The Gift of Time (Introduction) (Page 2)

Because the nuclear age and the cold war were born at almost the same time and developed together at every point, few observers troubled at the time to distinguish clearly between the two. But now that history has unexpectedly untangled them for us, we face the one without the other, and questions in eclipse for half a century have been placed before us again. What we might call the first nuclear era, which lasted from 1945 until 1991, has come to an end, and a second nuclear era has begun. Its basic shape remains to be decided. Some 35,000 nuclear weapons remain in the world. Whether these are merely a monstrous leftover from a frightful era that has ended, and will soon follow it into history, or whether, on the contrary, they are the seeds of a new, more virulent nuclear era, in which nuclear weapons are held more widely and rooted more deeply, is not a matter for prediction; it is a matter for choice.

By choosing to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the new abolitionists have revived a vision that had all but disappeared since the beginning of the nuclear age, when the United States placed the Baruch plan, which called for eliminating nuclear weapons, before the United Nations. The proposal was vetoed by the Soviet Union, and the United States, the sole possessor of nuclear arms at the time, proceeded with a nuclear buildup, which it justified as a desperate, temporary measure to counter a threat that Soviet conventional forces were thought to pose to a ruined Europe. In Western minds, the two evils were soon equated: Nuclear weapons, it was admitted, were a horrifying expedient, but so, many said, was the threat they kept at bay--world domination by a totalitarian power.

In the years that followed, the reasons for ruling out abolition multiplied. Once the Soviet Union acquired the bomb, in 1949, proposals for nuclear disarmament were rejected on grounds that the character of the Soviet regime posed an insuperable obstacle. Nuclear disarmament, the cold war catechism ran, was possible only if the arrangements could be fully inspected; but the Soviet Union, being a closed society, would not permit inspection of its military establishment; therefore, nuclear disarmament was impossible. In other words, the totalitarian character of the Soviet regime became both the justification for building nuclear arsenals and the specific explanation for why it was impossible to eliminate them. Even the most ardent opponents of nuclear weapons had to admit that the obstacles in the way of complete nuclear disarmament were towering. Few in the West were ready to rely on trust alone to guarantee disarmament agreements, and even fewer supported unilateral disarmament. The range of proposals considered feasible was sharply restricted. The opponents of nuclear weapons were most successful, they found, when they confined themselves to ameliorative proposals, such as an atmospheric test ban or a freeze on nuclear arsenals. Hopes of ridding the world of nuclear weapons died, and the superpowers embarked on their four-decade-long nuclear arms race.

In the 1950s, a reassuring gloss was placed on the nuclear peril by the rise in the West of the theory of deterrence, which taught that safety from nuclear weapons could be found only in the threat to use those same weapons--that relief from terror could be found only in terror itself. Official acceptance of this doctrine, in which nuclear arsenals appeared to provide their own justification, gave the nuclear buildup a legitimacy and a self-propelling momentum that at first it had lacked. The horrifying expedient came to be seen as a lasting necessity, even a positive good. The belief that great benefit could be extracted from nuclear arms perfectly complemented the belief that their abolition was impossible. If you could not eliminate nuclear weapons, it was comforting to discover that you would not want to anyway. Abolition was doubly ruled out. Nuclear terror, once regarded as intolerable, came to be seen as the new foundation of the world's safety.

The conviction that abolition was impossible played a pivotal role in moral as well as political thinking about the nuclear question. Nuclear weapons are distinguished above all by their unparalleled destructive power. Their singularity, from a moral point of view, lies in the fact that the use of just a few would carry the user beyond every historical benchmark of indiscriminate mass slaughter. Is it necessary, fifty-three years after Hiroshima, to rehearse the basic facts? Suffice it to recall the old rule of thumb that one bomb can destroy one city. A large nuclear weapon today may possess a thousand times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima--far more than enough to annihilate any city on earth. A single Trident II submarine has the capacity to deliver nearly 200 warheads, which could lay waste any nation, giving the further rough rule of thumb: one boat, one nation. The use of a mere dozen nuclear weapons against, say, the dozen largest cities of the United States, Russia or China, causing tens of millions of deaths, would be a human catastrophe without parallel. The use of a few hundred nuclear weapons, not to speak of a thousand, would raise these already incomprehensible losses by orders of magnitude, leaving the imagination in the dust. Because so few weapons can kill so many people, even far-reaching disarmament proposals would leave us implicated in plans for unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The sole measure that can free us from this burden is abolition. But abolition, during the forty or so years of the cold war, was ruled out.

The moral crisis created by the invention of nuclear weapons, then, lay in the fact that politically realistic people have felt themselves virtually barred during the cold war from being able to champion the only measure that would return governments and their peoples to the realm of minimal moral sense.

The resulting gap between political and moral requirements left us for almost fifty years with a fracture down the center of our beings. In the words of James Agee, in August 1945, just a few weeks after Hiroshima, "All thoughts and things were split." Rudimentary moral principle taught that we must never, even in "retaliation," threaten to kill millions of innocent people, but nuclear strategy required us to do so. Common sense rebelled against offering up every person in our country as a hostage to a hostile power and seizing every person on the territory of that power as a counter-hostage, meanwhile placing the whole arrangement on a hairtrigger; yet policy called this logically necessary. The experience of our century taught us that genocide was the worst of all crimes, but a nuclear "priesthood" taught us that to threaten it, and even to carry it out, was not only justifiable but our inescapable duty. Every scruple in the human conscience declared that we must never risk extinguishing our species--the supreme crime against humanity, and the only crime greater than genocide--but solemn doctrine declared that it was essential to threaten this act. All thoughts that led toward other conclusions had to go unthought--and unacted upon. These were the truly "unthinkable" thoughts of the cold war period. The morbidity of the era consisted of more than the threat of universal death with which it was overhung; it consisted also of the prohibition, so humiliating to the human spirit, against taking action to remove the threat. Thus did the reasoning of the age seemingly compel not only totalitarian regimes but great democracies to enter, against all their better instincts and understanding, into a hated complicity in potentially limitless killing.

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