Challenging nuclearism

A humanitarian approach to reshape the global nuclear order

Marianne Hanson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526165084
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Challenging nuclearism explores how a deliberate 'normalisation' of nuclear weapons has been constructed, why it has prevailed in international politics for over seventy years and why it is only now being questioned seriously. The book identifies how certain practices have enabled a small group of states to hold vast arsenals of these weapons of mass destruction and how the close control over nuclear decisions by a select group has meant that the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons have been disregarded for decades. The recent UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will not bring about quick disarmament. It has been decried by the nuclear weapon states. But by rejecting nuclearism and providing a clear denunciation of nuclear weapons, it will challenge nuclear states in a way that has until now not been possible. Challenging nuclearism analyses the origins and repercussions of this pivotal moment in nuclear politics.

Part I

The dominance of nuclearism

1

Identifying the elements of nuclearism: the traditional framings that normalized nuclear weapons

For decades, nuclear weapons have been portrayed as essential to the security of the few states that possess them, and as an established and very normal part of national and international security. This has been the case, despite the fact that these weapons have not been used in warfare since 1945, and that there seems to have arisen a ‘taboo’ against their use (Tannenwald 1999). Notwithstanding this history of non-use, nuclear weapons came to be the hallmark weapon of the Cold War era, the instrument into which certain states placed their faith, their finances, and their technological endeavours, coming to rely on atomic weaponry as the key element of their military doctrines, their position in the world, and their national security. These states proceeded to roll out enormous programmes of acquisition and expansion, all the while persuading their publics that this was a normal and necessary way to achieve national security. Yet the construction and the success of this ‘normality’ has been a puzzling phenomenon; it is based on what I argue are highly problematic foundations, laid by a select few whose everyday repetition and rehearsing of particular discourses and practices constituted what was meant to be, simply, ‘common sense’.

The term ‘nuclearism’ captures this broad and entrenched acceptance of nuclear weapons. But even as it has been an essential concept in modern history, the term nuclearism has not been particularly well-researched or well-defined at a scholarly level beyond the description given by its original framers (Lifton and Falk 1982). Most of us know instinctively what ‘anti-nuclearism’ is, but nuclearism, even as it has affected the entire nuclear age and shaped the global nuclear order, has remained a vague and largely unexplored concept within academia.

In the absence of detailed examinations of nuclearism, I have determined a set of elements which I argue go some way towards constituting what is meant by the rather sweeping notion of nuclearism. This chapter explores the elements that I believe have enabled and supported nuclearism over the past seventy-plus years, in order to distil certain beliefs, practices, and institutional arrangements which have been key to the longevity and success of nuclearism. The building of nuclearism can be seen as parallel to and intertwined with the creation of a nuclear hegemony, one that has allowed for the imposition of a particular global nuclear order. While the terms ‘nuclearism’ and the ‘global nuclear order’ are not synonymous, there is a commonality to them. I argue that the elements of nuclearism that I explore in this chapter have all been intrinsic components and reinforcements of what I call broadly the global nuclear order.¹ Later chapters will show how each of these elements has come to be challenged by the processes involved in creating the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as well as by the actual contents of this treaty. For now, this chapter focuses on how each of these elements has been allowed to flourish, and how they have been instrumental in entrenching a view of nuclear weapons as acceptable elements of international security, resistant – at least until recently – to serious challenge.

Nuclearism

At the height of the Cold War, in a landmark book entitled Indefensible Weapons, Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk used the term ‘nuclearism’ to explain what they saw as the ‘psychological, political, and military dependence on nuclear weapons, the embrace of [these] weapons as a solution to a wide variety of human dilemmas, most ironically that of “security”’ (1982: ix). As noted, although rarely examined in-depth, the term came to imply the complete faith in nuclear weapons as the primary means for achieving security.

