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Abstract

In this article, I trace and critique the discourse of “The Superweapon Peace”—the long-standing and enduring idea that weapons of radical destructiveness, both nuclear and non-nuclear, can force an end to war by rendering it too destructive to contemplate. The Superweapon Peace, I argue, is constituted by three elements. The first is an assumption of war as a controllable and resolvable problem. Within this formulation, superweapons function as disincentivizers, “solving” war by raising its destructive cost to an unendurable level. For all its intuitive appeal, this logic is flawed, grounded in a certitude of control that fails to comport with empirical reality. The second element of The Superweapon Peace is utopian ambition. Its proponents hold that through the threat of mass violence, war can be overcome in a fundamental sense. This, I argue, gives license to a ruthless consequentialism at odds with conventional morality, which restricts the use or threatened use of violence against those not liable to such an end. The third and final element of The Superweapon Peace is silver-bullet thinking, which frames the superweapon as the most effective, and likely only, method by which to eliminate or significantly mitigate large-scale armed conflict. This mode of thinking has overly narrowed the scope of possibility regarding alternative remedies to war. The Superweapon Peace, I ultimately conclude, is a false promise, giving license to modes of thinking and action that imperil rather than facilitate peace.

Keywords

War peace technology Utopia superweapons nuclear weapons

If science were to be allowed her full swing, if society would really allow that “all is fair in love or war,” war might be banished at once from the earth as a game which neither subject nor king dare play at.

—British popular science journal, 1864

It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.

—Truman diary entry on the creation of the atomic bomb, 25 July 1945

Introduction

“The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” So argued President Kennedy (1961) in his famous 1961 address before the United Nations General Assembly. Although voiced in reference to the spiraling nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, Kennedy’s plea echoes a broader conviction regarding the possibility of, and barriers to, global peace.¹ Military technology has long been framed as an inherently malign force—destabilizing when acquired and ruinous when used. Peace, so it follows, is contingent on our willingness to tame our technological drive and reduce the size and potency of our military arsenal.

For just as long, however, a countervailing discourse has existed, arguing that battlefield technology, and the destructiveness it unleashes, can end war by raising its associated costs. Weaponry is conceived here as a salvational force, the surest—perhaps the only—means by which to impose and enforce meaningful limits on war. In this article, I trace and critique a subset of this discourse, “The Superweapon Peace”—the long-standing and enduring idea that weapons of radical destructiveness can be harnessed as instruments for peace.

Analysis of the superweapon has been mostly limited, for understandable reasons, to the nuclear realm. Historical accounts of nuclear development and proliferation highlight early and lasting optimism in the “war-ending” potential of this technology (Franklin, 1988; Smith, 2007; Sylvest, 2020). Critical security scholarship has further detailed the ideological, technopolitical, and utopian assumptions that underpin the historical and contemporary nuclear order (Cohn, 1987; Egeland, 2021; Hecht, 2012; Peoples, 2019). There has also been extensive work done to problematize the rational-actor and predictability assumptions that sustain nuclear deterrence theory (Harrington, 2016; Pelopidas, 2015, 2017, 2020; Thayer, 2007; Wilson, 2014; Woods, 2002).

This work is of immense value, detailing the assumptive world that grounds and orients nuclear weapons thinking and practice. Too often, however, this analysis fails to recognize the degree to which the discourse of The Superweapon Peace predates nuclear technology. Long before the atomic age, a range of “superweapons,” both real (dynamite, submarines, aerial bombing, etc.) and imagined, were praised for their potential to abolish war by rendering it too destructive to contemplate. To what extent do contemporary arguments in favor of nuclear weapons mirror or diverge from those made in support of earlier superweapons? Are the moral and logical fallacies attributable to Pax Atomica unique to the technology, or merely the latest iteration of a long-standing, problematic discourse framing superweapons as a salvational force?

To answer these questions, I trace the shifts and constancies in meaning that underpin the identity and material practice of the superweapon over time. As analysis of academic scholarship, military strategy, media sources, and popular culture² reveals, The Superweapon Peace is characterized by a significant diversity. The discourse spans a collection of technologies, with a broad range of destructive potential, and different, often contradictory conceptions of peace. Amid this variance, however, important commonalities can be identified. Three elements in particular underpin the historical and contemporary discourse of The Superweapon Peace: (1) an assumption of control regarding the outbreak of war; (2) a utopian ambition to abolish or substantially curtail armed conflict; and (3) a preference for “silver-bullet” technical solutions to the problem of war. These elements consolidate into a flawed vision. Applying a critical security studies perspective, I argue that The Superweapon Peace exaggerates the reliability of superweapons as a check on war, downplays the immorality of their threatened use, and wrongly forecloses the possibility of alternative, and potentially more viable, pathways to peace.

These insights build upon important work already done to reveal how foreign policy practices such as nuclear threat-making, arms racing, and uncritical military research and development are licensed discursively (Cohn, 1987; Emery, 2021; Stavrianakis, 2019, 2020). Engagement with these themes is especially important, as nuclear weapons are unlikely to be the final iteration of this discourse. The arguments presented in this article speak to the broader dangers of technological fetishism, and the need to temper optimism toward all new weaponry, and what it can achieve in relation to peace.

In Section One of this article, I clarify the variance in The Superweapon Peace, in relation to both technological means and peaceful ends. In Sections Two to Four, I analyze and critique the constitutive elements of this discourse: assumed control, utopianism, and “silver-bullet” thinking. The Superweapon Peace, I ultimately conclude, is a false promise; giving license to modes of thinking and action that imperil rather than facilitate peace.

