Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest
Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought after the Thermonuclear Revolution
Draft – November 2013 – Please do not quote or cite without permission
Introduction
Do not treat the atomic bomb as weapon of offense: do not treat
it as a weapon of retaliation: do not treat it as an instrument of
the police. Treat the bomb for what it actually is: the visible
insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey
the laws of life.
Lewis Mumford, 1946
The atomic bomb had a kaleidoscopic variety of consequences for post-war thought and
culture. As an exogenous shock arriving in August 1945 it added on to an existing sense of
outrage produced by total warfare and the Holocaust, those unequivocal demonstrations of
the darker sides of civilization. In the United States, as elsewhere in the Western World, the
first five years of the atomic bomb produced strong but ultimately also confused reactions
ranging from utopian glee to the darkest gloom (Boyer, 1985). The dropping of the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima by Enola Gay on 6 August 1945 was, however, merely the beginning of the
nuclear age. ‘Fat Boy’ and ‘Little Man’, the euphemistically named bombs used against Japan,
developed over the ensuing decades into unfathomably more destructive H-bombs fitted on
missiles with ever-increasing, globe-spanning geographical range. Faced with the spectre of
global catastrophe, politicians, generals, intellectuals, and the general public searched for ways
to navigate ‘the Absolute Novum’ (Herz, 1989: 252). New courses were charted. Some of these
courses, integral to the developing ideological conflict of the superpowers in matters of
security, strategy and civil defence, are familiar not least because of their momentous and
wide-ranging influence on Cold War politics, society and culture.1 Other courses, however,
were charted but not followed and have subsequently been lost from view. Now is a fitting
moment to recover these perspectives.
Following the end of the Cold War, which appeared to make the prospect of nuclear war
more distant, nuclear weapons are again forcing their way to the top of global and national
security agendas. Moral arguments about the necessity of nuclear disarmament, subdued for a
time when the existence of a technological capacity for what would amount to mankind’s
collective suicide was largely ignored, now coalesce with worries about proliferation of nuclear
weapons to states like North Korea and Iran as well as projections of a potential great power
conflict between a rising China and a declining, but militarily powerful, United States. Amidst
the risks of such dangerous scenarios resides the intellectual danger of uncritically
resuscitating old categories and patterns of thought. This concerns, in part, the time-honoured
realist tradition that armed with cool-headed shrewdness provides supposedly superior policy
recommendations.2 The intellectual foundations and practical implications of realism are,
however, in flux, and it is not at all clear what a realist position on nuclear weapons entails. In
the world of policy former realists statesmen are driving a call for universal nuclear
1
The implications of strategic thought for postwar American society have been well-documented. See
e.g. Kaplan (1986), Amadea (2003) and Kuklick (2006).
2 Another prime candidate here is, of course, the legacies of the so-called “golden age” of nuclear
strategy (Baldwin, 1995), which has recently been read as a form of political decisionism with clear links
to realism (Guilhot, 2011b).
2
disarmament. Meanwhile, in the world of theory, different versions of realism ascribe different
value and importance to nuclear weapons.3 Moreover, not since the dawn of the early nuclear
age when self-professed political realists residing in the US came together to formulate a
“theory” with analytic purchase and academic respectability (Guilhot, 2011a), has it been so
unclear what political realism could and should mean.4
This book claims that the need for new, substantive thinking about nuclear weapons
presents a significant opportunity to reassess and broaden our view of realism in politics.
Animated by the conviction that contemporary attempts to address nuclear weapons and
other global security problems would benefit from a richer historical foundation, our purpose
is exactly to provide inspiration, imagination and caution to those presenting ostensibly new
avenues that have previously failed or to those searching for radical transformation unaware
of historical preconditions or problems. To this end, this book revisits, re-articulates and
reclaims a variety of highly innovative, yet conventionally overlooked responses to the nuclear
revolution, focusing particularly on the decade of deep, thermonuclear anxiety inaugurated in
the early 1950s. Its main focus is on four creative intellectuals – Günther Anders (1902-1992),
3
Modern structural realism appears increasingly stale in light of the pressing global problems of our
time. The images of international politics presented by defensive and offensive neorealists, the
attention accorded to nuclear weapons, and the policy recommendations on nuclear weapons that can
be derived from these theories, differ significantly. Nuclear weapons feature only marginally in
Mearsheimer’s version of (offensive) neorealism. In Waltz’s variant (which he denies can helpfully be
described as defensive), nuclear weapons proliferation is accorded a more central role as a pacifying
force in the international system. See Waltz (1979, 1981) and Mearsheimer (2000).
4
A wave of interest in the philosophical and historical bases of realism – in political theory and
International Relations (IR) alike – has significantly complicated this creed by expanding the range of
positions, including that on nuclear weapons, that can plausibly be cast as realist (e.g. Geuss, 2008;
Galston, 2010; Scheuerman, 2011; Mantena, 2012; Williams, 2013). Indeed, there are now many
realisms, each prefixed and qualified by terms like ‘progressive’, ‘wilful’, ‘radical’ or ‘republican’.