For Lifton and Falk, there was a deep psychological, even mystical, character to nuclearism: they intuitively noted that the bomb was embraced as a new ‘fundamental’, and as a ‘source of salvation’. More recently, Falk (2018) has stated that he applied the term nuclearism to what was the ‘association between the hardware dimensions of the weaponry and their various software dimensions’, with these latter ranging from the strategic doctrines of the nuclear states to the ‘infatuations of powerful men with their awesome destructive capabilities’. While the term was used less often after the 1990s, it remained a useful shorthand for describing the peculiar attributes of the atomic age.²

The term nuclearism thus holds great potential for helping us to define what it was that kept so many in the thrall of nuclear weapons, what it was that allowed policy planners to accept the ‘rationality’ of a system of extreme destruction, and what constituted the day to day activities of such a state of being. Political, bureaucratic, technical, and social factors noted by Lifton and Falk all contributed to nuclearism, as of course did the real fear of threat from the enemy. But perhaps what was really important was that nuclearism was also the means by which nuclear weapons and plans for nuclear war-fighting came to be seen as natural, normal, and as the way the world simply had to be, at least for those states involved. For Falk (2018), nuclearism established ‘the rationality of irrationality’ and enabled the concept of mutually assured destruction as well as ever larger and ever more destructive nuclear arsenals.

Following Lifton and Falk, Bryan C. Taylor has added to our understanding of what nuclearism is: the result of ‘a potent mixture of ideologies including bureaucracy, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, militarism, technological determinism, and instrumental rationality’ (Taylor 2007: 677). Nuclearism created a sense of certainty for its advocates, with no room for any who might question or resist its imposition. For Raymond Williams (1980: 26), the bomb, ‘as fact or slogan’, has operated in culture and society ‘as a static if terrible entity, provoking resignation, cynicism or despair’.

Broadly speaking then, nuclearism can be seen as the ‘dependence’ on nuclear weapons, the ‘embrace’ of these weapons as the answer to insecurity, the ‘rationalization of the irrational’, and as a self-reinforcing ‘potent mix of ideologies’. But we should add an important factor here: nuclearism is also the justification for having these weapons and for maintaining the present global nuclear order. Nuclearism creates and perpetuates the ‘need’ for nuclear weapons, but its very dangers are seen as the reason why the status quo should continue.

A number of elements compounded the rise of nuclearism and made it difficult to dislodge the view of nuclear weapons as being normal, and essential, for national and international security. Krieger (2013) points to several developments which, at a broad level, help to explain why nuclear weapons were acquired and sustained, and why it has been so hard to shift entrenched views. On one hand we can see a level of complacency on the part of the general public, often with a resigned deference to authority, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness or marginalization – the view that an individual cannot do anything to challenge the unstoppable march of the nuclear age. On the other hand, there are the practices of elites, the secrecy that surrounds nuclear policy-makers, their unerring belief in the infallibility of technology, and their optimism that deterrence will inevitably work; this is what Krieger has called the ‘tyranny of experts’. All these factors, and the state of nuclearism itself, have come to be co-constitutive, each reinforcing the other.

While it is interesting to explore further what nuclearism is, the purpose of this chapter is to draw out some of the key elements of practice and policy which have enabled nuclearism to develop in the first place, and which have kept it alive in all its vastness. From the broad range of factors noted above, it is possible to distil certain key elements that have helped to establish, reproduce, and reaffirm nuclearism. They may not be a comprehensive accounting of what has led to and sustained nuclearism over the decades, but they nonetheless seem to me to be most relevant.

These elements have for years enabled nuclear weapons to be seen as ‘normal’, almost ‘conventional’, ‘natural’, and beyond question.³ They are interrelated, and are identified as follows: First is the language used to describe the role of nuclear weapons and the overall discourse that this has created over several decades. Second, and very closely related to the first point, is the suppression of humanitarian concerns about nuclear weapons, and the deliberate avoidance of acknowledging the implications of nuclear weapons’ use. By holding off, for decades, any serious consideration of the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons’ use, policy-makers have been able to present this option as something manageable, acceptable, and perhaps not greatly different from conventional warfare. A third element is the decision-making processes and the ‘exclusivity’ which has enabled national security elites to plan for nuclear war largely free from public oversight; this has served to limit involvement with, and knowledge about, nuclear issues, in essence denying any real democratic deliberation on the topic within the state, and generally insulating decision-makers from external questioning. A fourth element is the material costs devoted to nuclear weapons programmes; that is, the expenditure of enormous sums of money on nuclear projects, which has served to elevate the status of these weapons almost beyond question, and which has created patterns of government spending more or less impervious to change. The fifth element identified here is the way in which the P5 nuclear states have used the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its associated non-proliferation regime to ensure that the global nuclear order remains essentially static, always favouring themselves, the ‘recognized’ nuclear states, as the hegemons of this order.