Variance in the superweapon peace

There are no shortage of proposed remedies to the problem of war. For some, peace is best achieved and sustained via the imposition of a particular international order, either a balance or monopoly of power (Blainey, 1973; Kindleberger, cited in Snidal, 1985: 588). Others cite economic (Cobden, cited in Cain, 1979: 240; Copeland, 2015; Gartzke, 2007; Karabell, 2020; Paine, 1791) or political (Bell, 2020: 302–303; Doyle, 1983) factors. Contrasting this are those who see the promise of peace in the character of war itself and, specifically, the increasing financial burden assumed by states for its preparation and prosecution. In 1898, Jan Bloch offered a qualified yes to the titular question of his text, Is War Now Impossible? With some prescience, Bloch (1898) described the wars of the future as prolonged, defensive, and attritional affairs, settled by “the bankruptcy of nations” rather than “the slaying of men” (p. xii). One year later, American delegate, Seth Lowe, expressed a similar sentiment at the Hague Conventions. Despite the good intentions of participants, Lowe argued, proposed restrictions on “invention in relation to warfare” were counterproductive:

The fearful costliness of modern war is one very great restraint upon a resort to it. This is, probably, one of the reasons why, in America, it has never been thought wise to try to prevent the free application of invention to the improvement of the weapons and engines of war (Lowe, 1899, cited in Price, 2007: 40–41).

The Superweapon Peace also locates the cure for war within war itself. Its focus, however, is not on the spiraling financial cost of battle, but rather, its growing destructiveness. This destructiveness is embodied by the superweapon—technologies of such appalling violence as to be sufficient, by themselves, to confirm the futility of armed conflict.

A major fault line within this discourse relates to the type of peace achievable via the superweapon. We can roughly divide this into three categories: peace-through-pre-eminence; transformative peace; and peace-as-balance.

Peace-through-pre-eminence versions of the Superweapon Peace imagine a pacified world under the control a single power, made unassailable by their monopolization of a newly created superweapon. In 1797, American engineer and inventor, Robert Fulton, submitted a proposal to the French government to construct a fleet of submarines capable of devastating British naval warships (cited in Parsons 2020: 73–74). With French supremacy assured, the now liberated seas would “become a guarantee of perpetual peace to all maritime nations” (Fulton, 1798).³

Within some versions of The Superweapon Peace, a more ambitious, transformative end is imagined. Before becoming a strident advocate of strategic aerial bombing, Italian General, Giulio Douhet, saw in the aircraft a potential for a radical restructuring of international institutions. In a 1917 article, titled “Sottomarini ed aeroplani” (Submarines and Aeroplanes), he argued that aerial bombing was so destructive as to render inter-state war “impossible” (Douhet, 1917: 169). Control of these superweapons, Douhet (1917) suggested, ought to be entrusted to a “parliament of humankind,” whose aircraft-equipped gendarmerie would be empowered to conduct “punitive expeditions” against would-be disturbers of the new global peace (p. 170).

A third version of this discourse frames the superweapon as the means to a more balanced peace. Seemingly immune to the falsifying effects of World War One, Thomas Edison gave an interview in 1921 with New York American, subsequently titled, “How to Make War Impossible.” Edison claimed that in order for there to be peace, creative minds needed to shift their focus from conventional weaponry to superweapons, particularly in relation to aviation, asphyxiating gases, and atomic energy. We must, he argued, “go on experimenting with death-dealing devices, ceaselessly, inexorably,” until these destructive technologies were so ubiquitous, as to “make war utterly impossible . . .” (Edison, cited in Franklin, 1988: 76). Edison’s peace demanded the invention and re-invention of superweapons in perpetuity, lest the potency of their threat wear off.

These three versions of The Superweapon Peace operate within atomic and nuclear discourse. For some proponents of this technology, the nuclear supremacy of a single actor is the most effective check against war. Peace is maintained via the submission of nuclear inferior states (Kroenig, 2018: 25). Transformative peace, via the formation of a world government, was an imagined possibility for realist thinkers in the early thermonuclear age (Morgenthau, cited in Herzog, 1963: 30; Herz, 1959: 230). Today, however, these more ambitious, Universalist goals have mostly vanished.⁴ Peace-as-balance, in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD),⁵ has become the dominant theory of nuclear politics.⁶ MAD, it is argued, “drains all of the competition out of the international system. With victory on the battlefield impossible,” balance is stalemated and peace between the nuclear powers entrenched (Green, 2020: 1).⁷

The discourse of The Superweapon Peace has considerable variance, in relation to both the means and ends of technology. Underpinning this variance, however, are a set of shared ideas, assumptions, and values that inspire, shape, and circumscribe approaches to war and peace. Analysis of these commonalities can help clarify both the enduring appeal and danger of this mode of thinking. Sections Two to Four draw out the core shared assumptions evident across the discourse of The Superweapon Peace. Before this, however, two further qualifications are needed.

