This is a response to an article by David Krieger on the existential threat of nuclear war. For context, check out the original article.
David Krieger writes about the urgent need to eliminate nuclear weapons, which since World War II have threatened to end most life on the planet due to the nuclear winter effect and the famine that would result if even a small fraction of present warheads are launched. Clearly, for all who wish to see life continue into the future, this must be a priority. Questions of movement-building are a vital part of Krieger’s article, and are discussed later in this essay. First, it’s important to reflect on the connection between democracy and survival, and the ongoing influence of illegitimate authority that must be overcome if we’re to abolish this threat.
Institutional Madness
For all those who believe that there are responsible, serious people crafting our nuclear war plans—plans emphasizing non-use—looking into the documentary and historical record suggests that this is a life-threatening delusion. As Krieger notes, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed up to 300,000 civilians, is justified to this day as a necessary sacrifice to avoid an invasion that would have cost the lives of American soldiers. But with nearly all military leaders believing that these bombings weren’t necessary to end the war, and US intelligence agencies knowing at the time that Japan was already working on terms of surrender, the likely reason was to impress the Soviet Union with the cataclysmic power of US technology. There are no words to describe the decision to murder hundreds of thousands of people in order to send a message.
In The Doomsday Machine (a reference to Dr. Strangelove and the real-life ability of nuclear superpowers to bring about Armageddon), Daniel Ellsberg provides an account of his experience with nuclear war planning at the height of the Cold War. He shows that upper-level military figures recognized that their plans for “general war”—an all-out launch of the US’s nuclear weapons against all major Russian and Chinese cities, triggered by a vaguely defined “armed conflict with the Soviet Union”—would lead to an estimated 600 million deaths, nearly all civilians. This number was actually a dramatic underestimate as the effects of fire weren’t incorporated in the death toll and nuclear winter wasn’t yet understood to be an inevitable result. Senior military figures were prepared to exterminate about one-third of the planet’s human population, at the time three billion people. This “general war” plan was maintained for various reasons: a desire to destroy all Communist threats at once (even without any provocation from China), an almost visceral distaste for the idea of reorienting the directives of a massive military force under a different plan, and a delusional expectation that an all-out strike would limit retaliatory damage to the US. President Eisenhower was in favor of general war for fiscal reasons, believing that a conventional war would be too expensive and would lead to inflation and perhaps a recession. President Nixon pushed a “madman theory,” sending deliberate signals to enemies that he was so obsessed with “containing Communism” that he wouldn’t hesitate to launch a nuclear strike.
However, a more accurate appraisal of the source of the nuclear threat doesn’t have to do as much with individuals as it does with the institutions that largely guide the behavior of war planners. Ellsberg makes an essential point about the vast majority of people who participated in creating nuclear weapons and planning for their use: these are normal people, no different than any of us. He worked for years to submit a revised plan for nuclear war that wouldn’t immediately target all Russian and Chinese cities, certainly better than the all-out plan he aimed to replace, but with decades of hindsight admitted it was an attempt to make an insane situation more palatable. His book illustrates a concept that is essential in understanding how our societies function, something activists should target in order to create change—bounded rationality. From his vantage point, steeped in a culture that raised him to believe that the Soviet Union was a state obsessed with world domination and planning an imminent nuclear attack on the US that our country couldn’t match, he and others were “working to save the world.” That meant the US needed to be capable of “retaliatory genocide”—an ability to essentially destroy the Soviet Union following a potential strike, as “the best, indeed the only way, of increasing the chance that there would be no large nuclear war in the near future.” Now sufficiently removed from the groupthink and the institutional assumptions and pressures, he draws a different conclusion: “What seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.”
In his 1999 essay “Death by Deterrence,” General George Lee Butler, the former head of the US Strategic Command (the unit responsible for all US nuclear weapons), confirms that all those absorbed into the hierarchy of nuclear planning have a religious fervor to their work. He describes US strategy against the perceived threat of Russia as “a modern day holy war, a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness.” The holiest part, of course, has been the ability to threaten nuclear annihilation. “This abiding faith in nuclear weapons was inspired and is sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades by a priesthood who speak with great assurance and authority.” Following his own departure from the military, he sought to “help legitimize [nuclear] abolition as an alternative worthy of serious and urgent consideration,” and his observations further illustrate the poorly designed institutions guiding war planning:
“For all of my years as a nuclear strategist, operational commander and public spokesman, I explained, justified and sustained America’s massive nuclear arsenal as a function, a necessity and a consequence of deterrence. . . It was premised on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions. It suspended rational thinking about the ultimate aim of national security: to ensure the survival of the nation. . . Vitally important decisions were routinely taken without adequate understanding, assertions too often prevailed over analysis, requirements took on organizational biases, technological opportunity and corporate profit drove force levels and capability, and political opportunism intruded on calculations of military necessity.”
