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The Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s Subtle Agenda In 2014

Save the planet, or at least a major part of it, from the insanity of a nuclear exchange.  That’s what this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award really aims to achieve, behind the scenes of its overt recognition of children’s rights and education activism.

The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded by Norwegians not Swedes, in Oslo not Stockholm, is arguably the most arbitrary and least predictable of the Nobel awards — Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger/Le Duc Tho received it; Gandhi, Pope John Paul II, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Cesar Chavez didn’t.  Some would argue it’s all about politics.  Just about everyone would agree, though, that it’s often used to send a message.

Sometimes it’s obvious, as when the NPP was awarded to activists Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan for their efforts to bridge Northern Ireland’s sectarian divisions, to Amnesty International and (separately) Doctors Without Borders for their humanitarian work, to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for negotiating a peace treaty between their countries, to the Dalai Lama for his advocacy of “peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect,” to Aung Sang Suu Kyi to stick a thumb in the eyes of Myanmar’s junta leaders, and to various advocates of nuclear disarmament.

Today’s award to a pair of Pakistani and Indian advocates for children’s rights also, I think, has something to do with keeping the nuclear genie in the bottle, although it also operates on several other levels.  Let me deal with those first.

Perhaps first and foremost for the Nobel Committee is saving their own asses.  Or, worded a slightly different way, polishing the NPP’s somewhat tarnished patina.  The entire world is cheering for Malala, and would be disappointed if she didn’t get it, so they had to give it to her or risk further erosion of public respect for their selection process.  They didn’t have many options here:  They couldn’t give it to Kim Jong Un for not nuking South Korea, or the U.S. Republican Party for not nuking Washington D.C., without provoking a public uproar; as laudable as those accomplishments were.

But giving it to Malala, there’s also something in it for the Nobel Committee beyond the warm glow accruing to them from showering rose pedals on a courageous and inspiring teenager who uses her time more usefully than sexting when driving, while simultaneously inflicting a prostate exam on the Taliban whom nobody likes.  And, of course, it earns them points for promoting women’s rights in a part of the world where such rights are in a parlous state, and for promoting education in lands where there isn’t any.  In addition, the fact this selection can’t possibly go wrong (unless Malala abruptly remakes herself into another Miley Cyrus), and nobody except the Taliban and al Qaeda will despise it, earns bonus points redeemable at the gas pump.  In a nutshell, it goes a long way toward refurbishing the illusion there’s a rational selection process, as when a stage magician pulls off a magic trick.

What the Nobel Committee is most interested in, though, is human survival.  Splitting the award between an adult and a child, and between a male and a female, is politically clever; but splitting it between a Muslim and a Hindu is exceptionally so.  In Pakistan and India, the home countries of the recipients, Muslims and Hindus live next door to each other, and work overtime at being bad neighbors.  For example, when Pakistan sends terrorist into India to blow up Hindu temples full of people, it creates frictions.

I just finished reading a newly published book (August 2014) by independent journalist Eric Schlosser titled, “Command and Control,” which has a dual storyline:  A history of (mainly) the U.S. nuclear arsenal (and also touching a bit upon the Soviet nuclear arsenal); and a drama of a missile silo accident in which an ICBM blew up and tossed its nuclear warhead into an Arkansas farm field.

http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412963160&sr=8-1&keywords=command+and+control

You’ll likely crap in your pants when you read in this book that the U.S. Air Force, for many years, secured nuclear weapons with bicycle locks and that six of the seven safeties failed on a 3.8-megaton Mark 39 hydrogen bomb that was accidentally dropped by a B-52 that broke up while flying over North Carolina.  After reading this book, you’ll realize as I did that we’re damn lucky any of us are still here.  Nuclear weapons are accident prone, have been mishandled, and the fact none so far have accidentally gone off shouldn’t lull us into a false sense of security.  But Schlosser’s relevant point for our discussion here, and the one I want to quote, is this:

“The greatest risk of nuclear war now lies in South Asia.  …  Pakistan and India are neighbors, embittered by religious and territorial disputes.  Both countries have nuclear weapons.  The flight time of a missile from one to the other may be as brief as four or five minutes.  And the command-and-control facilities on both sides are not hardened against an attack.  During a crisis, the pressure to launch first would be enormous. … India for many years embraced a strategy of minimum deterrence, building a small arsenal of weapons and vowing to use them only in retaliation.  But India may be moving toward a more aggressive strategy ….  Pakistan has doubled the size of its arsenal since 2006.  It now has about 100 nuclear weapons.  It is the only nuclear power whose weapons are entirely controlled by the military.  And the Pakistani army has not ruled out using them first, even in response to an Indian attack with conventional weapons.  To make that sort of deterrent credible, the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons has probably been given to lower-level Pakistani officers ….  Instead of making a war between India and Pakistan less likely, nuclear weapons may have the opposite effect.  …  [In addition to a volatile border dispute,] Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have allowed it to sponsor terrorism against India … without fear of retaliation.  Since the early 1990s the two countries have come close to nuclear war about half a dozen times ….”  [pp. 478-479]

It seems pretty obvious what the Nobel Committee is trying to do.  Basically the same thing it did by jointly awarding the Peace Prize to a Protestant activist and a Catholic activist who were trying to peacefully bridge the Protestant-Catholic differences tearing Northern Ireland apart, except there the combatants weren’t nuclear-armed as in the case of India and Pakistan.  By jointly honoring an Indian and a Pakistani, an adult and a child, a male and a female, who are together advocating for children’s rights and universal education — values that traverse national, ethnic, and religious boundaries — they’re hoping to prevent India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from detonating.

They’re undoubtedly hoping this might make it much harder for India’s generals to kill Malala, and for Pakistan’s generals to kill Kailash.  Images of Malala and Kailash together — Indian and Pakistani, Hindu and Muslim, man and girl — even if they’re seen and photographed together only once, at the Oslo acceptance ceremony, might be very powerful in that part of the world.  They might even trump in the generals’ minds whatever power the generals imagine those weapons contain.  (They would be mistaken about that; nuclear weapons are ultimately powerless, because they leave nothing worth happen behind if they’re used.)

I think it was a brilliant and timely choice, made for practical rather than sentimental reasons.

Update:  The Economist, which I regularly parse, has picked up my theme:

“Will the fact of a jointly awarded prize in any way encourage better relations between India and Pakistan? The award committee may perhaps hope so, though neither of these two recipients has made a point of looking at relations between the rival countries. There have been many other dual recipients of the Nobel prize … rewarded for efforts made to settle long-running conflicts. In this case, … there is little reason to expect any relief from the long-standing and bitter confrontation that divides their nuclear-armed countries. Others will have to work on bilateral peace.”  

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2014/10/peace-prizes-south-asia

Given that Pakistan and India resumed shelling each other last week, if I were on the award committee, I don’t think I’d wait.

 

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