Narrating Abolition

Abstract

Humans are storytelling animals. As such, the future of nuclear weapons depends on the yarns that political leaders and the public spin about them.

How does one tell the story of the disappearance of nuclear weapons?

Arms control experts speak in terms of the balance of forces, throw-weights, verification regimes, ratios of warheads to launchers, treaty obligations, and so on. But humans are storytelling animals. We do not live by treaties; we live by narratives. Narratives give us a sense of plot; of characters with fears, hopes, and passions; of events working toward a denouement, no matter how many detours they take on the way. Above all, narratives give us a sense of meaning.

If we look closely at the way arms controllers speak, in particular at the narrative thinness of their discourse, then we can see to what extent nuclear abolitionists can develop a more appealing narrative. After all, it is by narrating abolition that we will lend the emplot-ment of realism to a fervent hope.

The status quo. Our established way of speaking about nuclear weapons derives from theories of deterrence and arms control developed by physicists, political scientists, and game theorists in the 20th century. These men, and they are all pretty much men–Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Richard Garwin, and Thomas Schelling, to name a few–developed theories that have percolated into public political discourse in simplified forms, telling us that our security relies on rivals not daring to directly attack one another for fear of nuclear retaliation. Robert Jervis, a leading deterrence theorist, evokes the underlying dynamism of nuclear deterrence with an anecdote: “The question President Truman asked when deciding whether to try to build the hydrogen bomb was not unique to this situation: ‘Can the Russians do it?’ When his advisers replied in the affirmative, he declared: ‘In that case, we have no choice. We'll go ahead.’” 1

As weaponry evolves, which it inevitably does, arms controllers insist that asymmetries do not develop that might lead one side to assume an advantage by preemptively attacking the other. In the words of a 1985 National Academy of Sciences primer on arms control, “The underlying objective of arms control is to increase the stability of the relationship between the nuclear powers, thus reducing the risk of nuclear war.” 2

In this narrative world, humans are not the central reference point. According to cultural critic Carol Cohn, the logic of arms control experts is as follows: “The strategic stability of regime A is based on the fact that both sides are deprived of any incentive ever to strike first. Since it takes roughly two warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must expend two of his missiles to destroy one of the enemy's. A first strike disarms the attacker. The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed.”

“How is it possible to think this?” asks Cohn. “The homeland of ‘the aggressed’ has just been devastated by the explosions of, say, a thousand nuclear bombs, each likely to be ten to one hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the aggressor, whose homeland is still untouched, ends up worse off?” Cohn answers her own question thus: “In technostrategic discourse, the reference point is not … human beings at all; it is the weapons themselves.” 3

This story, the official story that helps us make narrative sense of deterrence, to live with and through it, has so far proved adequate to its task. But, despite its historical efficacy, it is flawed and unsatisfying. In fact, as a narrative, it is almost incoherent. Its main force lies not in any intrinsic appeal, but in the brute fact that it describes the world as it is.

Inevitability and lack of choice are the dominant themes of the official story. Accordingly, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, nuclear weapons would be developed. While arms control treaties can curb the numbers of nuclear weapons and help restrain destabilizing technical developments, “the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.” Peace is not so much peace, in what Kenneth Boulding would have called the “positive” sense of the term, but “stability”–a life of indefinite but anxious security in the shadow of a nuclear avalanche. The U.S. role in this story has been, in accordance with U.S. discourses of exceptionalism, to pioneer the development of nuclear weapons, then to superintend the rickety global apparatus of treaties and alliances that keep the avalanche at bay.

The strength of this story lies in the authority of its tellers and in its power to suppress alternative story lines. The official story is the one we've been told since the 1940s by presidents, secretaries of state and defense, military leaders, defense intellectuals, and most mainstream pundits. It's hard to resist a story told by such powerful storytellers. And it's hard to think outside a story line so powerfully reinforced by the built infrastructure of the nuclear age, a story whose power lies in its ability to say, “this is the way the world is; there is no alternative.”

But the status quo narrative also suffers some major flaws. Again, in some versions, the weapons rather than the people seem to be the principal actors. Weapons evolve; weapons seek targets; weapons tempt preemptive strikes; weapons create instability, and so on. We are hemmed in by the weapons, which have taken on the ability to rule our destiny through some mysterious process of historical automation. Even if there are good and bad people among the dramatis personae, their space for moral maneuver is restricted by the weapons and by the brutal logic of deterrence.

The status quo narrative suffers some major flaws. the weapons rather than the people seem to be the principal actors. Weapons evolve; weapons seek targets, and so on. We are hemmed in by the weapons, which have taken on the ability to rule our destiny through some mysterious process of historical automation.

During the Cold War, the captivating rivalry of two superpowers and their larger-than-life leaders masked this unappealing feature of the dominant nuclear narrative. This rivalry, putatively between good and evil, lent the story an air of moral drama that made it uplifting and concealed the degree to which humans on all sides were morally compromised by the alliances they had made with the weapons to which they had surrendered so much of their agency. But now the superpower clash is gone and, with it, an orienting sense that the weapons were ancillary to a historic clash of ideas, of human agencies. Now we have the weapons because, in a world where the weapons exist, we do not know how to be safe without them, even though we are no longer sure whom they are supposed to deter. The weapons exist because the weapons exist.

The second problem with the official story is that the plotline affords little space for climax, ending, or denouement. Indeed any climax that could be imagined would presumably be disastrous. So, instead, the unsatisfying plot is one of endless deferral–deferral of catastrophe by an arsenal stuck in the continuous loop of improvised security. In this story line nuclear deterrence has the narrative structure of a filibuster. This is not narratively satisfying.

