THE
UNFINISHED
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
NUCLEAR
WEAPONS
A TALE OF THREE AUGUSTS
An age ended, we know, when the
Berlin Wall fell, auguring, soon after, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
But which age was it? The Cold War was over—that much was clear. Yet many felt
and understood that some longer historical period, or perhaps several, had also
come to a close. One clear candidate is the age of totalitarianism—a period
coextensive with the life of the Soviet Union, which bracketed the rise and
fall of Nazi Germany. (China’s current government, which has evolved into a
strange hybrid that some are calling “market communism,” is the only one of the
great totalitarian states of the twentieth century that has not actually been
overthrown.) Another candidate is the age of world wars; which, as suggested by
the war that remained cold, have been rendered unwinnable and therefore
unlikely by the invention of nuclear weapons. And when the histories of the two
world wars and the two great totalitarian regimes are considered together, they
form a third candidate—an age that many historians are now calling the “short
twentieth century.” The calendar’s divisions of the years, they’ve observed,
match up inexactly with history’s turning points. According to this way of
reckoning, the nineteenth century began not in 1800 but in 1789, with the
French Revolution, and came to its close not in 1900 but in 1914, when the
First World War broke out, putting an end to the so-called long nineteenth
century. The twentieth century, having begun in August of 1914, lasted only
until the failed hard-line Communist coup in Moscow in 1991, which, in another
pivotal August of the twentieth century, set in motion the Soviet collapse.
Some years before, the Russian poet, Akhmatova had expressed a similar idea:
Snowdrifts covered the Nevskii
Prospect . . .
And along the legendary quay,
There advanced, not the calendar,
But the real Twentieth Century
It
is this real twentieth century—the twentieth century of the Somme, of the
Gulag, of the Holocaust—that in 1991 startled the world, the historians are now
saying, by turning out to be short. On either side of it were the, calmer seas
of a predominantly liberal civilization. A bolder assertion of this notion was
Francis Fukuyama’s renowned claim that the liberal restoration of 1991 marked
the “end of history”—by which he meant not that the end of days had arrived
but, only a little more modestly, that humanity’s long search for the best form
of government had reached its destination in a nearly global embrace of liberal
democracy.
The distinction between the real
twentieth century and the calendrical one is based on the convincing idea that
the century’s bouts of unprecedented violence, both within nations and between
them, possess a definite historical coherence—that they constitute, to put it
simply, a single story. The proposed periodization is clearly optimistic,
suggesting that the tide of bloodshed has reached its high-water mark and is
now receding. The failure of the Cold War to become hot and the liquidation in
1991 of the world’s last thoroughly totalitarian regime lend substance to the
hope. I wish to suggest, however, that this appraisal remains starkly
incomplete if it fails to take into account one more age that reached a turning
point in 1991. I mean the nuclear age, which opened in another epochal August
of the twentieth century, August of 1945. (Somehow in this century August was
the month in which history chose to produce a disproportionately large number
of its most important events.) No narrative of the extraordinary violence of
the twentieth century can possibly be told without taking into account the
greatest means of violence ever created.
The Greeks used to say that no man
should be called happy before he died. They meant not only that even the most
contented life could be undone by the
last minute but also that the meaning of an entire life might depend on its
ending. For a life’s last chapter was not merely an event, with its freight of
suffering or joy; it was a disclosure, in whose light the story’s beginning and
middle might need to be drastically rewritten. Or, to vary the metaphor,
stories, including the stories of historical epochs, are like pictures of
heavenly constellations drawn by connecting dots—in this case, historical
facts. The addition of new dots may merely add detail to the picture that has
already taken shape, but it may also alter the entire image. The swan will turn
out to be a crab; what looked like a whale turns into a dragon. Such was the
case, certainly, with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The Soviet
Union’s infirmities, we now must suppose, were eating away at its power long
before, one fine day in 1991, the empire evaporated. It is understandable that
contemporaries are usually startled by events, but historians have no right to
present surprise endings to the tales they tell. Their new job will be to
retell the story of the Soviet Union in such a way that the sudden collapse at
the end makes sense.
So it must eventually be with the
nuclear age. The story of a, Cold War that was the scene of history’s only
nuclear arms race will be very different from the story of a Cold War that
turned out to be only the first of many interlocking nuclear arms races in many
parts of the world. The nuclear dilemma, in sum, hangs like a giant question
mark over our waning century. To 1914 and 1991 two dates therefore need to be
added. The first is 1945 and the second is the as yet unknown future date on
which the end of the nuclear age will be disclosed. Whether this conclusion
will be the elimination of nuclear weapons (either before or after their
further use) or, conceivably, the elimination of the species that built them is
the deepest of the questions that need answering when we consider the
still-open book of the real twentieth century.
In the United States, the
historians’ oversight is only one symptom of a wider inattention to the nuclear
question. In the years of the post-Cold War period, the nuclear peril seemed to
all but disappear from public awareness. Some of the reasons were
understandable. As long as the Cold War lasted, and seemed almost indistinguishable
from nuclear danger—the more so since both looked they were going to last
indefinitely. One half of this assumption was of course negated by the Soviet
collapse. For a while, the public seemed to imagine that nuclear danger, too,
had unexpectedly proven ephemeral. The political antagonism that had produced
the only nuclear terror Americans had ever known had, after really ended with
the Cold War. The prospect of a second Cuban Missile Crisis became remote. It
was reasonable for a while to imagine that the end of the struggle in whose
name nuclear weapons had been built would lead to their end. Perhaps it would
happen quietly and smoothly. The Comprehensive Test Treaty would be accepted
and succeeded by reductions. START II would be ratified and followed by START
III, START III by START IV (at some point the lesser nuclear powers would be
drawn into the negotiations), and so on, until the last warhead was gone.
American presidents encouraged the public complacency. “I saw the chance to rid
our children’s dreams of the nuclear nightmare, and I did,” President George
Bush said at the Republican convention 1992; and in 1997, President Bill
Clinton boasted that “our children are growing up free from the shadows of the
Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust.”
The
news media took their cue from this official fantasy. Nuclear weapons all but
dropped out of the news and opinion pages. In the decade since the Berlin Wall
was torn down, newspaper readers and television viewers were given little
indication that some 31,000 nuclear weapons remained in the world, or that
6,000 of them were targeted at the United States. A whole generation came of
age lacking even rudimentary information regarding nuclear arms and nuclear
peril. On the tenth anniversary of the end of wall, few commentators taking
stock of the decade bothered to mention the persistence of nuclear danger.
A frightening new landscape was
coming into view. To begin with, the presidents who said they had ended nuclear
danger had not acted that way. Clinton’s repeated though little-reported
“bottom up” reviews of defense policy left the strategy of nuclear
deterrence—and the arsenals it justified—untouched. His spokesmen let it be
known that nuclear weapons were to remain the foundation of American security
for the indefinite future. Russia followed suit—abandoning a willingness
expressed by Gorbachev to eliminate nuclear weapons and stalling on the
ratification of the START II Treaty. And so the nuclear arsenals of the Cold
War, instead of withering away with the disappearance of that conflict, were
delivered intact, like a package from a deceases sender, into the new age,
though now lacking the benefit of new justification—or, for that matter, of new
opposition.
