DEFCON 2 for risk of nuclear war

I rewatched the movie Oppenheimer this week. I watched it over a few days. It’s a long movie. I appreciated it much more the second time because I could track the timeline shifts and concentrate on the emotions of the brilliant, flawed humans conjuring something amazing––a device built from the elements on Earth that gave us life yet powerful enough to destroy that same planet and that same life.

This week, in between watching Oppenheimer, I also watched Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minster, give an important speech at the Davos conference. It’s well worth watching. The link to the speech is in the footnote. ¹

Carney’s speech was a eulogy for the post-World War Two rules-based international order. He said it was dead and he was right. We now live in a world where America is no longer absolutely supreme. Now, great powers contend, and “middle powers” like Canada must scramble to keep their sovereignty.

Carney didn’t mention nuclear weapons. But since I was in the middle of watching Oppenheimer, it was nuclear weapons that I thought about. And how for the first time in history we live in a world rife with nuclear weapons and where we can no longer even pretend that America is a “world policeman.”

In the media, Carney’s speech was quickly overshadowed by coverage of Trump’s petulant and ridiculous designs on Greenland.

We have become so horribly complacent about the risk of nuclear weapons. The idea of a nuclear war or any nuclear device being detonated is too abysmal. So rather than look into the abyss we look away.

The first test of an atomic bomb, code-named Trinity, as depicted in the movie Oppenheimer

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Carney’s speech was a version of the old fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the joke being that the Emperor is naked and no one dares to tell him that the clothes he thinks he’s wearing are an illusion. The illusion is created by communal fear, a sort of group psychosis. But the fear is real and the risk is real. And so the people have to hide their disgust beneath their applause and cheers for the naked Emperor.

Until a child says the simple truth––“He’s naked”––and the illusion is destroyed.

To Carney, the idea of a fair and free rules-based order was always “partially false.” As a hegemon, America could operate by different standards than other countries. America could “exempt [itself] when convenient” from rules governing trade and from rules governing the use of force.

But even with some hypocrisy between the “rhetoric and the reality,” there was much to be grateful to America for its exceptional role.

…”public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes…”

In his speech, Carney played the part of the little boy pointing out the nakedness of the Emperor. In world affairs America may still be the strongest but it is now the first among others and no longer indispensable, no longer, in fact, to be depended upon to act in any way other than to further its own great power interests. The “rupture” between the reality and the rhetoric is too great to maintain the fiction.

We’re back to a world of multiple contending great powers attempting to impose their wills on each other and on less powerful nations. Except this time, for the first time, with nuclear weapons.

Seeing missiles descend on Central Park.

In the 1980s, the decade before the Cold War ended, I was in my 20s, got married, had our first child, and feared nuclear war. I remember watching the nuclear war movie The Day After with my wife Debbie and our saying to each other “wait, this could really happen.”

I remember imagining the sight of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile descending from the clear blue sky of the heavens over Central Park and knowing that my life and the lives of everyone I knew would be over. It was a thought so evil and horrific that I couldn’t hold it in my imagination for more than a split second.

At the time, I could comfort myself that the West was united behind the United States, that we seemed to be “winning” and that the Soviet Union had been checkmated by Mutually Assured Destruction. I believed we were the good guys keeping the world safe and we would prevail.

Late last year Debbie and I watched Katheryn Bigelow’s harrowing and well-named movie House of Dynamite, a reminder that a single missile might create a chain reaction of responses that would destroy the world. Nuclear weapons are the Dynamite and the House is our planet. ²

Luck is fickle

Movies like The Day After and House of Dynamite and my attempt to imagine seeing an ICBM about to hit New York City are all in the ancient tradition of stories and myths about technology racing well ahead of humanity’s capacity for good judgment.

Consider, as examples, the Tower of Babel in the Bible, the wax wings of Icarus in Greek myth, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature as imagined by Mary Shelly, and Stephen King’s bio-dystopian novel The Stand (echoed by the real live ravages of Covid). Our myths and our stories reflect that we always seem to take things too far. Many people believe artificial intelligence is in this category.

It’s true that since August 1945, the world has not experienced a nuclear weapon used in war. That has nothing to do with leaders being unwilling to kill their adversaries at great scale. There is ample and consistent evidence to the contrary. Instead, it has everything to do with a combination of the old rules-based system and a fair amount of good luck. We’ve had many close calls of nuclear weapons being launched.³

But luck is fickle and we no longer have the rules-based order. There are now nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons. The U.S. China, Russia, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

As well, there are many countries that undoubtedly want to possess nuclear weapons for protection and prestige. Knowledge and technology spread and advance. Countries only advertise their nuclear weapons capability after they’ve achieved it.

