The "D" Word: More Fears Without Foundation
If we humans perceive an immediate threat, the universal reaction is said to be “fight or flight.” It’s a bodily reflex. No thought necessary. (The term was coined in 1915 by a physiologist at Harvard, Walter Bradford Cannon.)
There may be some thought given to which one we go with. If we have elected “fight" rather than “flight” or a pause to investigate the actuality of the threat, the offer to fight, if perceived by the other side, may produce a counter-offer to fight, even if no impulse to fight, no threat, had been present on either side to begin with. Now there is one.
Perceived threats acted on in the mode of “fight” rather than, say, in the mode of attempts to clarify or negotiate the situation, can lead to “escalation.” If police officers give an order and we don’t comply with it, they may construe our lack of compliance as a threat rather than as a mere lack of compliance. If they then undertake to force compliance, “escalation” can result. Actual threats emerge. And further escalation. Even if no actual threat had been present to begin with.
This can happen, sadly, between parents and children, can’t it?
When a fight begins, the big change seems to be a serious simplification of the relation between the parties. It is now one in which one party will win and the other will lose. It can no longer be one in which both may eventually, in some sense, win.
While in the mode of “fight,” any prospect of the parties achieving a new relation which could eliminate the threat will have disappeared until the question of who has won the fight is ascertained.
That’s right, isn’t it?
Fights can, however, be ended by an agreement to stop fighting, as was done, for example, in the “armistice” that ended the Korean War. In that case, fighting and killing and destruction had gone on for three years and nobody had won yet. Both sides, all three sides in this case, decided that it would be better to stop losing. The parties at the time—North Korea, China, and the United Nations Command, which included South Korea but was led of course by the United States—are still officially at war.
It’s a terrible dangerous mess over on the Korean peninsula still, with incidents happening all the time across the dividing line that was agreed to between North and South Korea, at the 38th parallel. Both sides express a desire for unification from time time but on different terms. No progress there so far.
At the time of the armistice, only the United States had nuclear weapons. China and North Korea have them too now. South Korea is backed up by the United States with its armed forces and nuclear weapons.
Weapons, when they are “brandished,” can create threats. It’s not wise to brandish a weapon you don’t mean to use. This could be said to apply to nuclear weapons, of course. North Korea has been brandishing its nuclear weapons in recent years. We’ve brandished ours a number of times in the past. This counts as a “use” of them, no?
In fights, whatever weapons are available to you will get used, especially if you see you are losing. When a fight begins, things that weren’t weapons become weapons. A briefcase, a broom, an umbrella.
Or something you might have thought of as only “a deterrent.” Which, when the fight begins, has failed as a deterrent.
The big difference the existence of nuclear weapons seems to have made in all this was recognized by President Reagan and the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev not long before the Cold War was ended in 1989.
At the beginning of President Reagan’s first term in office in 1981, he had directed our Pentagon to work up plans to fight and win a “limited” nuclear war. It was revealed to us that he had done this. It worried some of us. It worried the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. That’s who has published a Doomsday Clock periodically since 1947. In 1981, they moved the big hand a whole five minutes closer to midnight. That meant they believed we were that much closer to “global catastrophe.”
In 1984, they moved the big hand two minutes closer.
By 1984, though, something had changed for President Reagan. In a speech he gave in China in that year, he said “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
What had brought about the change in his thinking? I think it might have been a made-for-television movie he got to see in 1983 called The Day After that realistically and dramatically depicted the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. Very realistically and very dramatically.
It didn’t have a happy ending.
Something else might have caused the change, of course. But this was sure different from what President Reagan had been sounding like in 1981.
In 1986, two years after President Reagan asserted that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, about three years before the end of the Cold War, President Reagan and the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, met at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. After it, they had jointly affirmed what President Reagan had said in China. In the same words. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
The Doomsday Clock was shortly moved away from midnight. And for the next while, it kept moving in that direction.
And today?
Today the Doomsday Clock is at 100 seconds to midnight. To the concern about the use of nuclear weapons causing “global catastrophe,” a concern about our inaction on human-caused global warming has arisen.
In January 2022, however, in a “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races,” issued by the White House, the affirmation President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had made was made again, in the same words: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Five Nuclear Weapons States signed this statement: China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Russian Federation.
The four other states that now have nuclear weapons did not sign the Joint Statement—India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. Israel hasn’t yet admitted having them. Those countries may believe a nuclear war could be fought and won.
A month after signing the document, the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine. When the invasion didn’t go well, he suggested he might use “tactical” nuclear weapons in the war. “Tactical” nuclear weapons are the ones that yield much less than the “strategic” ones. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, which was “strategic” then, would now be considered “tactical.”
Vladimir Putin may think that using tactical nuclear weapons is something different from “nuclear war” or won’t, almost certainly, lead into one.
Some Americans appear to believe that there’s no kind of war we can’t win. Including a nuclear war.
We haven’t won a war since World War II though.
Unless you count things like President Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and President Reagan’s invasion in 1983 of the island nation of Grenada. In both cases, they’d been worried about Communists taking control of those small countries.
We did win World War II. No doubt about that. We and the Soviets both.
Next: What Actions Did and Do We Hope to Deter with our Nuclear Deterrent?