3
John H. Herz (1908-2005), Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) –
who so far have not been accorded the attention they deserve as political thinkers of the
nuclear age. We argue that their political writings can fruitfully be read together through a
prism we term “nuclear realism”. This label designates a way of digesting the nuclear
revolution bound together by the central conviction that liberal modernity could survive
collective suicide only by radically rethinking and transforming its foundations. Spurred by the
development of the H-bomb, nuclear realism was an important, oppositional and resolutely
global strand of political thought that reached far beyond the traditional confines of national
security policy. It included not just a critique of dominant approaches to war and military force
in the face of large-scale destruction, reflections on the meaning and implications of ‘national
security’, and attention to the far-reaching encroachments that nuclear state apparatuses and
the increasing militarization of social life involved. It also revised conceptions of the
relationship between liberty and political authority, appreciated environmental problems
within a global ecological vision, and dissected the role of technology in improving, structuring,
restricting and endangering human life. In short, we argue that nuclear realists inserted their
apprehension of nuclear weapons’ global destructiveness into a developing analysis of
modernity that opened new vistas in grasping an ongoing transformation of the human
condition.
Nuclear realism has considerable contemporary relevance. Apart from its creativity and
sophistication, we make it clear throughout the book that some proposed cures for the ills
brought into existence or amplified by the thermonuclear revolution were potentially
4
counterproductive (if not downright dangerous) for the advancement of liberty that nuclear
realists saw as the essential, redeeming quality of a profoundly endangered modernity.
Despite – or exactly because of – such tensions, a study of these ideas can provide guidance
and caution at a time when nuclear weapons and other planetary security problems enjoy
political attention. Whatever the utopian or cynical interests that may lay behind calls for a
new American nuclear policy, “nuclear zero” has become the linchpin of a movement
spearheaded by former statesmen and the so-called “Prague generation” that attempt to
reinvigorate a push for nuclear disarmament around the globe. In this light, alternative
histories of thinking about nuclear weapons are called for.5 In sum, by placing the
thermonuclear revolution centre stage and by revisiting the ideas and practices of nuclear
realism and its exponents, we cast new light on a formative decade of the Cold War, provide a
richer historical account of critical thinking on nuclear weapons, and offer new inspiration for
ongoing scholarly and practical conversations.6
5
See also, Hugh Gusterson, ‘The new abolitionists’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 30 March 2012,
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-new-abolitionists (last
accessed 23 April 2013).
6
Apart from its significance for nuclear politics and other (extra-nuclear) global security problems like
climate change, the book speaks to at least three ongoing debates in the broad field of political studies
(see also the discussion below); namely about (i) the history and character of the field (e.g Katznelson,
2003; Freedman, 2003; Buzan and Hansen 2009), (ii) political realism and critical theory in IR and
political theory (e.g. Geuss, 2008; Scheuerman, 2011), and (iii) global security problems as they are and
have been approached particularly in IR and Critical Security Studies (e.g. Cohn, 1987; Craig, 2003,
Booth, 2007; Craig 2008; Cabrera, 2010). Moreover, Nuclear Realism complements those parts of Cold
War political and intellectual history that have focused on the early nuclear age or on social movements
calling for nuclear disarmament (e.g. Boyer, 1985; Wittner 2009).
5
Situating Nuclear Realism
By introducing the category of nuclear realism and covering a range of thinkers not
conventionally associated with realism or a realist tradition, our argument can be said to add
further complexity or, as some would argue, confusion to political realism as a tradition of
thought. The increasingly promiscuous use of the term realism in International Relations (IR)
and political theory is sometimes met with exasperation amongst realist and non-realist
scholars alike. In an attempt to protect a brand or a conveniently (but deceptively) clear
concept, they complain that the term is increasingly emptied of meaning. Given realism’s
historical and rhetorical standing in IR-theory as well as its current popularity in political
theory, debates about the nature and diversity of realism are, however, highly instructive and
should be welcomed.7 Indeed, the fact that realism is now up for grabs is a real opportunity for
testing the limits and investigating the philosophical and historical foundations of this nearmythical creed. At the same time, the concerns of sceptics should not be dismissed as hopeless
longing for clear scientific concepts but as genuine worries that some dimensions of what has
historically been associated with realism risk being lost from view (Scheuerman 2011: 273).
This, perhaps, is a particularly relevant concern for nuclear realism, which in the idiom of
disciplinary history (Schmidt, 1998) is not so much a historical tradition (if it is a tradition at all)
as our analytical construction. We use this construction as a lens to bring out how individual
thinkers displayed a marked commonality in theorizing a set of profound political issues in the
7
See e.g. Williams (2005), Bell (2008), Geuss (2008), Tjalve (2008), Scheuerman (2011), Mantena (2012).
6
aftermath of the thermonuclear revolution. Before turning to these authors and themes in
more detail, it is worth specifying the core and limits of this particular kind of realism.