Would it be wise and in Canda’s self-interest to acquire its own nuclear arsenal if it could do so covertly. You have your answer if you heard Mark Carney say in his speech that submission is not sovereignty and if you heard Donald Trump’s reply the next day,

“Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Reconsidering “Thank God For The Atom Bomb”

In November 2023 I wrote a post about Paul Fussell’s essay Thank God For The Atom Bomb. Fussell had been one of the soldiers preparing to invade Japan and was saved from doing so by Japan’s surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ⁴

The argument in favor of using the atomic bombs invented by Oppenheimer and his colleagues at Los Alamos was that the two bombs would kill fewer people than would die in a long and hard-fought invasion of Japan. And that the people killed by the bomb would be Japanese while during an invasion both Americans and Japanese would die.

That debate over whether to use the bombs recalls to mind the “trolley problem” where unless you push a lever a trolley will continue down a track to kill three people. If you pull the lever, you divert the trolley to a different track where “only” one person will die.

On a utilitarian basis, it’s obvious you ought to pull the lever because one death is better than three deaths. That was the position taken by the Truman administration and by Fussell in his essay in favor of dropping the bombs. In my post I agreed with Fussell who contended that the only morality associated with war is to end it as quickly as possible.

But I missed the moral implications

But now I think there was in fact a crucial moral dimension to using a weapon designed to kill so many civilians with a single bomb. A moral dimension to set the precedent that atomic weapons could and would be used to kill civilian populations at great scale because that was what they were designed to do.

In the trolley problem, if you pull that lever you have become the agent of someone’s death. After the successful atomic test a few weeks before Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer famously said, “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” a reference to the Hindu god Shiva.

Nuclear weapons are different than conventional weapons because they carry with them seeds of destruction so vast that their use is awful to contemplate. Thanks to John Hersey we have a journalist’s candid report of the human horror of Hiroshima.

“On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.” ⁵

We should not look away

Eighty years later, the destructive power of atomic weaponry has increased by a similar magnitude as have other technologies. The first hydrogen bomb America created in 1952 was about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In hindsight, I wish Truman had listened to the hesitations of some of the scientists involved in creating the atomic bomb about using it. Some scientists advocated warning Japan coupled with a demonstration of the bomb’s destructive power.

Later, Robert Oppenheimer opposed the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb because he was morally affronted by its destructive potential and the inevitable spread of the technology in an arms race.

How can we be calm when human beings control these weapons? Especially human beings who crave authoritarian power. It is a huge error of imagination to think that men like Hitler and Stalin were unique in their moral monstrosity.

What can be done

Mark Carney did the world a tremendous favor at Davos by speaking truth to power. His speech will likely be remembered as a stirring warning that we are in a new and more dangerous era.

Following and building upon Carney’s example, we can speak the truth loudly about the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and the dangers of nuclear weapons use, whether in a war or by accident or by terrorists. Especially in this new multi-polar, great power environment.

Protest and attention can have an effect on our leaders.⁶

As well, we should be studying the many close calls of nuclear war that occurred throughout the Cold War to remind ourselves of how necessary it is to have as many precautions as possible.⁷

Ever since the invention of an atomic weapon in Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos facility we’ve lived, often way too comfortably, with this greatest of all existential threats to human survival. Complacency could be the death of us all.

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1. Carney Speech at Davos

2. A clip from the movie House of Dynamite: “the object will go sub-orbital…nineteen minutes to impact…”

3. 12 Times We Came Close To Using Nuclear Weapons from Chatham House.

4. My post from November 2023: Thank God for the Atom Bomb

5. Hiroshima by John Hersey; The New Yorker; August 1946. I wish every world leader would read it. I wonder how many U.S. presidents have.

6. My friend Eleanor Anstruther has written an excellent novel, Fallout, to be released this spring, set in and during the Greenham women’s protest in early 1980’s Britain. The women were protesting against the American deployment in Greenham of nuclear cruise missiles. The novel is about how the protest changes the lives of a family.

Importantly, some historians believe that the protest ultimately helped lead to the removal of the nuclear weapons from Greenham after the signing of the INF treaty in 1987.

7. 12 Times We Came Close To Using Nuclear Weapons from Chatham House. Worth footnoting twice!