Meanwhile, newcomers to the nuclear
game moved to acquire the weapons. If nuclear powers such as Russia and the
United States, which no longer had a quarrel, were entitled to maintain nuclear
arsenals, why not countries that, like India and Pakistan, were chronically at
war? To insist otherwise would, in the words of India’s foreign minister
Jaswant Singh, be to shut the Third World out of the “nuclear paradigm”
established by the First and Second Worlds, and so to accept “nuclear
apartheid.” In May of 1998, India and Pakistan, accordingly, fired off their
rival salvos of nuclear tests. The antagonism between the Soviet Union and the
United States had been “cold,” but this conflict was hot. The three wars that
the two countries had fought since the late 1940s were in short order followed
by a fourth in the summer of 1999. The world’s multiplying nuclear arsenals
were meanwhile supplemented by a new prominence of their repellent siblings in
the family of weapons pf mass destruction—chemical and biological weapons,
which may become the instrument of choice of nations or terrorist groups
worried about the expense and difficulty of making nuclear weapons.
By the century’s end, the web of
arms-control agreements that had been painstakingly woven during the last half
century of the Cold War was tearing apart. The United States Senate voted down
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty—an act that cut away the foundation of
several decades of effort by the United States to halt the spread of nuclear
weapons. The Senate also persuaded the Clinton Administration to develop a
national missile defense, which would violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty
of 1972, thereby threatening to turn Russia’s stalling on the START
negotiations into outright opposition. The combined resolve of the five senior
nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, England, France, and China) to keep
their arsenals and of other countries to obtain them likewise threatened the
breakdown of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 180 countries
have agreed to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for promises by the nuclear
powers to abolish theirs.
From the very first moments of the
nuclear age, scientists have warned the world that it is in the nature of
nuclear technology—as of all technology—to become universally available and
therefore that, in the absence of political will, the world would tend to
become nuclear-armed. In a world boiling with local (and not so local) hatreds,
the retrogression of arms control raises the question of whether the Cold War,
instead of being the high point of danger in a waning nuclear age, will prove
to have been a mere bipolar rehearsal for a multipolar second nuclear age.
A number of voices challenged this
status quo by calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but their views
went largely unreported by the news media that had ignored the dangers of which
they warned. Among these voices were leaders of the traditional anti-nuclear
peace movement; the seven governments of the New Agenda coalition, composed of
Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Sweden, and South Africa; and an
impressive array of retired military officers and civilian leaders, including
President Jimmy Carter, Senator Alan Cranston, former commander of the
Strategic Air Command General George Lee Butler, and the commander of the
allied air forces in the Gulf War, General Charles Horner. In a series of
reports and statements, these people have argued that the end of the Cold War
has provided a historically unique but perishable opportunity to remove nuclear
danger by eliminating nuclear arsenals everywhere. (Since only eight nations
possess nuclear weapons, and of these only India, Pakistan, and Israel have not
signed the Nonproliferation Treaty, abolition means persuading just three
nations to live as would the 185 signatories.) Notable among the new
abolitionists were some of the most hawkish figures of the Cold War, including
Paul Nitze, drafter in 1950 of National Security Council Memorandum-68,
regarded by many as the charter of American Cold War policy. He recently argued
that the United States’ huge lead in the development of high-precision weaponry
created a new military context in which the United States simply did not need
nuclear weapons. Considering this advantage, Nitze could “think of no
circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear
weapons,” and therefore recommended that the nation “unilaterally get rid” of
them. The emergence of this hawkish strain of abolitionism, in which precision,
high-explosive conventional bombing would give the United States a usable
military superiority that nuclear weapons could never confer, assured that,
should the idea of abolition ever take hold, a debate within the ranks’ of the
abolitionists themselves would be robust. But Nitze’s dramatic proposal fell
into the media silence that had swallowed up all other proposals for abolition.
PREFACE TO A
CENTURY
It seems timely, then, to
take a fresh look at the nuclear question in the context of the century that
has just ended. The exercise, we can hope, will shed light on both the nuclear
dilemma and the story of the century, short or otherwise, in which nuclear
weapons have played, and unfortunately go on playing, so important a part. One
place to begin is with a work that, as it happens, was first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in London, at the turn of the last century, in
1899: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad
wrote in the heyday of a liberal civilization that had seemed to spread
steadily and grow stronger for most of the nineteenth century. Its articles of
faith were that science and technology were the sources of a prosperity without
limits; that the free market would spread the new abundance across the
boundaries of both classes and nations; that liberty and democracy, already established
in several of the most powerful and advanced nations, were gaining ground
almost everywhere; and that all of these forces were welling an unstoppable
tide of overall human progress. It is, of course, a revival of these
ideas—minus, notably, the idea of progress—that has inspired the belief that
the twentieth century; or even history itself, ended in 1991. Conrad was not an
acolyte of this faith. He was perhaps the most acute among a number of
observers who, having witnessed firsthand what the “civilized” countries were
doing in the “backward” parts of the world, where colonialism was at its
zenith, discerned the shape of a radically different future. Heart of Darkness was many things. It was a tale of travel to an exotic
place. It was a glimpse through the eyes of the seaman Marlow, of the
atrocities committed by King Leopold’s International Association of the Congo.
It was an investigation by literary means of the extremes of evil. And it was,
as we today are in a position to appreciate, a topographic map, clairvoyant in
its specificity, of the moral landscape of the twentieth century.
“It was like a weary pilgrimage
amongst hints for nightmare’s,” Marlow says of his sea journey to the Congo
along the African coast. The hinted nightmares turned out to be the waking
experience of the century ahead. That century, Conrad apparently understood,
was about to open up new possibilities for evil. In Heart of Darkness, he seems to thumb through them
prospectively as if through a deck of
horrific tarot cards. The concentration camps are there. The black men “dying
slowly,” “in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair,” whom Marlow
witnesses in a grove of trees immediately upon arriving at an outer station,
are unmistakable precursors of the millions of men and women who were to die in
the concentration camps soon to be built in. Europe. The monster Kurtz, the
charismatic station chief who murders in the name of progress, and who,
although “hollow at the core,” was gifted with magnificent eloquence and
“electrified large meetings,” is a sort of prefiguration of Hitler. Conrad even
has a Belgian journalist comment that Kurtz would have made a “splendid leader
of an extreme party.” Which one? “Any party,” is the answer. For, the
journalist stammers, “he was an—an—extremist.” But Kurtz is not to be
understood as a fringe character.” All Europe contributed to the making of
Kurtz,” Marlow says, in a rare moment of editorializing.
Consider, by way of inexplicably
refined forecasting; the likeness of some of Marlow’s comments about Kurtz to
some comments Hitler makes about himself in 1936. The power of Hitler’s voice,
carried to the German public over the radio, was a basic element of his power.
Conrad notes something similar in Kurtz. Marlow:
Kurtz
discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last.
Yet beneath the rich and resonant voice lay an
emptiness:
The voice was gone. What else had
been there?
And, for comparison, Hitler speaking at a rally in
1936 about his appeal to the German people:
At
this hour do we not again feel the miracle that has brought us
together!
Long ago you heard the voice of a man, and it struck to
your
hearts, it awakened you, and you followed this voice. You
followed
it for years, without so much as having seen him whose
voice
it was; you heard only a voice, and you followed.
To give just one more example, anyone who witnessed the monotonous, ceaseless American artillery fire into “free-fire zones” in Vietnam will experience a shock of recognition in the following description of a French naval vessel firing into the African jungle:
In
the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was,
incomprehensible,
firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the
six-inch
guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white
smoke
would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble
screech—and
nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a
touch
of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery
in
the sight.
