The dimensions of contemporary war and violence: How to reclaim humanity from a continuing revolution in the technology of killing

Abstract

An emerging school of thought contends that the world is becoming increasingly safe. Proponents of the peaceable-world argument point to statistical evidence that war and violence have diminished since prehistoric times and to the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945. The peaceable-world claim is misleading because it does not confront a continuing revolution in the technology of killing and the increasing capacity for numbed technological violence evidenced by the Holocaust, nuclear weapons use, and drone warfare. We, as human beings, are not surely destined for either extinction or continuation as a species. We must embrace a broadening identity and recognize the profound contemporary existential danger so we can reclaim technology and imagination to serve life.

I want to look at what could be called the existential situation of all of us in the world in the wake of the extremes of the 20th century. Where do we now stand, in terms of threats, in the early years of the 21st? For this to become a controversial question, as it has, seems surprising. But perhaps not when we consider our need as human beings to re-create and give new meanings to all that we perceive. It turns out that those meanings can vary greatly to the extent of becoming quite antithetical to one another.

An emerging school of thought, whose spokesmen include the psychologist Steven Pinker and the international relations scholar Joshua Goldstein, contends that the world is becoming increasingly safe. Goldstein tells us that “[w]e are winning the war on war,” and Pinker goes so far as to say that “[w]e may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” Proponents of this peaceable-world conviction point to statistical evidence that war and violence have diminished not just over the past few centuries but since prehistoric times, and to the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945.

Now, as loath as one might be to question such good news, I must do exactly that. The peaceable-world claim is deeply misleading in its failure to confront a revolution in the technology of killing and the increasing capacity for detached slaughter or numbed technological violence. Yet at the same time this school of thought should be taken seriously for what it is saying in relation to the diminished incidence of war and violence, because its assertions do have some importance for us.

Let me put my argument in context by referring to two interviews I did in connection with earlier research studies: one with a survivor of the first atomic bomb used on human beings, whom I interviewed in Hiroshima in 1962, and the second with a former Nazi doctor, whom I interviewed in Germany in 1979. I believe that these interviews will suggest in palpable fashion the kinds of danger that confront the present world.

The man I interviewed in Hiroshima told me that he had experienced the bomb on the outskirts of the city. These were his words:

I climbed Hijiyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared. … Of course, I saw many dreadful scenes after that, but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima, was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt. I could see Koi [a suburb at the opposite end of the city] and a few buildings standing. … But Hiroshima didn’t exist—that was mainly what I saw—Hiroshima just didn’t exist.

This interview conveyed to me the quantum leap in the technology of killing that the atomic bomb represented and continues to represent. I was left with a powerful image: “One plane, one bomb, one city.” That image has deeply influenced my perception of our vulnerability to products of technology that are called weapons, but can more accurately be termed instruments of genocide. Their genocidal capacity is enhanced by deadly radiation effects that can extend over months or years or decades after exposure, and even to subsequent generations. For those who have been exposed, the fear of such effects creates what can be called a lifelong immersion in death.

It wasn’t until the development of the hydrogen bomb a few years later that human beings achieved a capacity for destruction so great as to be unlimited. But the atomic bomb created—in the people of Hiroshima, and then in the rest of the world as well—what can be called an imagery of extinction. People everywhere became aware that we could, in a moment in time, destroy everything—ourselves and all that we had ever touched or loved—by means of our own technology and by our own hand.

The second interview I want to mention was with a former Nazi doctor, a neuropsychiatrist who had been assigned by the military to Russia in the early 1940s. In that capacity he came to examine and treat German soldiers who suffered from what he described to me as a “killer syndrome.” He was referring to men from the notorious Einsatzgruppen, responsible for the murder of about 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Europe. He told me that, among those troops, he estimated that as many as 20 percent had pronounced symptoms, resembling combat reactions but more severe, including intense anxiety, insomnia and nightmares, high blood pressure, rapid pulse, and other physical manifestations. These symptoms could persist and immobilize the men for weeks or even months. Of that 20 percent, about half expressed moral concerns about this face-to-face killing of Jews, and the other 10 percent simply felt it was a terrible ordeal, or what they called “a shitty job.”

Heinrich Himmler, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, is known to have been made aware by at least one of his own generals of these psychological disturbances in the killers. Reports by psychiatrists such as the man I interviewed undoubtedly contributed to that recognition. Himmler attributed such reactions to human weakness in carrying out the noble cause of killing Jews. A strong Nazi motivation for creating death camps that made use of cyanide or carbon monoxide gas was to render the killing more efficient and easier on the murderers. That was true for Nazi doctors who supervised the killing in Auschwitz; they did experience some initial conflict but were able to overcome it sufficiently to carry out their murderous work.