In our treatment, nuclear realism is a transnational, interdisciplinary and temporally
bound intellectual phenomenon that in important respects overlaps with, but does not
exhaust, political realism as it is currently conceived in IR and political theory. First, like wellknown (classical) realists in IR such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans J. Morgenthau, nuclear
realists had a distinctively broad intellectual agenda that transgressed the, at the time fluid,
boundaries of (and between) political studies, IR and social critique. Yet, they were united in
their view that the thermonuclear revolution symbolized the uncanny climax of a world gone
awry. Given the absolute materiality of nuclear weapons and the political context in which
they existed at the height of the Cold War, the insights of Anders, Herz, Mumford and Russell
have a good claim to be about reality (the anti-idealist element that realism involves)
particularly in comparison, for example, with the curiously apolitical, abstract and unreal
edifice of strategic thought during these years. Moreover, nuclear realists also consistently
unmasked the apparent, another central aspect of realism (Guzzini, 1994: 553). In fact, their
writings hover somewhere between the “descriptive” (that takes reality as a point of
departure) and the “normative” – a distinction that from a realist point of view is almost by
necessity artificial (Geuss, 2008: 17). Moreover, these figures began from the indubitably
realist claim that political conflicts over power are constitutive of the political life of human
beings. For nuclear realists, a state-dominated configuration of international politics were
bound to produce a politically suicidal and morally unacceptable great power nuclear war (or a
7
great power conventional war that risked escalating into a nuclear war), something that
classical realists familiar to IR scholars, if somewhat belatedly, also came to accept (Craig,
2003). Nuclear realism is, then, tied to a particular manifestation of political modernity
impressed on many political thinkers during the past century. In this sense, it has strong
affinities with a form of realism that seeks to formulate ‘an ethico-political response to the
visceral combination of industrial warfare, mass democracy, mechanized genocide,
nationalism, global capitalism, and the development of unprecedented technologies of mass
destruction…’ (Bell, 2008: 5).
Secondly, as we will establish below, nuclear realists were critical, oppositional thinkers
with links to radical political thought. In this respect, nuclear realism bears some resemblance
to contemporary interpretations of realism in IR (Ashley, 1984; Osborn, 2009; Scheuerman,
2011) and political theory (e.g. B. Williams, 2005; Geuss, 2008; Galston, 2010). Indeed, as we
go on to argue, the countercultural dimension of nuclear realism played an important role in
fostering and anticipating the spirit, forms and themes of the social and political protest that
we have come to associate with the 1960s (see also Jamison and Eyerman, 1994). Clearly,
then, nuclear realism should not be mistaken for a hard-nosed, nuclear war-fighting variant of
the Realpolitik school. There are, however, obvious links to the progressive dimensions of midtwentieth century (classical) realism. If this body of thought had a common denominator, it
was the existence in European and international politics of a balance of power as a socially
regulated but at the same time socially regulating principle that with solid doses of
pragmatism and wisdom could be used to assuage recurrent conflicts between great powers.
8
This mechanism (a term that inadequately captures the deeply social character of the balance
of power for most classical realists) was based on a basic presupposition about international
politics: that war between great powers to upset or restore the balance was a politically and
morally acceptable option. As Campbell Craig (2003) has accomplishedly demonstrated, the
thermonuclear revolution forced a slow and sometimes painful process of intellectual
readjustment and recalibration for realists like Niebuhr and Morgenthau. More recent
scholarship has pointed to how, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, realists came to conceive
of a much broader and more progressive political and normative agenda (e.g. Scheuerman,
2011; Sylvest, 2010).8 Nuclear realists, we argue, not only pioneered this development but
developed an impressively wide-ranging body of writings that in turn was closely tied to a
progressive political agenda of fundamental reform.
Indeed, the fundamental insight of nuclear realists that led them to recast their analysis
of politics, technology, and human life centered on the transformation in the availability of
military force that atomic and particularly thermonuclear weapons brought about. Critical of
deterrence and narrow, tactical approaches to the reconfiguration of military affairs, nuclear
realists were led eventually to a wholesale reconsideration of what politics could and should
mean in the thermonuclear age. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki functioned as
mythical reference points in this context. But as the nuclear revolution deepened and
unfathomably destructive warheads were fitted on intercontinental ballistic missiles,
Hiroshima came to symbolize a historical turning point to which the world could never return.
8
See Guilhot (2013) for a more sceptical view.
9
Hiroshima was the threshold between an ever-dangerous future and a past that could never
be retrieved:
On August 6, 1945, the Day of Hiroshima, a New Age began: the age in which at any
given moment we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even
our planet itself, into a Hiroshima … However long this age may last, even if it should last
forever, it is 'The Last Age': for there is no possibility that its ‘differentia specifica,’ the
possibility of our self-extinction, can ever end – but by the end itself (Anders, 1962: 493).
Even if nuclear realism displays some overlap with classical realism, then, it is a temporally
more circumscribed phenomenon and not – it is worth repeating – a historical tradition in the
sense in which realism is often heralded to be.9 Nuclear realism is an analytical construct
referring to a distinctive approach collectively advanced by Anders, Herz, Mumford and
Russell, even if was not fully articulated in the writings of either. Moreover, many of the
concerns and arguments that define this approach – for example related to rationality, the
militarization of social life, social acceleration and technology – can clearly be detected in a
range of other contemporary thinkers that could legitimately be described as nuclear realists
on our definition.10 It is also worth pointing out that nuclear realists concerns had important
9
For a discussion, see Williams (2005: introduction). See also Sylvest (2008) and Bell (2008).
To mention but a few: Karl Jaspers (author of The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, 1957/1961),
Norman Cousins (author of Modern man is Obsolete, 1945, and Who Speaks for Man, 1953), Herbert
10
10
intellectual lineages. Rather than developing their reactions to first the atomic and later the
hydrogen bomb from blank slates, nuclear realists had a longstanding interest in the nature
and consequences of political modernity, industrialization and the intensification of violence.
