Washington’s Cult of the Bomb

The first of the bombs used against Japan, the one that flattened Hiroshima, produced a blast equivalent to about 15,000 tons of TNT and killed tens of thousands of innocent people in minutes. Fast-forward to the ‘70s: the United States’ B83 bomb “is by far the most destructive weapon in the US nuclear arsenal,” capable of producing an explosion about 80 times stronger than the one used against Hiroshima. And we have seen nuclear weapons even more fathomlessly destructive: the Soviet Union produced a weapon, called Tsar Bomba, whose “detonation was astronomically powerful—over 1,570 times more powerful, in fact, than the combined two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Today’s nuclear bombs do not operate the way that the “fat man” bombs of WW2 did, but use bombs like those as triggering devices to set off much larger explosions. It’s important for us to understand that a nuclear exchange today could well end human civilization. It could even end human life altogether. Given the power of today’s nuclear weapons and the capacity to compound that power using modern delivery systems, we are in totally uncharted territory. Anyone who says that the destruction could be controlled or hemmed in is lying: as we will discuss, even much smaller and less sophisticated weapons consistently produced explosions that are far larger than expected. The nuclear warheads of our time belong in a different category conceptually from those the U.S. government used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Today’s bombs are qualitatively different in their destructive power.

Among the most remarkable, if little-known, defining features of American nuclear testing has been the consistent inability of supposed experts to accurately predict the power or consequences, in either the short or long term, of the explosions. In the short term, the blasts were consistently larger and more damaging than expected, with larger radiuses, more fallout, and higher TNT equivalents. In the long term, so-called experts have consistently (and I think, given the surrounding facts, quite intentionally) under-stated and under-counted the health consequences associated with the nuclear fallout associated with the explosions. From where I sit, it seems nuclear weapons have now embodied a quasi-religious or cultic death fetish, and I think this has seeped into politics and ideology in a number of ways. This stands to reason. With God long dead, with politics uglier and more nihilistic by the day, billionaires more delusional by the second, it is easy to understand the sadistic tendency to crank your neck and watch the crash. For a person like Trump – and to be sure, many American presidents fall into the same category; indeed an American president is the only one to have committed those unthinkable atrocities – the only thing left is abstract power, pure, destructive power, loosed from any rational thought or humane impulse. I think this kind of death-drive is a very real and tangible feature of our culture in America today.

Everyone is scared of Trump with the nuclear button, as they well should be, but few among our elite chattering classes care to tell you the whole truth. All of Washington, across both parties, has been thoroughly invested in aestheticizing and fetishizing nuclear weapons for decades. It has been an active and explicit goal of the U.S. government to help prosecute and manage this campaign. Billions of dollars have gone to these efforts, through cultural and museum practices, through curatorial choices and “educational” materials for children on just how darn cool the Manhattan Project was. I understand that you’re not supposed to discuss this in the West. Look, we can enjoy Christopher Nolan movies, and we can assume “our leaders” mean well, but we are all actively fetishizing nuclear weapons, and thus fascinating over the extinction of humanity. I can recall some several years back, a friend of mine among the Pueblo peoples sent me a presser from the Los Alamos Study Group, which was very much appreciated at the time and remains so. The Group’s director, Greg Mello, had spoken with real clarity on this, our culture’s nuclear death fetish, in a response to the dedication of an incredibly vulgar and tone-deaf, nearly full-sized recreation of the tower used in the Trinity test:

This exhibit fetishizes utter destruction. Lifting up the Trinity “Gadget,” the first plutonium bomb, is visually akin to a nuclear Black Mass. It celebrates the inversion of human values, which was the principal moral and political inheritance of the Manhattan Project. It celebrates a death cult.

I couldn’t say it any better than Mello. The way we have approached this topic points to a cultural sickness or moral atrophy, and that naturally leads to these attitudes we see amongst the powerful. They are downright cavalier on the topic, which evinces either their ignorance or their insanity. As a middle-aged American, I have heard no shortage of intelligence-insulting nonsense from politicians of both parties, but there has never been anything quite like the idea of a “tactical” nuclear weapon. If you know anything about how these weapons work in real life, there is no way to sustain this warped notion. The difference between “strategic” and “tactical” nuclear weapons would break down almost immediately in real life, that is, assuming that it is even a real distinction in theory. Given the power of today’s nuclear weapons, it makes no practical sense to talk to this and can only serve to expose us to more danger.

