4. Moral Arguments Aren't Enough
(The fourth in a series of occasional short pieces designed challenge accepted assumptions about nuclear weapons.)
Of course nuclear weapons are immoral—at least, almost all uses of them are immoral. There are virtually no practical military situations where using them doesn’t kill civilians and sometimes quite large numbers of civilians. (There is a famous study by Frank von Hippel and Sydney Drell from 1976 in which they created a hypothetical strike by Soviet nuclear forces carefully limited to U.S. missile silos, air bases, and submarine bases. They result of this “surgical” strike? Twenty million American civilians died.) And threatening to slaughter millions of people is also immoral, no matter what the tortured logic of the Catholic Bishops 1983 Pastoral Letter. But this obvious immorality isn’t enough.
People will do immoral things if they think it’s necessary. Ask a man to do something immoral or dishonest in order to protect his family—even commit murder—and most of the time he will do it. Necessity almost always trumps morality. Survival is almost always a higher value than morality. And since most people believe that nuclear weapons are both necessary and threaten our survival, advocating that nuclear weapons be eliminated for moral reasons strikes them as an argument that won’t win. It’s too idealistic and utopian.
Imagine a room full of advisors. It’s a crisis. Some people have been killed. Innocent civilians—it doesn’t really matter how many—have died. There’s a palpable sense of anger in the air. People want to hit “them” back hard.
Suddenly from the back of the room, someone says, “We should use a nuclear weapon against them. They want to see what happens when you attack the United States? Well, let’s show them they can’t do that.” There is a sound of agreement that goes around the room, more like a growl than words.
One brave soul stands up and says calmly, “Well, we could do that, but it would be wrong.” He talks about the risks of touching off a spiral of escalation and warns against worldwide condemnation. “But ultimately,” he says, “The reason we shouldn’t do it is that it would be morally wrong.”
And the guy who first proposed it says, “Yes. You’re right. It is wrong. But it is also necessary. No other weapon will deliver this message. We have to show them how serious this is and only an extreme response will do that.”
And that’s the problem. In a crisis, necessity almost always trumps morality. No matter how immoral it may be to use nuclear weapons, or threaten with nuclear weapons, or even just possess nuclear weapons, if people argue that it’s necessary to use, threaten with, or possess nuclear weapons they will usually carry the day. Morality is not strong enough, in most cases, to out duel necessity.
The same sort of standard that applies to using an immoral weapon applies to decisions about banning them. It has always been difficult to ban a weapon using moral arguments alone. Pope Innocent II famously tried to ban the use of crossbows against Christians in 1139, but crossbows were too useful, too powerful a weapon to be abandoned. A crossbow allowed a peasant to kill a knight—allowed a poorly trained, inexpensive soldier to kill the most expensive, most highly trained and valuable soldier on the field. The practical military utility of the weapon outweighed even the strongest moral declaration by the most influential churchman in the world at that time.
That’s just not the way military technology goes away. Nuclear weapons are military technology and technology is rarely abandoned because of morality. For obvious reasons. Nations with better military technology usually conquer nations that have failed to keep up. The Assyrians conquered much of the Middle East because they had adopted iron weapons while most other states were still using bronze. The Mongols conquered the largest empire the world has ever known because they had mastered the technology behind the reflex bow, which allowed them to fire an arrow farther and with greater penetrating power than their adversaries. Utility is the factor that almost always drives acceptance or abandonment of military technology. Is a weapon useful in war? —that is the question that matters.
When I think about banning nuclear weapons, I often think about the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the third or fourth day of the Excomm’s deliberations, Robert Kennedy argued that an air strike by a large country against a small one would be “Pearl Harbor in reverse.” He was arguing, in other words, that it would be morally wrong. His passion probably impressed the people in the room, but he didn’t win over the advocates of an air strike. They held firm to their option. It was not until the air force admitted to President Kennedy that they couldn’t guarantee that an air strike wouldn’t destroy all the missiles that the air strike was finally abandoned.
We need to do something similar. We need to keep the moral argument, it’s a powerful one. But we can’t make that our only argument. In a previous essay I argued that the debate about nuclear weapons has been framed (by the pro-nuclear weapons forces) as a contest between realists and idealists (and we are the idealists). If we make morality our only argument against nuclear weapons, it reinforces the nuclear weapons advocates’ (unbeatable) framing of the debate. “See,” they say, “we’re being realistic. They’re arguing bleeding-heart morality.” Of course, it feels good to make moral arguments. It makes you feel righteous. But we can’t win using moral arguments alone. Only when they are married to realistic arguments about military utility can we carry the day.
Fortunately, there are strong arguments that can be made about the military utility of nuclear weapons. None stronger than pointing to the fact that for seventy odd years no one has been able to find a situation in which they could use nuclear weapons in a militarily useful way. The U.S. and other nuclear powers have fought numerous wars since 1945. But no one has been able to find a situation in which nuclear weapons would serve their military needs.
We should use moral arguments, but we should be careful about using them. They should always be paired with practical arguments. Until we can reframe the debate, so that people see us as the realists and they see our opponents as weapons romantics, morality is a double-edged sword that can hurt our cause as much as help. Used on their own, moral arguments tend to confirm the framing of realists v. idealists, which—as I said before—is impossible to beat.
In my view, moral arguments should be treated with care. Reinforcing the realist v. idealist framing makes it impossible for us to win.