Nor
did Conrad fail to take note of those indispensable props of the gigantic,
insane, state-sponsored crimes of our time: the obedient functionaries. The
“banality” of their evil, famously described after the fact by Hannah Arendt in
Eichmann in Jerusalem, is foreshadowed
in Conrad’s description of a minor bureaucrat in the ivory-gathering operation
at the Central Station. This man, mistaking Marlow for an influential figure,
curries favor with him, prompting Marlow to observe, “I let him run on, this
papier-mache Mephistopheles.” He adds, “It seemed to me that if I tried I could
poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little
loose dirt, maybe.” Conrad described well the humiliation that so many decent
people were to experience in having to take ridiculous personages seriously
solely because of the. immense suffering they were causing. Face to face with
Kurtz in the jungle at night, Marlow comments, “I resented bitterly the absurd
danger of our situation, as if to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had
been a dishonoring necessity.” The inspired anti-Nazi diarist Friedrich
Reck-Malleczewen, who was executed by the Nazis in 1944, experienced a similar
feeling of humiliation when he thought back to an accidental encounter he had
once had with another atrocious phantom-Hitler. “If I had had an inkling of the
role this piece of filth was to play, and of the years of suffering he was to
make us endure,” he wrote, “I would have done it [shot him] without a second
thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip, and did not
shoot.”
The most remarkable and telling
augury of Heart of Darkness, however, was the glimpse that Conrad,
vaulting ahead in prophecy to 1945, provided of the destination toward which
all these preposterous and terrifying tendencies somehow were heading; namely,
the threat that, with the help of the Kurtzes of this world, the human species
might one day get ready to wipe itself off the face of the earth. After his
climactic meeting with Kurtz in the jungle, Marlow further comments, “There was
nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose
of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.” This
foreboding of annihilation was no incidental feature of the work; it returns
several times, always at critical moments in the story. The most renowned
passage in which it occurs is the legendary addendum “Exterminate all the
brutes” that Kurtz pinned to the bottom of the dithyramb to nineteenth-century
progress that he left as his legacy. The foreboding recurs even more explicitly
when, after Kurtz has died and Marlow is on his way to inform Kurtz’s betrothed
of the fact, he reports, “I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his
mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind.” The
technical means for destroying the species lay far in the future, but the
psychological and moral preparations, it appears, were well under way in 1899.
THE FIRST
AUGUST:
THE BEGINNING
OF THE REAL
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
As the scholar Jessica Reifer
has pointed out, Conrad’s intimations in a single text of virtually all the
unprecedented evils, including the threat of self-extinction, that Western
humanity was about to visit upon itself and the world in the twentieth century
are evidence before the fact of their common roots and essential unity. These
“hints for nightmares,” however, did not materialize into real historical
events in Europe until, during the first of the century’s fateful Augusts, the
First World War broke out. Then the nightmares followed, one after another, in
a chain whose unusually clear linkage points to the underlying continuity.
The judgment that the outbreak of
the First World War was the starting point in the twentieth century’s plunge
into horror did not originate with the inventors of the idea of the short
twentieth century; it has been the belief of a remarkably wide consensus of
historians. George Kennan spoke for this consensus in his diplomatic history The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order:
With
the phenomenon of the Second World War before me, it was
borne
in upon me to what overwhelming extent the determining
phenomena
of the interwar period, Russian Communism and
German
Nazism and indeed then the Second World War itself, were
the
products of that first great holocaust of 1914-18. . . . And thus I
came
to see the First World War . . . as the great seminal catastrophe
of
the century. . . .
As
Kennan suggests, the stories of the two world wars on the one hand and of the
two great totalitarian regimes on the other were as tightly intertwined at
every crucial juncture as the proteins on the strands of a double helix. Total
war and totalitarianism were kin in more than name. From 1914 onward, each fed
the other in a vicious spiral of violence. To begin with, the shock of the
First World War is widely understood to have created the social conditions
essential to the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In the words of
the historian Martin Malia, “This war disorganized Russia’s still immature
political structures to the point where the Bolshevik Party, a throwback to the
violent and conspiratorial politics of the 1870s, was about to seize power.
Many understood even at the time that the brutality of the war had been carried
over to the system of rule that followed. As the contemporary socialist Victor
Chernov put it, “The moral nature of the Bolshevik Revolution was inherited
from the war in which it was born.”
That the Nazis’ rise to power in
Germany was made possible by the war is also accepted widely. It will be enough
here—without trying to recount the story of the destabilization of German
politics and society by her defeat and the harsh terms of the peace
settlement—to recall two comments made by Hitler. The first is his remark that
“if at the beginning of the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew
corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to
hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the
sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” The idea of
killing Jews by gas was not one that Hitler, who had been a victim of an
English gas attack, was to forget. The second comment is his description of his
reaction to the declaration of the First World War. “Even today,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “I am not ashamed to say
that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked
Heaven from an overflowing heart.”
If in the century’s Teens and
Twenties total war prepared the way for totalitarianism, in the Thirties, when
Hitler carried out the series of aggressions that brought on the Second World
War, the process worked the other way around. Hitler’s biographers tell us that
while at the front in the First World War he felt so much at home in the
trenches and so ill at ease in civilian society that he canceled all his
leaves. For him, it seems, not war but peace was hell, and there is a sense in
which the interwar period was just one more leave that was canceled by a
peace-weary Hitler.
The plainest of these links,
finally, is that between the war against Hitler and the decision by the United
States and England to build atomic weapons. In October of 1939 (more than two
years before the United States went to war with Germany and Japan), when the
businessman Alexander Sachs visited President Franklin Roosevelt to recommend
an atomic-weapons program, Roosevelt commented, “Alex, what you are after is to
see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” Sachs replied, “Precisely.” Throughout
the war, the scientists at Los Alamos—many of them refugees from Europe—held
before their eyes the prospect that Hitler would succeed in building the bomb
first.
Evil,
even when opposed, has a way of preparing the ground for more evil, and Hitler
by this route became a progenitor of the bomb. His extraordinary malevolence
induced his adversaries to embrace an evil that otherwise they conceivably
might have forgone. Through this indirect paternity were reborn key aspects, of
the policies that he, more than anyone else, had pioneered. As in a magic
trick—appropriately accompanied by a gigantic world-blinding flash and
(mushroom-shaped) puff of smoke—the politics of mass annihilation, even as they
were going down to defeat in Hitler’s bunker; were in 1945 transferred to the care
of Washington.
