Irrational Nuclear Exuberance

Tanha Kashfia Kate

Tanha Kashfia Kate is a student in the MPhil in Development Studies at Cambridge University.

The invention of the first nuclear bombs demonstrate that scientific discoveries can play an enabling role toward the state’s murderous ends. The detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 130,000 to 215,000 human beings, either from direct exposure to the blasts or long­term side effects of radiation. Individuals from historically underrepresented backgrounds, who could have otherwise sympathized with the future victims of the bombs, instead contributed to the science that led to the detonation, including the Polish­French scientist Marie Curie who co­discovered radium, Hungarian­German

American scientist and exiled Jew Leó Szilárd who invented the nuclear chain reaction, as well as multiple African American chemists, physicists, and mathematicians. In other words, members of any tribe, race, class, gender, religion, or belief system are capable of participating in collective brutality and horror should powerful stakeholders deem such a course of action necessary.

The realization that a small number of people — i.e. weapons manufacturers, buyers, and the policymakers on their payroll — disproportionately benefit from a world constantly on the verge of nuclear war contrasts with the democratic promises of art, a medium presumably available to anyone wishing to indulge their creative aspects. Yet, the art industry regretfully reinforces various social inequities and operates, in large parts, like a plantation economy.

Visual art can nevertheless play a positive role as a form of resistance. Different visual art pieces concerning nuclear war can mobilise people through their depiction of material reality and alternative future scenarios, as well as by humanizing fellow members of the human community whom any group or state perceive of as “the enemy.”

My first visual encounter with Little Boy and Fat Man — as the bombs detonated in Japan were nicknamed — was through Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a 1964 film satirizing Cold War fears of a nuclear clash between the US and the Soviet Union. Dr. Strangelove stars English actor­comedian Peter Sellers in multiple roles, including US President Merkin Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (a British liaison officer), and Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair­using former Nazi and President Muffley’s primary scientific advisor. In one of the most iconic moments in film history, President Muffley intervenes in a confrontation between a high­ranking US general and the Russian ambassador, saying, ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.’

The brilliance of Dr. Strangelove is difficult to capture fully in words, but the most important takeaway, driven home by Sellers’ multifaceted performance as a Nazi, an American president, and a British officer, is the fundamental interchangeability of these roles. The ease with which Sellers switches between characters at the boundary of victor and vanquished made me consider that the individuals that composed each of these groups were, ultimately, fellow humans who could be found to have much in common with their antagonists. WarGames (1983) is another film exploring the possibility of a nuclear winter. It stars Matthew Broderick as David Lightman, a high school hacker who unexpectedly accesses a US military supercomputer that controls the state’s nuclear arsenal. To prevent World War III and, therefore, the destruction of humanity, Lightman instructs the supercomputer to play tic­tac­toe against itself. After multiple simulations, the machine realizes that there is no winner in a nuclear war and that such a game is not worth playing at all.

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), as this condition of supposed equilibrium has since been described, was first coined by military analyst Donald Brennan. Brennan was opposed to MAD for two reasons: first, an extended deadlock accomplishes little to guarantee long­term US security interests. And, second, as long as people possess weapons of mass destruction, superpowers such as the US and the Soviet Union — and other countries with nuclear weapons in today’s context — will fight to achieve an advantage over the other.

Hence, Brennan advocated for an anti­ballistic missile defence system to eliminate enemy warheads before they could be detonated. Although the required technology was far from finalized, the Soviets also attempted to pursue an anti­ballistic missile defence; shrinking military budgets and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union spelled the end of these attempts. Still, in the aftermath, visionary policymakers, including former US Senator Richard Lugar, led highly successful bipartisan efforts towards non­proliferation and arms control worldwide, although the reduction or total elimination of nuclear weapons is not yet a policy objective of any major world power.

There is an important distinction between the plots of Dr. Strangelove and WarGames While the strategy of MAD prevents the destruction of humanity in WarGames, a communication hiccup in Dr.

Strangelove between the base and its troops ultimately leads to a nuclear detonation. Put another way, Dr. Strangelove helps us consider that the nuclear­weapon­induced end of life on Earth is inevitable as long as weapons of mass destruction exist and the activities maintaining the lifecycle of such weapons continue, even if adversarial parties decide to cooperate. So, as long as there is a risk of annihilation in the world that we actually live in, why do governments continue to build weapons of mass destruction? Why do global actors not have a plan of action to pursue complete disarmament as soon as is prudently possible?

In The Holy Family, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make the following remark about history which can clarify matters: ‘History [...] does not use people to realize its own ends, as though it were a particular person: it is merely the activity of people pursuing their own objectives.’ In the context of nuclear weapons, then, most people (especially elite decision­makers) have a personal belief about nuclear armageddon that keeps individuals merely pursuing their own objectives while not accounting for the devastating future effects of their actions. The belief is that the “other” will die, but “we” will somehow survive, even in a fallout­devastated landscape.

