The Anti-‐Nuclearist Discourse
The anti-‐nuclearist discourse also takes the destructiveness of nuclear weapons as its starting point, but reaches opposite conclusions. The central thesis that illuminates almost most of the anti-‐nuclearist literature is that nuclear weapons cannot be managed safely, and therefore must be eliminated. Robert McNamara’s (cited by McGuire 2004, p.126) quasi-‐syllogism sums up anti-‐nuclearist logic succinctly: “(1) nuclear weapons make nuclear war possible, (2) major nuclear war has the unique capacity to destroy our present civilization and jeopardize the survival of the human race; (3)Human fallibility means that a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable.”131 The anti-‐nuclearist discourse typically produces representations that orbit these three points. Indeed, if the government and nuclearist discourse (see next section) emphasise the manageability of nuclear weapons, through deterrence, the anti-‐nuclearists have produced, a vast amount of research, fiction, pamphlets, and campaigns constituting the nuclear weapons problem as both potentially apocalyptic and beyond the control of human management
strategies. Indeed, the anti nuclearist’s discourse has grown rapidly since the nuclear era began132 and can draw upon a deep and widely discursive economy.133 It is relevant for this thesis because it constitutes the discourse which both Thatcher and Blair nuclear discourses had to marginalize in order to ensure that they successfully presented the UK’s maintenance of nuclear weapons as legitimate and desirable.
131 See also the Canberra Commission Report (Canberra Commission, 1996) and The New Agenda Coalition (1998) statement for significant examples of the same anti-nuclearist point.
132 And arguably earlier: H G Wells’ (1988)[1914] The World Set Free, which 30 years before their invention describes a world held captive to “atomic bombs” dropped by aeroplane and capable of unprecedented destructive power.
133 Continuous whirring of the anti-nuclear movement in the background of most nuclear weapons states, particularly the UK. The CND and Acronym institute produce a continuous stream of literature. In recent years this remains fairly marginal to the mainstream discourse, but in times of high nuclear tension the UK nuclear movement has generated mass opposition to nuclear weapons. However, beyond academia and activists, the anti-nuclear discourse however has long pervaded popular culture. While, Academic scholarship discusses the feasibility of stable nuclear deterrence, other actors, notably the Church offers ethical opposition to the maintenance of nuclear weapons, and threatening annihilation in the name of peace (Young, 1983)
Representing the Risk of Nuclear War
Scholars have provided ballast to the anti-‐nuclearism discourse by theorizing and documenting when and why states may not behave as rationally as the nuclearist models predict, and thus why nuclear weapons cannot be managed safely. For example, Scott Sagan, in his debate with the Waltz (Sagan, 1994; Sagan & Waltz, 1995) argues why the military, political leaders and bureaucracies may not behave rationally and thus why a nuclear accident must be expected (and indeed has happened134). Meanwhile, building on the assumption of human fallibility statistician CS Snow Erik (in)famously predicted in 1960 that “at the most, ten years some of these bombs are going off”. Those ten years have since come and gone but data analysts now make the more temporally humble claim that nuclear war is inevitable eventually, and the more nuclear weapons the world has the more likely a nuclear accident is to occur. As, nuclearists’
complain, the “statistical certainty” rhetorical commonplace has become an under examined mantra.135 Perhaps with this criticism in mind, other scholars have sought to uncover concrete evidence to unsettle nuclearist complacency. For example, Schlosser (2013a) meticulously documents the great lengths the US went to, seeking to manage its nuclear stockpile safely; and how they still often failed, but hid accidents from their public in the name of “national security”.
Questioning “Nuclear Peace”
Scholars have also challenged the empirical record of nuclearist claim that the long peace is proof of deterrence working and instead argue in various ways that nuclear deterrence’s utility is an illusion. For example, Mueller (1988, 1998) claims nuclear weapons have been irrelevant to the “long peace in Europe”. As George Kennan (1982) repeatedly argued, one can plausibly explain the absence of war between East and West as a consequence of the Soviet’s fears about their border with China, and the expense and hassle involved in invading and occupying hostile states. Meanwhile, Lebow and Stein (1989, p. 208)trace nuclearist’s problem to their tendency towards abstract modelling arguing that “[r]ational deterrence theories are poorly specified theories about non-‐existent decision makers operating in non-‐existent environments” and when tested against the historical record, these models come up wanting. Furthermore, MccGwire has long argued that deterrence produces and embeds the antagonism that it seeks to manage, which caused all periods of détente between superpowers to be temporary (MccGwire, 1985, 1986b, 2001).
