3. Reframing the Debate

(The third in a series of occasional essays challenging excepted ideas about nuclear weapons.)

Sometimes it is disheartening and exhausting fighting against nuclear weapons. Sixty years into the fight and we are still pushing back against some of the same arguments nuclear weapons believers made up fifty years ago. No sooner do we beat back some attempt to build a new weapons system than some other fight arises. You pick up Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, you’re reading along, and suddenly you blurt out, “Hey, that’s me!”

The reason is that the game is rigged. Since the 1950s nuclear weapons advocates have framed the contest in such a way that we can’t win. The reason our work is so frustrating and we can’t seem to get anywhere is that all the cards are stacked against us. Let me explain.

Imagine you were out in the wilderness with a small group of pioneers trying to traverse some territory where wolf packs regularly roamed. Many of the groups that tried to cross this wilderness in the past ended up getting attacked, killed, and eaten by the wolves. Two guys step forward claiming they can get you through to safety. The first guy has spent a long time studying wolf attack tactics. He’s expert at detecting the wolves. He’s made a map plotting all the times and places in the past where pioneers were attacked and uncovered patterns in the evidence. And he has a sensible and straightforward plan for defending the group if a wolf pack appears.

The other guy is a little bit of a mystic. He says that he’s also studied wolves closely and claims that he even lived with a pack for a while. “If we all just have the right spirit,” he says, “the right generosity of heart, the wolves will leave us alone.” They can smell our fear, he says, and the key is our feelings. He says we should love the wilderness and respect wild creatures.

Of course, the second guy’s point of view is admirable, but when it comes to being eaten, 99 percent of people would choose the first guy. When there’s danger ahead, no one wants to rely on a dreamy, idealistic approach. Wherever real risk is involved, almost everyone wants a realist in charge.

And that’s the problem. The nuclear weapons advocates have framed the question of whether to keep nuclear weapons or not in such a way so that we appear to be muddle-headed idealists and they are tough-minded realists. They say it again and again, in ways subtle and not so subtle: it is a debate between realists and idealists. Again and again they assert that we are idealists. We believe in soft-headed proposals and foolish, open-hearted gestures (they say.) They, on the other hand, miss no opportunity to complacently assert that they themselves are hard-headed realists who face the harsh realities of the world. And once that framing is in place, the game is up. No one wants to side with idealists when the survival of the nation is at stake. (When I say “realist” I always mean the common sense definition of the word, not the International Relations-theory definition of the word.)

That’s the bad news. As long as that framing is in place, we lose. As long as we are idealists who hope ardently for human nature to change rather than taking a realistic view of things, we lose.

The good news is that we can change that framing. Most arguments for getting rid of nuclear weapons are not actually unrealistic. And nuclear weapons advocates are demonstrably not realists. They swagger and condescend as if they are the only ones in touch with reality. But they are deluding themselves. They are actually weapons romantics. They are so infatuated with the weapons that they have exaggerated their capabilities and influence. They think they are tough-minded warriors, but they’re actually more like teenagers mooning over their first loves—ardently believing that everything about the object of their desire is wonderful. They aren’t analyzing reality closely. They are projecting their desires on these relatively clumsy and difficult-to-use weapons. They are holding up a sow’s ear and saying, “Look! Look! It’s silk!”

One tiny example: nuclear believers regularly say that you can’t disinvent nuclear weapons. This seems persuasive until you realize that “disinvent” is a made up word. There is no actual process of disinvention that can be used to get technology to go away. Name all the toasters and trowels and bi-planes you can think of that have been disinvented. And what would disinvention be like, as an activity? Would there be a guy in a lab coat at a long table, and then another guy would bring in a old, metal-box, two floppy drive IBM PC, drop it on the work table and say, “Get cracking on this one, Charlie. The boss wants it disinvented by the end of the week”?

People who are actually realists don’t argue using imaginary processes. How can these people say that they’re realists if they argue based on something that don’t exist?

Once you look closely at this “you can’t disinvent” claim, what they’re actually saying is that nuclear weapons will always exist because people will always want them. But that’s a judgement about human nature and the characteristics of nuclear weapons masquerading as a statement of fact. They’re saying that nuclear weapons are such useful weapons (powerful and destructive) that everyone will always want them. There are a number of assumptions buried in there, as well as an important mistake about the process by which technologies go away, but the key point is that they’ve dressed up a collection of beliefs as a statement of fact. Rhetorical tricks aren’t realism, they’re just gymnastics with words.

Nuclear advocates are not realists. They are believers in the grip of a faith, a faith that leads them to exaggerate the powers of the object of their veneration. They insist on the truth of what they’re saying just the way religious fanatics do. We can reframe this debate by insisting on the unreality of some of the ideas that nuclear advocates put forward, and by framing our objections to nuclear weapons in realist ways, rather than idealistic ones. By challenging Cold War assumptions—assumptions that still shape U.S. nuclear weapons policy—I believe it is possible to build a persuasive realist case for eliminating nuclear weapons.