First, I do not seek to, and likely cannot, discern the true motives and beliefs of those who defend and advance the discourse of The Superweapon Peace. There is likely a spectrum of sincerity, from those who genuinely hold faith in the war-ending potential of military technology, to those who advance this discourse for more cynical and opportunistic reasons.⁸ Rather than seek to penetrate the inscrutable realm of intent, my less ambitious goal is to identify commonalities, including common flaws, in the discourse of The Superweapon Peace. My interest, put simply, is in public justification, rather than sincere belief.⁹

Second, The Superweapon Peace, whatever its influence, is but one discourse on technology and peace, counterbalanced by others. Within the Western psyche,¹⁰ techno-optimism has always co-existed with a deep and abiding distrust in the emancipatory potential of technology (Adas, 2014; Ellul, 1965; Freud, 1961: 38–39; Heidegger, 1982: 287; Roberts, 2005; Winner, 1977). This distrust was arguably at its most intense in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The conflict triggered a loss of confidence among Europeans in the promise of scientific progress, as well as their own civilizational primacy (Evangelista, 1988: 368–370, 372–375; Franklin, 1988: 84, 155; Hippler, 2013: 50–84). Faith in the capacity of technology, and specifically superweapons, to affect positive change, including the eradication of war, has waxed and waned at various points in history. Critically, though, it has always endured.

The Superweapon Peace is constituted by three inter-related elements: assumed control over the outbreak of armed conflict; a utopian ambition to secure an enduring peace; and a preference for “silver-bullet” technical solutions to the problem of war. In the next three sections, I explore each of these elements and detail the dangers inherent to the discourse of The Superweapon Peace.

Assumptions and misassumptions of control

Superweapons and control

The Scientific Revolution established reason as the primary source of legitimacy and authority in the production of knowledge. Through the utilization of technoscientific rationality, the universe was thought to have been made discoverable, comprehensible, predictable, and ultimately controllable (Bacon, 1996: I, 222; IV, 114; Comte, cited in King, 2000: 20; Descartes, 2006: 51; Wiener, 1964: 33).¹¹

Technoscientific rationality challenged much of the pre-modern conventional wisdom, including the long-standing image of armed conflict as an intractable human affliction. Long thought of as a divine curse (Lincoln, cited in Library of Congress, 1865), an inherent facet of human nature (Kant, 1983: 365), or a biological imperative (Lorenz, 1996), war was now a mere illogic, assailable once exposed to the “common ground of reason” (Morgenthau, 1946: 70).¹² Conscripted into this narrative, superweapons were conceived as tools of peace, devices uniquely empowered to clarify the irrationality of war.

Assumptions of controllability are fundamental to The Superweapon Peace discourse. In a 1784 letter to scientist, Jan Ingenhousz, Benjamin Franklin marveled at the revolutionary potential of the military balloon. These emerging superweapons, Franklin (1784) argued, would convince “Sovereigns of the Folly of Wars . . . since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his Dominions.” Franklin’s peace is straightforward; simply a matter of bringing belligerents to reason; by illustrating, beyond all doubt, war’s ever-diminishing return on investment.

This same sentiment animated later versions of Pax Aeronautica. A 1947 New York Times article praised airpower as a vital component in the current and future pre-eminence of the United States. This technology was to be utilized by and against rational actors “to discourage aggression by a plain demonstration of its futility” (The New York Times, 1947: 6E). The article frames war as a temporary, rather than permanent fixture of international politics, superfluous once the necessary level of destructiveness is reached.

For many, this level was met and exceeded in the middle of the last century with the invention of the atomic bomb. Upon the successful completion of the Trinity Test, Leo Szilard, a key member of the Manhattan Project and one of the original advocates for creating a bomb, sent a petition, along with 70 other leading scientists, to President Truman, urging him to give Japan all opportunity to surrender before attacking (Szilard Petition, 1945).¹³ Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” was among those who refused to sign. The weapon was so terrible, he argued, that “actual combat-use might . . . be the best thing” as it would confirm the need “to get rid of wars” (cited in Szilard, 1978: 209). Oppenheimer also emphasized the positive potential of the bomb, at least initially. “The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw,” he claimed, making “the prospect of future war unendurable” (cited in Rhodes, 2005).

Both Teller and Oppenheimer framed war as a comprehensible, controllable, and most importantly, curable phenomenon. It would be fought for as long as it was rational to do so, and no longer. Within this framework of technoscientific rationality, the atomic bomb became the ultimate method of instruction.

This is not to argue that uncertainty and emotion, elements typically hostile to control, are absent from the discourse of The Superweapon Peace. As McDermott, Lopez, and Hatemi explain, the psychological and emotional state of revenge is a major driver of nuclear deterrence. It is the instinctive desire for violent payback, they argue, not calculated rationality, that ensures a retaliatory second strike in response to a first, the core dynamic at the heart of MAD (McDermott et al., 2017: 73–74).¹⁴

Along with revenge, risk-taking and chance often play a role in the discourse of The Superweapon Peace. In his work on nuclear brinksmanship, Thomas Schelling (1966: 187) recognized the role of threats “that leave something to chance.” Uncertainty, he concluded, ultimately deters:

[T]he thought that general war might be initiated inadvertently—through some kind of accident, false alarm, or mechanical failure; through somebody’s panic, madness, or mischief; through a misapprehension of enemy intentions or a correct apprehension of the enemy misapprehension of ours—is not an attractive one . . . It seems likely that, for both human and mechanical reasons, the probability of inadvertent war rises with a crisis. But is not this mechanism itself a kind of deterrent threat? (Schelling, 1966: 188)

Chance and irrationality, when they are recognized at all within the discourse of The Superweapon Peace, are typically framed as exploitable, controllable resources. Such framing adds a veneer of rationality to seemingly irrational courses of action,¹⁵ including a willingness to navigate, and in some instances actively court, nuclear crisis.