Cultural historians have for some time discussed the extent to which Europeans
comprehended and digested the First World War with a basis in existing cultural schemes, and
Western reactions to the nuclear revolution(s) can be approached from a similar angle. The
previous intellectual experiences and interests of the four figures at the centre of our analysis
are crucial for grasping their agonizingly insightful analyses as well as their sometimes
desperate and simplistic critique in the post-war decades. This sort of contextualization also
serves to remind us of the dangers of treating the Cold War as a “time bomb” with singular
effects (Isaac, 2007). Still, nuclear realism as a distinct form of global political thought is
unmistakeably tied to the nuclear age.
Marcuse (author of One-Dimensional Man, 1964) as well as classical realists like Hans J. Morgenthau and
Reinhold Niebuhr can be read as nuclear realists. Niebuhr is a fascinating case – but one that only begins
to unveil the complexity of nuclear realism. One of the most influential intellectuals in the US at the
time, Niebuhr was briefly involved in world government thinking, but later became a loud and critical
voice against idealism in the late 1940s. During this period he warmed to a cynical conception of the
motives of the Soviet Union and became a devoted “Cold warrior”, particularly after the Soviet
acquisition of the atomic bomb. His policy suggestions at this time were based on the actual possibility
of nuclear war fighting. Only by the mid to late 1950s did Niebuhr give up on this idea, which he thought
morally unacceptable under thermonuclear conditions, and turned, privately at least, towards ideas of
global reform (Craig, 2003: ch. 4). Nuclear realism is not an exclusive label with rigid boundaries, and we
hope that future work can add new themes, thinkers and nuances to this body of thought. Likewise, it is
certainly possible to analytically identify descendants of nuclear realist thinking in critical scholarship on
nuclear weapons emerging from the 1970s onwards, for example by Jonathan Schell (1982) or Carl
Sagan (1983), and in contemporary debates about planetary security issues (e.g. Wendt, 2003; Deudney,
2007; Craig, 2008). In both instances, however, there is very limited self-identification with nuclear
realists.
11
In particular, the 1950s and early 1960s stand out as the most fertile period of nuclear
realist thinking. During these years, advances in weapons technology and a capacity for total
destruction (which is still with us today) as well as a series of superpower crises over Taiwan,
Berlin and Cuba raised the spectre of omnicidal war in the public mind (Holloway, 2010). It is
not without irony that nuclear realist concerns appeared in the farewell addresses of two US
presidents leaving office in this crucial period. In 1953 Truman bluntly, but without abiding
confidence, stated that ‘[s]tarting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men’. Eight
years later, Eisenhower famously warned that ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist’ with the reality of the military-industrial complex.
Though often estranged from, if not abhorred by, the actual policies of Truman and
Eisenhower, nuclear realists shared the sentiments expressed in these grave reflections
spurred by the abdication of executive power. Indeed, they devoted their energy to
substantiating such claims, describing their consequences and imputing the necessity of
political and social reform. Noting that ‘the prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all
precedent’, in 1945 Bertrand Russell pessimistically observed that, ‘[m]ankind are faced with a
clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree
of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to
be averted’ (Russell, 1945: 339). In their probing, oppositional and not always systematic ways,
this was the challenge to which nuclear realists responded.
12
Nuclear Realist Thinkers
Nuclear Realism, then, synthesizes the work of Günther Anders, John H. Herz, Lewis Mumford
and Bertrand Russell in an attempt to recover and recuperate a set of political arguments
largely ignored in conventional accounts of nuclear political thought. Although political
scientists and historians have sporadically recalled the writings and insights of these figures,
they have so far not been read together as representatives of an important theoretical and
practical credo of radical political transformation in the wake of the thermonuclear revolution.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that this body of work has failed to attract much attention. Anders,
Herz, Mumford and Russell had diverse national backgrounds, worked in various, or even
outside, academic disciplines and their ideas were shaped by several intellectual and political
traditions. At the same time, their approach to theory and political action sat uncomfortably
with the dominant theoretical and political agendas that shaped Western Cold War security
policy during the 1950s and 1960s, just as their perspective bears little resemblance to those
highly “rational”, yet fantastic, structures of knowledge we have since come to associate with
nuclear strategy.
Moreover, nuclear realists were by no means part of a clearly delineated research
program, school or paradigm, nor did they see themselves as such. Reading them together,
therefore, involves above all a claim about the ‘family resemblance’ of their ideas; while some
traits are central, if not essential, to nuclear realist thinking, ‘a complicated network of
similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing’ is equally important in defining this creed
13
(Wittgenstein, 1953: §66). First, and in spite of their dissimilarities, they shared intellectual and
political affinities and viewed each other, directly or indirectly, as important sources of
inspiration. Herz acknowledged the work of Anders as an important influence on his thinking
about ‘the atomic age’ (Hacke and Puglierin, 2007: 374). Moreover, both were Jewish émigrés
from Germany in close contact with other émigré intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno,
Hannah Arendt (Anders’ first wife), Herbert Marcuse, Hans Morgenthau, Otto Kirchheimer,
and Franz Neumann, to mention but a few. Herz was also familiar with Mumford’s work,
whose definition of freedom he shared and adopted in his own work on political theory (Herz,
1951: 135). Although Mumford had remained quite aloof from questions of international
politics until well into the 1930s, he was deeply inspired by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr,
whom he knew personally (Miller, 1991: 394). In the conversation with Niebuhr and in his
realist writings, Mumford’s critique of pragmatic, sterile and depraved liberalism gathered
conviction and direction (Mumford, 1940); it prompted him into a campaign for American
entry into the Second World War and shaped his thinking on nuclear weapons. Later, Mumford
praised Russell for his efforts to change the downward spiral of 1950s nuclear politics
(Mumford 1962: 213-14). Russell, in turn, penned the preface to one of Anders’ books (Russell,
1961), and Anders were later to serve on the Russell tribunal for the investigation of American
foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam.
