Tim Wright
Ray Acheson is an activist, organizer, and writer. They are the director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. From 2008 to 2024, Acheson served on the steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work on banning nuclear weapons. We spoke via the Internet in mid-July.
Q: We’re coming up on the eightieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right now, two wars are being perpetrated by nuclear-armed countries: Russia and Israel. Where are we today in terms of the possibilities of nuclear disarmament?
Ray Acheson: We’re in a dire straits at the moment. What we’re seeing is a renewed nuclear arms race. Any drawdown that did happen at the end of the Cold War, those numbers are now increasing in terms of arsenal sizes. All of the nuclear-armed states are involved in nuclear weapons modernization programs.
Right now, they’re spending roughly $100 billion a year collectively on nuclear weapons, but that is set to increase. And we’ve seen new requests from the current U.S. government to increase spending on the U.S. arsenal even more: The Congressional Budget Office is predicting that the United States will spend about $1 trillion on its nuclear arsenal in the next decade. So these are just astronomical figures planning to be spent on these weapons.
We’re also seeing an expansion of some of the facilities related to nuclear weapons. We’re seeing some activities around nuclear test sites in Russia, China, and the United States. We’re seeing the expansion of Los Alamos nuclear lab, which is where the atomic bomb was created. And we’re seeing U.S. plans to replace all of the intercontinental ballistic missiles with the new Sentinel missile, which will cost billions because it’s already facing cost overruns.
I’m not somebody who ever bought into the theory of nuclear deterrence, but I think it’s getting harder and harder for people to claim that these weapons create some sort of geostrategic stability in the world.
Q: In terms of deterrence, the United States recently attacked Iranian nuclear development sites. Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, but some people are saying now that maybe they wish they did so that the United States wouldn’t have done that.
Acheson: It’s an understandable, sympathetic argument from a sort of simple perspective, the idea that these weapons would prevent a nuclear-armed state from attacking you. But the problem is all the harms that are generated by these weapons, whether they’re ever used or not, are just so catastrophic, from the uranium mining to the fuel production to the bomb production, and then the radioactive waste storage. Then, what it actually means if they are detonated in terms of the catastrophic destruction to people, land, animals, water, and [radioactivity that] lasts for [future] generations. So this idea that we need to have weapons of genocidal intent in order to be secure as nations is really a problematic way of approaching global security and stability.
The only real answer is for all countries not to acquire nuclear weapons. We can see that nuclear weapons aren’t keeping countries from being engaged in conflicts with each other in various forms, including proxy wars. It’s not a stabilizing factor. In fact, it facilitates a form of global violence. So the only real answer is the abolition of nuclear weapons.
In terms of proliferation, it’s been very contained with the Non-Proliferation Treaty that’s been in force since 1970. In 2017, most governments of the world voted at the U.N. General Assembly to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which actually outlaws nuclear weapons and all related activities for all countries. So there is international law, there are structures, and there are processes that have been developed for verifying nuclear disarmament. We have all the technical tools and know-how to do this work. At this point, it’s just the political commitment of the nine [nuclear-armed] states that we need in order to eliminate those nuclear weapons.
Q: This is a bipartisan agenda here in the United States, as we’ve seen the modernization of the nuclear weapons arsenal in the Obama, Biden, and Trump Administrations. What’s driving this idea of modernizing the nuclear arsenal?
Acheson: It’s all about profits for the military-industrial complex in this country, which is highly entrenched in the U.S. political economy. It’s mostly private corporations involved in both the management of the nuclear weapons laboratories and the building of the bombs, missiles, and submarines. So a lot of it is private profits for shareholders and CEOs. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and all the big military-industrial companies are involved in nuclear-weapon enterprises, and have been for a very long time. That’s really what’s driving this expansion. Certainly 9/11 was a big boost in terms of turning public sentiment back toward the building of weapons.
Also the nuclear energy industry as well, which is having a resurgence as some sort of false solution to climate change and this idea that it’s a renewable or clean energy. But all of these problems we’ve talked about also exist with nuclear energy. And much of the burden of nuclear energy is disproportionately borne by Indigenous communities, which is where most of the uranium mines and radioactive waste dumps are situated. So there’s a plethora of problems from the nuclear complex that are beyond just the weapons themselves.
Q: In your book, Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons is only one piece of the larger notion of abolishing state violence. You also discuss prisons, police surveillance, and borders. Can you explain this idea of abolition as a movement?
Acheson: The concept of abolition is looking at what is causing harm in our societies and our world today. What are the structures and systems in place? Who’s profiting from the generation of these harms? And deconstructing those, tearing those down, divesting from those structures, and building in place alternatives that actually provide for people and the planet, not just for billionaires and the 1 percent who are profiting from all this generation of harm.
There are a lot of structural similarities in the areas I explore in the book. Of course, there are many others, as the book isn’t fully comprehensive, it just focuses on specific structures of state violence and looks at which corporations are involved in building nuclear weapons, the weapons of war, violent border enforcement, and private prisons and detention centers. So there are material connections between each of these things.
There are philosophical connections between a lot of these structures of state violence, and deterrence is a great example. We have nuclear deterrence that we’ve already talked about being extremely problematic and generating a lot of harm in terms of creating a justification for more and more nuclear weapons, but also the concept of border deterrence, that if we make it deadly to cross a border, then people won’t try. That’s just resulting in people dying in the desert or the Mediterranean Sea.
Or, related to deterrence around “crime,” trying to deter crime by having three-strike policies in mass incarceration. Meanwhile, of course, the actual crime that’s being committed around the world is by the richest of our societies—in terms of stealing wealth from the public and building weapons and committing genocide and never being held accountable.
Q: One thing you talk about in the book is the difference between reform and abolition. How do we get to abolition, and how are the small reforms that we are able to accomplish under the boot of the Trump Administration a way of getting there?
Acheson: In the abolitionist movement, there are different ways of approaching reform. There are reforms that actually just reinforce the status quo. So if we’re talking about police, for example, some reforms to deal with police brutality that are commonly suggested are more training for police and body cameras, but what that actually does is invest more money into the police, and it doesn’t deal at all with the fact that the whole way that police forces in the United States and Canada and other places are constituted is as a white supremacist, pro-capitalist force.
When we’re looking at reforms in terms of abolition, it is reforms, or changes to the system, that actually lead toward its eventual abolishment: reforms that divest from, reforms that change structures of.
There are many opportunities for us to pursue those at this moment. I think one of the important things is that when we’re talking as abolitionists, we’re not talking about going back to the way it was under the Democrats, when we’re still sending weapons to Israel for genocide, we’re still having mass incarceration, and we’re still funding ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], because these are all bipartisan initiatives. What we actually need is an alternative to both of those, and I think we’re seeing an appetite from people for that real alternative. We are seeing people waking up about the degree to which states have been captured by the economic elite, what their real vision for the world is, and how that is just a project of mass death for the majority.
As abolitionists, we need to be tapping into that concern and new awareness that people are having and promote ideas and visions for a path forward that are a real alternative to the ones that’ve been provided so far.