The distinction between

“them” and “us” when it comes to the harms of nuclear weapons, however, is largely fictitious. Consider that the US has conducted 1,054 nuclear tests — some within national borders, such as in Denver and New York — costing more than $100 billion and causing immeasurable harm to individuals, communities, and the environment. Furthermore, in the hyper­globalized world we inhabit, detonations in remote places may not be as safe as we might believe since every part of the Earth is functionally inhabited or is related to a community whose cultural and economic products could very well be a crucial component of the modern supply chains on which we all depend. In the aftermath of a nuclear detonation, gamma radiation from the fallout would penetrate even the best shelters and create health problems. Without large numbers of people to carry out socially necessary economic tasks, such as the production, distribution, and consumption of products and services, social systems would become significantly inefficient, even if supply chains were largely automated.

Additionally, the environmental effects of a nuclear winter cannot be understated. Entire species of nonhuman animals could become extinct, along with severe disruptions to soil health and global agricultural production. These impacts would be felt most directly by marginalized communities globally, such as black and other racialized people, women, disabled folks, and those already residing in climate­risky areas, should they survive at all. Such inequalities, which also shape the global wealth distribution, have already been shown to harm the functioning of healthy democracies in far too many “advanced” econo­ mies, and would endanger the possibility of well­functioning post­nuclear democracies. Ultimately, homo sapiens is a social animal. Given the material reality of our interdependence, we cannot afford to be so blasé about nuclear testing and the risk of detonation, whether near or far.

The risk of these harms results from the belief that mass violence is necessary for “our” safety, that there is no alternative, and that the military­industrial­complex operating across both the Global North and South must wage war against humanity itself to guarantee “national interests.” Surprisingly, civilians often consent to, or even wholeheartedly welcome, the preparation and maintenance of nuclear capacity and disproportionate retaliation towards human beings “on the other side.” To illustrate, a 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that 56% of Americans believed that the use of nuclear weapons during the Second World War was justified, with 34% saying it was not. In Japan, however, 14% said the bombing was justified, versus 79% who said it was not.

There is significant opposition to nuclear weapons from non­nuclear weapon states, but elite decision­makers and intellectuals rarely heed such calls. A painful reminder of such inaction in the face of democratic opposition is Picasso’s Guernica, a large black and white oil painting currently housed in Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. A gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead newborn, a mutilated soldier, and flames represent the anguish caused by arbitrary exercises of violence. Picasso produced the piece at the request of Spanish nationalists in response to the bombardment of Guernica, a rural Basque town in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1937. The Allied powers, in response, posed no meaningful opposition. Guernica was presented at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, as well as at other venues across the globe. Although Guernica did little to prevent the Second World War, it remains relevant today as a reminder that the establishment, alienated from the material realities of the global majority, often treat the lives of regular citizens as nothing more than a score in a computer game to enhance their power. sequent reliance of the US and the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons undermined both international legal instruments. Today, research into weapons promising to kill “better and faster” continues to be backed by education institutions, corporate establishments, and government facilities.

The gaze through which our individual lives are viewed as disposable is reminiscent of a quote from I Am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 anthology drama, where a personified Cuba says: ‘Look! I am Cuba. For you, I am the casino, the bar, the hotels. But the hands of these children and old people are also me.’ Policy and security discourse, especially in the face of nuclear threat, often drown out the multiplicity of human voices for the ease and convenience of elite strategists, government officials, and private actors.

Democratic contestation surrounding nuclear weapons and the regimes that sustain them continue to gain popularity, owing largely to the work (often uncompensated) of multiple international and local grassroots actors. However, the successes of these initiatives are obstructed by the lack of readiness on the part of state officials. For example, although two watershed milestones in international law were produced in the aftermath of the Second World War — the adoption of the United Nations (UN) Charter and the Nuremberg Trials — the sub­

Most recently, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) established standards of international humanitarian law (IHL) that apply to all governments and deemed nuclear weapons as violating IHL. Still, the five nuclear­armed permanent members of the UN Security Council, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China, have all opposed the TPNW. Due to these countries’ lack of political will and other shortcomings, we, as citizens of this world, are resigned to depend on a security system that is ethically, legally, and intellectually corrupt at its core. All of us must figure out how to learn and teach the difficult lesson which our irrational self does not want to believe: collective state ­ organized violence and war — and the profits they make for private stakeholders — will never make us safe. Frightened and worried as we might be, the worldwide danger we live with today can only be quelled by an enduring peace where we are free from the fear of any weapon of mass destruction. The pursuit of real security, in a democratic fashion that leaves no one behind, requires not only that we organize vigorously and unapologetically around our objectives but also that the leaders of our world, who continue to obstruct complete disarmament, stop pursuing theirs.