Secondly, the penetrating insights, far-reaching imagination as well as the evident
limitations of nuclear realism powerfully show that important theorizing, albeit of a different
and less technical sort, was going on outside the central institutional sites privileged in
14
histories of nuclear political thought, including the RAND Corporation, the Kennedy School of
Government or Yale's Institute for International Studies.11 The central figures in this book
developed their work outside the policy establishment and had a complicated, if not
strenuous, view of academic life and its ongoing transformation. Mumford's urge for
independence and extremely critical view of the modern university meant that he never
sought a permanent academic job (although he did hold a series of visiting professorships at
prestigious American universities like Dartmouth, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley). Anders’
commitment to political activism after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima led him to
decline various offers for professorships. Rather than ‘waste’ his time with literature, poetry
and philosophy, he chose to confront the bomb as a popular philosopher (Anders, 1956: 273;
Anders, 1984: 328).12 Russell’s lingering radicalism and near-pacifism was spurred by World
War I and coalesced with his estrangement from academia and professional philosophy (Monk,
1996). After World War II, having established himself as a popular author on a wide range of
issues, he became increasingly embroiled in a series of public campaigns centred on the new
menace of nuclear weapons. Herz was never as intensively engaged in activism as Mumford,
Anders and Russell. Nonetheless, over the years he increasingly distanced himself from the
rationalism and behavioralism of post-war American social science and maintained that the
character of the global survival problems facing mankind called for intelligent, dedicated
11
For analyses of intellectual work done at these sites, see Kaplan (1983) and Kuklick (2006).
Anders thus embodied Adorno’s remark that after Auschwitz there could be no poetry. Or as he put it
himself: ‘Wie Schöne wäre es, wenn ich mich einmal hinsetzen dürfte, um zum Beispiel eine
Interpretation von Tintoretto oder von Berlioz zu machen … Und wie einseitig und öde ist die Situation
für uns geworden, die wir Tag für Tag nichts anderes tun dürfen, als dieses “Ihr dürft nicht!” aus zu
sprechen oder zu rufen’ (Anders, 1984: 328).
12
15
reflection, if not decidedly rebellious scholarship.13 Our reading, then, is loyal to nuclear
realism as a distinct theoretical and practical political perspective and will revisit arguments
put forward in central texts such as Lewis Mumford's In the Name of Sanity (1954), Günther
Anders' Die Aniquiertheit des Menschen (vol. I, 1956), John Herz' International Politics in the
Atomic Age (1959), and Bertrand Russell's Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959). But it
will also closely examine these authors' more openly political writings as they appear in
standard outlets of public campaigning: newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets.
Even if important commonalities can be traced between nuclear realist thinkers both in
terms of their intellectual premises and political orientations, their differences are equally
instructive in drawing out the distinctiveness of nuclear realism as a body of thought. First,
their diversity in national backgrounds highlights the transnational character of nuclear
realism. If so far the reorientation of political knowledge in the wake of total war and the
Holocaust has been mainly discussed as an American phenomenon (Craig 2003; Katznelson,
2003; Williams, 2013), nuclear realism is a broader, transnational phenomenon. In this book
we cover only Western political thought. Still, the origin and upshot of nuclear realist ideas
clearly transgress national political contexts, even if the US remained a dominant reference
point. Furthermore, their different professional backgrounds as urban theorist, historian of
technology and architectural critic (Mumford), philosopher and journalist (Anders),
13
Herz (1976: 258). Perhaps already in the mid-1950s, and certainly later, some realist scholars
concerned with shoring up the theoretical identity of IR deemed Herz too idealist. This could explain
why he was one of the few self-professed realists that were not invited to participate in the 1954
Rockefeller conference on (IR) theory (Guilhot, 2011a).
16
philosopher of mathematics and independent author (Russell) and scholar of international law
and politics (Herz) demonstrate that nuclear realism is not bound to a single discipline in the
modern, professionalizing, human sciences either. The nuclear revolution, global in its scope,
solicited intellectual response that cannot easily be analyzed through the compartmentalized,
disciplinary lenses that define academia today. Thus, rather than speaking of the post-war
emergence of a ‘political studies Enlightenment’ (Katznelson, 2003) or ‘IR Enlightenment’
(Williams, 2013), the recovery we are pursuing in this book begins from the notion of a
‘nuclear enlightenment’ that cuts across such disciplinary divides.14
Finally, these four authors illustrate that nuclear realism transgresses, perhaps even
transcends, conventional political preferences and orientations. As a child of Victorian
liberalism and radicalism, Russell grew to realize not only that the comfortable world of the
century in which he was born was gone past recall but also that his fundamentally liberal
values – diversity, liberty, peace and progress – were under increasing strain as the twentieth
century marched on through two catastrophic wars. Always searching and sometimes reckless
in his policy proposals, Russell at different times supported near-pacifism, the use of atomic
bombs as instruments of political coercion, and a virtually “guevarist” strategy for fighting
“American imperialism” in the 1960s. Herz’s flight from Nazi Germany and a Europe in turmoil
tempered his early, left-leaning liberalism. As he pursued a career in American academia, he
emphasized the unrelenting and ingrained features of social life that produced political conflict
14
Tellingly, even sophisticated proponents of realism in political theory depict realism in IR as a crude
form of power politics (e.g. Geuss, 2008).
