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(9 Jan) Good communication is important whatever you want to achieve. Indeed, extraordinarily good communication might yet save humanity from annihilation by nuclear war.

That’s one of the many things we can learn in 2018 from Beatrice Fihn – international lawyer, Nobel Peace Prize winner and communicator extraordinaire. Fihn combines clarity of purpose with deep strategic thinking and clever organisation. These plus some extraordinarily powerful words.

“Will it be the end of nuclear weapons or will it be the end us? One of these things WILL happen (given the risk is always higher than 0),” she said when accepting the Nobel Prize in December. “… mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.”[1]

The message poses stark choice for governments and citizens everywhere: “We” either get rid of nuclear weapons now or accept the inevitability that, sooner or later, they will be used and cause untold millions of civilian deaths.

Continuing to live with the risk, says Fihn, is “completely absurd”, and “no longer acceptable” given the state of the world today and the now-public knowledge of how close we have previously come to annihilation.

The message is so powerful because it so simply expresses such a dreadful thought – and also because Fihn is articulating what each of us already fears to be the case. Who doesn’t believe that Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are escalating the risk of nuclear war, especially in context of growing geopolitical tensions between the US, China and Russia? Surely it becomes harder and harder to view nuclear weapons as a source of security and peace between mutually-deterred nations.

Today we also have the voice of Daniel Ellsberg, a former US “nuclear war planner” of the 1960s and famous Pentagon Papers whistle blower. Ellsberg’s new book, “The Doomsday Machine” is his personal story of awakening to the “institutionalised madness” of the Cold War and his highly informed (and passionate) plea for immediate scaling back of America’s still-large arsenal.

Beatrice Fihn’s message draws power also from her personal credibility (differently based from that of Ellsberg) and that of her organisation, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The 36-year-old Swedish lawyer is executive director of ICAN – a global coalition of human rights and humanitarian organisations which is advancing an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons in their entirety. 

ICAN has been working for 10 years to see the development, possession and use of nukes prohibited under international law (as happened with anti-personal landmines). In 2017, ICAN had a major victory when the UN General Assembly adopted the text of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Thus far, 56 countries have signed, including NZ. Three have ratified (not yet NZ).

If and when 50 or more States have ratified the treaty, it will become international law. Not that Fihn or ICAN expect the US or any of the other eight nuclear powers to sign any time soon. She says it will be a “normative treaty”, designed to change thinking and behaviour over time.

In essence, ICAN, the treaty and the powerful words of Beatrice Fihn are all part of a grand communication strategy for persuading today’s nine nuclear States (North Korea included) to abolish their weapons and shift their “defence” off the morally-repugnant threat to murder millions of citizens. “Extraordinary” is definitely the right word to describe the scope and complexity of this strategy.

As Fihn outlined on RNZ, it begins with a reframing of the argument against nuclear weapons: They violate fundamental human rights and raise huge issues of international law. By what right does one government threaten to annihilate another’s populace and place its own citizens at equivalent risk?  ICAN has organised among the world’s humanitarian organisations, not “peace” groups or political parties.

Fihn says ICAN is not telling America or Russia how to manage their affairs, but promoting a new mindset on the value and role of nukes.

Once outlawed within an international framework which nuclear States themselves established, the weapons will increasingly lose their prestige and be seen more clearly for what they are – the products of Ellsberg’s “institutionalised madness”.

Even so, she says, change will only come when political leaders recognise for themselves the self and national interests attached to abolition. ICAN is largely about exposing such interests – avoidance of the “shame” of possessing nukes, greater ease in dealing with other governments absent the threat of annihilation and increased popularity with domestic constituencies, to name just three. The communication strategy seeks to mobilise public opinion worldwide, as a means of putting pressure on leaders to sign and ratify the treaty and, ultimately, to give up nuclear weapons.

For those publics, Fihn has powerful messages that span generations and national differences. For the 1960s generation: “We forgot to ban the bomb … we’ve got to finish the job, and end nuclear weapons before they end us.”

For younger generations, she argues the case that governments infringe individual rights by possessing the destructive power of nukes – and anyway, these weapons are obsolete compared with the high-tech precision weapons of modern warfare (as seen on TV)!

Beatrice Fihn and ICAN definitely know the importance of strategic communication. Let’s hope they have extraordinary success.

[1] Listen to Beatrice Fihn interviewed on RNZ Nine to Noon, 21 December 2017