EXTERMINATION
What was the nature of the
new possibilities for evil that Conrad had discerned in the Congo and that the
series of calamities inaugurated by the war in 1914 brought, as if through the
action of a pendulum swinging in an ever-widening arc; to fuller and fuller
realization, until the human species created weapons whereby it could destroy
itself? Violence on a previously unimaginable scale was the obvious common
denominator. This violence was the basis for the increasing use of that lingua
franca of twentieth-century politics, terror—terror as an instrument of rule,
which is to say totalitarian rule; terror as a strategy of war, and especially
of “strategic” bombing, aimed at breaking the morale of civilian populations;
and, finally, nuclear terror, rather optimistically referred to as a “balance
of terror.” (Terror in nuclear strategy, let us note, is terror in not only its
most extensive but also its purest form, inasmuch as its practitioners
sometimes imagine that it can be projected forever without actual use of the
instruments that produce it.) But something more than a colossal increase in
violence and terror was involved. In Kurtz’s phrase “Exterminate all the
brutes,” Conrad gives us the concept we need: extermination. The capacity and
will to destroy not just large numbers of people but entire classes of people
was the new invention. Policies of extermination, of course, require slaughter
on a mass scale, but they aim at more than slaughter. By seeking to eradicate
defined human collectivities, extermination aims not only at those groups but
at their progeny, who are shut out of existence when the policy succeeds. The
distinction is basic. Mass slaughter is a crime against the living;
extermination is, in addition, a crime against the future. When Hitler launched
the Final Solution, his target was not just the living Jews but all future Jews
together with the culture they had created and, if they were permitted to live,
would go on creating. Murder is a crime that, by destroying individual lives,
violates the legal and moral order of a community; extermination is a crime
that, by destroying an entire community, is a crime against the family of
communities that make up humankind—a crime; as international law has come to recognize,
“against humanity.”
Genocide—the destruction of a
people, whether defined as a race or a tribe or a nation—is the quintessential
act of extermination, but it is not the only one. Another is the extermination
of social classes, practiced by Stalin and Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, among
others. In the Bolsheviks’ very first year in power, they discovered a
category. of crime that they called “objective.” A crime was “subjective” when
you had done something wrong; it was “objective” when, through no deed of your
own, you belonged to a social class that the government wanted to liquidate. As
early as 1918, Latvian Latsis, one of the chiefs of the Cheka, the precursor of
the KGB, announced the goal in plain language: “We are engaged in annihilating
the bourgeoisie as a class.” Thus there was no need, Latsis explained, to
“prove that this or that man acted against the interests of Soviet power.” It
was enough to ask, “To what class does he belong, where does he come from, what
kind of education did he have, what is his occupation?” The answers to these
questions “decide the fate of the accused.” “That,” he said, “is the
quintessence of the Red Terror”—terror that was to cost the Soviet people an
estimated 50 or 60 million lives in the coming half-century.
A third target of policies of
extermination was cities and their populations. Let us consider two examples.
The first is the bombing of Hamburg by the British air force in 1943. As early
as July 1940, Churchill, while commanding the Battle of Britain, had called for
“exterminating” air attacks on Germany. From then until 1942, the Bomber
Command, afflicted by high loss rates and fearful of losing out in interservice
rivalry with the Navy and the Army, drifted away from “precision” bombing,
which had to he carried out in daylight, into “area bombing,” which could be
carried out at night. The aim was to destroy the morale of the German people by
killing German civilians and destroying their homes. By the end of 1942, giant
raids on Lubeck and Cologne had made it clear that the annihilation of entire
cities in one or a few raids was feasible. Accordingly, Most Secret Operation
Order No. 173, of May 27, 1943, stated, under the heading “Intention,” that the
aim of the raid was “to destroy HAMBURG.” The order estimated that 10,000 tons
of bombs would have to be dropped to “complete the process of elimination.” And
thus it was done, producing a firestorm in the city and killing some 45,000
people in a single night.
The second example is Hitler’s plan,
formed even before his attack on Russia, in June of 1941, for the annihilation
of Moscow and Leningrad. Moscow was to be razed because it was “the center of
[Bolshevik] doctrine”—for Hitler’s larger goal was an “ethnic catastrophe.” He
intended to dig a reservoir where Moscow had once been. At first, he planned to
spare Leningrad, because it was “incomparably more beautiful” than Moscow; but
soon he put Leningrad, too, on the list of cities to be destroyed. His
explanation sheds light on the mentality of those who are preparing to
exterminate entire human communities:
I
suppose that some people are clutching their heads with both hands
to
find an answer to the question, “How can the Fuhrer destroy a
city
like St. Petersburg?”. . . I would prefer not to see anyone suffer,
not
to do harm to anyone. But when I realize the species is in danger,
then
in my case sentiment gives way to the coldest reason.
The Nazi general Franz Halder
concurred with this supposedly cold reasoning: annihilating the two cities, he
wrote, would be a “national catastrophe which [would] deprive not only
Bolshevism but also Muscovite nationalism of their centers.”
A plan was drawn up. Leningrad would
be sealed off, to weaken it “by terror and growing starvation”; then the
Germans would “remove the survivors in captivity in the interior of Russia,
level Leningrad to the ground with high explosives, and leave the area to the
north of the Neva to the Finns.”
Of course, we know that the two
cities survived, owing not to any thaw in Hitler’s cold reasoning but to the
almost superhuman resistance mounted by the Russian people.
EXTERMINATION
AS
A SYSTEMIC
EVIL
Just as the twentieth
century’s policies of extermination—whether of peoples, classes, or
cities—enveloped entire human communities, so also they were carried out by
entire communities—or, at any rate, by the state authorities that putatively,
represented those communities. Extermination, a species of crime requiring
extensive social resources, is—can only be—a systemic evil. To the extent that
popular support was present, the policies amounted to, attempted murders of one
society by another. Although there can be debate over just how extensive
popular support was for Stalin’s and Hitler’s policies of extermination, there
can be no doubt that, through the states that ruled over these peoples, the
resources of entire societies were placed at the disposal of those carrying out
the policies.
Those resources were not just the
obvious ones—the secret police, the transportation systems, the concentration-camp
administrations, the armies, the bomber forces. They had to include mass
cooperation of the kind that control of the state alone provides. When the
state becomes an exterminator, and the law, instead of enjoining evil, supports
and enforces it—as does the whole tremendous weight of custom, habit,
bureaucratic inertia, and social pressure—the individual who might seek to
oppose the policies is left in an extremity of moral solitude. Even the voice
of conscience, in these circumstances, can become an enlistee in the ranks of
the evildoers. People find themselves in the dilemma defined by Mark Twain when
he presented Huck Finn’s inner deliberations whether to turn in his friend the
runaway black slave, Jim. Huck’s “conscience,” he believes, is telling him that
it is wrong not to turn Jim in. Nevertheless, Huck decides to do what is
“wrong” and hides Jim. Adolf Eichmann, too, heard the voice of an inverted
conscience, but he, unlike Huck, obeyed it. At the end of the war, with the
defeat of Germany in sight, he had an opportunity to slow down or even halt the
transports of the Jews to the killing centers, but instead he redoubled his
efforts. “The, sad and very uncomfortable truth,” Arendt writes, “probably was
that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann
to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war. . . .”
For “he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only
if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men,
women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous
care.”
EXTERMINATION
AS
PSEUDOSCIENCE
As if to Leave individual
judgment in even greater perplexity, science—or to be precise, pseudoscience
(otherwise known as ideology)—was summoned to lend its pseudoauthority to the
policies of extermination. In thee late nineteenth century, in a wholesale
resort to the persuasive power of sheer metaphor, social Darwinists had taught
that nations in history, like species in evolution, were subject to the law of
survival of the fittest. As early as 1848, Friedrich Engels had distinguished
between “historical nations” (they included Germany, England, and France),
which were destined to flourish, and “ahistorical nations” (they included most of
the Balkan peoples), which were destined for history’s scrap heap. His interest
in these ideas is one illustration of the intellectual roots that the Marxist
theory of classes shared with racial theories of evolution. In Stalin’s Russia,
classes—some. doomed, some destined to rule—played the role that races played
in Hitler’s Germany.