The fiction that there are any low-yield nuclear weapons only encourages miscalculations and exchanges. Annie Jacobsen’s book contains a good discussion of how the structure of the system favors mistakes that could lead to the firing of a nuclear weapon. This is the height of today’s rational irrationality in Adorno/Horkheimer’s terms, the absolutely batty idea that we could start lobbing “low-yield” nukes at each other as a tactical option. The reality is that these “tactical” weapons are capable of producing blasts well in excess of the fat man style bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today’s technologies permit dial-a-yield functionality, meaning you can decide how many innocent people you want to kill like you’re playing a video game. Some of today’s variable yield “tactical” bombs can give you several times a Hiroshima explosion. But I guess we just expect that they’ll dial the tactical ones back to just one Hiroshima each use. Or something? Submarines are towing these weapons around day and night, all the time (and that’s to say nothing of the strategic big guns). Testing them was a very bad idea in the ‘50s, and it is an even more ill-fated idea today. Everyone, everywhere, of any political spectrum or style should speak with one voice on the question of nuclear weapons. It is not a question at all. It can’t be on the table in any way, whether it be testing or use in war.

American politicians and public officials of both parties have been virtually silent on the question of nuclear weapons for decades on end, and that is intentional and carefully tended to by staff; when they’re not silent, even the “liberal” ones tend to use their words in support of nuclear build-up and escalatory language in the direction of Washington’s major adversaries. At least prior to Trump, the very few congressional voices for peace and a more sane, diplomatic foreign policy have been smeared as unserious and insufficiently committed to national security. That is, our politics is completely lost on this issue and all of its major institutional incentive structures point the country’s leaders in exactly the wrong direction. My own professional experiences confirm that many people on the Hill and in Beltway policy circles still harbor deep misunderstandings and false beliefs about the power of nuclear weapons in practical, real-world terms; the probabilities around their own survival; the long-term global climatic and temperature consequences of any exchange; the possibility of civilizational collapse; the number of people who will starve, etc. Thus the nuclear cult is not even conservative in any valid sense of that, charitably, trying to carry on with practices that have worked in the past. It is rather the insane collective death worship that made the Soviets produce the horror of the Tsar Bomba, and that compelled us to — like children torturing a bug or blowing things up for no reason — torment the people of the South Pacific with successive tests during Operation Castle. We have not reckoned with this as an American people and society, and that is to our shame. There are so many of these stories that need to be told. I don’t know where to start, but it’s a lot worse than I thought before I took a look.

If we had responsible and scientifically literate leaders (and this really is both parties in the U.S.), we would approach this differently domestically and in diplomatic terms. With respect to our nuclear obligations abroad, Trump is turning up the volume on longstanding U.S. practices of doing whatever the hell we want and readily disregarding agreed-to treaty terms. As an aside, the reason I am so careful to point out the duplicity and shamelessness of the British is because our ruling class gets its whole style of “diplomacy” from this skullduggery. And I don’t think it’s a very good or effective way to be a global citizen – and I know I’m very naive and silly to think Americans should care. But as good and diligent students of history, as careful people, we know that what goes up must come down. And so global citizenship remains important, as it has been through the ages.

But Donald Trump insists upon unilateral prerogative. Sound familiar? We are having the same debate we were having during the unfortunate George W. Bush era; there are two different registers of unilateral power working here I think, and they are related but distinct. We have been having a longstanding conversation about unilateral power as executive power within the U.S. government; and about unilateral power in terms of the U.S. making decisions at the planetary scale while accepting no input from anyone else. So Trump only makes it explicit again, though I am not downplaying the danger. From the evidence of his public remarks, Trump is attracted to the topic of nuclear weapons and nuclear wars. Americans like them, too, whether admitting it or not. But as bad as war is, if we must continue to do it, we have to stay here and go no further.