Expanding Democracy to Eliminate the Threat of Nuclear War
What is it about our institutions that organizes normal people under such conditions that they will thoughtlessly work towards the end of the world under the guise of saving it? The reason appears to be that nuclear planning institutions and the broader military system aim to preserve American power rather than defend the public. It’s the purpose of these institutions that creates a lethal absurdity. Where maintaining control conflicts with survival, control is prioritized.
A related question is, why are our institutions guided by this priority? These institutions are shaped by the power imbalances that exist within societies and between them. The power afforded foremost by wealth creates various social dynamics that pit people against one another, up to the point of threatening all living things. When a small minority of the population possesses extreme wealth and the control over others that flows from it, maintaining that authority and expanding it become an overriding life purpose. It also creates a sense of paranoia against those who might seek to take it. Elite priorities are then translated into the language of “national security,” which disguises the reality that defense of power takes precedent over the defense of citizens. Our social institutions are constituted around this hierarchy, with those at the top driven by considerations of hegemony while those below are driven by the patriotic story used as a pretext. Everyone within the institution is disconnected from humanity to varying degrees, and operates within the confines of an extremely narrow worldview. These effects combine to make the threat of using or potential use of a Doomsday Machine—what would make any ordinary citizen outside of these ideological institutions recoil in horror and disgust—seem normal, even essential. In this way, power imbalances and the institutions that maintain them create a logic and the conditions for humanity to annihilate itself. Such an outcome is rational in view of these institutions. Preserving and expanding elites’ control over the rest of the world is worth the threat that this goal poses to every living thing.
With this in mind, eliminating the threat of nuclear war isn’t just a matter of putting more responsible people into our institutions, but rather redesigning the military institutions that protect the power imbalances between countries. Hierarchical institutions that lead rational individuals to plan for the end of the world must be transformed into democratic institutions that allow for a full analysis of the issues—especially the simple moral principles that define them—and for communities to participate in military planning. The need for such institutional transformation didn’t end with the Cold War, as our discussion of Russia remains highly biased. We apply different security principles to Russia, where US-led NATO forces push up to its borders, than we apply to the US. The disproportionate threats we pose to Russia aren’t discussed in the media, and the perception of a Russian threat is repeated again and again. This forms a pretense for nuclear war. “We cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded homilies of the nuclear priesthood,” Butler urges. “It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity.”
It’s conceivable that a pulse of democratic energy from a mass movement could lead to reduced stockpiles of nuclear weapons at levels that no longer threaten nuclear winter, and leave the economy as a largely unaccountable system. However, there is no reason not to aim to correct the original power imbalances that set up this and other crises by extending democratic control to the economy. Existential crises like nuclear war perhaps most clearly illustrate the threat and injustice perpetrated by illegitimate authority, and the connection between democracy and survival. No community decides to destroy itself by starting a nuclear war. No one not utterly deluded by power and disconnected from humanity can annihilate the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a display of military supremacy. Without creating a broadly democratic society, even positive steps are always in peril of being undone. This was illustrated by the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Iran deal, which had halted the country’s progress in creating a nuclear weapon, a move driven not by any credible violations of the deal but by desire for war. I think the goal of nuclear abolition should be a stepping stone to a democratic society where these injustices don’t happen, a leading piece of a broader vision. Failing to come to a calm, deep-seated conclusion that the present institutions are intolerable, we will continue to submit our lives to the “institutionalized madness” that leads to a perfectly rational extinction. “We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention,” Butler warns, “and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”
Building an Autonomous and Transformative Nuclear Abolition Movement
Krieger examines the challenges of building a nuclear abolition movement. He provides a useful overview of the several obstacles we must overcome, a topic to which I’d like to add.
