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Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

My recent post on abolishing nuclear weapons prompted a long exchange over on Cliopatria with Alan Allport, who convinced me that I needed to make a clearer and more convincing case for the abolitionist position. So here goes.

I start with the premise that the use of a nuclear weapon is never morally justified. Some disagree with that premise, most notably those who believe that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped end World War II and prevented the casualties that would have been suffered by an invasion force in Japan. That justification, however, relies solely on consequentialist moral reasoning -- that the results of an action are the only things that bear on its justification. And at best, consequentialism merely postpones moral deliberation to a later stage (since we would now only find ourselves asking, not which acts are morally good, but which results are). Besides, it is possible to acknowledge that some evils are averted by other evils, without conceding that either evil was morally justified itself.

My premise about nuclear weapons is easy to accept if you already accept the premise that violence is more often unjustified than not. Human societies have not always accepted that premise, but it has been esteemed one of the marks of civilization that we should seek to resolve conflicts peacefully. Even those who stop short of a pacifist position tend to believe that violence must be used as a last resort -- that there is such a thing, for instance, as a just war and an unjust war, or a murder and an act of manslaughter committed in self-defense. We take for granted that violence has to be justified carefully to be tolerable. Moreover, all of our society's justifications for violence depend on the assumption that violence can be controlled and directed, proportionately and precisely, at a particular person or group of people -- the invading army, for instance, or the aggressor who induces our violent act of self-defense.

The use of nuclear weapons, however, could never be justified by the kinds of calculus that justify, say, a defensive war or a citizen arrest, because the violence they unleash is necessarily uncontrolled, disproportionate, and imprecise. A nuclear weapon is incapable of discriminating between combatant or noncombatant (a crucial distinction in any just war theory), as it also incapable of discriminating between guilty or innocent. This is not only because the yield of even a small nuclear weapon is so explosive that it is impossible to direct, but also because the technology itself involves the release of harmful radioactive materials whose patterns of dispersion cannot even be predicted with great accuracy. I believe that the indiscriminate nature of nuclear violence undermines any attempt to justify its use.

To that point can be added other strikes against nuclear weapons. In addition to believing that violence can only be justified when its victim is deemed somehow "deserving," our society tends to believe that even justified violence must stay within limits of scale and kind. We believe, for instance, that certain kinds of punishment are cruel and unusual, and that certain amounts of force are excessive. By any reasonable definition, I believe, a nuclear weapon would have to be classified as a cruel and unusual form of weapon that unleashes excessive amounts of force. Nor is the destructive power of a nuclear weapon limited to the fatalities and casualties it would immediately cause; it also wreaks unjustifiable harm on the ecological landscape, making its use not only homicidal but also indirectly suicidal.

One could argue, of course, that all kinds of military weapons wreak ecological harm, and that war cannot avoid being cruel and unusual, that accepting war means "collateral damage" to civilian and ecological life. Those points are some of the reasons why I incline strongly towards pacifism. But suppose you don't incline the way I do. You still believe that militaries should take steps to minimize such collateral damage. And even from my point of view, with my strong inclination towards pacifism, I can acknowledge with real and sincere gratitude the steps that the U. S. military in particular takes in this regard. I do believe that most commanders in the field try to clear aerial targets of civilians, for instance. And while I am suspicious of claims that evidence of torture at places like Abu Ghraib point simply to a "few bad apples," I also believe that American servicemen and servicewomen are not in the habit of torturing people, since I know some of them personally. A non-pacifist should and does see the honorable restraint shown by soldiers in not torturing combatants or harming civilians as morally praiseworthy. But for that very reason, even a non-pacifist can reject the justified use of nuclear weapons: the casualties such weapons inflict on survivors cannot be described as anything but torturous, and once again, whereas in the case of most weapons, steps might be taken to limit harm to civilians, in the case of nuclear weapons such steps are not only improbable but would also be strategically counterproductive.

If it is impossible for the use of a nuclear weapon ever to be justified, that seems to me a strong prima facie reason for abolishing nuclear weapons. How many other artificial things do we keep around or cover with legal protection even when we know there is no conceivable scenario in which those things could be justifiably used? (Seriously, I tried to think of an example of such a thing and could not.) On the other hand, we routinely pass laws that criminalize the possession of materials (like certain biochemical agents, for instance, or explosive devices, or backyard superconductors) whose imaginable range of justified uses is extremely small. Those considerations, to me, add up to a strong presumption against the very possession of nuclear weapons being morally justified. There may be a moral distinction between the possession and use of nuclear weapons, such that we could describe the user of them as somehow incurring "more guilt" than mere possessors, but this is a slender distinction on which to hang an argument against abolition.