To my mind, nothing in international law is more clear than that any use of a nuclear weapon is illegal, impermissible, and a war crime. Nuclear blasts necessarily kill innocent civilians and needlessly incapacitate medical infrastructure – they literally vaporize everything in a radius that could today go out for miles. International courts like the ICJ have provided totally incoherent and substantively incorrect guidance on this precisely because they do not understand the factual situation, which has nothing to do with the law. (This is why I’ve always been with Richard Posner on the importance of facts in cases. We could avoid most of our strange and unnecessary legal curiosities with more attention to and understanding of what is actually happening, but I’ll save that rant.) The point is that it is impossible, here in the world of flesh and blood, to use a nuclear weapon and yet provide what international law requires for protection of civilian lives, children, etc. It is not possible and it never was, even in 1945. As we’ve discussed, many of the United States’ most renowned military men (including Dwight Eisenhower) strongly opposed the use of nuclear weapons as dishonorable in their bringing civilians into the mess unnecessarily and wantonly. It was the political system that first required and demanded the bomb. The most honorable generals and admirals looked on nuclear weapons with horror and disgust, as they would child-killers. We don’t have much of that kind of quaint ethical sensibility today, at least not in the political class (to be sure, it remains widespread amongst regular people.

What very few today recognize is that these cultural features come only at the end of a collapsing spiral of cultural differentiation and meaning. The billionaires who believe they will be able to escape into space may be surprised by how quickly a nuclear exchange destroys even the most basic infrastructures, to say nothing of high tech. Nothing will be far enough underground, nowhere close. As in other ways, today’s global ideologies are alike in their most important and fundamental features. And in the discourse about state capitalism, we can see how they are all converging. It is remarkable to watch how MAGA state capitalism and Communist Party state capitalism are converging before our eyes; the global ideal is this marriage of the state and capital, and it is now more openly acknowledged that the state not only is a capitalist, but must be one. This is the conversation today amongst both government officials and the billionaires of our country: how can the U.S. government not be in the game when the Chinese are starting new investment funds and participating in the market in this very active and intentional way in the direction of the Party’s ends?

Once the bombs stop flying, if anyone is alive, they will be living in a nightmare, no matter where they are in the world. Global temperatures will plummet as the soot and dust spread and block the sunlight. Many crops could yield one-tenth of what they had before. There will be chaos, like even those in the most war-torn parts of the world can’t imagine, because there will be no plausible hope for aid, as even the “richest” people fight and kill to survive. Our leaders just plain aren’t being serious in the way they talk about nuclear weapons. Given our track record on predictions around blast yield and overall harm (for example, vastly underestimating after-the-fact harm from medical issues associated with exposure to radiation), it is highly likely that even our current worst-case scenarios underestimate the harms from a nuclear war. The good news is that all countries and all human beings share in this risk equally, whether they realize it or not. The old term says the truth: mutually-assured destruction. Every country should challenge each other to reduce their nuclear arms. We have done this. There are fewer today than during the height of the Cold War. This competition would be a bonanza for humanity and its long-term prospects. Show us how responsible you can be.

We have to stress the failure of our predictive power because this is the thing the technocratic class hangs its hat on, and I think this returns us again to the dialectic of enlightenment. There is some kind of epistemic failure or contradiction here obviously, because scientific-bureaucratic rationality has not been able to accurately represent this phenomenon. And it can’t contain it. As mentioned above, it is the political that’s driving nuclear death-worship. To this point, I don’t think a factual reminder is enough for everyone, not if their nuclear death religion is the driver. And that is still most national-level politicians in our country; these folks are supposed to be in the reasonable center of something. That’s the depth of the rot in our political language. We all participate in it. The work of Jean Baudrillard speaks directly to this moment:

The scandal is that experts have calculated that a state of emergency declared on the basis of a prediction of seismic activity would trigger off a panic whose consequences would be more disastrous than the catastrophe itself. Here again we are fully in the midst of derision: in the absence of a real catastrophe it is quite possible to trigger one off by simulation, equivalent to the former, and which can be substituted for it. One wonders if this is not what fuels the fantasies of the “experts” – which is exactly the case within the nuclear domain: isn’t every system of prevention and deterrence a virtual locus of catastrophe? Designed to thwart catastrophe, it materializes all of its consequences in the immediate present. Since we cannot count on chance to bring about a catastrophe, we must find an equivalent programmed into the defense system.

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