One central challenge is developing an autonomous movement structure capable of generating large-scale public action. In their book Right Turn, political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers highlight the influence of elites on the anti-nuclear movement in its early-1980s heyday. Krieger states that “One must wonder if the protest was so large because it asked for so little: a freeze, rather than deep reductions.” While the movement was surely motivated by citizen fears about the prospect of nuclear war, its size was likely amplified by the funds flowing in from businesses and industrialists aligned with the Democratic Party. At the time, the massive military buildup and aggressive international posture of the Reagan Administration didn’t align with the interests of some sectors of business who were served by different allocations of government spending and peaceful relationships with international elites. Consider this:
“The elite concern with arms control and the military budget found a focus in the growing grassroots campaign for a ‘nuclear freeze.’ The multinational Democrats and the real-estate interests coalesced behind efforts to reduce the Reagan arms budget by cutting—or, rather, restructuring—nuclear programs. From a decentralized campaign begun by a few committed activists, the movement for a freeze abruptly changed character. All of a sudden Eastern real-estate magnates with no known interests in any defense issue, such as the famous Donald Trump, began supporting a vaguely defined ‘freeze’ movement. . . By mid-1982, the anti-nuclear movement had become a powerful political force. But it had also moved far from the intentions of its original champions. Few of the business groups and foundations that now helped push it along wanted to explore the relations between multinational business, the use of force in American foreign policy, and social class. Accordingly, the critical content of the early freeze proposals largely evaporated. Allying with the ‘freeze’ became little more than a way of disaffiliating with a military buildup of the size Reagan projected. . . As explicit commitments on the freeze faded, many Democrats even abandoned the rhetoric, and (following the Administration) shifted the earlier rallying slogans in favor of ‘build down’ proposals on nuclear weapons. Sponsored by a group of mostly Democratic officials with very close ties to weapons producers, this notion proposed that the United States and U.S.S.R. destroy a certain number of nuclear warheads for each addition they made to their nuclear forces. Because they provided for the destruction of some nuclear weapons, such proposals could be plausibly passed off as ‘freeze’-inspired. In fact, they were really formulas for the further modernization of strategic forces.”
Krieger seems to be right. Though the limited goal of the nuclear freeze movement may have encouraged the participation of greater numbers of ordinary Americans, it also avoided concrete demands that many businesses would have found intolerable and enabled support from some elite sectors looking to advance their own interests. This analysis shows that we must have our own plan of action and independent sources of funding: we can’t expect the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons to receive business support, especially because the goal goes far beyond a freeze. And any support won’t truly be aimed at eliminating the Doomsday Machine—it will likely only water down the movement’s demands and militancy. If these weapons are perceived to be a strategic asset by most elites, not only will there not be significant business funding, there will be a massive campaign in opposition. Krieger points out that “Once the Cold War ended, though, interest in nuclear disarmament issues rapidly faded.” Perhaps this is a sign that a sufficiently autonomous movement structure that could sustain public mobilization as business funding receded hadn’t been created. If a nuclear abolition movement is to succeed it will have to grow from independent grassroots institutions, especially if it is part of a larger movement to democratize the economy.
Another priority of the nuclear abolition movement must be to correct the public’s perception of its own security. The discussion of security is a foundational part of the nuclear abolition narrative, with several key chapters. The first could be that as nuclear winter studies make clear, the only outcome of using any significant portion of the weapons that exist today are conditions that would destroy nearly all life on the planet. Even if the US launched a massive nuclear first strike and was not hit in response, it would still decimate the American public. Another chapter is the startling history of accidental nuclear close-calls, a subject covered by Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control (at least the fraction that we know about). We may highlight the meaninglessness of the many mistakes that could have destroyed humanity and the fact that we continue to rely on miracles to survive while the Doomsday Machine still exists. Krieger notes that “The nuclear abolition movement builds on the stories from ground-zero, those beneath the mushroom cloud.” Stories of the survivors of US nuclear attacks, the hibakusha, should be another chapter in the narrative of nuclear abolition. Of course, dispelling the legitimacy myth that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end World War II must be part of the context. And we should also make clear that the fission atomic bombs dropped on Japan are now merely the detonators for today’s fusion thermonuclear weapons, which are many times more powerful. The public’s sense of security with regard to nuclear weapons depends on not knowing this narrative.
