This commentary is by Richard Czaplinski of Warren, president of the Will Miller Green Mountains Veterans for Peace, Chapter 57. He served six years in the U.S. Navy, is on the board of Friends of the Mad River, and worked for 15 years at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation on water resources concerns. For a brief time in the 1990s, he worked with the Institute for Sustainable Communities on environmental matters in Poland, the Czech/Slovak Republics, and Bulgaria.
With the attention and controversy of the Covid-19 pandemic winding down, another crisis has come to the fore — the invasion of Ukraine. Where there was heated controversy over vaccinations, masking and how the pandemic was handled, which led to more division in the country than was already there, the public response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has garnered an almost unanimous condemnation of Russia.
How could it be otherwise when we hear it reported that civilians and civilian areas were targeted by Russian missiles. In the news, we hear the words “war crimes” mentioned.
War crimes. Isn’t war in and of itself a crime? Let’s take a brief look at the long history of war. War has been around, it seems, for as long as human beings have been on the planet.
War didn’t look much like what war looks like today. War probably started not long after there were clans of humans who hunted and gathered their food. Most likely these clans went to “war” to chase other clans out of their hunting and gathering grounds. Minor stuff compared to today.
As the number of humans increased and agriculture became prevalent, and villages and then cities were built, wars probably took a step up in scale and means. Villages and cities set up protection measures, walls, moats with drawbridges. War materiel was, in today’s terms, primitive — spears, bows and arrows, boiling oil, catapults and battering rams. Then guns ± muzzleloading muskets, single-shot rifles, rifles with magazines with multiple cartridges, machine guns and Gatling guns (one can hear these being test-fired in the Jericho firing range as one walks along the Long Trail, which sound is often attributed to the mythical Wampahoofus).
Then on to bombs, mines, tanks, submarines, battleships and the Strategic Air Command’s B-52 bombers, carrying atomic bombs, and silos with intercontinental missiles. Now we are into the age of hypersonic missiles and space/cyber warfare.
There are many other war materials I’ve not mentioned, such as gases used in World War I and the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
War, it seems, has become a part, a very big part, of the “human/economic culture.” In fact, war has been institutionalized into the human culture.
Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, began the process of codifying these customs into international humanitarian law. In 1864, he helped establish the first Geneva Convention, an international treaty that required armies to care for the sick and wounded on the battlefield. It was adopted by 12 European countries.
In 1949, after the horrors of World War II, diplomats gathered again in Geneva to adopt four treaties that reaffirmed and updated the previous treaties and expanded the rules to protect civilians. They’re now collectively known as the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and contain the most important rules of war.
Leaving out the legal language, the “Rules of War” can be boiled down to six basic rules:
- No targeting civilians
- No torture or inhumane treatment of detainees
- No attacking hospitals and aid workers
- Provide safe passage for civilians to flee
- Provide access to humanitarian organizations
- No unnecessary or excessive loss and suffering
Applying these rules to recent wars and the invasion of Ukraine, we can see how most or all of the rules are being violated. When there is a war, the rules of war are mostly ignored. This is plain to see in the present situation in the Ukraine and looking back at past wars.
To show the utter absurdity of having rules of war, I will take the first rule — no targeting civilians — to show how this rule is ignored in the nuclear warfare field. Atomic weapons are fearsome and can cause very widespread destruction of humans and infrastructure. Can a nuclear missile be targeted so as to spare human lives? By its tremendous destructive force, I think not. Of course, the same can be said of the firebombing that was done in World War II.
There are some considerations under this first rule of war:
- Attacks should only be directed at military objectives, and military targets such as bases and stockpiles should not be placed in or near populated areas.
- If the expected “incidental civilian damage” of an attack is “excessive and disproportionate” to the anticipated military gain, then the attack legally cannot be carried out.
There is one caveat: civilian structures, for example a school, may become a legitimate target if it is being used for specific military operations — as a base to launch attacks, for example, or a weapons storehouse.
The question when applying this rule of law is: Due to the tremendous destructive power of nuclear weapons, can they be used at all without the wanton destruction of human beings? I think not. And if my reasoning is correct, by extension, the building and maintaining of nuclear weapons and the infrastructure to maintain them is a continuing violation of this first rule of war. So we are fooling ourselves. We are saying, yes, we can use nuclear weapons even though the loss of life will be in the hundreds of thousands and more if we ever use them.
One can ask who is responsible for this insane state of affairs. The answer is that all of us are responsible. Complicity in this matter runs deep — the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Congress, corporations, and workers involved in the manufacture and maintenance of nuclear weapons.
The argument can be made that the inclusion in the defense budget of any nation for the manufacture, deployment and maintenance of nuclear weapons is a violation of the first rule of war.
Bringing this argument home to Vermont, it can be argued that the placing of a military base, Vermont Air National Guard, within the Burlington metropolitan area, and then deploying F-35s that can become capable of carrying nuclear arms, is a violation of this first rule of war.
The very sad part of this collective shortsightedness and delusion by us humans is that the very substantial amount of resources that are used to make, maintain and deploy nuclear weapon — and nonnuclear weapons as well — could instead be brought to bear to reduce, cope with, and adapt to the powerful destructive forces of the climate crisis that we are now seeing more and more clearly.
I urge every voter to ask our congressional delegation and those seeking to become our representatives in Congress, to confirm that they will work to eliminate the nuclear portion of the U.S. defense budget so that we as a country can say that we understand and are abiding by the first rule of war.
Naïve? Maybe so. However, we humans need to come to grips with the forces bearing down on us before it is too late. Given the inertia/momentum of the present worldwide economic/cultural system, we may be very close to the point where we will no longer have the ability to chart a different course.
Peace, rather than war, making the rules of war irrelevant, is a much better alternative.
