Pat Kane: An independent Scotland could set example to world with disarmament

I move on two pathways – one cosmic (or more precisely cosmological), one very close to home.

The physicist Enrico Fermi was at the core of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, directing the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942. But in 1950, while still researching at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fermi noted an apparent contradiction.

This was between the high probability of extraterrestrial civilisations existing in the universe (based on its vast size and age), and the lack of evidence for or contact with such civilisations. The paradox is summarised in Fermi’s famous question: “Where is everybody?”

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In 1996, economist Robin Hanson proposed the concept of the Great Filter. One of the reasons we aren’t in contact with many alien civilisations is that they might blow themselves up, or choke/poison themselves to death – or both – before they (or their machine representatives) can get off planet.

The biologist E.O. Wilson would add: “We have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. It is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

There’s an easy road to nihilism here. We preside over an Earth on which there are many ways to terminate ourselves, of which the nuclear option is only one.

Planetary warming, caused by the unaccounted material externalities (and throughput) of a world capitalism, looks likely that it’s tipping us out of the narrow band of ecological living conditions that supported homo sapiens.

Powerful computation, accessible through digital networks, is not only amplifying the tribal and group tendencies of mammalian humans. But it also may put the capacity for biological disruption in too many hands.

The physicist Brian Cox makes a poignant point on this. He notes that life on Earth, ending up with conscious creatures like us, took something like a third of the whole period of the universe’s existence to occur.

“That’s a long time”, Cox noted on the BBC’s breakfast couch. “And that may indicate that microbes may be common, but things like us may be extremely rare.”

So we’re cosmically extremely rare. Yet we might also be cosmically self-terminating. When such elemental information is placed before us, how should we react?

My own reaction has surprised me, given my hauntedness with these issues. In short, it induces in me a sense of cosmic responsibility. A sense that what I must do with my remaining lifespan is to create and build positive, active cultures of peace on this planet.

It’s these cultures (indeed, civilisations) that will hold their poise, and exercise their wisdom, when reaching for Wilson’s “god-like technologies”.

How to create and build those positive, active cultures of peace? We must avail ourselves of the imaginative tools that currently underpin and legitimate our journeys to disaster. And then deploy them in the service of better, planet-and-cosmos friendly visions.

Narcissistic moguls like Elon Musk at least do one service. They bring our cosmological responsibility into the realms of everyday discussion, with their talk of “interplanetary civilisation” and “preserving the light of consciousness”.

But another resource for creating cultures of peace are the arts of science-fiction. The greatest of its makers are involved in a mighty struggle with Wilson’s trinity of conditions. They invent scenarios where all three can be improved and developed.

Part of that boldness has to be a grappling with the direction, design and applications of our radical technologies. It’s not as if this isn’t urgent, particularly around the use of increasingly powerful AI in battlefield situations.

If we have been living on a knife edge, in terms of the faulty systems and misreporting of our current nuclear arsenal, then how much sharper will that edge get if ever-more autonomous AIs make decisions, with no humans in the loop?

This is something of a clarion call to artists, both in Scotland and well beyond. Commit your talents to imagining futures (and presents), in which the majority of humans can make decisions about technologies that are currently not theirs to make.

Our cultural speculations about the future – in film, TV, games, novels, theatre, comic strips, whatever – are usually dystopian, jabbing away at the negative emotional systems of the brain (fear, anger, panic, sadness).

It seems vital to me that our sensibility for the future brims with peace-positive cultures too. As well as the Terminator and its war of all against all.

I note that this week’s Booker Prize winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, is a tale of space-stationed astronauts contemplating the planet beneath them. The author dedicated the book at her acceptance speech “to all those who speak, call and work for peace”. Maybe that’s a good sign.

It may not surprise a Scottish CND conference to hear that my second pathway beyond nuclear weapons is the achievement of nation-state independence for Scotland. And the subsequent exercise of democratic sovereignty, in order to remove the UK’s Trident nuclear missile system from Scottish territory.

The opening objection may be obvious. So you seek a non-rivalrous global culture of peace, by means of declaring your separation, and establishing borders, from others on the same landmass?

As many in this room will know, the devil of modern independence lies in the details. The current Scottish Government’s aspiration is that national independence realises itself in interdependent contexts – geoeconomically in the European Union or the European Free Trade Association; geopolitically, under Nato and within the UN, but as a nuclear-missile-free power.

We can adopt our various positions within and beyond all that. But the modern model of nation-state independence could not possibly be an autarchy, a dramatic sweep leading to hard separation.

SNP grandee Winnie Ewing’s famous axiom – stop the world, we want to get on – is perennially pertinent.

Yet Scottish independence should involve enough sovereignty to enact a moment of non-proliferation, indeed reduction, of nuclear weapons. As well as a declaration of independence, this is also a declaration of imagination.

Indeed, one of the classic modern definitions of nationalism is that it is an “imagined community”, in the words of Benedict Anderson. The quality of that imagination transmits to a networked world, as an act of soft power, upon the assertion of independence. It has always been a matter of pride to me that the Scottish independence movement has had, at its core, an anti-nuclear-weapons position. Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario is a stark reminder of something we’ve always known in the movement, and which the late John Ainslie of Scottish CND was always at pains to evidence.

Which is the sheer unusability of nuclear weapons in any theatre of war, due to their sheer destructiveness, as well as as the escalatory dynamic of any nuclear exchange.

I’m well aware that there are pragmatic perspectives on Trident from within the independence movement. For example, their bases should be leased to the UK Government upon attainment of independence, securing billions in payments over a decade or more – payments that can be used to build up currency reserves for the new nation.

I would regard that as blood money. I weigh the moral global leadership demonstrated by a safe but effective disarmament and removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil, against a perpetuation of their corrosive and pervasive death-rationale in a new Scotland, for medium-term fiscal benefit. And I would most certainly find the latter case wanting.

I don’t expect many to adopt my cosmist position on nuclear weapons. Which is that the dangerous fragility of these annihilatory systems is a crime against the universe – a universe that all-too-rarely raises itself to consciousness and agency. We should strive not to snuff out our own possibility for civilisational development.

But that striving has to start somewhere, in some polity or self-determining place, at various levels and scales – the village hall, the town or city, the region (or bioregion), the small nation.

“Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation”, our late great imagineer Alasdair Gray once urged us. The nuclear dimension prompts a significant twist to that. We should also work as if we were in the early days of a better planet, too.