Confidence in the stabilizing effects of destructive technology has long dominated the discourse of The Superweapon Peace. French nuclear strategist, André Beaufre typified this confidence in a 1971 interview. The risk of nuclear war, he argued, was essentially non-existent:

[A]t the nuclear level, we are able to . . . exactly calculate what the war will look like. We were not able to do so with much smaller means such as the pistol, the machine gun, or even the canon. Errors and dreams were allowed. Today, this [sic] is no longer possible. We are working with something which is infinitely calculable and we know ahead of time what the results will be. Men, because they are not crazy, will not do certain things. . . . Therefore, I do not believe in the great catastrophe nor in atomic death. (Cited in Pelopidas, 2017: 259)

Robert Art (1980: 27) expressed similar certitude, arguing that the probability of war between The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact members or between the United States and Russia was “practically nil” due to the rational fear of escalation, on both sides, to general nuclear war.¹⁶

The Superweapon gamble

The discourse of The Superweapon Peace too often exaggerates the controllability of war and wrongly downplays the role of uncertainty. As noted above, irrationality, emotion, and chance are rarely ignored entirely by proponents of The Superweapon Peace. More often, they are recognized, but either minimized or, in the case of Schelling, reframed as controllable forces. Schelling’s model of nuclear deterrence, with its focus on crisis and brinkmanship, reduces “unacknowledged, unfathomable unknowns, contingencies and indeterminacies” into “manageable risk” (Katzenstein and Seybert, 2018: 42).¹⁷ The problem, however, is that so much of the unknowable, by its nature, cannot be managed ahead of time. The belief that it can fosters a neglect of the very real possibility that The Superweapon Peace will come undone.

The scale of the superweapon gamble can be appreciated upon reflection with a growing body of empirical scholarship—declassified documents, interviews, and testimonies—cataloging near-uses of nuclear weapons due to misperception, miscalculation, and basic error (Gregory, 1989; Lewis et al., 2014; Phillips, 1998; Sagan, 1993; Schlosser, 2013). This includes near-use during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where substantial evidence has emerged in the decades since of the critical role played by contingency and unacknowledged risk, and the degree to which key decision-makers at the time underestimated both (Pelopidas, 2017: 245–256; Scott, 2015: 241–242). Our avoidance of nuclear disaster during these 13 days, long attributed to the rational incentive structure of the superweapon, was likely closer to “plain dumb luck” (Acheson, 1969: 76).¹⁸

Reinforcing this delicacy were the mistaken assumptions held by both powers during the Cold War regarding the intentions of the other. Throughout détente, the United States and Soviets understood the aims and rules of their rivalry differently, and falsely believed that this understanding was shared (Grynaviski, 2014: 14). “The superpowers,” writes Grynaviski (2014), “were simply wrong; they did not understand each other as well as they thought” (p. 13).¹⁹ Enduring uncertainty over the reliability of the nuclear deterrent and false certainty over the thinking and action of adversaries highlight the limits of control in this latest iteration of The Superweapon Peace.

It is important here to avoid over-generalization, as the fragility of MAD has been recognized by a number of nuclear theorists. As Green (2020) observes,

The theory of the nuclear revolution . . . predicts that the arrival in the mid to late 1960s of nuclear stalemate—the condition of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)—should have initiated a great relaxation of military efforts in both Cold War superpowers. Instead, the last two decades of the Cold War witnessed a peacetime nuclear competition of furious intensity. (p. 247)

Green goes on to list a range of perceptual uncertainties, held by both the United States and the Soviet Union during these decades regarding the survivability of their nuclear stockpile (Green, 2020: 31–42). Lieber and Press (2016: 31) point to similar uncertainties in current and future deterrence—the likelihood that the United States will be drawn into violent conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary is far greater than commonly understood, they argue.

These arguments highlight the precariousness of The Superweapon Peace and the very real possibility that these technologies will not avert, but rather trigger and feature in cataclysmic war. Rarely, however, does this provoke a more fundamental recognition, that the risk of deterrence failure is not just real, but unacceptably high. That the risks and challenges of superweapon investment are less acceptable than the risks and challenges of abolition.²⁰ Nuclear theorists critical of traditional “easy deterrence” narratives (Payne, 2020) typically advocate (either grudgingly or enthusiastically) for the opposite of abolition—further development and improvement of nuclear arsenals (Lieber and Press, 2016: 35); intensified nuclear competition (Green, 2020: 264); or the pursuit of outright nuclear supremacy (Kroenig, 2018).²¹

Even if we accept nuclear deterrence as the most stable and effective iteration of The Superweapon Peace to date, our confidence in this logic going forward should be tempered. Fundamental and irresolvable uncertainties exist regarding thermonuclear war; uncertainties that leave us forever vulnerable to miscalculation, misperception, and mischance. This is not to argue that deterrence has not had some role in averting great power war over the last seven decades, nor that its future collapse is certain. The argument is that nuclear deterrence is a gamble, one far shakier that the control-centric assumptions of The Superweapon Peace typically concede. And it is a gamble that only needs to go truly bad once for it to be the worst bet in the history of human existence.

Assumptions of control, so central to The Superweapon Peace, extend not only to the means, but also the ends of technology. Most iterations of this discourse imply a profound optimism in the potential of technology, and specifically the superweapon, to secure a grand peace.

