‘Nuclear weapons can wipe out life on Earth, if used properly.” Despite being found in the liner notes of a Talking Heads album, this is the sentence I think best captures the bizarre contradictions of the atomic age. Human beings have manufactured bombs explicitly designed to unleash destructive forces equivalent to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of TNT.
Deploy them and millions die; civilisation as we know it could disappear. And yet, they’re not actually supposed to be used. In fact, their proper function is to remain in the ground, or at sea, or in the air. Launch, fire or drop ‘em and the whole system has failed. Is there any other device so intricately constructed in order to decrease the likelihood of its own use?
Last week, Jeremy Corbyn, a man with at least a chance of being entrusted with the launch codes for 225 British warheads, stated that he would never press the nuclear button. I asked philosopher Jonathan Glover, whose book Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century, includes a study of the Cuban missile crisis, about the comments. He confirmed most analyses so far “on the assumption that if he’s PM he has full say, that would indeed get rid of any deterrence”. In other words, were Corbyn to gain power, those weapons would become immediately impotent. His shadow defence secretary, Maria Eagle, called the remarks “unhelpful”.
Corbyn had let the air out of the nuclear balloon, given the game away. Despite what British Prime Minister David Cameron said last Sunday: “There are circumstances in which its use would be justified” — the truth is that no one is going to press the big red button — not Cameron, not George Osborne, Theresa May or whoever follows him. To do so would either be grossly disproportionate (against a non-nuclear state) and invite Britain’s own destruction (against a nuclear-armed one) or be grossly immoral (a futile retaliation against civilians). But the important thing isn’t to say so.
What Corbyn’s intervention did was immediately change the strategic value of Trident. He may not have got his debate on the question of its renewal at party conference, but that didn’t matter: He’d realised a simple way of pursuing unilateral disarmament was to use a handful of magic words.
That’s only possible because of the peculiar nature of deterrence. For a while after the end of the Second World War, America was the only nuclear power, but the Soviets soon caught up. It rapidly became clear that preventing war from taking place at all should take priority over making sure you could win it. To this end, a doctrine of mutual assured destruction emerged. If either side initiated a nuclear conflict, it could expect to be met with an overwhelming response in kind. Planners therefore focused on making sure their capacity to retaliate would not be wrecked by any first strike — and that the counterpunch would be crippling, targeting civilians in cities, rather than just military installations.
Glover points me in the direction of a paper by Gregory Kavka which famously sets out some of the paradoxes of deterrence. Chief among them is the following: It’s a given that any rational person would want to avoid war by deterring his or her enemies. But in the case of nuclear arms, retaliation — whereby, in response to half the world being destroyed, you decide to destroy the other half — would not only be morally inexcusable, but irrational. Welcome to the nuclear hall of mirrors.
Despite such contradictions, at the height of the cold war, Soviet and western citizens essentially played the role of hostages to each other’s militaries. Kill us and we’ll kill you, ran the logic. The danger had to be seen to be clear and present, so the number and sophistication of nuclear weapons shot up. In 1986 the global nuclear arsenal comprised more than 60,000 warheads. Since the end of the cold war it has rapidly diminished, but there are still about 10,000, the vast bulk of which belong to the United States and Russia. This is a depressing situation. Some argue that the presence of nuclear weapons has prevented large-scale conventional wars. That’s possible, but impossible to prove. In any case, there have been many significant conflicts fought as a proxy for the real thing. These have cost millions of lives. And there’s one thing that deterrence doesn’t protect against — the possibility of nuclear accident.
Cold War strategists tended to neglect the possibility that a nuclear war might be triggered not by geopolitics, but by simple cock-up. An accidental explosion could be interpreted by the other side as an act of aggression, provoking a full-scale response. Given that weapons systems were often placed on hair-trigger alert, the possibility of a false signal leading to Armageddon was quite real. And though the likelihood of a deliberate nuclear conflict has receded, it’s not clear that the risk of accident has.
Some theorists now argue for a staged progression towards zero nuclear weapons. Whether or not this is realistic is a matter of fierce debate. What’s certain is that we’ve got far more nukes than we “need”. One thousand warheads apiece would be more than enough to achieve minimum deterrence between Russia and the US. Glover, however, is unconvinced. “If you’re worried about the danger of accidental nuclear war, as no doubt we should be, then it’s actually much safer if you’ve got the formula in the lab, but don’t actually have the dangerous weapons on the runway.” He continues: “Ideally, there’d be an agreement not to have them at all. Nothing is foolproof in this area: They can’t be uninvented. But a monitoring system to prevent their re-emergence is probably, while fallible, no more fallible and much less worrying than the danger of accidental war.” He tells me that he agrees with what Corbyn says and wouldn’t feel unsafe in a country that didn’t have its own nuclear weapons, like Sweden. “It doesn’t seem to be that anyone is seriously threatening a nuclear attack on us — the only people who might be are terrorists who manage to acquire them. But I suspect they’re not the sort of people that you can deter.” If a world without nuclear weapons is achievable, it will require political leadership. A country giving up its own would be a rare and shining thing: An altruistic act in world affairs. The cost would be minimal, the savings great and it would make us far more convincing when trying to dissuade others from acquiring nuclear capability. Britain should do it.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
