THE RECENT shooting down of a Russian warplane by Turkish jet fighters has raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. Readers remembered my two columns on World War III hot spots (5/31/15 and 6/7/15) and asked about the possible aftermath of an atomic war.
Scourge of war. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, while presiding over the Japanese surrender in World War II, sighed: “War can no longer be controlled. It can only be abolished.”
The WWII hero was lamenting the horror wrought by two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki on Aug. 8, 1945. The bombs instantly killed over 100,000 civilians, permanently scarred, disfigured and maimed hundreds of thousands more, and brought Japan to its knees.
Despite MacArthur’s dire warning, several states accelerated their production of more destructive nuclear weapons that would be carried by unmanned intercontinental missiles from remote land-based silos and from untraceable nuclear submarines roaming ocean depths.
Now, humanity faces the prospect of nuclear annihilation in several hotspots in the Middle East, Ukraine and South China Sea. If that should ever happen, it will wipe out most living things, sear the earth’s foliage, melt polar caps, flood most countries, shroud the globe with radioactive clouds, and then usher in an ice age that would bring untold miseries to survivors.
World government. World War III will abolish states, erase territorial borders and eliminate sovereign rights. In place of states, I see the rise of a new world order, what I would call the International Peoples Union (iPU). It will be a federation of nonindependent nations similar to the United States or Russia or Canada on a worldwide scale, with only one central government responsible for peace and order for everyone.
Unlike the League of Nations and the United Nations, the iPU will not respect state rights, only human rights. It will not get its mandate from the victors, not even from the losers, but from the victims who would all become citizens of one united world, no longer of separate independent states. It will have its own international police force to enforce its laws.
Indeed, a nuclear holocaust will have no victors or losers, only victims who will have one common aspiration—the outlawing of war and the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction.
The iPU will have a first set of self-anointed leaders who will organize the survivors in licking their wounds and in healing the earth. They will begin a new civilization and invent novel technologies of survival. Nuclear energy will be used to propel new machines for peace and prosperity, no longer for war and poverty.
Eventually, leaders will be elected worldwide to run the world government, with disciplinary sanctions over everyone. The iPU will have absolute dominion over the resources and treasures of the earth for the common welfare of all earth beings, not anymore for states or for the exclusive enjoyment of the natives of a specific area of the globe.
Governance principles. In the iPU, the individual will be supreme. The sovereign rights of states will be severely degraded, if not totally eliminated. All earthlings will be governed as equal citizens of one world. International law will radically change and become the equivalent of domestic law for the entire world.
For example, the maritime rights of states provided under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or Unclos, that entitle sovereign states to 12 nautical miles (22.2 kilometers) of territorial sea, an additional 200 nautical miles (370.4 km) of exclusive economic zone, and another 150 nautical miles (277.8 km) of continental shelf will be obsolete because there will be no more need to protect the territorial integrity of one state from invasion/incursion by another state.
Under current international law, the “International Bill of Human Rights” consisting of (1) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), (2) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and (3) the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, though adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, are not enforced worldwide.
This is because many states refuse to recognize and enforce them in their respective jurisdictions, claiming that they contravene their constitutions. They argue that under the currently-recognized principle of noninterference in domestic affairs, they cannot be compelled to obey them.
(Unlike these states, the Philippines recognizes and enforces the UDHR and the two Covenants. Our Supreme Court has accepted them as “part of the generally accepted principles of international law that are binding on us.”)
But with the abolition of sovereign rights, the iPU could easily enforce the International Bill of Human Rights which, however, may be modified to satisfy criticisms that it contains Western biases that contradict some religious beliefs.
Truly, all the peoples of the earth, regardless of gender, creed, race, language, religion or color will be entitled to equal protection, dignity and respect. Loyalty will be primarily to the world, and only secondarily to nations and villages.
Transparency, responsibility and accountability will be the hallmarks of governance. Meritocracy, integrity, probity and honor will be the inexorable standards for public servants.
In short, a nuclear holocaust may have the unintended consequence of ushering in a new world order making the individual supreme and the state largely irrelevant.
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