One might draw a less slender distinction between agents who can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those who cannot. Analogously, for example, our society generally recognizes that a person of a certain age and criminal record can be trusted to own a gun, while other persons cannot. But that analogy breaks down in the case of nuclear weapons, because when we speak of those who can be trusted with guns, we mean those who can be trusted only to use the weapon justifiably. And it is because we can imagine such scales of trust that we accept the possession of guns as morally feasible. Those scales of trust, however, depend fundamentally on there being an accepted range of justifications for the use of guns. Since there is no justifiable use for nuclear weapons, what do we mean when we refer to an agent who can be trusted with such weapons? In this case we actually mean those who can be trusted never to use the weapons, not someone who can be trusted to use them "in the right way" or "at the right time," since there is no such way or time.

In addition to the prima facie reasons for abolition, such a step also makes sense in light of principles that, again, we already acknowledge in more quotidian spheres. There is, for example, our sense that a person who endangers a child's well-being is to some extent morally culpable, even if that person does not actually abuse the child. Given the destructive power of nuclear weapons, a power that would be just as destructive if unleashed accidentally as intentionally, I think a case can be made that their mere possession is a culpable form of reckless endangerment.

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There is a compelling objection, however, to this last conclusion, and a compelling alternative to nuclear abolitionism. One could argue, as Alan has, that (a) whereas nuclear weapons can never be justifiably used, and (b) whereas it is impossible to abolish the technical know-how that makes nuclear weapons possible, therefore (c) the best thing for a state to do is possess a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to their use by other states.

This case was made most forthrightly, of course, by the architects of American and Russian nuclear strategies in the Cold War. The theory is that a balance of nuclear power between two states will prevent either state from launching a nuclear strike. The mutually assured destruction (MAD) that would result from such a strike checks the impulse of either to pull the trigger. Even the proponents of this doctrine have to admit there's a degree of lunacy to it, since it requires both sides to made credible threats that they will do the very thing that their nuclear policy is supposed to prevent -- that is, launch a first strike. The Cuban missile crisis showed just how dangerous and ultimately unsustainable that high-stakes game of "chicken" can be. Nonetheless, the case can be made that in a nuclear age, nuclear policies that take MAD as their starting point are the best we can hope for. If so, building nuclear arsenals is not reckless endangerment, but a rational safeguard. And that possibility has to be taken seriously by the abolitionist, since it also begins with the presumption that the actual use of nuclear weapons is unjustifiable and must be prevented at all costs. As I will argue below, however, I believe a nuclear policy of balancing arsenals is more likely, not less, than abolition to result in their eventual use, especially in our post-Cold War world. (And in making that case, I'll be following closely some of the persuasive arguments for nuclear abolitionism made by Jonathan Schell in his book, The Unconquerable World.)

Before I argue for that conclusion, though, it's worth noting a slightly tangential debate in the discussion over at Cliopatria, where Alan has raised the possibility that nuclear weapons not only act as checks against their own use, but also help to deter nuclear powers from waging conventional wars with each other. Alan writes:

Would a world without nuclear weapons be necessarily 'better' than the one we have? Frightening as the implications of MAD may be, it is arguable that the risk of truly catastrophic retaliation has proven rather more successful in keeping the Great Powers in check than the much lower risk of conventional retaliation ever did. If the A-Bomb had never been invented would the US and the USSR have been as likely to refrain from open warfare during the late 1940s onwards? One might not look back on the Cold War that we actually got with unalloyed nostalgia, yet still accept that there were much less desirable alternative outcomes.

My initial response was that while the Cold War prevented conventional war between the Great Powers, it also facilitated indirect wars between the Powers in places like Vietnam, Korea, and Latin America. (And, I might add here, that in defining the priorities of American and Russian foreign policy for decades, the Cold War also contributed to the world's neglect of regions, like Africa, which were deemed as off the board in the chess game between democracy and communism. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think a fair assessment of the consequences of the Cold War would have to include a wrestling with the genocidal and devastating hot wars that have taken place over the past several decades in places like the Congo and the former Yugoslavia.)

Alan replied that, as bad as these hot wars were, their horror would have paled in comparison to an outright conventional war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Perhaps that is so: debates about counterfactuals know no end. But I'm not sure I see the utility of drawing up a balance sheet of fatalities, with one column for the number of those who died in the "hot" Cold War and with one column for estimates about the number of those who would have died in a war between the Great Powers. For however much the A-bomb contributed to maintaining peace between Russia and the United States, surely all can agree that it was an intolerable kind of peace. It was a peace founded less on true peace -- an absence of conflict combined with friendly cooperation -- than on the cultivation of mass terror. There was a lack of conventional war, yes, but that did not constitute peace. At least, it's not the kind of peace that I want to bequeath to my children as the legacy of this generation.