17
among individuals and groups – a dynamic he captured in the since influential concept of the
security dilemma (Herz, 1950; see also Jervis, 1978; Booth and Wheeler, 2008). This insight
severely tempered the extent to which rationally devised reform of political relationships was
feasible, yet Herz consistently defended an approach that combined realism with liberal ideals
(Herz, 1951). His longstanding interest in the technology and its consequences for human life
under conditions of modernity was reignited by the advent of the thermonuclear revolution
and led him to rethink and reformulate what “Realist Liberalism” (as he termed it) could now
mean. As a public intellectual Mumford came to attack both the practices of contemporary
American society like insentient social planning, environmental degradation and consumerism
but also the dangers and rationales of concentrated political power of the US national security
state. He saw these phenomena as the outgrowth of a complacent form of liberalism and
argued – in a phrase that other nuclear realists could have penned – that ‘[l]iberalism's most
important principles do not belong exclusively to liberalism’ (Mumford, 1940: 64). Anders,
arguably, remained closer to radical political thought throughout his life and must have
welcomed Russell’s late shift to central beliefs of the New left (Monk, 2000). Nevertheless, the
Marxist-inspired epigraph that introduces Anders’ second volume on The Antiquatedness of
Humankind captures the intellectual core of all our thinkers: ‘It is not enough to change the
world. This is what we do anyway. And it mostly happens without our intervention. We must
also interpret this change. In order to change it. In order for the world not to go on changing
without us. And not finally become a world without us.’15
15
Anders (1980: i): ‘Es genügt nicht, die Welt zu verändern. Das tun wir ohnehin. Und weitgehend
18
The interdisciplinary, critical and activist approach to politics displayed by nuclear
realists combined with their liberal education to produce a particular view of political theory.
Nuclear realists offered not theory in the impoverished sense in which the term is often
deployed today, but rather visions of politics that came to restructure the conventional
dichotomy of utopian dreams and realist action: the bomb required, namely, that political
engagement and activism became part and parcel of intellectual theorizing.
Themes and Organization
Given the thematic range of nuclear realist ideas and the dense historical contexts in which
they originated, this could be a very long book. It is not, since the aim is to recover nuclear
realism and re-introduce some of its thinkers and themes. The study is highly attentive to the
details of nuclear realist argument in the 1950s and early 1960s, but in terms of the
biographies of our main figures or in relation to the many other interesting aspects of their
intellectual activity it is not (if it ever could be) an exhaustive treatment. The thermonuclear
revolution takes centre stage but we place it in the wider context of a series of ongoing and
accelerating changes in the socio-economic, cultural and political organization of post-war
Western societies. Industrialization, social acceleration, the concentration of political power,
the re-configuration of knowledge economies, the homogenization of human experience and
geschiet das sogar ohne unser Zutun. Wir haben diese Veränderung auch zu interpretieren. Und zwar,
um dies zu verändern. Damit sich die Welt nicht weiter ohne uns verändere. Und nicht schliesslich in
eine Welt ohne uns’.
19
emerging cultures of consumption, suspicion or rationalization were central to how nuclear
realists identified and tried to comprehend those dimensions of the nuclear age that had the
largest impact on the human condition. The reconfiguration of time and space that nuclear
weaponry came to symbolize was only one (albeit the most advanced and most immediately
dangerous) element in a larger process of human estrangement and loss of authenticity
deepened by technological expansion. For nuclear realists, such processes involved a range of
experiences, for example the reconfiguration of work as a human activity, estrangement from
nature and the organic dimensions of human existence, as well as quantification and
acceleration of social life. The organization of the book reflects our attempt to do justice to the
many interlocking dimensions of nuclear realist thinking while at the same time providing a
structured narrative that balances historical interest and contemporary relevance.
We begin the book with a context-setting chapter (Chapter 1) that clarifies the meaning
of the nuclear revolution(s) before going on to discuss different social and political reactions to
the arrival of atomic and thermonuclear weapons at a time when knowledge economies
underwent significant change. Above all, we seek to demonstrate how leading, iconic social
scientists in the US academy tried to come to terms with the atomic bomb in ways that
ultimately absorbed this supposedly revolutionary weapon into existing modes of thought.