I refer to research concerning Hiroshima survivors and Nazi doctors to suggest the nature of the revolution in mass killing and the significance of its minimizing the psychological effects on the killers. Hiroshima and Auschwitz were defining events of the 20th century.

For instance, the American conventional bombing of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945, killed more people (in excess of 100,000) than did the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6 (about 80,000). But 279 B-29 bombers dropped 1,700 tons of bombs in the Tokyo raid, while in Hiroshima, as we know, it was a single plane and a single bomb: one plane, one bomb, one city. Estimates of long-term radiation effects from the Hiroshima bombing vary enormously; the delayed radiation death toll likely was between 65,000 and 100,000.

Similarly, in the case of the Nazis, more Jews were killed in face-to-face shooting (about 1.5 million) than at Auschwitz (about 1.1 million), but such was the efficiency of the Auschwitz gas chambers that in less than eight weeks, 370,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered. At its peak, Auschwitz could kill as many as 12,000 people a day, while radically reducing the ordeal of the killers.

When our technology renders our killing unlimited, we must invoke the Hegelian principle that an extreme shift in quantity significantly affects quality, in this case the quality of our contemporary existence in the face of threat. That too calls into serious question the supposedly peaceable nature of our era.

The banality of nuclearism

The overarching problem can be said to be the relation of mind to weapons and the resulting numbed technological violence that so bedevils humanity. It is a problem of technology and feeling.

Having explored the experience of victims and survivors of the atomic bomb, I became interested in the feelings of those on the other side of the weapon, the scientists who created it. Their experience was summed up by the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman:

You see what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something, and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know, you just stop.

He might well have said, “You just stop feeling.” One cannot afford to feel, to imagine or experience, what will happen at the other end of the weapon. In various encounters, I heard similar words from other scientists who played a leading part in making the bomb—Philip Morrison, George Kistiakowsky, Hans Bethe, and Herbert York—all of them sensitive and admirable people who were later to become leading antinuclear spokesmen. What the scientists did feel had nothing to do with anger at the Japanese or anyone else: They understood themselves to be in a desperate race against the Nazis, who had the deeply troubling advantage that German nuclear physics was far more developed than America’s. Until the defeat of the Germans on the battlefield, the Japanese hardly entered into the scientists’ minds at all.

It is one of the sad ironies of the story that the cruelest weapon in human history was developed in something like a utopian community. The Los Alamos group of scientists worked with a strong sense of shared purpose in a crucial project under a benevolent and much admired leader, Robert Oppenheimer. Similarly, the political and military leaders who, together with President Harry Truman, made the decision to use the bomb did so for reasons they took to be morally, politically, and militarily justified: to end the war, combat Russian expansion, and satisfy the American people concerning the extraordinary effort and expense that went into the project. There were also, of course, other reasons they were less aware of: technological and bureaucratic momentum, profound scientific curiosity, and in some cases an attachment that had been formed to the weapon and to the extraordinary power it represented, the kind of attachment that can be called nuclearism.

The use of nuclear weapons, then, requires no psychological aberration, no extreme emotion. All that is needed is a rationale, an interpretation of challenging events, to the effect that such use could serve a larger purpose.

There is a temptation to make use of such weapons in frustrating, unsatisfactory wars, and the United States considered doing that in Korea and Vietnam, though just how close our leaders came is not clear. It is clear that the United States and the Soviet Union did come very close to such use during the potentially world-destroying Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis, those in the peaceable-world school stress the capacity for human wisdom displayed by John Kennedy, the American president, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, in avoiding catastrophe. But the larger lesson from that crisis is that existing nuclear stockpiles and concepts of national purpose on either side could bring the two nations shockingly close to destroying much of the planet and murdering a large percentage of its inhabitants.

Nuclear terror for sale

Nuclear weapons are vehicles of terror. Their existence is bound up with terrorism on two levels, both of which profoundly disturb the peace of our contemporary world. This is true at a non-state level: the ever increasing anxiety about terrorist organizations obtaining and using nuclear weapons, whether of the most lethal kind or the less deadly but still dangerous “dirty bombs” consisting of conventional explosives combined with radioactive material. There has already been considerable black-market selling or smuggling of nuclear materials, including plutonium and enriched uranium.

I was able to do a study of a rather small but very extreme Japanese religious cult, Aum Shinrikyo, which sought energetically to produce or obtain all varieties of weapons of mass destruction. It did succeed in producing crude forms of chemical and biological weapons, and in its quest for nuclear bombs went so far as purchasing uranium mines in Australia, while expanding activities in the Soviet Union in order to find black-market sources there for acquiring bomb parts or whole bombs. This was done by a group with no more than 10,000 members in its own country.