But let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that a balance of nuclear terror does help prevent both nuclear and conventional wars because it maintains an unstable armistice between nuclear powers. If this line of argument is correct, then doesn't it lead inevitably to the conclusion that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, far from something to be feared, is a positive good? If the Cold War was (in some sense) a success story, then should we encourage the reproduction of its conditions in other conflict situations? Does the possession of nuclear weapons by both India and Pakistan, for instance, prevent war between the two just as it did between Russia and the United States? Instead of making the destruction promised by nuclear weapons less assured, shouldn't we go about making the assured destruction more mutual, so that MAD can do its psychological and political work more effectively?

Jonathan Schell makes the case against this kind of pro-proliferation reasoning more concisely than I could, so I'll simply cite some of his reasons for rejecting it. First, the logic behind creating a "balance of terror" assumes a bipolar, Great Powers world in which we no longer live. It is conceivable, I suppose, for two states to try to match each other in an arms race, but it is hard to imagine how eight or ten or twenty states could calibrate the balance of nuclear power among them so that the doctrine of MAD would be effective. Moreover, it should be underlined that the geographical distance between Russia and the United States was one of the only reasons why MAD made sense to strategists, since it meant that both states could develop "launch on warning" missiles that would activate before a first strike by either arrived. Even then (and, I should add, even now), the amount of warning each state could have was terrifyingly short -- each head of state could count on one hand the number of minutes he had to decide whether to launch after being informed of a first launch. But further proliferation would make even that amount of warning impossible: in the case of India and Pakistan, for instance, a first strike would likely be the only strike, which is perhaps one reason why nuclear weapons on the subcontinent have not perceptibly lessened the likelihood of conventional war.

Encouraging proliferation, thirdly, would make controlling proliferation virtually impossible. If arms control treaties have been difficult to negotiate between the two great powers, negotiating multilateral reduction treaties between multiple powers is nearly inconceivable. The alternatives we have here are not between abolition and a carefully regulated proliferation coupled with the reduction of present arsenals, but between abolition and untrammeled proliferation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the proliferation of more nuclear weapons merely increases the risk of those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, for whom non-proliferation and reduction treaties mean nothing.

The reality of global terrorism is the most decisive reason why the potential lessons of the Cold War have little, if any, applicability in the twenty-first century. MAD depended not only on the presence of identifiable Great Powers who could stare at each other seriously across the table while also making reduction deals under it. But it hardly needs to be said that the kinds of terrorists who are the most eager to obtain nuclear weapons have no apparent fear of their own destruction. Once you run up against an enemy for whom suicide is not only not an evil, but a consummation devoutly to be wished, the logic of MAD dissolves. Keeping nuclear weapons out of such hands therefore has to be a priority of any foreign policy in the present age, and seriously advocating further proliferation would only undermine that task.

Of course, in that last paragraph I might as well be quoting from a Bush administration official. The Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, perceives the threat of nuclearized terrorists, working in conjunction with nuclearized "rogue states," as the most pressing danger we face. But both administrations have also believed it possible to pursue diplomatic agreement for non-proliferation without embracing nuclear abolitionism, and that is where our views part ways. The Bush administration, in particular, believes that the only way to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons is, ultimately, to launch preemptive, conventional strikes on states close to acquiring them. But that strategy has numerous diplomatic and strategic pitfalls. Diplomatically, it weakens cooperative relationships even with our allies because it asserts our right to military hegemony, exercised unilaterally at moments of our choosing. And it also creates a diplomatic double standard whereby some states are allowed to develop nuclear weapons (indeed, are even, like Pakistan, welcomed into our diplomatic embrace for doing so) while others are denied them, even when they can make a case that possessing them is the only way to offset imbalances of nuclear power with their enemies.

Strategically, preemptive wars also encourage the very thing they are designed to prevent, since they give non-nuclear states an incentive to develop nuclear weapons more quickly and more secretively than before. Despite the administration's spin on Libya's apparent pliability after the fall of Baghdad, the lesson that our enemies learned from the Second Gulf War was that actually possessing weapons of mass destruction is the only way to avoid such invasions. And it is simply not possible to pursue multiple invasions and state-building projects at once, so that we can effectively be sure that we are preempting all our enemies from developing nuclear weapons -- especially since, diplomatically, our aggressive assertion of the right of preemption is causing our enemies to proliferate.