Indeed, we argue that such scholarship became too closely tied with an ambition of bringing
social scientific expertise to politics, which in turn narrowed its purview. In contrast, nuclear
realists, who reacted strongly to the thermonuclear revolution commencing in the early to
mid-1950s, were primarily interested in examining the terms of politics under conditions of
20
modernity. To do so at a time when scientific knowledge and the conditions under which it was
produced were rapidly being transformed inevitably placed nuclear realists at some distance
from the expanding scientific and policy establishments of Western nuclear states. This
position gave their voices a critical bent and determined their outlets, which often appealed to
a wider public sphere. Despite their pessimism about possibilities to change the world, nuclear
realists did not retreat into ivory towers of pure knowledge. They also refused the role of
scientific expert or that of the ‘specific intellectual’,16 whose political interventions are justified
by a claim to possess specific, technological knowledge. According to nuclear realists, the
implications of the H-bomb were universal and, hence, a question too important to be left not
just to politicians or generals, but also to atomic scientists or strategic thinkers. For them,
human survival became the Olympian point from where to speak truth to power.
Chapter 2 examines what is arguably the strongest overlapping feature of nuclear
realists; namely their analysis of the nature and availability of military force in the
thermonuclear age. This was a focal point of these figures and their catalyst for thinking
through more thoroughly the human condition. During the phase in which the hydrogen bomb
and ICBMs were developed, nuclear realists pondered the consequences for the nature and
availability of military force, primarily by inquiring into the relationship between weapons
technology and international order, examining historical and post-nuclear purposes of the
deployment of military force, and by dissecting the central concept of nuclear age politics:
deterrence. For nuclear realists, the logic of the thermonuclear revolution did not mean that
16
The term 'specific intellectual' is taken from Foucault (1984).
21
military force was unavailable or that its use was unlikely; rather, they argued that the kind of
destruction wrought by the hydrogen bomb was logically self-destructive and that since
deterrence was ultimately unreliable, if paradoxically successful in the short run, human
civilization was at risk. These arguments stood in stark contrast to dominant modes of strategic
thinking and hegemonic ideas about national security at the time. Their persistent questioning
of the future of military force in the nuclear age also led nuclear realists to develop
distinctively global visions – epitomized in Herz’s coining of the term ‘globality’ (Herz, 1959:
319) – and advocate various kinds of global reform. They were all convinced that since nuclear
war was self-defeating and self-destructive, the world would have to organize itself differently
to avoid the dangers of a thermonuclear exchange. While current debates have begun to
recognize the importance of global reformist ideas in the decades following World War II, they
often fail to appreciate that at the heart of debates about nuclear war and global reform were
also difficult and larger questions pertaining to freedom, technology and the very condition of
political modernity.17 Reducing nuclear realism to a critique of the military establishment and
the ideology that produced the bomb and neglecting these wider and deeper reflections,
would unfairly eliminate some of the most powerful insights lodged in nuclear realist thinking.
17
No doubt, this is due to the disciplinary lenses employed in much contemporary IR scholarship, which
tends to focus predominantly on questions of violence, war and international organization. Nuclear
realism is obviously relevant for discussions of ‘violence interdependence’ and other global challenges
that require political and institutional responses (Deudney, 1995, 1997, 2007; Wendt, 2003). There is a
danger, though, associated with focusing too narrowly on political institutions: even as wide-ranging a
scholar as Deudney (2007) tends to reduce (what we would term) nuclear realist ideas to idealist
proposals for world government (Deudney, 2007: 248-252).
22
Against this background, Chapter 3 turns to the way in which nuclear realists
approached and reformulated answers to classic questions in political theory. The guiding
theme of this chapter is global reform and individual liberty in an age of planetary security.
Whether calling for world government, supporting well-known proposals for international
control of atomic energy or seeking to establish the sociological basis for global political
structures of authority, nuclear realists consistently brought into focus the ever-present
conflict between authority and liberty. In contrast to many military strategists of the period,
who provided straightforwardly pragmatic rationales for engaging in policy science (often
couched in slogans about defending the free world or avoiding World War III) but who
studiously avoided more complex questions about the nature and realization of liberty, the
nuclear realist emphasis on security and survival led to a preoccupation with the relationship
between liberty and political order. Indeed, viewed from particular angle their animating
concern can be seen as ascertaining the nature and prospects of liberty in the nuclear age.
Nuclear realists insistently defended what today is termed a concept of negative liberty, but
they also persistently sought to demonstrate how social and political contestation of the
accepted order of things in the nuclear age could be made to serve individual liberty in a
broader, more positive sense. Indeed, their insistence on both bare survival as well as the
demands of a truly fulfilling way of life at times makes it impossible to distinguish these
aspects of liberty in their work (see also Geuss, 2001: 94-97). In order to investigate and bring
out this complex matrix of liberty and authority in nuclear realism, we begin this analysis be
returning to the treatment of these vital themes in Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, two
23
iconic political thinkers that throw light on the dilemmas that the nuclear age produced for
Anders, Herz, Mumford and Russell.
Particularly the difficulties of realizing the positive aspects of human liberty led nuclear
realists to rethink the nature and social consequences of the dramatic expansion of technology
in the modern world. Nuclear weapons were the pinnacle of this process, but its effects were
felt in almost every dimension of social life. Hence, Chapter 4 contextualizes and details
nuclear realist approaches to technology and ecology. These two themes are deeply linked,
since attention to ecology appears to have been, in part at least, a natural response to the
alienating effects of technology – a return to nature, so to speak. Indeed, nuclear realists were
to some extent romantics lamenting the loss of traditional ways of life. Tendencies toward
regimentation and homogenization in a context of utmost fear challenged the social
sustainability of modern life. Nuclear realists worried that the social fabric could not provide
the same locus of meaning for individuals under conditions of social acceleration. It became
impossible, they feared, to replenish socially and spiritually (Sylvest, 2013). Repeatedly,
nuclear realists emphasized how the opportunity of individuals to achieve and use their liberty
depended among other things on their ability to develop their capacities and talents,
something that our thoroughly technologized society, or “the Machine” in Mumford’s words,
appeared to make possible, but really made impossible.
