CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Abstract

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, by John Mueller. Oxford University Press, 2009. 336 pages, $27.95.

Les armes nucléaires: Mythes et réalités [Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Realities], by Georges Le Guelte. Actes Sud, 2009. 390 pages, [euro]25.

Keywords:

• Nuclear weapons
• United States
• Soviet Union
• critical thinking
• theory

Notes

1. On this idea, see Lee Clarke, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in Popular Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 9–16.

2. The quote is from Bruno Tertrais, “Correspondence: Nuclear Myth-Busting,” Nonproliferation Review 16 (July 2009), p. 131.

3. We might use the concept of epistemic community here as defined by Peter Haas, as John Mueller and Georges Le Guelte would probably consider themselves as part of “a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue area.” (Emphasis my own.) See Peter Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46 (Winter 1992), p. 3. In spite of Michel Foucault's popularity among international relations theorists, one should note that his notion of episteme cannot be used because it is in the study of epistemic communities without important changes. Indeed, the concept was forged by Foucault in his Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things] (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), and abandoned in the 1970s. Moreover, it was associated with a much broader cultural background, namely the Western culture, and not with any particular group of experts or with a specific will to interfere in politics. When he came back to it in an interview in 1977, Foucault insisted on the fact that it was a discursive device that allows one to distinguish not what is true from what is false, but what pretends to be scientific from what is not within a field of scientificity. In other words, it is only a discursive device that is not related to a specific field of expertise or to a specific political goal. See Michel Foucault (interview with Dominique Colas, Alain Grosrichard, Guy Le Gaufey, Jocelyne Lévy, Gerard Miller, Judith Miller, Jacques-Alain Miller, Catherine Millot, and Gérard Wajeman), “Le jeu de Michel Foucault” [“Michel Foucault's Game”] Ornicar? Bulletin périodique du champ freudien [Ornicar? Periodical Bulletin of the Freudian Field], July 10, 1977.

4. Another concept built by Foucault might be relevant: that of “rarefaction principle,” which delineates the authorized discourses in one field by delegitimizing most of the others a priori. See Michel Foucault, “L'ordre du discours” [“The Discourse on Language”], reprinted as an appendix to Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1971). In this respect, critical thinkers change the rarefaction principles over time. In international relations theory, Emanuel Adler's framework of “communities of practice,” of which epistemic communities are a specific kind, allows an understanding of them as evolving thanks to a theory of learning contrary to more structural approaches. See Emanuel Adler, “Communities of Practice in International Relations,” in Communitarian International Relations: Epistemological Foundations of International Relations (London: Routledge, 2005).

5. Adler recognizes that most communities of practice share a common goal. Adler, “Communities of Practice,” p. 22.

6. Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993).

7. John Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World,” International Security 13 (Fall 1988), pp. 55–79.

8. The others are Thérèse Delpech, L'héritage nucléaire [The Nuclear Legacy] (Brussels: Complexe, 1997); Georges Le Guelte, Histoire de la menace nucléaire [The History of the Nuclear Threat] (Paris: Hachette, 1997); and Bruno Tertrais, Le marché noir de la bombe. Enquête sur la prolifération nucléaire [The Black Market of the Bomb: An Investigation in Nuclear Proliferation] (Paris: Buchet Chastel, 2009).

9. Indeed, Michel Rocard, who wrote the foreword of Le Guelte's book, stated this earlier in his introduction to the French version of the report of the Canberra Commission on the elimination of nuclear weapons, in which he participated: Éliminer les armes nucléaires [Eliminating Nuclear Weapons] (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997), pp. 8, 11. In the recent opinion piece he published in Le Monde with three other high-level French officials, wishing that France would “resolutely declare its commitment towards the success of [the] disarmament process and its resolve to act consequently regarding its own capability when the time comes,” the words are more cautious: nuclear deterrence “played a role in the limitation of armed conflicts during the Cold War.” See Alain Juppé, Bernard Norlain, Alain Richard, and Michel Rocard, “Pour un désarmement nucléaire mondial, seule réponse à la proliferation anarchique” [“For a World Nuclear Disarmament, the Only Answer to Anarchical Proliferation”], Le Monde, October 15, 2009. Similarly, a lieutenant-commander attending the Joint Service Defence College suggested renouncing nuclear deterrence while maintaining that it was a guarantee of “national independence,” though he did not mention the guarantee of peace. Luc Savoyant, “Renoncer à la dissuasion nucléaire?” Défense nationale et sécurité collective, July/August 2009, pp.134–35. An English translation is available from Diploweb as “Should We Abandon Nuclear Deterrence?” <www.diploweb.com/Should-we-abandon-nuclear.html>. See also Bruno Tertrais, “The Last to Disarm: The Future of France's Nuclear Weapons,” Nonproliferation Review 14 (July 2007), pp. 251–73; and Bruno Tertais, “French Perspectives on Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Disarmament,” in Barry Blechman, ed., Unblocking the Road to Zero: Perspectives of Advanced Nuclear Nations (Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009).

10. See Ward Wilson, “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima,” International Security 31 (Spring 2007), pp. 162–79.