Hitler’s Final Solution of the
Jewish “problem” was in his mind only one part of a vast scheme of ethnic
expulsion, resettlement, extermination, and racial engineering, in which he
planned to eradicate Poland and Ukraine, among other nations. For example, of
forty-five million inhabitants in Western Russia, according to a memo prepared
by the Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, thirty-one million were to be
expatriated or killed. “Drop a few bombs on their cities, and the job will be
done,’ Hitler suggested.
The extent to which Hitler, caught
up in the grandiose theories of racial pseudoscience, had transcended mere
nationalism is shown by his often-stated readiness to sacrifice even the German
people if they showed themselves cowardly or weak. No nationalist could have
said, as, Hitler did in 1941, when still at the height of his power, that if
the Germans were “no longer so strong and ready for sacrifice that they will
stake their own blood on their existence, they deserve to be annihilated by
another, stronger power.” In that event, he added, “I would not shed a tear for
the German people.” He made good his promise when, facing defeat in 1945, he
ordered the destruction of the entire infrastructure of German society,
including its industry, buildings, and food stocks. But then had he not warned
the world, as if in fulfillment of Conrad’s vision of Kurtz devouring all the
earth with all its mankind, that “we may perish, perhaps. But we shall take the
world with us. Muspili, universal conflagration”? Hitler’s
willingness to accept—and even to carry out—the destruction of Germany (and the
whole world into the bargain) was an early warning of the ease, later
illustrated on a much greater scale in the nuclear policy of “mutual assured
destruction” during the Cold War, with which those who adopt policies of
annihilation can overshoot the mark and wind up involving themselves in
suicidal plans. Unfortunately, once the scruples that inhibit the extermination
of millions of “others” have been discarded, there are very few left with which
to protect “ourselves.”
EXTERMINATION
AS
RADICAL EVIL
The new policies—of which the
extermination of human populations was the objective, states or whole societies
were the authors, the instruments of modem science were the means, and for
which the concepts of pseudoscience were the rationalization—prompted new
thinking about the nature of evil. They precipitated what might be called a
crisis in the meaning of evil, by which I mean a crisis in all of the human
capacities whereby, once evils have occurred, the world tries, as best it can,
to respond to them—to incorporate them into memory and the historical record,
to understand them, to take appropriate action against their recurrence. The
crimes of the twentieth century seemed to make a mockery of these powers. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt,
making use of a phrase of Immanuel Kant’s, named the new phenomenon “radical
evil.” According to Kant, ordinary evil occurred when the will, driven by some
fear or lured by some temptation away from the principals of equity and
justice, committed a selfish act. Radical evil occurred when the will, even
when unafraid or unswayed by temptation, somehow inspired itself to commit
evil. Whereas ordinary evil, being dependent on the happenstance of external
threats or temptations, was by its nature occasional, radical evil, being
ever-present in the will, might infect any or all of a person’s actions. If we
extend this idea from the individual to the state, we arrive at the distinction
between a state that commits a crime in violation of its own good laws and a
state whose laws ordain and enforce evil. Obviously, the latter is more
dangerous, for it has corrupted one of the main defenses we sometimes have
against evil—the state and its laws. This nullification of the human power of
response brings a new feeling of bafflement and helplessness. For outbreaks of
radical evil, Arendt explained, do not only destroy their victims, often in
stupefying numbers, but “dispossess us
of all power” (italics mine), for they “transcend the realm of human affairs,”
and “we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses.”
The problem for the most elementary of
responses, memory—a problem deliberately created by totalitarian regimes, which
have sought to erase their crimes from the historical record—was simply to
rescue the facts from their intended oblivion. Against these efforts were
eventually pitted heroic acts of witness—by an Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a
Nadezhda Mandelstam, a Primo Levi. The problem for feeling was the exhaustion
that empathy must encounter in the face of suffering on such a scale. And the
problem for thought was nothingness—the
sheer absence created by the extinction of communities. The problem for law, in
addition to the corruption of the perpetrators’ own laws, was the likely
destruction of the victims’ legal system, if one ever existed. What remained
were third parties who might seek to judge the wrongdoers by newly created
laws, as was done in the Nuremberg trials. (This problem was solved after the
fact for the Jews by the foundation of the state of Israel, which put Eichmann
on trial.)
The twentieth century’s policies of
extermination were radical in one more sense. “Radical” evil, as the Latin
origins of the word suggest, is evil that goes to the root. The root, though,
of what? The answer must be: that which extermination afflicts and destroys;
namely, life. The root of life, the spring from which life arises—as distinct
from life itself—is birth, which is the power that enables communities composed
of mortal beings to regenerate and preserve themselves in history. And it is
this power, precisely, that acts of extermination annul.
After witnessing the trial of
Eichmann, a “papier mache Mephistopheles” if there ever was one, Arendt backed
away from the phrase “radical evil.” “Only the good has depth and can be
radical,” she wrote in a letter to her friend Gershom Scholem. Evil, she now
believed, “is never ‘radical,’ only extreme.” It was this very shallowness, she
concluded. that produced the
frustration of the mind faced with the new crimes. “It is ‘thought-defying,’
she explained, “because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots,
and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is
nothing.” (This relationship between evil and nothingness, though it has been
most clearly manifested in history only in this century, was signposted in
Christian theology, in which, as St. Augustine maintains, being, taken as a
whole, is good, and its absence is called evil.)
In truth, though; “there is nothing”
in two senses where radical evil is concerned. First, there is nothing (perhaps
just “a little loose dirt”) in the souls of bureaucrats such as Eichmann, for
when the state of which they are a part goes berserk, they can, merely by
thoughtlessly doing their jobs (quitting would take some imagination),
participate in gargantuan evils. Second, as Arendt had pointed out earlier, the
erasure of a community from the face of the earth leaves a kind of “nothing”
behind; namely, the “hole of oblivion” in the human order where that community
had once existed. Perhaps banal evildoers, as Conrad knew, are capable of committing
evil that is radical (or “extreme,” if you prefer), as if the emptiness of
their minds and souls prefigures the emptiness in the world that they and the
policies they serve leave behind. What is “thought-defying” after the fact is,
appropriately, done thoughtlessly to begin with.
THE SECOND
AUGUST:
NUCLEAR
EXTERMINATION
In her reflections on radical
evil, Arendt was addressing policies of extermination that had been adopted before
the advent of nuclear weapons, but it is plain that what she had td say applies
in almost every particular to nuclear policies and nuclear danger. In other
words, although Hiroshima came as a great surprise and shock to the world, it
did not arrive without a historical context and historical precedents. On the
contrary, it was the supreme expression of forces that had been developing ever
since Conrad had Kurtz write, “Exterminate all the brutes.” Behind Hiroshima
stood not only the obvious precedent of area bombing but all of the twentieth
century’s policies of extermination. These amounted, by the end of the Second
World War, to what might be called a legacy of extermination, and in August of
45 the United States fell heir to it. The hallmarks of the legacy were all
present. The nuclear threat was a threat of extermination—extermination, this
time, not only of nations and peoples but of the human species. The root of
life that now would be severed would be the root of all human life, birth
itself, and would shut all future human beings out of existence. The evil was a
systemic evil: The system posing the threat, once the “balance of terror” was
established, went beyond any single state to incorporate the greatest powers of
the world, which, in the system of mutual assured destruction, became jointly
complicit in the project. The threat was supported by pseudoscience, spun this
time from game theory and other forms of futurology manufactured in think tanks
and academic institutions that subserved power. Nuclear “strategy”—regarded by
many as a contradiction in terms—became the very epicenter of banality. Nuclear
arms increased the capacity of human beings to destroy one another to its
absolute limit, beyond which any further improvements would merely be “overkill.”