Utopian ambition

Absolute weapons for absolute ends

“The utopian thinker,” writes Brinton (1965), “starts with the proposition . . . that things are bad . . . [and] must become better” (p. 348). While strictly correct, this description fails to properly convey the scale of conceived improvement. No mere tinkerers, utopians typically think big:

. . . a political project can be considered utopian if, and only if, it invokes or prescribes the radical transformation, transcendence or elimination, of one or more pervasive practices, structures or ordering principles, that shape human collective life. Utopianism of this kind is predicated on a fundamental change in the order of things. (Bell, 2020: 23)

Most iterations of the Superweapon Peace meet this standard. They confront a problem as old as our species, near-universal in scope, and ruinous in cost, and conceive an endpoint—the complete elimination of or radical reduction in war.²² As Bell (2020) notes in his recent work on the subject, some utopian projects are “driven by a fissile mix of anxiety and hope” (pp. 1–2). Within the discourse of The Superweapon Peace, the anxiety is the hope; the cataclysmic potential of the superweapon, and the existential terror it inspires, will cure us of our bellicosity.

In the 1907 novel, The Vanishing Fleets, the protagonist utilizes “the most deadly machine ever conceived”—an antigravity powered “radioplane”—against an invading Japanese host. The weapons are a success, “thereby ending wars for all time” (Norton, 1907: 237, my emphasis). Four years later, Franklin (1988) (of machine gun fame), described the “airplane flying machine” as “the most potent instrument of destruction ever invented,” one that would, by virtue of this destructiveness, “lead to universal peace and prevent war altogether, at least among the highly civilised nations” (p. 9). Orville Wright expressed a similar hope, albeit one tempered by direct knowledge of global war. After the 1918 Armistice, Wright questioned whether his creation had “made war so terrible” that no country would “again care to start” it (cited in Bilstein, 1984: 39).

A similar grandiosity characterized much of the early discourse around the atomic bomb. According to Eugene Wigner, the weapon was originally conceived as an instrument of dual value. Its immediate task was to counter the “imminent disaster” of the Nazis, whose military, it was then believed, might soon develop their own atomic weapon. Alongside this, however, stood a more transformative goal:

We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed, no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war . . . This hope was almost as strong a spur to our endeavors as was our fear of becoming the victims of the enemy’s atomic bombings. (Wigner, cited in Rhodes, 2012: 308, my emphasis)²³

Seventy-five years after the invention of the bomb, this statement has an almost delusional quality. Early proponents of the atomic device dressed their vision of peace with an inevitability grounded more in hope than evidence. The nuclear deterrence theory that evolved over the decades that followed differed in important ways. The goal, first of all, was less ambitious—security and stability was the focus, and how best to achieve both in an imperfect world where nuclear weapons already exist. There was no promise that deterrence would deliver humanity from war in its entirety; the balance of terror provides ample opportunity for lower intensity violence. Nuclear deterrence theorists themselves, it should be added, would also certainly reject any association with “utopianism,” considering the term more fitting for the disarmament movement (Schlesinger, cited in Sagan and Waltz, 2010: 88). There is no question that nuclear deterrence is a profoundly less optimistic variant of The Superweapon Peace.²⁴ This downgrade of ambition, however, should not deceive us as to the extent to which it retains a trace of utopianism.

As with earlier forms of The Superweapon Peace, the fundamental defense of nuclear weapons remains their potential to avert destruction on a massive, and in some cases, civilizational scale. They are lauded as the best tools we possess for suppressing the “existential problem” (Porter, 2022) of major war, and the violence, instability, and sometimes genocide, that attends it. This is a claim of some magnitude. It is a claim of radical transformation and improvement, from the pre- to the post-1945 world. It is, I argue, a utopian claim, by virtue of the severity of the dystopia it takes credit for preventing.

“U.S. nuclear weapons,” writes Kroenig (2020b), “have been one of the greatest forces for good in the world over the past three-quarters of a century,” helping to create and maintain “garden[s] of stability” (p. 127). These bombs, the most destructive weapons ever conceived, are venerated by many as “instruments of peace” (Spalding, 2013) with “war preventing effects” (Kaiser et al., 1982: 1159) that form the “bedrock of our security” (Carter, cited in Mehta, 2016). Elspeth Rostow was not alone in suggesting that the atomic bomb deserved a Nobel Peace Prize (cited in Schlesinger, 1994: 150).

Atomic and nuclear weapons have also been praised for facilitating positive political and economic change. The nuclear revolution, it is argued, stabilized competition between the competing major power blocs, allowing for economic growth and prosperity, both during and at the conclusion of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons were “clearly important,” argue Brooks and Wohlforth (2000), as they “provide[d] a margin of safety that made adopting retrenchment at this time easier for many [in Moscow] to swallow” (p. 13, n.22). The “relatively peaceful nuclearized environment” at the end of the Cold War, “fostered liberalization and decentralization within the Soviet Union” argues Oye (1995: 59). Nuclear weapons, it is often suggested, have not only rid the global order of its worst danger in major war, they have enabled a level of prosperity and development that would otherwise be unachievable.

The ruthless consequentialism of the Superweapon Peace

Utopian projects are central to the human experience. They validate our desire for societal, economic, and political improvement, and speak to our ambition for grand transformation. Utopia provides a frame of reference with which to critique the deficiencies of the present and an idealized endpoint to strive toward. When utopianism is challenged, it is most often done so on the basis of its alleged impracticality. The goals of its proponents are admirable, it is argued, but quixotic, impossible to achieve in the way or at the pace envisioned. While often true, this criticism overlooks the darker aspects of utopian thinking, including its sometimes toleration or outright advocacy of morally problematic methods.²⁵ This sacrifice of means on the altar of ends—what Glover (2001) terms “ruthless consequentialism” (p. 256), is a feature of The Superweapon Peace.

