Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: What's Holding Things Up?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, see the Archive.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
The 2021 Annual Report of the Nuclear Threat Initiative said it would be continuing work to develop the “political will” to eliminate nuclear weapons.
A lack of “political will” had been seen for quite a while to be the big obstacle to elimination. But doesn’t that beg the question? Why haven’t set about eliminating nuclear weapons? Because we don’t want to eliminate them.
Who is the “we” in this case? “We” might need to think more about this, mightn’t “we”? Members of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex and many national leaders seem to think that we need not to eliminate them. So might those who live in the smaller towns near ICBM bases, in spite of the fact that living near an ICBM base certainly makes you a target for a strategic nuclear weapon.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative’s 2021 Annual Report said NTI would be trying to develop “political will” by making us more aware of the effects of nuclear weapons. Not the immediate effects from the unimaginable heat, blast, and ionizing radiation that we may think we already know about, but the effects that would unfold in the years following a nuclear exchange. One effect some of us may not know about is the Nuclear Winter that would kill billions of people around the world.
Really?
Nuclear Winter began to be recognized as a likely effect of a nuclear exchange only in the 1980’s. By 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, most of the scientists who had studied the matter carefully took Nuclear Winter to be a near certainty.
It’s a mistake to demand absolute certainty in such matters. As it is in weather prediction or predictions about climate change. As it may be in a great many important matters. Iain McGilchrist, to whose work and thought we will return, has written, “the more certain our knowledge, the less we know.” Of this, he went on to say, he was as certain as it is possible to be.
A Nuclear Winter would be caused, it has now been calculated, by soot propelled up into the atmosphere and stratosphere by the firestorms that would follow a nuclear exchange. It wouldn’t even have to be a massive nuclear exchange. One or two hundred strategic weapons on cities or even forests would bring it on—even if all the weapons had been detonated in one country.
The resulting Nuclear Winter would not be confined to that one country, of course. It would be experienced beyond the country’s borders, possibly world-wide. However widely it was experienced, it would be in place long enough—a couple of years, maybe more, maybe considerably more—that the plants we depend on for food would die and the animals would starve and we would too. With not a thing to be done about it.
We can’t test this proposition experimentally by actually detonating that many weapons on cities to see if a Nuclear Winter was the result. But it has been shown that firestorms are caused when nuclear weapons are dropped on cities. That had happened in Hiroshima.
At first, we hadn’t been told about the firestorms in Hiroshima, just as we hadn’t been told about the harm that had been caused there by ionizing radiation. In fact, the authorities hadn’t even let us see the physical damage that had been done to people in the city—mostly civilians, old people, and children. The pictures that showed that damage were censored and kept classified for decades. We were allowed to see only the damage to buildings. Some of that damage had been caused by the firestorms, which of course had also killed people.
Conventional bombs can cause firestorms too. We might have known this from reports about our firebomb attacks in Dresden and Hamburg in Germany. We might have known it also if we’d been getting reports about the firebombing campaign that General Curtis LeMay had conducted in Japan in the months before the atomic bombs were dropped. Those firebombing attacks had “burned” over sixty cities. An early attack on Tokyo, in March, had killed more people than would be killed in either of the atom bomb attacks.
Firebombing attacks, like nuclear attacks, are attacks on cities, not just military targets. They can’t be limited to military targets.
But would getting more information out about the highly likely prospect of Nuclear Winter do much to build the political will to eliminate nuclear weapons? If we were paying any attention, didn’t we realize already how terrible the consequences of a nuclear exchange would be? Even before we’d heard anything about Nuclear Winter?
If we hadn’t been paying attention before, would an educational campaign like NTI’s get us to start? I couldn’t see how.
Here’s an even bigger obstacle to elimination that education clearly wouldn’t be able to help with.
If you believed in deterrence, if you believed that having nuclear weapons was what prevented the use of them on you by others who also had them, any account of how horrific the effects of a use of them would just strengthen the belief that they should not be eliminated.
The strong and almost unquestioned faith in deterrence can be expected to have a hold on the faithful as long as one nuclear weapon state doesn’t attack another with nuclear weapons. Only a failure of deterrence could show the faith in deterrence to have been a delusion.
Remember: we are talking about nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons, deterrence has to work 100% of the time if horrific consequences are to be avoided. Has deterrence worked 100% of the time ever in any system that relied on it? In the criminal law, say? That’s a laugh, isn’t it? Deterrence—trying to control conduct through fear—seems always to fail at some point. We’re just too inventive and ornery.
But something beyond an ignorance of consequences or an unfounded faith in deterrence may be an obstacle when it comes to nuclear weapons.
In 1992, a year after end of the Cold War, General George Lee Butler, the Commander in Chief of the United States Strategic Command, had invited the Defense Minister of what was then the Russian Federation, Pavel Grachev, into the underground command center of the Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska—the place from which General Butler would have commanded our forces in a nuclear war (unless he was in one of our airborne command centers).
General Butler invited General Grachev to sit in the chair Butler would have occupied if a nuclear war were taking place. He told him, “You are free to examine anything you see at my position but I would ask that if the red phone at your right hand rings, please don’t answer it—you might give the President of the United States a heart attack.”
This had helped the room relax, Butler said.
General Grachev then asked a number of questions to which Butler said he gave, as he had told Grachev he would, candid answers. General Grachev then asked Butler’s opinion about the future of arms control.
“I replied,” wrote Butler in his memoir, Uncommon Cause,
that our two nations had an obligation to lead the way toward reducing our stockpiles as far and as fast as possible—hopefully to zero if the rest of the world followed our lead. After hauling that on board, he thought for a long minute and said, “But that is not possible, General Butler. Nuclear weapons are what make Russia a great nation.” Moving to a point just a few feet in front of him, I replied, “General, nuclear weapons make you a feared nation. The fact that you are on a path to democracy is what will someday make you a great nation.”
I asked General Butler, in a personal email, if he remembered Grachev’s reaction. He wrote back,
What I remember very distinctly about the aftermath of my comment to General Grachev was on the one hand as you suggested, the rather blank look on his face, but on the other, the rather astonished expressions on the faces of many of his staff who were present in the room. I caught them out of the corner of my eye and thought to myself that maybe there is some hope for the younger generation of these officers.
Is it possible that the leaders of other nuclear weapon states feel that simply possessing nuclear weapons makes them “great”? Is it possible that our own leaders had felt that way at the end of World War II? And might still?
We could ask them.
How about you? Do you feel that having nuclear weapons makes our country “great”?
Or that not having them would keep us from being “great”?
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
Note: We could stop here. But in the next several entries, I will go on to consider what Einstein might have meant by a “mode of thinking” and what might free us from a Cold War Mentality that seems to be keeping us from achieving a world free of nuclear weapons (and perhaps keeping us from other important changes as well). The tone of the writing may change now. So far I’ve been trying to think along with my readers about questions we may have about matters having to do with nuclear weapons. Now, with the help of some important recent thought and writing, I’m going to take up this new and more hidden issue: what might Einstein have meant by the “modes of thinking” that needed to change if we are avoid “unparalleled catastrophe”? What is it that needs to change? How and how so?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.