9 International dispute resolution mechanisms
• 10 A United Nations peace force
• 11 Objections
• 12 Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index