“None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace,” wrote Theodor Adorno (2005: 157). The most grandiose versions of The Superweapon Peace echo this hope of a permanent elimination of all war (Edison, cited in Franklin, 1988: 76; Norton, 1907: 237). Less but still ambitious nuclear versions aim for the suppression of great power conflict. These weapons, it is argued, have been “instrumental in reversing” humanity’s otherwise inexorable progression “toward deadlier and deadlier warfare” (Drehle, 2009). This potential, to deter nuclear war in particular and great power war in general,²⁶ has long served to insulate nuclear weapons, in some quarters at least, from the moral and legal scrutiny they would otherwise warrant:

By framing nuclear weapons . . . as an abstract construct outside and beyond any real-world battlefield considerations, the fear-based framing lifted nuclear weapons out of the conceptual framework—international humanitarian law—that had been tried and tested to limit the harmful effects of armed conflict. Limits could not, after all, be imposed on an absolute. (Løvold, 2020)

Leaving aside for now the legal implications of The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which entered into force on 22 January 2021, the tension between this technology and international humanitarian law (IHL) is worth considering. Arguably the most important rule of war today is discrimination—non-combatants are immune from direct and deliberate violence and indiscriminate attacks are prohibited (International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 1977: Art. 48). This rule is necessarily violated by the military doctrine of “countervalue”—the use of nuclear warheads against the largest metropolitan areas of the adversary. We should also, however, maintain a skepticism regarding the legality of “counterforce” doctrine, which restricts nuclear attacks to “military targets.” As Kristensen and McKinzie (2015) note,

If there were to be an attack on all 450 Minuteman III ICBM silos in the United States, a pure counterforce attack that did not target civilians directly, this would cause intense radioactive fallout over large parts of the north-central United States and southern Canada and kill millions of civilians. (p. 596)²⁷

Such destruction is difficult to reconcile with the rule of proportionality, which prohibits attacks expected to generate incidental harm against civilians or non-military objects “which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” (ICRC, 1977: Art 51, 5(b)). Both countervalue and counterforce threaten a morally (and in most cases, legally) unjustifiable level of civilian injury and death, either directly and deliberately in the former case, or indirectly, but entirely foreseeably, in the latter.

Compounding this problematic status are the actual policy demands of mutually assured destruction. States possess a secure nuclear second-strike option which they pledge to use in retaliation against a nuclear attack on their own territory, or in the case of extended deterrence, the territory of an ally.²⁸ This is not a policy of measured, legally compliant, retaliatory force. It is a threat of intolerable harm. The promised retaliation must be so destructive as to render the initial attack not just unwise, but suicidal. Fetter and Glaser (2022) are correct in observing that countervalue—the murder of civilians at scale—“is the deterrent strategy that flows logically” from the nuclear weapon (p. 27).

For proponents of The Superweapon Peace, the value of the nuclear condition is worth the cost. The threat of a second-strike, it is argued, unsavory as it may be, is not merely permissible, but obligatory, given the (potential) civilizational consequences of a nuclear exchange and the utopian triumph of its avoidance.

We should first recognize that even if we knew what we cannot know, that the threat of nuclear retaliation has been and remains the most effective check against ruinous great power war, this would, at best, render the threat necessary, not—and never—moral. This distinction, which matters, is too often ignored or downplayed by the most committed defenders of this technology. So too is the fact that this threat cannot ever be realized by moral actors. Consequentialist appeals to “supreme emergency” (Walzer, 1977: 274) obscure what should be self-evident; that in the event of an actual nuclear first-strike, the moral duty of the target state is to renounce a reciprocal descent into barbarism and wear the blow. At a minimum, the retaliatory response cannot be one that condemns tens or hundreds of millions of additional innocents to death. There are some acts that can never be countenanced, no matter how vile the adversary or how severe the provocation. “Retaliatory genocide” (Schell, 2000: xxxi) is one such act.

Utopianism pervades The Superweapon Peace—albeit to a lesser degree today (Pelopidas, 2016, 2020); War is conceived as a significant, but ultimately suppressible antagonist, and destructive technology is framed as the means to this grand end. This elevated status typically comes at the expense of a meaningful consideration of alternative approaches to peace.

Superweapons as silver-bullets

A silver-bullet theory of peace

The Superweapon Peace offers a parsimonious explanation for war. It recognizes, but renders secondary, a multitude of potential causes—anarchy, anger, avarice, atavism (to cover just the a’s)—in favor of a single comprehensible diagnosis; war endures because it is insufficiently destructive. Superweapons are the “silver-bullets” of this equation, delivering violence of the type and scale needed to render war prohibitively costly. They are the surest, and likely only, means by which to secure and maintain lasting peace.