Anti-‐nuclear academic work is frequently mirrored and actualized in fiction and disseminated
134 He documents accidents and near-‐misses, arguing that Waltz’s complacency about the risks of accident are unfounded.
135 See Waltz’s rebuttal to Sagan in The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A debate (Sagan & Waltz, 1995)
across the broader public sphere. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) remains probably the Doomsday Device was undone by human, bureaucratic and technological fallibility on both sides.138 The Soviet military kept the device a secret in order to unveil it at politically opportune
136 Although academia typically considers popular culture irrelevant, a growing literature that recognise that pop-culture can have significance in shaping the public discourse on war (Behnke & de Carvalho, 2006; de Carvalho, 2006; Hansen, 2006). Behnke and de Carvalho (2006, p. 935) are especially bullish: “Thus, the argument in the present exchange is not about whether popular culture is relevant to IR, but about how it is relevant, and how it shapes discourses about international politics. Indeed, in the case of Dr Strangelove, there is evidence to suggest it has grown in social significance and continues to carry cultural resonance today.” Type
“Rd. Strangelove” into Google and it returns more than 633,000 hits, at the time of writing. Meanwhile, Google’s Ngram view which measures the frequency words appear in books published in the United States in Googles digitized library provides another (imperfect) indication of how widely Strangelove – and the anti-nuclearist discourse it embodies – is embedded in culture. According to the N-gram viewer the frequency the term “Dr. Strangelove” has appeared more frequently in books than “Spiderman”, “Superman”, and “Count Dracula” and remains on an upward trend (See Appendix 2). Indeed, “Dr Strangelove” was referenced in the UK parliament debate about Trident in 2007 to attack the pro-nuclearists; it did not require any explanation on the part of the MP what he meant (HC Deb 14 Mar 2007 Vol 468 cc 373)
137 An idea that Szilard, one of the nuclear scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, is reported to have floated. Adler’s(1992, p. 120) analysis of the epistemic communities of arms control notes that Szilard suggested the idea of “a doomsday machine” in conversation with Herman Kahn in 1949 but oddly does not note that it seemed to have inspired Dr Strangelove.
138 President Merklin Muffley: “General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you
*assured* me there was *no* possibility of such a thing *ever* occurring!
General "Buck" Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”
139 Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
“Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.”
Soviet defences, continues to limp towards their target, rapidly leaking fuel on what is now a suicide mission. However, in an extraordinary feat of patriotism, they make it and the Captain releases himself and the nuclear bomb, unwittingly triggering the doomsday device in the process. The end of the world ensues.140
In addition to theorizing why and how deterrence can go wrong, and providing evidence of when it has gone wrong, the anti nuclearists provide vivid descriptions of what a nuclear war would mean. Since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nuclear weapons have never been used in anger, however their firepower has increased exponentially. Therefore, the anti-‐nuclear weapons discourse does a lot of predicting, modelling and imagining of nuclear war. Carl Sagan (1983) 'Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions models the consequence of what would happen in the event of a nuclear exchange. Capturing the public imagination, according to the New York Times, when published it “spawned a host of movies, plays and books predicated on the nuclear winter hypothesis”. The term nuclear winter has now become
embedded in popular discourse as a “conventional metaphor” meaning a catastrophe of some sort (Ausmus, 1998). Indeed in the last decade, Time Magazine (Beech, 2014) compared Beijing smog to nuclear winter, The New Yorker, compared Basketball’s strike to a “nuclear winter”,141 and the metaphor has even been used to describe the problem of low bond yields(Cohen &
Malburg, 2011). These are just illustrations, but the imagining(s) of what a nuclear war may involve runs deep into popular discourse. Wikipedia, for example, lists more than 100 “nuclear apocalypse” films, although the number is probably much greater.142
In summary, anti-‐nuclearism discourse involves showing how nuclear accidents have happened, imagining how nuclear war could happen, and describing – or they would say revealing -‐ in vivid detail what nuclear war would mean. Thus if the nuclearist discourse produces nuclear
140 A more recent example, one that name checks Dr Strangelove, is Joseph Heller’s (1994) lesser-known follow-up to Catch 22: Closing Time satirizes the nuclear security culture of the United States. Heller’s novel tells the story of politicians, military men, and weapons manufacturers, whose combination of high-technology, massive funding, and warped logic leaves them cut off from the world around them as they construct ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In particular, Heller takes aim at the modelling of nuclear war, which the (simpleton) president of the United States understands as computer games. At the end of the novel, while president is playing his “games”, he accidently releases all the US’s nuclear missiles. When his staff find him, panic sets in, and they order him hurry to the Shelters known as “Triage”. The President replies “sure I know that one I was playing that one before I switched to this one” (Heller, 1994; 530). The president still does not grasp that the nuclear games he has been playing affect the world around him. As with Dr Strangelove, the end of the world ensues.
141 See “Basketball’s Nuclear Winter,” (2011)
142 Recognising that using Wikipedia is taboo this thesis offers a twofold defence 1) the precise number of nuclear holocaust films does not matter as much as the main point that many exist, 2) Wikipedia is not as inaccurate as is commonly assumed. A randomized study conducted by Nature Journal (Giles, 2005) found Wikipedia’s accuracy to be similar to Britannica Encyclopaedia.
management strategies, seeks to demonstrate their effectiveness, and downplays the dangers of nuclear weapons, the anti-‐nuclearist discourse seeks to show why these management strategies are not working, are dangerous, and why they are not worth the risk. However, although the anti-‐nuclearist discourse represents total nuclear abolition as urgent, it does not necessarily offer a plan for how this can be realised without risking leaving one state with a nuclear monopoly and victim to coercion (Wohlstetter, 1961).143 The next section analyses why both discourses are unlikely to achieve hegemonic status in the near future.