11. For recent insight on that, see Anne Harrington de Santana, “Nuclear Weapons as the Currency of Power: Deconstructing the Fetishism of Force,” Nonproliferation Review 16 (November 2009), pp. 325–45.

12. The argument is regularly made that nuclear weapons may be cheaper than conventional weaponry, in spite of evidence laid out in Stephen Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), which is quoted by Mueller and Le Guelte.

13. See Ward Wilson, “The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence,” Nonproliferation Review 15 (November 2008), pp. 421–39; and the discussion by Philipp C. Bleek and Bruno Tertrais, “Correspondence: Nuclear Myth-Busting,” Nonproliferation Review 16 (July 2009), pp. 135–39.

14. On the emergence of arms control as a valid political goal among U.S. and then Soviet experts, see Emanuel Adler, “The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Arms Control,” International Organization 46 (Winter 1992), pp. 101–45. On how it was then framed in opposition to that of disarmament, see Neil Cooper, “Putting Disarmament back in the Frame,” Review of International Studies 32 (2006), pp. 353–76.

15. On these dynamics, see Raymond Boudon, The Analysis of Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), chs. 6 and 7. On the epistemological impossibility of doubting endlessly and the need for authorities to make judgments, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 1991 [1950]), notably § 493 and 625.

16. Tanya Ogilvie-White rightly insisted on how fundamental the question of the content of knowledge is in nuclear issues. (She focused on proliferation, but her point has a larger pertinence.) See Tanya Ogilvie-White, “Is There a Theory of Nuclear Proliferation? An Analysis of the Contemporary Debate,” Nonproliferation Review (Fall 1996), p. 43.

17. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002 [1938]). Bachelard considered the opposition between rationalism and empiricism in the history of sciences.

18. Mueller first made his argument on the two types of nuclear arms races in Quiet Cataclysm, Reflections on the Recent Transformation of World Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), ch. 3.

19. On that point and the political problems that follow, Benoît Pélopidas, “de l'incrédulité à l'action” [“From Incredulity to Action”], Esprit 343 (March 2008), pp. 158–72. In the nuclear field, General Pierre-Marie Gallois considered nuclear deterrence as an “insurance against the unforeseeable.” Pierre-Marie Gallois, L'arme nucléaire: assurance contre l'imprévisible (Paris: Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes d'Histoire de la Défense, 1997).

20. Richard Garwin and Georges Charpak, Megawatts and Megatons (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 192 (see also p. 75). However, nongovernmental organizations issued reports suggesting as many as 200,000 additional deaths. But even the second report released in 2006 by the Chernobyl Forum of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization goes far beyond the number of fifty deaths. It suggests 4,000 deaths due to the accident, with remaining uncertainty. See Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes (Geneva: WHO, 2006, p. 106). The point here is not to discuss the exact figure but to say that it is increasing and cannot be precisely established.

21. For a recollection of these near-misses, cf. Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1993).

22. Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), chs. 9, 10.

23. The distinction between taboo and tradition builds upon the following elements. First, social taboos like incest and cannibalism are not considered as possible actions that should be assessed by a cost-benefit analysis. This has not been the case for the use of nuclear weapons, which has been contemplated on several occasions. Second, a taboo implies an inevitable and very severe punishment if you break it, whereas there is no formal punishment for violation of the so-called nuclear taboo. The threat of use of nuclear weapons, which has never been condemned, even in the advisory opinion of 1996 by the International Court of Justice, proves that the taboo is at best incomplete and should be approached as a tradition. See T.V. Paul, The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 4–13. On the tradition versus taboo debate, see also Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Believing in a normative taboo as a foundation for non-use over the last sixty years would resolve one of the important problems raised by the perspective of abolition. If the existence of a taboo is the fundamental reason—not complementary, but alternative, to deterrence—why nuclear weapons have not been used, then the situation of nuclear monopoly that comes just before a nuclear-weapon-free world is not likely to be dangerous at all. The taboo will work anyway, which also reduces the risks associated with the durability of a nuclear-weapon-free world. However, the main proponent of the notion of taboo, Nina Tannenwald has clarified that if a normative taboo partly explains the non-use of nuclear weapons, this factor is complementary to deterrence and cannot be considered as a substitute for it or its only foundation. See Nina Tannenwald, comments on T.V. Paul's book, International Studies Association Fiftieth Annual Convention, New York, February 16, 2009.

24. After Mueller's International Security article, he restated his argument in “Cold War, Containment and the Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons,” in Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1989), ch. 5; in Quiet Cataclysm, ch. 5; in “Epilogue: Duelling Counterfactuals,” in John Lewis Gaddis, John R. May, Ernst Gordon, and Jonathan Rosenberg, eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and “What Was the Cold War About? Evidence from Its Ending,” Political Science Quarterly 119 (Winter 2004–2005). The most recent statements of this argument include the idea that the peaceful ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the whole ideological, political, and social Soviet system in spite of the persistence of the weapons reveals their at best modest impact on history.

25. Richard Ned Lebow, “What's So Different about a Counterfactual?” World Politics 52 (July 2000), pp. 576, 584. He rightly points out that Mueller's conclusion has been much more discussed than his method (p. 568).