A. Q. Khan, the unscrupulous Pakistani scientist, not only played a large part in helping his country acquire nuclear weapons but also created an international black-market network for nuclear parts and bomb-making knowledge. Over decades, he was a one-man proliferation machine, plying his deadly trade all over the world and including among his customers the governments of North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

Khan’s involvement contributed to the second dimension of nuclear terror, the kind that emanates from nation-states that possess the weapons. Such nuclear terror reached its height in connection with the Cold War, and during the 1980s, psychological studies demonstrated significant nuclear fear in children and adults in the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries. These studies, for the most part, documented only conscious forms of fear but suggest that there exists a more widespread and amorphous store of nuclear anxiety, mostly outside awareness, and ever prone to reactivation in the face of immediate nuclear threat.

Nuclear terror can give rise to dangerous forms of military belligerence. Such terror can be seen as the context for recent threats to bomb nuclear facilities in Iran, whether on the part of Israel or the United States. Israelis are understandably fearful of the possibility of Iran obtaining the weapon, given Iranian leaders’ frequent threats to annihilate them. But little is said by either Israelis or Americans about Israel’s own nuclear stockpile and the fear this creates in Iran and other Middle Eastern powers. True, nuclear fear can at times be a helpful source of opposition to the weapons and of calls for restraint, as was the case in the United States and the Soviet Union during very dangerous moments of the Cold War. But absence of the weapons is a safer condition. And in this regard, the Israeli people seem to be wiser than their government, since polls show that a considerable majority of them favor a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East, which they much prefer to both Israel and Iran possessing the bomb.

The insufficiency of deterrence

I would insist that nuclear fear is an appropriate reaction to the existence of the weapons, and that its relative decline since the end of the Cold War in 1989–90 represents another example of the gap between mind and weapon. To be sure, during the height of the Cold War there was greater danger of literal world destruction. But since that time, improved technologies, increased proliferation, and various forms of instability surrounding the weapons have increased the possibility of their actual use. There is also a dangerous trend in efforts to prevent further proliferation, in the form of a shift from diplomacy to military threat, including that of nuclear weapons. Hence the strange dynamic of invoking the use of nuclear weapons to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons. This kind of thought was prominent during the presidency of George W. Bush but has not been absent under the Obama administration, despite the latter’s public advocacy of overall nuclear restraint and even nuclear abolition.

In all this, the issue of nuclear deterrence looms large. But there is much misunderstanding and illusion surrounding the idea of deterrence as a nuclear panacea. Indeed, the concept of deterrence allows the weapons to be seen as a beneficent force, contrary to their malignant nature. While nuclear weapons may indeed deter some acts of violence, including nuclear violence, there is no way of knowing just how much that is the case at any time. What we can be sure of is that deterrence policy requires a willingness to use the weapons under certain conditions, which tells us that the failure of deterrence is inseparable from ultimate catastrophe. Moreover, with increasing proliferation it becomes difficult and dangerous to decide whom and how to deter.

In addition, the practice of deterrence requires the stockpiling of weapons by the elite states that possess them, which immediately creates a powerful psychological and political stimulus for proliferation. Countries lacking the weapons seek the power and accompanying prestige that can be gained only by acquiring them. Khan, the notorious spreader of nuclear bounty, made it clear that an important motivation for his proliferation activities was combating US domination of the nuclear weapons sphere.

Another false assumption of deterrence is that of emotional and behavioral steadiness on the part of nuclear decision makers—a highly questionable assumption in light of what we know about human beings in general and about the particular susceptibility of national leaders to ideologies of, and quests for, “national security.”

The ultimate spiritual disease of our era

This kind of commitment to the weapons for deterrence and much else are aspects of nuclearism—an embrace of the weapons and of their ultimate power as a means of maintaining peace, keeping the world going, saving us from ourselves. That embrace can render them virtual deities, entities that can do what in the past only God could do: destroy the world. Nuclearism is the ultimate spiritual disease of our era, involving as it does the near-worship of the technology that threatens to destroy humanity.

Beginning with nations that first build and create the weapons, nuclearism all too readily trickles down to less technologically advanced nations and to non-national religious or secular organizations. Groups such as Aum Shinrikyo or Al Qaeda can readily experience the lure of the actual power and near-mystical aura of the weaponry. I would emphasize that the nuclearism of nations with established stockpiles is the driver of this international dynamic.

