The Nation — October 30, 2017

The Nation.

since 1865

UPFRONT

3 Dropping the Bomb

4 Antitrust Facebook

Micah L. Sifry

5 Q&A: Danny Meyer

COLUMNS

8 The Liberal Media

Liar and Lunatic

Eric Alterman

10 Deadline Poet

Harvey Weinstein,

Hollywood Predator

Calvin Trillin

12 Between the Lines

The Color of Terrorism

Laila Lalami

Features

14 The Future of Food:

A Forum

Anna Lappé, guest editor

+pƫ.,!*0!.ƫđƫ.1ƫ



5.)*ƫđƫ&ƫ0!(ƫđƫ

%* /!5ƫ$10!ƫđƫ

+$*ƫċƫ

+5 ƫ

.ċƫđƫ*ƫ!.(/

18 Hacking the Grain

Madeline Ostrander

24 What Is the

Recipe for Home?

Dalia Mortada

27 Fatteh (recipe)

Dalia Mortada

28 Class-Conflict Cuisine

Sarah Jones

32 Confessions of

a Beef Eater

Amitava Kumar

34 Mass Exposure

Rene Ebersole

41 Fighting Spirits (recipes)

David Wondrich đ Naomi

Gordon-Loebl đ Megan

Barnes

Books &

the Arts

43 The Power Historian

David Marcus

48 International Territory

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

51 A Shimmery Cube

Paul Goldberger

VOLUME 305, NUMBER 11,

October 30, 2017

The digital version of this issue is

available to all subscribers October 12

at TheNation.com.

Cover illustration by Brian Stauffer.

W

ith all the bad news filling the headlines, we are

thrilled to trumpet something uplifting: the award-

ing of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize to the Inter-

national Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

(ICAN), a scrappy coalition of groups from around the world that

Dropping the Bomb

played a decisive role in the adoption, this past July,
of an international treaty banning the production,
possession, and use of nuclear munitions. While
many activists had become discouraged over the
prospects for further progress on the nuclear issue,
ICAN turned the tide by emphasizing the humani-
tarian impacts of a nuclear war, which would affect
every country on the planet, whether or not they
were parties to the fighting.
As the Nobel Committee ruefully acknowledged,
the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons “will not in itself eliminate a
single nuclear weapon,” given that the nu-
clear-armed states have shown no interest
in signing it. For the organizations and
governments that share ICAN’s objec-
tives, this means a lot more work ahead to
bring the treaty into force (this will occur
when 50 nations ratify it) and persuade
the nuclear-armed states to join it. Need-
less to say, this will not, in today’s fractious
political landscape, prove an easy task.
But getting states to sign the treaty is not the
only objective of this effort: Equally vital is the drive
to establish an international legal norm against
the use of nuclear weapons, akin to the existing
norms against land mines, cluster munitions, and
biological and chemical weapons. “Nuclear weap-
ons are even more destructive [than those other
munitions],” Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-
Andersen noted, “but have not yet been made the
object of a similar international legal prohibition.”
Propounding and establishing a norm against
the use of nuclear weapons has never been more
critical. For decades, we have been spared unimagi-
nable death and destruction in part because of arms-
control treaties that reduce the risk of a nuclear
exchange, and in part because of the disinclination
of leaders to be the first to order such a strike since
the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in

1945. This nuclear taboo was especially evident
      during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.
      Ronald Reagan, in his final years as president, and
      Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also came to rec-
      ognize the horror of nuclear war, and so discussed
      the elimination of these weapons.
      Today, any reluctance on the part of key world
      leaders to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons
      appears to be vanishing. One after another, top of-
      ficials in Russia, India, Pakistan, North
      Korea, the United States, and NATO
      have taken steps or made statements in-
      dicating a greater inclination to employ
      such arms.
      Russia, for example, appears to have
      violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range
      Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibits
      ground- launched cruise missiles with a
      range of 500 to 5,000 kilometers, by de-
      ploying a cruise missile capable of flying
      within that range. Moscow has also adopted a stra-
      tegic doctrine that calls for the early use of nuclear
      weapons in the event of a major NATO assault on
      its territory—a move that has been cited in the West
      as justification for the deployment of additional
      nuclear- capable aircraft and cruise missiles to deter
      the Russians. In much the same manner, military
      officials in India and Pakistan have announced plans
      to employ nuclear weapons at an early stage in any
      major encounter.
      However, nothing is as troubling as the state-
      ments by Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Donald
      Trump of the United States suggesting an unfet-
      tered readiness to employ nuclear weapons in any
      future confrontation. The North Koreans have
      often used inflammatory language, threatening to
      engulf South Korea in a “sea of fire” if it threatened
      the North, but many US and foreign officials were
      shocked in August when President Trump warned

EDITORIAL