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Draft – November 2013 – Please do not quote or cite without permission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

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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).

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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’.

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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

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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).

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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 near-

mythical 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).

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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 well-

known (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

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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 mid-

twentieth 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.

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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.

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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).

10 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

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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.

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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.

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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

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(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

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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). 12

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).

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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),

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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).

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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).

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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

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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’.

20

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

21

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).

22

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).

23

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

24

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

25

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

26

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 semi-

romantic 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 self-

enslavement.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?),

27

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).

28

nuclear realist voices that spoke from outside the academy and policy institutions of the post-

war 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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