A Peculiar Calm
We fight about almost everything in this contentious country of ours. Issues large and small, everything from silly memes to matters of life and death. It’s a dispute-filled, angry existence. The discord is most obvious in the deadlock over politics. But the contest over cultural values is, if anything, even fiercer. It’s gotten so bad that columnists regularly offer up advice on how to navigate family events without arguments and shouting. There are just so many subjects we don’t agree on.
Which is what makes nuclear weapons so curious. It is the one oasis of calm in our bedlam of noise and argument. Other issues incite TV screens crammed with experts shouting over one another. Not nuclear weapons. It is the one area where we seem to be in full agreement. That’s odd, isn’t it?
Why should we disagree about everything else but find no cause for debate when it comes to nuclear weapons? It’s a subject that has unquestionable significance for all of us. A nuclear war could bring the end of everything we find familiar (not, probably the end of the world, but certainly an end to civilization as we’ve come to know it.) And possibly even the end of a considerable number of us. Funny that the one area where we don’t disagree is the one where the stakes are so high.
We’ve apparently decided that the experts and government officials who set nuclear weapons policy have it exactly right. There’s no need for debate or even any discussion about minor course corrections. Which is kind of odd considering that there are number of troubling contradictions about nuclear weapons. Not necessarily falsehoods, but things that don’t quite seem right. —That seem to clank in your mind, like a crankshaft that’s about to drop onto the road.
For example, consider that we hardly ever use nuclear weapons. They’re “decisive” weapons, but for some reason we never use them in war. It’s been three quarters of a century since we’ve used nuclear weapons. Imagine you spent $8,000 on a brand new, 12 burner, stainless-steel, two oven, 430,000 BTU, restaurant-quality stove — but then turned it on twice and after that refused to ever use it again. Or imagine you spent a great deal of time standing in the auto supplies aisle comparing different kinds of car wax, and after great deliberation chose the best (and most expensive can of wax), but when you got home swore you would never put it on your car. That would be eccentric behavior, wouldn’t it? If your neighbor acted that way you’d tell stories about him at the dinner table and laugh. But that is exactly how we have acted and continue to act toward nuclear weapons. We’ve spent something like 5.8 trillion dollars on nuclear weapons. Why would you keep an expensive, supposedly-decisive weapon locked away and never use it?
Advocates for nuclear weapons regularly say that the weapons are the ultimate guarantee of safety. Yet in 1982 Argentina, a non-nuclear-armed state, attacked the territory of a nuclear-armed state — the United Kingdom. Why didn’t nuclear weapons prevent the Falkland Islands war? And for that matter, in 1973 Egypt and Syria embarked on a major war with a nuclear-armed state (Israel.) What sort of ultimate guarantee can’t even prevent states from waging war against you?
Or think about the way experts talk about nuclear weapons as “revolutionary.” Winston Churchill said that their arrival revolutionized “the entire foundation of human affairs.” Einstein went further, saying they had “changed everything, except our modes of thinking.” Yet life seems to go on pretty much as it always has. Alliances are made, business deals signed, wars even fought. It is difficult to see much of a difference between the “foundation of human affairs” in, say, the 1930s and, for example, the 1970s. Why would experts insist that nuclear weapons are “revolutionary,” but all the while we live our lives for the most part as if they didn’t exist?
We don’t use them, they don’t seem to be the “ultimate guarantee” of safety, they don’t seem to have revolutionized human affairs. The whole thing seems pretty peculiar. And: there are these funny contradictions and anomalies about nuclear weapons that we never talk about. Almost as if there were some kind of dogma that existed about nuclear weapons — some set of unquestionable beliefs that you couldn’t argue about. As if nuclear weapons policy were a set of beliefs that you either believed or you didn’t. Almost as if the whole thing were a matter of faith, rather than a practical problem that affects our very survival.
But that could never be, could it? To have the most dangerous, most important subject in our lives be out of bounds for debate or discussion? Who would be foolish enough to live that way?