Establishing the abnormal: a discourse of security, strategy, and rationality normalizes nuclear weapons

Since 1945, nine states have elevated the most lethal weapons ever created into ones considered essential for (their) security. This study focuses to a large extent, but not exclusively, on developments within the United States, because it is the national security elites and nuclear experts from that country who have, arguably, exercised the most influence in constructing the nuclear ‘world’ and the way that we think about it. This is not to suggest that the other nuclear weapon states, both within and outside the NPT, do not share in the creation of this overarching paradigm – merely that it has found its most dedicated builders among policy-makers, nuclear scientists, and strategic experts in the very first state to have developed, and the only state to have used, nuclear weapons. As Taylor et al. (2008) in their study of communicative processes in the US remind us, how individuals talk about nuclear weapons, or how they do not talk about nuclear weapons, have been important factors in creating the nuclear world understood by the United States and its Western allies, but also in turn by other nuclear weapon states.

When nuclear weapons have been discussed within politics and government, this has invariably been within strategic and technological contexts; rarely have they been assessed and debated – by states – within explicit humanitarian contexts, or within the broader contexts of morality, or even of utility and rationality, notwithstanding the privately held fears of individuals or constituents regarding them. Ideas about strategic necessity, parity, nuclear preponderance, ‘prevailing’ in, and even ‘winning’ a nuclear war,⁴ have characterized much of the thinking and research in this field. As Ritchie (2013) and others have observed, the nuclear weapon states have exhibited a long-standing and deeply entrenched valuing of nuclear weapons, a traditional framing of nuclear arsenals which was, first and foremost, about ‘security’, strategy, deterrence, and war-fighting, but rarely about what the actual impact would be of any nuclear weapons’ use.

Unsurprisingly, challenging the dominant discourse – built up over several decades – has been very difficult. A full history of how this discourse was constructed and how it continues to prevail – in some national security circles, at least – is extensive and complex, and only a brief overview can be presented in this chapter.⁵ Nonetheless, this overview will help us to understand why it has been difficult, until now, to apply a humanitarian framework to the question of nuclear weapons, and will assist us in understanding the recent challenges to these traditional views as a serious contestation of prevailing policies.

What is meant here by the ‘normalization’ of nuclear weapons is the creation of that state of affairs where their possession came to be construed by their owners as ‘natural’, and almost without question. This involved cultivating a faith in nuclear weapons and presenting it to the layperson as an inevitable and essential part of national security, notwithstanding that these weapons are highly abnormal in terms of their destructive capability, and that their actual military utility is limited.⁶ The paradox of nuclear weapons has been that they are always viewed with both ‘faith and fear’: at the same time that we see an overwhelming reliance on nuclear weapons for security, so too do these weapons invoke an existential sense of fear and dread (Ungar 1992).

To contextualize this concept of normalizing further, the words of Lewis Mumford are useful. He wrote in 1946 of the growth of the US nuclear weapons programme, the ‘undeviating motions’ which ‘soberly, day after day’, were conducted and which were ‘so stereotyped, so commonplace, that they seem the normal motions of normal men, not the mass compulsions of people bent on total death’. This normalizing meant that even while living with the perpetual threat of impending destruction, we have kept, for the most part, what Mumford (1946: ix) called a ‘glassy calm’.

Normalizing these weapons does not suggest that their enormous power was not recognized. It is rather that these bureaucratic and strategic everyday practices by the leaders and strategists of the nuclear states built a nuclear context that replicated itself easily, and strengthened its presence every day. Gamson (1987: 16) has written of a ‘nuclear forgetting’, where ‘sustained governmental efforts’ successfully softened atomic dangers, and where the impacts of a nuclear strike were invariably do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The dominance of nuclearism
• Part II The transition – from the Humanitarian Initiative to the prohibition treaty
• Part III Rejecting nuclearism
• Part IV Ending nuclearism?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index