The arsenals threatened radical evil, in the fullest and most exact sense of
that term: they brought radical evil to perfection. The powers of human
response to evil would be entirely destroyed by the evil deed itself. Policies
of extermination again spilled over into suicidal policies. The “coldest
reason” again was invoked to rationalize genocide. The conscience of the
individual was again thrown into crisis by the policies of the state.
The deeds in question again were, as
Arendt had said, “thought-defying.” The “nothingness” that now awaited was
absolute, the crisis of meaning full-blown. The atomic bomb that burst over
Hiroshima burned for a moment as bright as the sun, but at its heart was a
darkness that was eternal. The twentieth century had, so to speak, arrived at
the heart of the heart of darkness.
The advent of the nuclear age,
however, brought with it another major change in ‘the development of the
century’s policies of extermination. At a stroke, it removed them from their
totalitarian residence and planted them at the core of liberal civilization,
which is to say at the core of the national security policy of the powerful
democratic nation about to assume leadership of the non-Communist world—the
United States. The new location brought with it a new moral and practical
riddle of the first order. Instruments of the most radical evil imaginable—the
extinction of the human species—had appeared, but they were first placed in the
hands of a liberal republic. The fact that, more or less by an accident of
history, the bomb was born in New Mexico, U.S.A., in 1945, rather than, say,
Heidelberg, Germany, in 1944 (no sheer impossibility of science or history
rules out our imagining the latter possibility), lent it a triple warrant of
virtue that it otherwise would have lacked.
In the first place, the bomb gained
luster from its new residence. Without becoming jingoistic about the United
States or overlooking the dark passages in its history, including slavery and
the near-extinction of Native Americans, it must be said that the United States
was no Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. History had in a sense played a trick
on the world, as it so often does. If history had been logical, it would have
given the bomb to Hitler, whose policies (including his suicidal inclinations)
so clearly pointed in the direction of extermination on the new scale. It’s
easy to imagine what civilized people would have said if Hitler had been the
first to use nuclear weapons—perhaps against Moscow or London. They very likely
would have said that nuclear war was a natural culmination of Vernichtungskrieg and an ideology that
sanctioned the extermination of peoples, and that with nuclear weapons Hitler
was enabled to do quickly and efficiently what he had already been doing slowly
and clumsily with gas chambers. The United States, on the other hand, had shown
no recent inclination for policies of extermination, as was demonstrated
shortly by its mild, liberal, extremely successful occupation policies in
Germany and Japan. In the second place, the bomb arrived just in time to hurry
along the end of the most destructive war in history. It made its appearance as
a war-ending, war-winning device. The totalitarian and the liberal regimes had
arrived at their policies of extermination along very different historical
paths. Whereas Hitler and Stalin destroyed peoples, classes, and cities for
reasons that even today defy rational explanation, the United States destroyed
Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the perfectly clear and, comprehensible purposes of
ending the war quickly and getting the upper hand over the Soviet Union in the
embryonic Cold War. (To point this out is not to justify these acts; it is only
to observe that the goals of policy were conventional and rational.) In the
third place, the almost immediate outbreak of the Cold War, with the
totalitarian Soviet Union created a justification for continuing to build
nuclear arsenals, lending the bomb still another warrant of virtue. It assumed
the role of guardian of the free world.
To this triple validation of
policies of nuclear extermination, accorded by the accident of timing and
place, a fourth, of later origin, must be added. Although it was true that with
the growth of the arsenals the depth and range of terror were soon increased to
their earthly maximum, it also happened that none was ever used after Nagasaki.
Instead, they were held suspended, like the sword of Damocles cited by
President John Kennedy, over a completely jeopardized yet undevastated world.
It was as if, in the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War, the destruction and mass
killing of the entire first half of the twentieth century had been distilled
into a poison of fantastic potency but then this poison, instead of being
administered to a doomed world, had been held in reserve, being employed only
to produce terror. To the question whether Western Civilization had put behind
it the legacy of extermination that it had been developing for half a century,
the nuclear policymakers of the, Cold War in effect gave an equivocal answer.
Their answer was, No, for we have plans for extermination that beggar Hitler’s
and Stalin’s, but our sincere wish is never to be provoked into actually
committing the deed. Certainly, the legacy of extermination had not been
renounced. Rather, it had been hugely developed and assigned a more important
role in world affairs than ever before. Now the world’s greatest power as well
as its adversary relied upon it for basic security. On the other hand, the very
fearsomeness of the new threat was invoked to prevent its being carried out.
And not only did the bomb prevent its own nuclear war, the theorists said; it
prevented the worst of the conventional wars: no conventional third world war
broke out. In the meantime, however, an estimated 40 million people, most of
them civilians, were killed in local wars—a fact suggesting that major war was
as much displaced as deterred.
Whether a third world war was headed
off because of nuclear deterrence or for some other reason is a question not
easily resolved. It is a historical fact, however, that in the minds of most
policymakers as well as millions of citizens nuclear deterrence worked. The
bomb, already seen as a war-winner and a freedom-defender, now was granted the
additional title of peacemaker. (The MX missile was given this very name, and
the Strategic Air Command adopted the motto “Peace Is Our Profession.”) Here
was a bargain with the devil to make Faust green with envy. Victory, freedom,
peace: was there anything else for which the world might petition an openhanded
Lucifer?
And yet none of these benefits
altered in the slightest particular the irreducible facts of what nuclear
weapons were, what they could do, and what they were meant to do “if deterrence
failed.” One bomb of the appropriate megatonnage would still obliterate any
city; ten bombs, ten cities. Hitler had killed an estimated 6 million Jews;
Stalin had sent an estimated 20 million of his fellow Soviet citizens to their
deaths. A few dozen well-placed nuclear bombs could outdo these totals by an
order of magnitude. But at the height of the Cold War, there were not a few
dozen nuclear bombs; there were almost 70,000, with thousands poised on
hair-trigger alert. A policy of extermination did not cease being that because
the goals it supported were laudable. Described soberly and without the
slightest hyperbole, it was a policy of retaliatory genocide.
For most people most of the time,
these perils remained all but unimaginable. But every now and then the reality
of the policy was borne in on someone. That happened, for instance, to Robert
McNamara shortly after he became secretary of defense in 1961, when, he
received a briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan at the
headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. In the event of a Soviet
conventional attack on Europe—or merely the plausible likelihood of such an
attack—the United States’ Plan 1-A, which was its only true option for major
nuclear war, McNamara learned, was to annihilate every Communist country from
Poland to China. There was no operational means, he further learned, by which,
if the president desired, he could spare one or more of these countries.
Albania, then engaged in bitter polemics with Moscow, was to be obliterated
merely because a Soviet radar facility was stationed on its soil. The plan was
for obligatory multiple acts of genocide. In The Wizards of Armageddon, Fred Kaplan reports that “McNamara was
horrified.” He set about trying to create other options. Today McNamara favors
the abolition of nuclear weapons because, in his carefully chosen words, they
threaten “the destruction of nations.”
