Terry Sarten: A mass delusion about mass destruction

Thermo-nuclear missile trajectories mean MAD by WMD.

As the international standoff with North Korea evolves towards a possibly peaceable compromise, the language of the Cold War years has come back into play.

One of the terms being rejuvenated is the concept of MAD, which stands for Mutually Assured Destruction.

The acronym fits perfectly to the crazy prevention strategy (or lack of) that no matter which country or leader starts a nuclear war, there will be no winners as all sides will face annihilation, wiping out entire populations and damaging large parts of the globe for aeons.

The idea behind MAD is, indeed, mad — but in its own crazy way it has held back nations that might have otherwise gone to nuclear war.

No matter which world leader has the most nuclear weapons or the biggest button (Trumpist declaration), the degree of destruction wrought would ruin all combatants.

The other phrase that has re-emerged is "weapons of mass destruction". But what is a mass?

The Collins dictionary entry says "death or injury on a large scale, esp as caused by nuclear or biological weapons".

The Third Edition of the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy refine this further to being "weapons that can produce devastating results when delivered in a single strike. They include nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons".

Both these definitions skip around the delicate matter of when does a level of killing become a mass? This is not easy and would involve setting a number — is a mass more than say two, three, 10, 100, a thousand, an entire city, a continent?

Do the 95 people killed and 163 wounded after a powerful bomb in the Afghan capital Kabul count as a mass? The media reporting did not call that a mass killing.

When a man with guns (plural) shot 59 dead and injured 527 people in Las Vegas, the media described this as a "mass" shooting. This leads to a suspicion that what counts as a mass killing is more about which country it is in rather than simply a defining number.

Suicide bombings happen frequently in conflict zones. Could it be that we, in the so-called "advanced nations" regard these as different and not qualifying for the same kind of attention?

The shooting of 20 school children at Sandy Hook elementary school in the United States commanded huge media profile – as well it should when so many children died. In contrast, a recent suicide bombing in Afghanistan's Kandahar region killed 11 children and yet it did not garner the same media scrutiny. It was news for a day then the world moved on to the next story.

Any killing that involves children should prompt a reaction no matter how many have died.

Maybe the notion of mass destruction should be downscaled. If a semi-automatic can kill many in a single event, then it should be counted as a weapon of mass destruction; if a vehicle is deliberately driven into a crowd, then a car is a weapon of mass destruction; a bomb, whether detonated in a busy street or flung from on high by rocket or plane, is a weapon of mass destruction.

It is necessary for us to rethink the notion of mass destruction and move beyond thinking about it as some arbitrary number that makes some deaths count more than others. We can make it become a counter mass made up of solid protest against the killing of people, especially children, who are the innocents in conflict all over the world.

And we can begin this here in New Zealand by challenging the violence that leads to the deaths of children in our own communities.

*Terry Sarten (aka Tel) is a writer, musician and social worker — feedback welcome: tgs@inspire.net.nz