We come again, therefore, to the case for abolishing nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent their proliferation and use. Indeed, the global community has already recognized, in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that abolition is the other side of non-proliferation. The NPT, which the United States signed but has been interpreting very selectively ever since, included the promise of non-nuclear states not to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for the commitment of nuclear states to disarm. There is no reason why that kind of multilateral, negotiated disarmament treaty, combined with an international inspection regime that would verify the compliance of all parties, might not accomplish abolition -- if, that is, the United States has not already gone so far down the path of preemption (which the NPT acknowledges as a breach of its rules) as to undo the diplomatic work that has already been done.

The primary objection of nuclear states to disarmament is that inspections do not work, that "rogue states" will acquire nuclear weapons anyway and then supply them to terrorists who do not fear to use them. It's worth noting, though, that this objection admits, implicitly, that our own possession of nuclear weapons does not give us any solace any longer. If our fear is that terrorists will acquire nuclear weapons and target us with them, then our fear is based on the knowledge that the doctrine of MAD provides us with no security against stateless enemies. It's hard to see, then, why the fear of terrorists nuclearizing should count as a reason to delay our own disarmament, since that delay is doing nothing to prevent the efforts of our enemies to arm. Moreover, our claim that inspections do not work leaves much to be desired in the way of credibility. Another lesson from Iraq that we seem not to have learned yet is that for all of Saddam's bluffing, the inspection regime did its job well and prevented him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction in secret.

There is, however, a final reason that might be advanced against the abolition of nuclear weapons: that it is chimerical. Now that nuclear power has been discovered, it will be impossible to put the evil genie back in the bottle, and futile to try to do so. As Alan put it in the thread at Cliopatria:

The only end point of disarmament that would really ensure a lasting non-nuclear world would be the destruction of the knowledge of how to build a nuclear device at all. Since that seems to me not simply impractical but logically impossible at this stage then it hardly seems worth arguing about; it's a bit like saying that having discovered the New World the Europeans should have pretended that they didn't know it was there. The A-Bomb is "going to be around" forever whether I or you or anyone else likes it or not. Its existence is not a matter for worthwhile dispute; what is is whether we can create a situation where the likelihood of its use is kept to an absolute minimum.

Much like the argument that a world with the bomb may be better than one without, this argument accomplishes more than it wants to, for if the mere technical knowledge of a nuclear device makes it futile to pursue disarmament, it makes it equally futile to pursue non-proliferation or reduction of any kind. The argument from futility cannot be directed solely at the nuclear abolitionist; it amounts to an argument against action of any kind.

But it also simply doesn't follow that because the knowledge of how to build the "A-Bomb" will always be with us, the "A-Bomb" must therefore always be with us too. If that did follow, then it would be impossible to argue for the abolition of anything -- including slavery, or lynching, or abortion, or capital punishment -- since if something is around to be abolished, that means the knowledge of how to do it will always exist. We can't go back to a time in which the New World was not discovered and then forcibly populated with African slaves, but thankfully we live in a time when slavery has been abolished throughout the New World, even though the knowledge have how it was done is becoming more robust and detailed every day. I hope for a world in which nuclear weapons will be similarly slated for abolition.

Abolition, of course, does not mean extinction. Alan is right that even if all nuclear states fully disarmed -- not just by removing their weapons from deployment but by actually dismantling them -- the possibility of recreating and reassembling nuclear weapons will always remain with us. We cannot go back to a non-nuclear or pre-nuclear world. But, and this is a point that Schell also makes brilliantly, that knowledge itself would serve the same deterrent function that the weapons themselves are alleged to serve by the opponents of abolition. If the fear of MAD prevents nuclear weapons from being used, the same fear would operate (in a post-abolition world) against their redevelopment and redeployment. By abolishing nuclear weapons, we would not be extinguishing the possibility of nuclear weapons but would merely be stepping as far away from the brink as is conceivably possible in a post-Hiroshima world.

We already realize that we are too close to the brink, since even the Bush administration holds the belief (despite its contradictory support for the development of "tactical" nuclear weapons) that our nuclear arsenal does not need to be as large as it is to serve its much ballyhooed deterrent purposes. Neither does the arsenal need to be on hair-trigger alert, according to a nuclear posture review drafted by the Department of Defense. But if a nuclear weapons does not need to be on hair-trigger alert to be deterrent, then why does it need to be assembled? And if it does not need to be assembled, why do its parts need to be manufactured? If our goal really is, as Alan says, to keep the likelihood of a nuclear launch to an "absolute minimum," surely abolition is as absolute a minimum as we can conceive.