Nuclearism is enhanced by the mind’s extreme difficulty in taking in what the weapons actually do. This difficulty is related to at least two factors: the mind’s resistance to such grotesque and highly threatening details, and the absence of any previous experience that could provide images or models that might contribute to more accurate perceptions of the weapons. People in Hiroshima, groping for ways to explain what had happened to them, used such diverse images as a large electrical short circuit and the “collapse of the Earth,” as described in some forms of Buddhism. They stressed the inadequacy of words to recreate so extreme an experience, and even from a distance we share some of that sense.

The gap between mind and technology seems to operate at all levels, including a kind of cosmic level of what might be called apocalyptic expectation. In religious visions of the apocalypse, there is a sequence of world destruction followed by profound renewal in which the world re-emerges in greater beauty and purity. Nuclear weapons, in their destructiveness, are inevitably associated with apocalypse, including a frequent expectation that, after its destruction, the world will somehow be renewed. But the terrible truth is that use of the weapons could well permit no such renewal—only an end in which radiation poisoning (and, as we now know, the effects of nuclear winter) results in the death of most or all of Earth’s inhabitants. This is the kind of end depicted in the novel and film On the Beach. There is no purified human future. This “hermetic apocalypse,” as we might call it, may be what the mind resists most of all.

The seductive danger of drones

One cannot discuss this revolution in technological destruction without bringing up the subject of drones. These are the unmanned ships, now mainly airships but land and sea vehicles as well, in the newly emerging robotic dimension of warfare. Drones are the epitome of numbed technological violence, perhaps even a caricature of it in their increasing replacement of human beings. The appeal of drones lies in their abolition of human risk, their engagement in what has been called “unmanned slaughter,” which has the advantage that (as one observant military man put it) “[w]hen a robot dies you don’t have to write a letter to its mother.” Drones, that is, can cover over the central truths of war—not only that of killing but also that of death and dying.

The technology of drones is still in its very early stages—none other than Bill Gates describes it as resembling that of computers in the 1980s—but its possibilities are unlimited. Drones can vary in scale, for instance, from the size of an insect to that of a football field. And they are being programmed for increasing autonomy, to the point that they might face situations in which they must react too quickly for human beings to intervene.

But it is humans who bring the drones into being and operate them. Driving to a Nevada military base from their nearby homes, these operators engage in 10 or more hours of remote warfare before stepping back into their cars to drive home. Their quick movement in and out of war-making is enabled by a psychological mechanism I call “doubling,” the calling forth of a functional second self by a single individual as a means of adapting to highly antithetical environments. The mechanism, though hardly eliminating stress, helps keep the overall system going. But one of the closest students of drones, Peter W. Singer, speaks of the “dark irony” of the lure of riskless warfare, so that “[a]ppearing to lower the human costs of war [drones] may seduce us into more wars.” And, of course, that is the ultimate seductive danger of numbed technological violence.

Reclaiming technology and imagination

Yet we are not helpless before our technologies. If we resign ourselves to the inevitable triumph of destructive technology, we cease to make use of our specifically human capacity for what the philosopher Martin Buber called “imagining the real,” a capacity required for life-enhancing action. That takes us back to the question about existential status that I raised at the beginning of this piece. That status is deeply paradoxical: While war and violence might have been more pervasive in earlier historical times, there has never been a situation so dangerous to the human future, so threatening to our collective existence.

Some of the findings of the peaceable-world school are useful. I have in mind especially those shifts in consciousness described as having taken place since the 17th century in the direction of humanitarian principles and human rights. These humanitarian principles—including a turning away from routinized sadism, torture, and war-making—can be used in the struggles against nuclear destructiveness and nuclearism itself. These struggles must include a long-range plan, however incrementally carried out, to rid the world of nuclear weapons, a goal embraced more and more by even conservative political leaders in the United States and elsewhere. In seeking that goal, we take steps toward what can be called species consciousness, toward identifying ourselves not only as Christians or Jews or Muslims or as Chinese or Americans or Nigerians, but as human beings.

Nuclear threat presses everyone in that direction. Consider the most popular toast made at annual meetings of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, an organization that was to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Either a Soviet or American physician—it did not matter which—would make the toast, which was as follows: “I drink to your health and long life and that of your countrymen and your leaders. Because if you die, we die; if you survive, we survive.” However lugubrious, that toast was what the international antinuclear movement was all about.

After I finished my study of Nazi doctors and the large part they played in genocide, friends of mine would sometimes ask, “Now what do you think about human beings?”—expecting, indeed inviting, the reply “Not very much.” But my answer then, as it is now, was that we can go either way. We are wired neither for inevitable species extinction nor for guaranteed continuation of humankind. We need to embrace our broadening human identity and at the same time recognize our profound existential danger. Only then can we reclaim our technologies, and our very imaginations, in the service of human life.