Silver-bullet thinking elevates the status not only of technology, but also its creators, the scientists and engineers who invent and advance the superweapon. “Lone wizards” (Franklin, 1988: 169), “dreamy pioneers” (Smith, 2007: 167), “knight errants” (Szilard, cited in Shils, 1964: 41), “Jesuits . . . of a nuclear priesthood” (Cohn, 1987: 702); the technical expert is lauded as midwife to salvation.²⁹ These architects of peace, who either work alone or in small groups, devote their promethean ambition and singular intellect to the betterment of humankind.³⁰

This emphasis on lone genius typically comes at the expense of the collective. A foundational truth in much of the Superweapon Peace discourse is that “government by committee is inefficient; in the scientific age, we need strong individuals who will take decisive action based on science and statistics” (Smith, 2007: 193).³¹ This action rarely includes disarmament. Such measures, if referenced at all, are typically framed as the outcome of a superweapon peace, rather than a viable means in themselves. Prohibitory regimes stand directly counter to the logic of The Superweapon Peace, premised as it is on the unbridled destructiveness of weaponry.

Alfred Nobel provides an effective illustration of this mode of thinking. Before founding the peace prize that still bears his name, Nobel’s greatest achievement was the invention of dynamite. In a letter to Austrian peace partisan and leading figure in the European anti-war movement, Bertha von Suttner, Nobel wrote the following:

Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses. On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilised nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops. (Nobel, 1892, cited in Tägil, 2014)

This juxtaposition, between the true peace of the superweapon and the false peace of technological restrictionism, is a common theme of the discourse. In 1907, Nikola Tesla conceived of a weapon that he termed the “teleautomaton.” This “novel engine of war” would harness wireless telegraphy to induce tsunamis; “an agent of unlimited potency of destruction [that] could alone annihilate a nation’s fleet” (Tesla, 1907: 6–7). Tesla’s boasts were published in the New York World, under the title, “Tesla’s Tidal Wave to Make War Impossible.” Accompanying this was the paper’s own editorial, which directly contrasted Tesla’s method with the Second Hague Peace Conference running that same year:

To urge peace was the dream of the Peace Conference. To compel peace is the newest dream of science. Representative men of many nations have been gathered in New York to plead the altruistic cause of international harmony. At this very juncture inventive Science comes forward to promise a device so terrible that, should it be perfected and put into practice, sea battles will become impossible . . . Such is the unanswerable peace argument offered by Nikola Tesla (1907: 6).

Silver bulletism endures in the nuclear version of The Superweapon Peace. The theoretical reputation of MAD stems largely from its “elegant, parsimonious, and logical structure” (Green, 2020: 2). Waltz argues that “with nuclear weapons, stability and peace rest on easy calculations . . . anyone—political leader or man in the street” can recognize that “catastrophe lurks” if these weapons “begin to fly” (Waltz, 1990: 734). The Superweapon provides a comprehensible and reliable solution to the problem of war by rendering it prohibitively costly. In light of this benefit, opponents are encouraged to put aside their “heady dreams of abolition”—even if achievable, “it is not clear that a world without nuclear weapons would be desirable” (Kroenig, 2013).

The perils of “silver-bullet” thinking

Technology in war is not an inherent problem. To the contrary, a range of technological advancements have helped limit both the likelihood and destructiveness of armed conflict. The Superweapon Peace goes beyond this concession, however, operating as a form of cathexis—an investment of mental energy (often to an unhealthy degree) on a single idea (Johnson and Mosri, 2016). For Morgenthau, this scientific variant of cathexis was a pathology of the age. “Scientific man,” he lamented, was

[F]orever searching for the philosophers’ stone, the magic formula, which, mechanically applied, [would] produce the desired result and thus substitute for the uncertainties and risks of political action the certitude of rational calculation. (Morgenthau, 1946: 86)

When applied to the abolition of war, such an approach offers the comfort of simplicity, reducing a multitude of causes into “a single one capable of rational formulation” (Morgenthau, 1946: 86). For proponents of The Superweapon Peace, this ultimate cause is insufficient destructiveness. War, cruel and costly as it is, must be made more so, lest it endure eternal. Superweapons are the “silver-bullets” in this calculus, instruments to seize, and hold peace via the deterrent effects of their threat.

This logic simultaneously creates and constrains the scope of possibility of its adherents in relation to peace. In the contemporary context of nuclear deterrence, silver-bullet thinking naturalizes the value and permanency of nuclear weapons, as well as the existential threat they represent. As noted above, this marks an important distinction from (some) earlier iterations of this discourse, which stressed the potential of superweapons to trigger more radical change in the direction of peace.

Returning to Giulio Douhet, he predicted in 1917 that the soon to be realized capability of aerial bombing to destroy cities in a single night would produce “an intolerable state, a total absence of security” (Douhet, 1917: 169, my emphasis). Douhet (1917) emphasized “the absolute necessity of finding an effective means to render war impossible, since it is impossible that humankind should have to remain always threatened by such a nightmare” (p. 169, my emphasis).

Douhet was mistaken. The existence and prominence of nuclear weapons for over seven decades is proof enough that the “nightmare” of the superweapon can indeed be tolerated. The question remains, however, whether it should be. What does it mean for us, as a species, to labor under “the permanent possibility of thermonuclear holocaust” (McNamara, 1967)? Nothing good, I argue. As Fromm (1962) observed in 1960, “to live for any length of time under the constant threat of destruction” will induce a callousness in those affected; an “indifference to all the values we cherish” (p. 130). Eventually, he wrote, it will “transform us into barbarians” (Fromm 1962: 130).

The brutalizing effect of the deterrence threat, and the permanent jeopardy it necessitates, can be appreciated most clearly in those rare moments of apparent failure. On 13 January 2018, at 8:09 am, Hawaii residents received an emergency alert over television, radio, and cellphone stating the following: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Although sent in error, such warnings, and the communal terror they elicit, serve to remind us of what may have to be endured, and inflicted, as part of this silver-bullet “cure” for war.³² The forever threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction is a sub-optimal way to live, and no way to flourish.