A broader discussion would recognize that claims for peace and security have been used by powerful states throughout history to justify unconscionable brutality. Such claims are a surefire way to dampen one’s own conscience and win public support. History teaches us that supposed threats to “national security” shouldn’t be sufficient on their own—the public must be able and ready to assess global issues for itself rather than accepting that we have something to dread. Fear is a powerful mechanism of control that elites can use to generate support among innocent people for heinous crimes against other innocent people. We must thoroughly examine our sense of insecurity and ensure that our emotions and actions are properly aligned with reality. All of this suggests the need for a massive public discussion about what threats we actually face, and whether they stem from other peoples or our own powerful institutions.
The other side of the nuclear abolition narrative, as alluded to previously, should be the reasons why we find ourselves having to fight to preserve life on this planet. The threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity is as illegitimate as the hierarchical institutions that would use them to secure their priorities.
Finally, Krieger observes that it’s difficult to sustain the “horror of nuclear catastrophe in the public mind year after year, decade after decade, in the absence of nuclear war.” Like climate change activism, fear does tend to play a significant role in animating our action. Of course, on the other side of fear are the people and places we love and the desire to ensure their safety. But it seems like staking a movement on a desire to keep ourselves and others from dying in a nuclear war leaves aside a stronger basis with which to answer the question “what are you fighting for?” That basis is gained when we follow Krieger’s vision and recognize that “The nuclear abolition movement must join with other movements seeking systemic global change.” He notes that “each calls into question the governing assumptions of society that have led us down an unsustainable path.” It’s not just the redirection of nuclear spending to social priorities that we’re fighting for. Nuclear abolition could be at the leading edge of a broad democracy movement aimed at creating a society where the pressure for war doesn’t exist, and where the goals of other movements are fulfilled. Under such a structure, activists can continually affirm each other’s reality, especially in the face of powerful institutions that deny it. This larger movement holds up these injustices as the symptoms of a species out of balance, and seeks to uproot the deep institutional maladies responsible for them, those that keep us from a more harmonious state worthy of human dignity.
Simple Moral Questions
Towards the end of his essay, Krieger writes that “We can no longer think in old ways, solving differences among countries by means of warfare. Instead of absolute allegiance to a sovereign state, we must think holistically and globally.” That’s true. Though perhaps if citizens recognize the connection between nationalism and the threats that the concept poses to their loved ones, in the form of war between states—including a potentially rapid escalation to nuclear war—the recognition of oneself as a citizen of the world will come more naturally. After all, it would be an unspeakable tragedy if arbitrary lines on a map, and differences in language and customs, led humanity to destroy itself.
Of course, as has been noted, these differences do not in themselves lead to war. It is the imbalance of power, when a small portion of the population is able to decide the fate of the rest, that forces us to fear the next power grab or paranoid recourse to “defense.” The questions that reveal the nature of the Doomsday Machine are simple. As Ellsberg writes, “Does any nation on earth have a right to possess such a capability? A right to threaten—by its simple possession of that capability—the continued existence of all other nations and their populations, their cities, and civilization as a whole?” Such questions are not addressed by our government, not simply because the answer is clear, but because a movement of sufficient force has not yet compelled an answer. Then again, the question really isn’t for elites to answer—it’s for us as ordinary people. We cannot submit to those who endorse the continued possession of nuclear weapons—those who suspend logic and yet accuse the ones asking simple moral questions of being irrational.
Conclusion
Ellsberg lays out the steps we could take to dismantle the American Doomsday Machine, noting that reducing nuclear stockpiles to levels that wouldn’t lead to nuclear winter could technically be accomplished in a year, but points out that elites broadly reject them:
“Both parties as currently constituted oppose every one of these measures. This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public—though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability—but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.”
The foundation of any movement is its understanding of the problem at hand. Too many people unknowingly consent to the ongoing existence of the Doomsday Machine because of their lack of awareness. It is clear that what is desperately needed is a society-wide discussion of the existential threats that we face—both nuclear and ecological—if we are to preserve human civilization and even life itself. As long as successive generations of people can be brought up and live day-to-day with scarcely any knowledge of these crises or a sense of their responsibility in addressing them, it is only a matter of time before “divine intervention” is no longer enough.