Hiroshima, in sum, had created a
gulf between ends and means. Never had evil been more radical; never had the
good that was hoped from it been greater. The means were an evil that exceeded
the capacity of the human being to imagine them; the ends were all the
splendors of liberal civilization and peace.
Thus, through the invention,
production and deployment of nuclear arsenals, was the tradition of
extermination glimpsed in prospect by Conrad in colonized Africa, pioneered and
developed under totalitarian government and in total war, conjoined to the
liberal tradition that had been knocked off course at the beginning of the real
twentieth century by the First World War. In a political as well as a moral
sense, however, the union was tentative. During the Cold War years, the Western
nuclear powers (the United States, England, and France) did indeed learn the
art of Living with Nuclear Weapons, in the title of the Harvard-sponsored
book of 1983, but they had not taken the marriage vows. Reliance on nuclear
arms was widely considered an extraordinary, provisional response to an
extraordinary, provisional emergency: the threat, as many people in the West
believed, to the freedom of the entire world by the Soviet Union, which, of
course, soon developed nuclear arsenals of its own.
The Soviet threat shaped the West’s
embrace of nuclear terror in two fundamental ways. First, it was placed in the
moral scales opposite the nuclear threat, rendering the latter acceptable. The
mere physical existence of humankind, many people believed, was worth risking
for the sake of its moral and spiritual existence, represented by the survival
of freedom. Second, most people were persuaded that the secretive nature of the
Soviet regime ruled out effective inspection of radical nuclear-arms-control
agreements, thus making full nuclear disarmament impossible. In 1946, when the
United States put forward the Baruch Plan, which proposed the abolition of nuclear
arms, the Soviet Union, now working at full tilt to develop its own bomb,
turned it down. Historians still argue whether it was reasonable for the United
States, already in possession of the bomb, to expect the Soviet Union, which
did not yet possess the bomb, to close down its nuclear program as part of a
global agreement to abolish nuclear weapons. However that may be, there is no
doubt that the Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan played an important role in
the United States’ understanding of its own moral and historical responsibility
for the nuclear arms race that followed. The United States, Americans believed
from 1946 on, had proved itself ready to eliminate nuclear weapons, but the
Soviet Union stood in the way. The Soviet threat, in American eyes, thus both
justified nuclear arms and placed an insuperable practical obstacle in the way
of their abolition. As long as this appeared to be the case, the United States
could regard itself as a reluctant threatener of nuclear destruction, merely
forced into this unwelcome role by the character of the regimes it felt obliged
to oppose.
THE FUTURE
OF EXTERMINATION:
THE THIRD AND
THE FOURTH AUGUSTS
The third of our Augusts, in
which the failed coup in Moscow brought on the collapse of the Soviet Union, dissolved
this equation. The age of totalitarianism, which had opened in October of 1917,
was over. The balancing factor in the moral equation that for almost fifty
years had justified nuclear arsenals had fallen away. Would total war survive
the loss of its linguistic and historical brother? Could the one exist without
the good of the other? Should nuclear weapons survive the end of the “short
twentieth century,” not to speak of the “end of history”? And if they did, had
the century (the “real” one) or history really “ended”? This question, which
has hung over the decade between the end of the proposed short twentieth
century and its calendrical end, has acquired even greater urgency as we move
into the next century and millennium.
At the beginning of this essay, I
recalled the old Greek idea that because the end of a story can force us to
rewrite its earlier chapters, we cannot know what the story is until it is
over. No single narrative can or should attempt to encompass the history of an
epoch, which contains a limitless variety of entwined tales; yet, as the
concept of a real twentieth century suggests, the very choice of the dates that
mark off one era from another means that certain stories lay special claim to
our attention. It’s already clear that it will be impossible to write the
political history of the twentieth century without reference to the
many-chaptered story of the century’s policies of extermination, some of whose
main chapter headings will surely be the three Augusts we have mentioned. The
final shape of that story, however, will not be known until the arrival of that
future date—some future August day, perhaps—on which the ultimate fortunes of
the arms that were born in 1945 are decided. Interpretations of the real
twentieth century now require not so much smarter interpreters as the world’s
decision whether, in the wake of the Cold War, it will reject nuclear weapons
or once again embrace them.
Let us, then, perform a thought
experiment in which we try to imagine how the twentieth century will appear in
retrospect, in light of two possible next chapters of the nuclear story. In the
first, we will imagine that the next chapter is the last—that the world decides
to eliminate nuclear weapons. In the second, we will imagine that the Cold War
legacy of nuclear arms has been accepted and has led to their proliferation.
Our glance, in the two cases, is not chiefly forward, the world that lies
ahead, but backward upon the century that has just ended.
In the event that abolition is
embraced, we will find, I suggest, that what the American government said and
the American public believed from 1946, when the Soviet Union rejected the
Baruch Plan, until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, was essentially true:
that the policymakers were as dismayed by nuclear danger as ordinary people
were; that in their minds the reason for enduring the risk of human extinction
really had been the threat to freedom around the world posed by the Soviet
Union; that the government would indeed have preferred to abolish nuclear
weapons in 1946 but had been prevented by the Soviet Union; and that this was
truly why, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States seized the
opportunity to lead the world to nuclear abolition. We will, further, take
seriously the often-repeated argument that “arms control was an invaluable
temporary holding action for reducing nuclear danger until political conditions
were ripe for full nuclear disarmament. We will take even more seriously the
arguments of those who held that it was not nuclear arms that fueled the
political differences of the Cold War but the political differences of the Cold
War that fueled the nuclear-arms race, and who therefore argued against arms
control. And then we will show how, precisely because the anti-Communism of the
time had been authentic, Communism’s end naturally opened the way to abolition
of the arms that had protected us against Communism. We will be unsurprised to
record that many of the Cold War’s fiercest hawks had become abolitionists And
we will note with satisfaction how the example of these former hawks was
emulated by hawks in other nations, including India, Pakistan, and Israel, who
therefore agreed to relinquish their countries’ nuclear weapons as part of the
general settlement.
Even the evolution of high nuclear
strategy, historians may go on to relate, will then seem to have been a slow
education in the realities of the nuclear age, especially after the shock of
the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which left such a deep impression of the horror
bf nuclear war in the minds of later abolitionists, such as Robert McNamara. It
will be the gratifying task of analysts to record how, even on the political
right, the most militant believers in armed force slowly came around to an
understanding that, in the words of Ronald Reagan, the most conservative
president of the era, “nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,”
and they will trace the path from that understanding to his discussion of
nuclear abolition at the Reykjavik summit meeting of 1986 with the Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Paralleling this slow evolution in
thought, we will see, was the equally slow development in practice of the
so-called tradition of nonuse, which gradually taught statesmen that even when they
possessed a nuclear monopoly they could extract no military or political
benefit from it and so did not use nuclear weapons after Nagasaki. In this
story, acts of nuclear restraint—by the United States in Vietnam, by the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan, by China in its border war with Vietnam in 1979—will have
the place that battles have in bloodier narratives. The Cold War thus will be
partially redeemed in our eyes as a vast laboratory in which, at the price of a
few hair-raising close calls, the world learned through patient reflection and
oblique experience that nuclear weapons were as futile as they were abhorrent
and that they could and should be eliminated.
The lessons will go deeper still.
