The relevance of Alva Myrdal to our current conundrum

Alva Myrdal was my first boss when I joined the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) straight out of university in 1967. She was soon replaced by Gunnar, but we continued to see a lot of her in her role as Swedish representative to the Disarmament Committee in Geneva and later as the first Swedish Minister for Disarmament. Her way of thinking about disarmament issues profoundly influenced my own work and so I thought I would talk about the relevance of Alva’s ideas for the current context. I will focus on four points: her notion of the arms race as a mutual enterprise; the centrality of reason, science and morality; the concept of common security; and the importance of popular mobilization.

The Arms Race as a Mutual Enterprise

Alva always emphasized that the arms race was a binary phenomenon between the two super-powers. She used the title ‘Game of Disarmament’ for her book because she argued that for the super-powers, disarmament was a game though it was deadly real for everyone else. My favourite of her metaphors was the two Vikings bound together by a belt destined to fight a duel.

I took up her idea in my book The Imaginary War where I argued that far from preventing war, deterrence kept the idea of war alive. Instead of keeping the peace, we in Europe experienced imaginary war, played out over and over again in spy stories, hostile rhetoric, periodic nuclear scares, exercises across the East German plains, and real wars in what was then called the third world as well as in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I argued that the imaginary war was a way of legitimating both the superpowers, justifying Soviet domination over Central Europe and American hegemony in Western Europe, as well as the continued arms race.

Until the 1980’s, the opposition often played into this framing. The peace movement in Western Europe tended to argue that the Soviet Union was not a threat and this allowed them to be dubbed as fellow travellers. The opposition in Eastern Europe (dissidents and later human rights groups) often argued that the West needed to be strong. It was only when an alternative framing of the Cold War as a mutual enterprise, in which disarmament and democracy were linked, and which peace movements and human rights groups came together, that the Cold War was truly challenged.

Of course, the situation is very different now. The threats come from far-right authoritarian oligarchic regimes, who deliberately aim to create disorder and foment polarization. Violence is a way of constructing ‘we-them’ ideologies as well as a source of individual economic benefit. I use the term ‘new wars’ to describe a long-term situation in which numerous warring parties, both state and non-state, engage in violence not in order to ‘win’ but for political and economic gain. The main challenge nowadays is what are called hybrid threats – misinformation, cyber-attacks, sabotage, threats to undersea cables, support for the far-right, and other measures designed to exacerbate already existing weaknesses in the functioning of democracy. These threats come from different directions. Russia is definitely a threat but so is the US, Israel, Iran, Hungary under Orban, and so on. Yet the idea of mutual enterprise is even more relevant as these powers compete and co-operate according to the exigencies of the moment.

Reason and Morality

Alva and Gunnar always emphasized the importance of knowledge guided by values. ‘Facts talk’ Gunnar would say. Alva emphasized the total irrationality of the arms race. There were two aspects, in particular, with which she was preoccupied. One was overkill – the madness of being able to kill the planet several times over. If we take deterrence seriously, surely one (or possibly ten) would be enough.

And the other was the idea of ‘limited war’ in Europe. There is a problem at the heart of the concept of deterrence and that is credibility. Why should anyone believe that any leader, especially a democratic leader, would be prepared to kill hundreds of thousands of people and risk human extinction? This problem was expressed in a profound contradiction in the case for the deployment of so-called tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. For the Americans, the argument was that the possibility of containing a nuclear war to European territory would increase the credibility of the American readiness to use nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion; that is to say, it was assumed that by using a European based tactical weapon in response to an attack the Russians would not retaliate against the United States. Yet for the Europeans, the argument was exactly the opposite. Precisely because the Russian might well retaliate against the United States, the presence of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe tied the United States to Europe. In her book, Alva quotes Herbert York, the nuclear physicist who worked alongside Oppenheimer in the Manhattan project and later in the Livermore laboratory: ‘To-day’s Western Europeans have chosen to buy political stability by placing awful risks over their lives and their future. Perhaps their choice was inadvertent: perhaps they did not and even to-day, do not realize what they have done.’

That irrationality is no less true now. What is currently so striking and frightening is the way this assumption that nuclear weapons underpin stability and security, far from being questioned, is now ‘normalised’, ‘hardwired’ into the thinking of the defence and security elite. Irrationality about nuclear weapons seems to be built into contemporary understandings of security.

What is worse, is that the far-right embrace irrationality. They reject expertise. They are climate deniers. They are against science and universities. How can we think that it is safe to possess nuclear weapons when Trump, Putin, Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen might control these instruments of extinction? When Trump talks about erasing civilization in Iran, is he hinting at the use of nuclear weapons? Putin has already made such hints in the context of Ukraine. Yesterday. Russia attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine. How will he react to losing the war?

The Meaning of Security

Alva opposed the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Sweden on the grounds that it would make Sweden less secure. It would make Sweden a target and encourage further proliferation. She argued that Sweden will be safer in a safer world. The idea that Swedish security depended on global security prefigured Olof Palme’s concept of common security.

That idea is even more relevant today, and not just for small states. All existential threats are interconnected – climate change, pandemics, extreme deprivation, and, of course, nuclear war. This doesn’t imply a pacifist position. Alva was always clear that she supported the war against Hitler and the Finnish resistance to Soviet invasion. There is a role for military force for international law enforcement though it needs to be configured in a more defensive way, with much tighter rules of engagement. We do need to protect people from aggression, genocide, or massive violations of human rights. But this is not the same as threatening others. It is about protecting people not winning wars.

To be able to do this, we need to preserve and renew democracy and to understand that democracy is a security issue and that this is world-wide. The only way to reduce vulnerability to hybrid threats is by reducing inequalities, overcoming polarization in our societies, and increasing trust in our institutions. Ukraine offers an example of what is called democratic resilience. The war effort is bottom-up. In 2014, when dissidents seized administrative buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk, there were attempts to seize administrative buildings across Southern Ukraine, including places like Odessa and Kherson, but in all cases, except Donetsk and Luhansk, these were thwarted by courageous citizens who, though Russian-speaking, were loyal to Ukraine primarily because of its democratic nature. In other words, resistance to hybrid threats depends on political legitimacy, inclusion, and civic commitment.

Political Mobilization

Alva lived to see the growth of the peace movement in the early 1980’s and was very excited about it. She didn’t live to see the end of the Cold War and, subsequently, reductions in nuclear weapons and a whole series of arms control and disarmament measures for which she had worked. There are nuclear weapons free zones (something she was very keen on) in Latin America, Asia and Africa and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force in 2021 and now has 95 signatories.

All the same, I think she would say that the end of the Cold War was a missed opportunity. There are still some 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world and now there are 9 nuclear weapons states. What is alarming is the way the political class in Europe and Asia is reverting to imaginary war thinking. They seem to see what is happening as a reversion to the Cold War. There is talk now about acquiring nuclear weapons in places like Finland and Poland as well as Japan and South Korea, without taking into account the risks of proliferation as well as accident and miscalculation, the inherently provocative nature of nuclear weapons, and the trade-offs both with conventional defence and with welfare, the environment, or foreign aid. You cannot deter hybrid threats. All you can do is to reduce vulnerability both by technical measures, such as cyber defence or active emergency services, and through strengthening and spreading democracy. The defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary has greatly reduced financial support to far-right parties, think tanks and media groups. We need an open debate about these matters, we need a movement, which is not happening, and, as Alva put it in her book: ’If we are not going to succumb to cynical defeatism, we need to hold on to the precepts of rationality and morality’.