It is an irony that for all the creativity of proponents of The Superweapon Peace, the concept itself so often proves lacking in imagination. Superweapons are depicted in vivid, often lurid detail. Quantity, range, scope, explosive yield, after-effects—the technology is calibrated and re-calibrated to meet the threshold necessary to incentivize peace. The “peace” itself, however, is typically deracinated from culture, history, social and normative values, or any real conception of “the good life.” The reason for this lack of depth can be guessed. To imagine peace ambitiously—as something more than “hegemony” or “balance”; as a condition of justice, as well as order; as a point beyond the brute threat of extermination—is to quickly reveal its resistance to technical solution and its incompatibility with the hostage threat of the superweapon.

What then are the alternatives to this “peace that is no peace” (Orwell, 1945)? For proponents of the TPNW, the alternative begins with extirpating the superweapon from the international system. Established in 2017 and ratified in 2020, the “Ban Treaty” commits state parties to “never under any circumstances” manufacture, acquire, transfer, station, “use or threaten to use nuclear weapons” (The United Nations, 2017: 3). Proponents of this treaty challenge both the moral legitimacy (Gibbons, 2018) and practical value (Ritchie, 2019) of nuclear weapons and the “nuclear peace” they purport to create and maintain.

US State Department spokeswoman, Morgen Ortagus, spoke for many when asserting that “the TPNW will not result in the elimination of a single nuclear weapon” (cited in Gladstone, 2020).³³ Even if this proves correct, the Ban Treaty effort will have had value, elucidating a truth too easily concealed by the silver-bullet logic of The Superweapon Peace. Nuclear deterrence and possession is not an inevitability, but a choice; one that is made and potentially unmade by political leaders. The belief that it is otherwise—that nuclear weapons are a salvational and thereby “eternal” (Pelopidas, 2021: 485) feature of global politics—restricts our thinking to a dangerous degree regarding alternative, and potentially far safer conditions of human relations.

A final qualification is needed. Even if the Ban Treaty meets the expectations of its architects and (eventually) ushers in a post-nuclear weapons era (Sauer, 2016), this, by itself, will almost certainly not inspire a grand and lasting peace between the nations. The Ban Treaty, like The Superweapon Peace, is no silver-bullet—silver-bullets do not exist for something as complex and enduring as war. There are only approaches that take us closer to or further from the peaceful conditions we should aspire to.

This should not be forgotten as states race to develop and employ a range of other technologies, including military artificial intelligence, cognitive and physical human enhancement, cyber tools, and hypersonic missiles. Technological fetishism and silver bulletism are intoxicants that impair the critical reasoning and moral judgment of those who imbibe. What is needed is sobriety, and a more careful consideration of the limits, risks, and costs, of technological innovation in war.

Conclusion

Seven decades after the invention of the atomic bomb, we continue to grapple with the uncertainties of the nuclear condition. How durable or delicate is the peace secured by this technology? How moral? In our tragic international politics, are nuclear threats ultimately the best we can do to limit the likelihood of large-scale war? To answer these questions, we must reflect upon The Superweapon Peace as a discourse that encompasses, but also precedes the nuclear debate. This article has explored the assumptions and dangers inherent to this discourse.

The Superweapon Peace is constituted by three elements. The first is an assumption of war as a controllable and resolvable problem. Within this formulation, superweapons function as disincentivizers, “solving” war by raising its destructive cost to an unendurable level. For all its intuitive appeal, this logic is flawed, grounded in a certitude of control that fails to comport with empirical reality. The second element of The Superweapon Peace is utopian ambition. Its proponents hold that war can be overcome in a fundamental sense. This, I have argued, gives license to a ruthless consequentialism at odds with conventional morality, which restricts the use or threatened use of violence against those not liable to such an end. The third and final element of The Superweapon Peace is silver-bullet thinking, which frames the superweapon as the most effective, and likely only, method by which to eliminate or significantly mitigate large-scale armed conflict. This mode of thinking has overly narrowed the scope of possibility regarding alternative remedies to war.

It is right and proper to seek peace instead of war. For that pursuit to be meaningful, however, we cannot pin our hopes on a superweapon, no matter how destructive. To paraphrase von Moltke, the Elder, The Superweapon Peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Elke Schwarz, Antoine Bousquet, John Emery, Jack Macdonald, Valerie Morkevičius, Liane Hartnett, Alexander Graef, Marina Favaro, Emil Archambault, Jairus Grove, Benoit Pelopidas, Ben Tallis, Jeffery Sherman, Krista Takkala, Sanne Verschuren, the anonymous reviewers, and the Editors of the European Journal of International Relations for their insightful feedback.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Neil C. Renic

Notes

Author biography

Neil C. Renic is a senior researcher at the Centre for Military Studies, University of Copenhagen. He specializes in Just War theory, drone and autonomous violence, the regulation of armed conflict, US foreign policy, and the changing character of war.

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Superweapons and the myth of technological peace

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Variance in the superweapon peace

Assumptions and misassumptions of control

Superweapons and control

The Superweapon gamble

Utopian ambition

Absolute weapons for absolute ends

The ruthless consequentialism of the Superweapon Peace

Superweapons as silver-bullets

A silver-bullet theory of peace

The perils of “silver-bullet” thinking

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References