When the last nuclear plutonium pit has been liquidated (or, more likely,
adulterated and buried away in some deep cavern), we will see that the ground
for nuclear disarmament had been prepared, on the one hand, by the peace
movement in the United States, and, on the other, by the movement against
Soviet power by dissidents in the Soviet empire (two movements that at the time
failed, on the whole, to grasp the common drift of their activity). The
astounding success of the resistance movement in the East will emerge as the
first stage in a global movement against not only Soviet terror but all
terror—against not only totalitarianism but its close relative, total war—whose
last stage will be the elimination of nuclear arms, thereby truly ending the
spiral of violence that began in 1914.
The rise and fall of totalitarianism
from start to finish will wear an altered aspect. It will turn out to have been
a ghastly, protracted detour from the progress (the word itself might even gain
new credit) and enlightenment offered by liberal civilization, which, although
capsized in 1914 by the First World War, will have righted itself in 1991,
bringing on an era of prosperity and peace. Then liberal civilization itself,
freed of its complicity in the policies of extermination it adopted in 1945,
will rest at last on a sure foundation. The political history of the twentieth
century will thus be the story not only of the rise of policies of
extermination in all their variety but also of the human recoil against them,
leading, first, to the renewed rejection of totalitarianism and embrace of
democracy in the 1990s and then, in the years following, to the abolition of
nuclear weapons along with other weapons of mass destruction.
In the second thought experiment—in
which we suppose. that the nuclear powers have renewed their embrace of their
nuclear arsenals in the post-Cold War period, setting the example for several
other powers, and so installing nuclear weapons as a deep—and many-rooted
structural feature of life in the twenty-first century—the political and
military history of the twentieth century will have to be written very
differently. To begin with, we will not be able to take so seriously the West’s
stated justifications for building nuclear arsenals. How will we continue to
believe that the democratic nations endured the risk of human annihilation for
the sake of human freedom when, with the threat to freedom gone, the threat of
annihilation is preserved? How will we continue to say that the totalitarianism
of the Soviet Union was the great obstacle to full disarmament when, with the
Soviet Union collapsed and Russia (under Gorbachev) inviting full inspection
and proposing full disarmament, the United States refused? Having discovered
that the end of Communism left our will to possess nuclear arms intact, the old
claim that in the Cold War we chose to risk being “dead” rather than going
“Red” will ring hollow. The entire fifty-year confrontation between
totalitarianism and democracy will shrink in importance as an explanatory
factor. Our attention will be drawn instead to the ease with which the United
States shifted its nuclear planning in 1945 from Germany to Japan, and then
from Japan to the Soviet Union, and we will see this flexibility as a precedent
for the much more drastic and shocking shift of targeting at the end of the Cold
War from the Soviet Union to . . . well, what? A few feeble “rogue” states, the
mere possibility that Russia will again become an enemy of the United States?
We’ll hardly be surprised to see
that several nations outside the original nuclear “club” have followed the
“nuclear paradigm.” As for arms control, it will be understood as just one of
the means by which public anxiety about the nuclear danger was put to sleep.
Our policy of non-proliferation will seem to have been half-hearted, since it
will have been shown that we preferred to permit the whole world to acquire
nuclear arms than to give up our own.
The process of education that
occurred during the Cold War will seem to be the opposite of what it would have
seemed had we abolished nuclear weapons: one not of deepening understanding of
the horror and futility of the arsenals but of simply getting used to them in
preparation for accepting them fully and without reservation as a normal
instrument of national policy, of learning to “stop worrying and love the
bomb,” in the words of the subtitle to the movie Dr. Strangelove, which will have lost their ironic connotations.
A graver suspicion will be
confirmed: that the United States and its nuclear allies did not build. nuclear
weapons chiefly in order to face extraordinary danger, whether from Germany,
Japan, or the Soviet Union, but for more deep-seated, unarticulated reasons
growing out of its own, freely chosen conceptions of national security. Nuclear
arsenals will seem to have been less a response to any particular external
threat; totalitarian or otherwise, than an intrinsic element of the dominant
liberal civilization itself—an evil that first grew and still grows from within
that civilization rather than being imposed from without. And then we will have
to remember that the seminal event of the real twentieth century, the First
World War, sprang in all its pointless slaughter and destructive fury from the
midst of that same liberal civilization, and we will have to ask what it is in
the makeup of liberalism that pushes it again and again, even at the moment of
its greatest triumphs, into an abyss of its own making.
Our understanding of the historical
place of totalitarianism will likewise change. Instead of seeming a protracted
bloody hiatus between the eclipse of liberal civilization of 1914 and its
restoration in 1991, totalitarianism will appear to have been a harsh and
effective tutor to liberalism, which was its apt pupil. The degree of moral
separation from the tradition of extermination that was maintained during the
Cold War will have disappeared. If we look at nuclear arms as a lethal virus
that spreads by contagion around the world, then totalitarianism in this
picture of I events becomes a sort of filthy syringe with which the dominant liberal
civilization managed to inject the illness into its bloodstream, where it
remained even after, in 1991, the syringe was thrown away. Liberalism will
itself have unequivocally embraced extermination.
At stake is the very
character of the victorious civilization that in the twentieth century buried
its two greatest totalitarian antagonists and now bids to set the tone and
direction of international life in the century ahead. Will it shake off the
twentieth century’s legacy of terror or, by embracing nuclear weapons even in
the absence of totalitarian threat, incorporate that legacy into itself? Will
we find that protecting civilization is unimaginable without threatening
extermination? If so, a critical watershed will have been crossed, and we will
have passed, by default, from a period in which an extraordinary justification,
such as the Soviet threat, seemed needed to justify the extraordinary peril of
nuclear arms to a period in which the quotidian fears, jealousies, ambitions,
and hatreds that are always with us are found to be justification enough. At
that moment, a nuclear arsenal will cease to be felt as Conrad’s “dishonoring
necessity” and become a fully legitimized voluntary component of the state: a
permanent subbasement, or catacomb, on which the fairer upper floors of
civilization—the freedom, the democracy, the prosperity—rest: But if this
happens, can liberalism itself survive, or will it in the long run find itself
sucked, as in 1914, into a vortex of destruction that it cannot stop?
Nuclear arsenals do not exist in isolation from the rest of politics, and no single policy, whether regarding these arms or anything else, can decide the character of the century that is about to begin. Nor will a decision to abolish nuclear weapons even put an end to the legacy of extermination that disfigured the century now ending. The deeds of Pol Pot in Cambodia and of the former Hutu government in Rwanda have made it clear that genocide remains attractive and achievable for many governments in many parts of the world. No nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction are needed to bring it off; Kalashnikovs, or even machetes or hoes, will do. What seems clear, however, is that if the triumphantly restored liberal order of the 1990s cannot renounce the threat of extermination of peoples as a condition for its own survival, then it will forfeit any chance that it can successfully oppose a resurgence of barbarism anywhere else in the twenty-first century. We will be unable to say that any year—whether 1991 or 2000 or 2050 has undone 1914 until we have also undone 1945. More than any other decision before us, this one will decide who we are, who we are to be, and who, when the last line of the story of the real twentieth century is truly written, we will have been.
Jonathan Schell teaches at
Wesleyan University as well as New School University and is the Harold Willens
Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. A new edition of his Fate of the Earth will be published by Stanford University
Press in February.
Harper’s
Magazine, January 2000, pages 41-56