From the November/December issue of The National Interest.
John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 336 pp., $27.95.
Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda
IT IS easy to overlook the fact that the most startling characteristic of our era is that we are still here. John Mueller reminds us that with the dawn of the nuclear age, we became obsessed first with the idea of all-out nuclear war, then with the idea that nuclear weapons would inevitably spread throughout the world, and, lately, that nuclear terrorism would threaten our cities.
Whether an optimist, a pessimist, a political scientist, a policy maker or merely a person of a certain age, almost all of us and much of our sense of culture has been preoccupied by the atom.
At the start of the Cold War, many levelheaded American officials like George Kennan doubted that this conflict could last for long without either igniting world war or undermining American society. Others looked to a longer and brighter future, and as early as 1946, Bernard Brodie, the father of nuclear-deterrence strategy, believed that mutual and stable deterrence was possible. Others still foresaw nuclear power making electricity too cheap to meter or expected peaceful nuclear explosives to be a key to economic progress by cheaply building ports and canals. And more recently, Columbia professor Kenneth Waltz argued that while nuclear weapons would spread, the result would be to replicate the stability that characterized Soviet-American relations.
Meanwhile, observers of social life and culture saw an enormous impact of things nuclear; from the bikini to the changed and contested images of science and scientists as saviors or menaces, to the (in)famous clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told us how close we were to doom, all the way to visions of a freer, cleaner and better world. Whatever they believed about it, everyone knew we were living in the atomic age.
With the iconoclasm that typifies his work, Mueller will have none of this. Nuclear weapons have been remarkably unimportant; Albert Einstein had it exactly backward when he said that "the atom has changed everything save our way of thinking." For Brodie, the most important "twin facts" about the new bomb were that "it exists" and "its destructive power is fantastically great"; for Mueller, they are that nuclear weapons have had little impact on actual events and that their dangers have been vastly exaggerated. He summarizes his argument sharply: "nuclear weapons have had at best a quite limited effect on history, have been a substantial waste of money and effort, do not seem to have been terribly appealing to most states that do not have them, [and] are out of reach for terrorists. . . ." Far from having nightmares about the bomb, we should "sleep well." A more critical summary would be the picture of Mad's Alfred E. Neuman with his idiotic grin and slogan "What, me worry?" paired with the comic strip Pogo's "We have met the enemy and they are us," which encapsulates Mueller's argument that the unfortunate effects of nuclear weapons stem from our excessive worries about them. The failure of disasters to materialize is less the result of human contrivance than of the natural course of things, Mueller claims.
And that is really a central and rarely asked question. Is it to the credit of our clever policy makers and their wise strategies that we have thus far escaped nuclear Armageddon? Or is it instead simply the general social and historical flow of events that has led us to our current moment?
FOR MUELLER, the benign consequences of nuclear weapons-or at least a lack of malign impact-occurred despite national policies, not because of them. The half-century of peace followed from the broad course of economic development and perhaps progress in human affairs. In other works, Mueller explains that a general aversion to war has emerged among world powers.1 He argues that this trend has nothing to do with nuclear deterrence. For even without nuclear weapons, peace would have been maintained because conventional wars have grown too expensive and human beings seemed to have lost much of their taste for violence. Indeed, if anything, arms-control agreements have been more a hindrance than a help in lowering the level of nuclear arms because by drawing attention to these weapons, they magnified their importance. Similarly, most nations chose not to pursue nuclear weapons because they saw that the costs were great and the benefits few. Terrorists, presumably beyond many of these calculations, have found that the barriers in their way are simply insurmountable.
