2. The Wrong Map

(The second in a series of occasional short pieces designed to stimulate new ideas and challenge accepted assumptions about nuclear weapons.)

What sort of problem are nuclear weapons? What is the best way to approach this problem? When you’re trying to solve a math problem, you use one kind of thinking. When you’re trying to solve a song writing problem, you use a different sort of thinking. What sort of thinking do we need to solve the problem of nuclear weapons?

Imagine for a moment that you’re going to write a book about nuclear weapons. You want to cover the whole subject and bring clarity to the topic. How will you organize the chapters? What sections will you divide it into? How, conceptually, are you going to approach the many problems created by nuclear weapons in the world?

The first and most obvious approach is to see nuclear weapons from a military perspective. They are designed for use in war and were actually used in war during World War II. A book that sees the entire subject as primarily a military topic would have a chapter about their use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a chapter about the capabilities of missiles, several chapters about potential ways of targeting and the likely effectiveness of nuclear weapons against those targets (soldiers on the battlefield, ships at sea, buildings, and so on). Perhaps you would include scenarios of possible wars that illustrate some characteristic uses of nuclear weapons. Key reference works would include Clausewitz and other treatises on war. Much of the book would be devoted to practical matters of killing and destroying, and protecting weapons and their associated systems from nuclear attack. These are quintessentially military concerns.

If, after a few months of work, you took a break from writing to go back over what you'd written and consider your work, however, an honest appraisal would force you to admit that there were some serious gaps in your thinking. For example, nuclear weapons have the potential to affect entire populations and therefore their significance reaches beyond the battlefield. In the American system, military commanders focus on purely military matters of strategy and tactics, while political leaders look to larger issues of national purpose and survival. A book that focuses on nuclear weapons from a purely military perspective could be accused of being limited, of ignoring important existential questions that nuclear weapons necessarily raise, and of potentially seeing nuclear weapons from a parochial perspective.

A military book also wouldn’t cover the diplomatic uses of nuclear weapons, arguably the way in which nuclear weapons affect our everyday world most often. And the practical planning for using violence on the battlefield may not be the best way to approach highly psychological topics, like deterrence. In addition, thinking in terms of killing and destroying tends to put considerations of morality in the background. This is a problem, since your hope was to cover the entire subject, not just the war fighting part.

So take all those printed pages and file them in a folder marked “First Draft,” add a handwritten note that says “abandoned,” and put today's date on the cover. Create new directories on your laptop and start again.

Given the importance of existential questions and the large literature on deterrence, perhaps a better approach would be to see the field from the perspective of a national leader or politician. After all, politicians tell military people what to do. Perhaps a political perspective will have the larger perspective that was lacking from your military approach.

There are other advantages to thinking about nuclear weapons from within a political framework. Nuclear weapons have been used in war only once, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even though there have been any number of wars since World War II, people seem to have resisted the thought of using them again. Perhaps nuclear weapons aren't really best suited for use in war but are best thought of as threats. There are many scholars who take this exact view of nuclear weapons. “No one really thinks about actually using nuclear weapons,” they say. “Nuclear weapons are only used for deterring and diplomacy.” And it is certainly true that they've been used as threats (either explicitly or implicitly) far more times since 1945 than they've been used in war.

A book like this would probably put the Cuban Missile Crisis at the center of the narrative. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the most dangerous and most dramatic crisis involving threats and counter-threats in the history of nuclear weapons. You would likely talk about the theory of threats. Perhaps for perspective you could reread some of the political masterworks: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. You could talk at some length about the work of Thomas Schelling. It would be useful to investigate how far the political influence of nuclear weapons reaches: in other words, what are the things that nuclear threats can and cannot do?

And yet. With all this new writing finally down on paper, if you describe the course of the book so far to a friend over coffee, you'll have to admit to yourself that leaving out, or even just downplaying the actual use of nuclear weapons in war leaves important subjects uncovered. How can a trustworthy theory of deterrence be developed if the implications of using nuclear weapons are left unexplored? How can you (or your readers) judge whether a use of nuclear weapons is likely to escalate if the mechanics of nuclear war are passed over in silence?

And the emphasis on deterrence seems problematic. Deterrence theory is almost exclusively about what happens before a nuclear war begins. Imagine a treatise on, say, a particular type of sword that limited itself to talking about what happened before the sword was actually used in combat. For all it's importance, deterrence clearly doesn't offer complete coverage. It is a subset theory, not an analytical structure that can bear the weight of the entire field.

Also a political focus doesn't answer the critics who firmly believe that a moral component is essential to the study of any weapon that has the potential to kill so many people. Again, most books on deterrence ignore morality. So gather up the piles of notes and the marked up drafts, write “Second Draft” on a folder, handwrite “abandoned” and today's date on the folder, and rethink (again).

Maybe the thing to do is to stop fighting the obvious and make the book's outlook frankly moral. Many people feel strongly that the most salient feature of nuclear weapons is their palpable immorality. You could talk about the history of Just War Theory, stressing the points that have relevance for nuclear war (like civilian immunity and disproportionate effect). Then you could lay out various possible scenarios for nuclear war and point out the ways in which using nuclear weapons would violate those rules. You would not be vulnerable to the criticism that your study was too narrowly focused (as you were with the military study). But nevertheless there are troubling issues.

Although there is a large literature that takes this very approach – emphasizing and exploring Just War Theory – few of these arguments are cited outside their own particular corner of the field. Articles about war-fighting strategy rarely mention morality. Similarly, articles and books that talk about the political influence of nuclear weapons—their usefulness in coercing other nations—give scant attention to moral questions. If morality were the underlying principal around which the entire debate should be structured, how is it possible that it so often ignored?

There is another, more devastating objection. The fact is that people, in crisis, often set moral considerations aside. Sometimes, when the chips are down, people say things like, “Well, it's wrong. But we have to do it” and then commit immoral acts they believe are necessary. In a crisis, necessity almost always trumps morality. How can you base the analysis of your book on a principle that may be set aside the moment a truly important crisis arises?

So in disgust file away the third draft and perhaps take a vacation from the subject. It seems that no matter what angle we approach the topic from something about it is inadequate.

It seems difficult to know just what sort of problem nuclear weapons are. The familiar approaches—military, political, moral—all seem to see the problem differently. And each has distinct limitations and gaps. Which leaves you with a conundrum: How is it possible to understand a subject if you have no intellectual framework to fit it into?

The principle problem with trying to study nuclear weapons is that most of the existing literatures cannot serve as an intellectual structure for understanding the entire subject: war fighting, deterrence, political influence, and moral considerations combined. It’s like playing twenty questions without knowing whether the thing you’re trying to guess is animal, vegetable or mineral. You can’t even begin to ask your questions because the starting point is obscure.

What does it mean that the nature of a problem is difficult to state? It means that the fundamentals of the problem are not well understood. The biggest hurdle to getting rid of nuclear weapons is that our ideas about them, the fundamental framework of our thinking, is wrong. The reason we’ve been deadlocked for seventy years is that the experts and government officials who laid out the shape of the debate in the very beginning, and who continue to shape the debate to this day, got it wrong. It’s hard to find your way out of a maze if the map you’re using doesn’t reflect reality. Nuclear weapons experts drew a map of the intellectual landscape of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. And that map has served as the basis for all our discussions since. But the longer we wonder hopelessly in the maze of this subject, the clearer it is that we are trying to navigate Bangalore using a map of Boston.