Going critical: Toward a modified nuclear one worldism

Abstract

Nuclear weapons posed a profound conceptual problem for classical realism, forcing into collision two of its long-standing core dictums: oppose world government as a source of insecurity and un-freedom, and exit anarchy into authoritative government when levels of violence interdependence in particular spaces become very high. Initially, leading realists (Burnham, Morgenthau, and Herz) chose world government, hoping internal restraints (analogous to the role played by the balance of power in anarchies with lesser levels of violence interdependence) could overcome its threat to freedom and its political impracticality. But this option reached a conceptual and practical dead end. Building on Herz’s suggestion of a generalized historical materialist base-superstructural model to theorize security practices and orders, the actual materiality of the nuclear situation (previously dimly understood) points toward the obsolescence of the statist mode of protection, and toward arms control, as the practices of an alternative, republican-federal, mode of protection whose operation gradually moves world order from anarchy, but not toward a world state. Until this shift is complete, world order remains in fundamental contradiction with the nuclear forces of destruction.