Gradually, however, nuclear realists also came to realize the environmental problems
involved in the kind of technical civilization that nuclear weaponry embodied. Not only were
24
nuclear weapons themselves hazardous for the environment in terms of their production,
maintenance and (particularly) deployment; the entire way of life that flourished particularly in
the US (and in other Western societies) in the 1950s and 1960s involved other more direct
environmental costs. In environmental history, ideas about ‘total ecology’ - derived from the
approach of Aldo Leopold but epitomized by scholars like Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt
that linked the total nature of modern war to environmental degradation – are now seen as
crucial for understanding the rise of the post-war environmental movement (Robertson, 2012;
see also Guha, 1996). Arguably, nuclear realists were among the select group that pioneered
such a global ecological vision, which centred on a range of planetary environmental concerns,
including global population pressure, resource-depletion and, most strikingly, on ‘Man’s Role
in Changing the Face of the Earth’ (Mumford, 1956). Viewed from a global or planetary
perspective, industrial capitalism and its necessary corollary in modern consumerism gradually
produced among nuclear realists a global ecological perspective that anticipated many aspects
of contemporary environmentalist arguments.
These sombre reflections on human life in the shadow of the mushroom cloud pushed
nuclear realists to stress the importance of imagination and the role of the future, which is the
subject of the fifth and final chapter of the book (Chapter 5). Openly lamenting the qualities
that furthered and were furthered by modern technological society such as conformity and a
mechanistic, often unreflexively sterile acceptance of political and moral values that
demanded deeper scrutiny, led nuclear realists to formulate proposals for the moral (re)education of humans, variously described as “the whole man”, “universalism”, “the ethics of
25
survival”, and “the courage to fear”. Despite the differences between these projects for moral
and intellectual reform, they all reflected a search for a way out of the curious combination of
stalemate and emergency that modernity had become. In this sense, these projects were
consciously progressive (though not necessarily utopian). What has been said of Mumford,
that he ‘might have been an optimist about possibilities, but he was most certainly a pessimist
about probabilities’ (Miller, 1989: 541), is a general trait of nuclear realists. Indeed, their semiromantic attempt to cultivate the aesthetic, eccentric, emotional, and imaginative faculties of
human beings, which also often smacked of elitism, can be seen as the nuclear realist way of
heeding the (supposedly Gramscian) dictum that ‘the challenge of modernity is to live without
illusions and without becoming disillusioned’.
Nuclear realist sentiments are perhaps best summed up in Anders’s notion of a
“Promethean discrepancy”, in which ‘our capacity to produce’ had become separated from
‘our power to imagine’ (Anders, 1962: 496-7). Rather than waiting for the inevitable catch-up
of social man or extending the reach of scientific methods into the social domain, as envisaged
by some theories of cultural lag, nuclear realists called for intellectual and moral mutiny. ‘No
society can be progressive without a leaven of rebels, and modern technique makes it more
and more difficult to be a rebel’, Russell (1952: 77) argued. Indeed, too readily an acceptance
of social trends or processes as somehow outside human activity led to a form of selfenslavement.18 While enslavement was in itself undesirable, it was also politically and morally
18
J.H. Herz, International Politics in the Technological Age: An Analysis of the Role of Acceleration and
Petrification in World Affairs [hereafter IPTA], p. 220. Unpublished manuscript (undated, 1964-1965?),
26
suicidal, because our inability or unwillingness to imagine pandemonium in a perilous nuclear
age stemmed from an acceptance of science and technology as destiny.19 Against this
background, the restoration of our imagination and other faculties needed for grasping of our
planetary future became a central nuclear realist preoccupation.
o0o
Recovering the importance of imagination nuclear realism and contrasting it with historical
and contemporary security thinking, we argue that nuclear realists have much to say about
what it means to grasp and take responsibility for our future. Indeed, the book ends where our
ambition began: to provide inspiration and caution for new substantive thinking about nuclear
and other forms of global politics. In this sense, the book speaks directly to regenerated
debates about a nuclear weapons free world and global governance of planetary problems.
But it also posits a challenge for the ‘new political thinking’ that is once again necessary;
namely to include the wider social and political-theoretical questions raised by the figures we
cast light on. Nuclear realist discourse and its most potent thematic dimensions led to a
profound and holistic analysis of global security problems that much contemporary
scholarship, particularly perhaps in IR, has failed to provide. By listening to, and amplifying, the
254 pp, John H. Herz Papers, German and Jewish Émigré Collection, M.E. Grenander Department of
Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, State University of New York, box 29 (The papers
are uncatalogued; all references are provisional).
19
Anders captured this predicament in his play on the words Zeitende and Endzeit (Anders, 1972).
27
nuclear realist voices that spoke from outside the academy and policy institutions of the postwar years and by identifying its main strengths and weaknesses, we gain access to a largely
untapped resource of political thought at a time when we are in dire need of inspiration.
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