Finally, there is a contradiction at the heart of the official narrative: Nuclear weapons are presented both as terrifying objects that could destroy the nation in half an hour and as the ultimate guarantors of our security. Nuclear weapons are terrifying, but deterrence keeps us safe. Quite apart from the psychological confusion created by placing our faith for security in objects that terrify us, the dominant narrative's contradictory attitudes toward nuclear weapons lead to a double standard in the wider world where the public is taught to see them as demonic objects in the hands of others–es-pecially non-white and Muslim others–but rational instruments of peace when we deploy them. Of course, it is the essence of privilege to live comfortably with double standards, and Americans are not so bothered to explain why the United States should not abolish its nuclear weapons while other countries would be guilty of a crime for acquiring these same weapons, why deterrence assures peace but Iran should not be allowed to balance Israel's nuclear weapons. This hypocrisy increasingly grates on the rest of the world. In activist David McReynolds's words, “We cannot, to paraphrase Lincoln, have a world half nuclear and half nuclear free.”

The trouble with abolition. Talk of abolishing nuclear weapons goes back to the earliest days of the Cold War, when J. Robert Oppenheimer, David Lilienthal, and Joseph Rotblat, among others, warned of the dangers of an arms race. As superpower arsenals climbed into the tens of thousands, it became harder to see abolition as plausible, though the publication of Jonathan Schell's The Abolition in 1984, when the superpower arsenals were more or less at their largest, was an early harbinger of the idea's return a few years later when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met at Reykjavik.

As is always the case with insurgent narratives, the onus today is on the abolitionist narrative to explain why things should not continue to be done in the way they've always been done since the 1940s. Its spokespersons must convincingly explain–as they have so far failed to do–how countries with no nuclear weapons could protect themselves against a rogue state that had somehow hidden one or two. The abolitionist narrative is, in other words, not only a story of how the world might be rather than how it must be, but it is a story with, as yet, a blank final page.

Another liability has more recently abated. That concerns the authority of the spokespersons for abolition. These were, for a long time, mostly activists and writers with marginal standing in mainstream society. Now that, in two op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, George Schultz, and William Perry have given the imprimatur of bipartisan realism to abolition, as well as a direct lineage to Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of modern Republicanism, the cause has a new sheen. And it does not hurt that the new Global Zero campaign has enlisted the support of such established political figures from around the world as Margaret Beckett, Jimmy Carter, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lawrence Eagleburger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Chuck Hagel, Max Kampelman, Anthony Lake, Robert McFarlane, Merril McPeak, Jack Matlock, Queen Noor, Thomas Pickering, Malcolm Rifkind, and Philip Zelikow. These are people with the authority to narrate the world.

Clearly the abolitionist narrative has momentum in elite foreign policy circles, a momentum that derives from a recalculation of the costs and benefits of nuclear weapons in the age of post-Cold War terrorism. Such realists are newly concerned that, in an era where there is no rival superpower but there is good reason to fear “loose nukes” in the wrong hands, nuclear weapons may now pose more of a threat than a benefit to U.S. national security. In their telling, the story of abolition is–as the most compelling foreign policy narratives always are–one that fuses a hard-boiled calculation of the national interest with a moral imperative.

What the abolitionist narrative has on its side, above all, is that it is structured around a clear struggle between good and bad–with abolition good and nuclear weapons bad–and it involves humans taking back control over the weapons. This makes the story line morally legible in a way that deterrence is not, since it is the essence of deterrence that good outcomes can only be achieved by threatening a terrible evil.

In the realists' telling, the story of abolition is–as the most compelling foreign policy narratives always are–one that fuses a hardboiled calculation of the national interest with a moral imperative.

The abolitionist narrative also has a clear plotline with a dramatic and triumphal culmination. And it has great intertextual resonance with other narratives of hope and progress. As the abolitionist movement's name implies, the narrative is intended as a symbolic reenact-ment of the great historic movement to abolish slavery–the movement that led to what we might think of as the second founding of the nation. The abolitionist narrative has also, in some inflections, a resonance with biblical narratives and a broader prophetic tone. We see this, for example, in Sam Nunn's description of the abolitionist movement as leading us to the top of a mountain he can see but does not expect to scale in is lifetime–language reminiscent of Moses in the Old Testament as well as of Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech before he was assassinated.

A note of warning is in order here. As the cultural historian Sac-van Bercovitch has observed, American political discourse has a tropism toward the jeremiad, a form of sermon, popular among the early Puritans, which berates a chosen people for not living up to their unique calling and summons them to redouble their efforts to be God's chosen ones. It is a form of political discourse on the edge between the secular and the religious that goes well with the American exceptionalism that non-Americans find so irritating–an ex-ceptionalism dissected and condemned by British author Godfrey Hodgson in a fine new book.

Great American reformers often speak the language of the jeremiad. John F. Kennedy did in his inaugural address. King did in his “I have a dream” speech. Barack Obama did so throughout his campaign for the presidency. And so do many American antinuclear activists who speak of America's historic mission to lead the world to abolition. This, however, is the antinuclear movement's version of the double standards problem that haunts the status quo position. This raises the question: Is it possible to have a global movement for abolition mediated by a discourse of American exceptionalism? And is it possible to make abolition meaningful to the American people, whose support is indispensable, without recourse to that exceptionalism?