The oblivion machine

The Mail might love Starmer for committing to the bomb. But the rest of us deserve a decent conversation about it.

Photo by James Adams on Unsplash

If you blink, you'll miss it. If you blink, the whole thing will be over and its content will pass you by. 

We're currently having our biannual conversation about the nuclear bomb. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon. The conversation will last for moments. It'll be defined entirely by unrelated concerns of domestic party-political positioning and framed by a desperate need to prove our machismo. And then it'll be done, and we'll keep chugging along as if the bomb doesn't exist.

Keir Starmer won perhaps his greatest set of front pages since he took leadership of the Labour party today. It'll be one of those mornings where his team sit down, smile at one another, and then head off into the weekend with a spring in their step. They got the front page of the i with a commitment to spend 2.5% of GDP on defense and - far more excitingly - glowing coverage in the Mail for his renewed commitment to nuclear weapons. 

This is what he won: An incredibly positive front page splash, with copy which contains zero criticisms of Labour and includes all of his attack lines on the Tories. A full comment piece by Starmer speaking directly to Mail readers about a nuclear deterrent "triple-lock". Another opinion piece by Stephen Glover questioning "the seriousness with which Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are taking the defence of the realm" and saying that Starmer "will appeal to many who have so far doubted him". And an editorial saying that a reliable Labour defence policy could "remove one more of the dwindling number of reasons to vote Tory".

That's Christmas for a Labour leader. It's Christmas and Easter and your birthday and wedding anniversary rolled into one. A full love-in with the Mail right in the heat of a local election campaign. And that, ultimately, is why Starmer will have done it. There is nothing remarkable about his policy position, no matter how excited the Mail claims to be about it. A Labour leader wanting to prove their defence credentials will sign up to Trident. Sometime later in the general election campaign they might be asked about it once more, probably in a series of quick-fire questions, often with a BBC political editor. Would you use the weapon? Yes. Great. Done. Now we move on.

It's a sound electoral tactic, as the coverage today makes clear. But it is also something else, which we should spend a moment recognising. It is an expression of moral insanity. A complete lack of engagement with one of the most damning inventions of the human species. A studied indifference to the existential reality of this terrible apparatus.

The bomb is an oblivion machine. It is the world-ender, the device which negates those who create it. It is the moment that humankind invented its own downfall. More than a bomb, it is an expression of all that is lost within us. It is the single greatest gamble this species ever took and one which it adopted for reasons of paranoia, suspicion and fear. It is an object so dangerous that we can only rationally discuss it by reference to its eradication. 

This is not a naive belief. It is neither pacifist or radical. Indeed, the chief proponents of nuclear disarmament have often been the very world leaders who would be tasked with using it. Over and over again, you see the same story. US and Soviet leaders who were informed of what a nuclear exchange would actually entail felt themselves unable to comprehend it. The magnitude of it. The lunacy. It kept them up at nights.

Ronald Reagan was a hawk when he arrived in the White House. He changed when he was told that 150 million Americans would die in a nuclear war. He came to despise the mock-professionalism of the language around the bomb, the manner in which it pretended to offer predictability and respectability to a fundamentally irrational proposition by talking about kill properties, equivalent megatonnage, bomber payload and the mathematical evaluation of assured destruction. He resented the officials who, in his words, "tossed around macabre jargon about 'throw weights' and 'kill ratios' as if they were talking about baseball scores". 

He said in 1984 that "we cannot go into another generation with the world living under the threat of those weapons and knowing that some madman can push the button some place". None of this is unusual. The reality of nuclear exchange, once it is explained to the person responsible for initiating it, haunts the human spirit.

The vast literature on nuclear strategy is a black hole. It is full of complex ideas and elaborate thought-processes, but it's impossible to sustain them because the remorseless logic of the bomb pulls them all downwards towards bedlam. The basic fact of the bomb is this: its power is so vast that it defies precautionary calculation. Nothing you do or say can get you out from that grim realisation. As Bernard Brodie, the American military strategist, said: "Everything about the atomic bomb is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and that its destructive power is fantastically great." 

You cannot reduce the power of the bomb to so-called tactical nuclear capability without the side effects of its use. They tried. In the early years of the bomb, defence experts tried to assess the consequences of limiting its power but it couldn't be done. The size of the blast meant you'd always be hitting your own troops. In the aftermath, food, water and parts would be contaminated. As Trevor Dupuy, the military historian, said: "The basic components of a limited war force were not capable of existing, let alone operating, in the very nuclear environment to which our strategy has consigned them."

The bomb initiates a series of domino-strategies which work to constantly ramp up military spending. Mostly this is in peripheral areas to the weapon itself, like surveillance systems and missile defence. This is because an advantage here would provide a viable first-strike capacity without fear of consequence. But no-one ever could secure that advantage, or be confident about it. So the money kept on rolling in - wasted on areas that need not be entertained but for the existence of the bomb in the first place. 

Strategies around the bomb's use reliably degenerate into lunacy. This is because lunacy is baked into the invention. It is something only a madman would do. And therefore all its outcomes reflect that original taint, like a pathology passed down the hereditary line. 

You can feel that madness in that tiny half-second of debate we have about the bomb. The Tory or Labour leader is always asked the same question: Would you use the bomb? They always say yes, unless they're Jeremy Corbyn, because that is the logic of the deterrent. But that is, of course, an insane thing to say. It is the only context in which someone could be asked if they would be willing to murder millions of men, women and children and be considered sensible for responding in the affirmative.

The bomb is a weapon of genocide. It has been recognised as such from the start. As Oppenheimer himself said during the development of the hydrogen bomb: "It is clear that this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives. It is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations." 

Because of the potential for the complete destruction of the enemy country, the remorseless logic of nuclear exchange is towards surprise attack. But this creates a cascading madness of grotesque incentives. Thomas Schelling, the game theorist, summarised it best. "If surprise carries an advantage it is worthwhile to avert it by striking first," he said. "Fear that the other may be about to strike in the mistaken belief that we are about to strike gives us a motive for striking, and so justifies the other's motive. But if the gains from even a successful surprise are less desired than no war at all, there is no fundamental basis for an attack by either side." 

There is therefore a value to madness. And more than that, there is an motivation towards acting as if you are mad so that the other side believes that you will do mad things, because that is the only way to maintain credibility in a strategy that is itself grounded in madness. As Lawrence Freedman wrote in his textbook on nuclear strategy: "Stability depends on something that is more the antithesis of strategy rather than its apotheosis - on threats that things will get out of hand, that we might act irrationally, that possibly through inadvertence we could set in motion a process that in its development and conclusion would be beyond human control and comprehension."

And then of course there is the greatest madness of all, which is the conviction that accidents never happen. Because they do, and they do specifically in this area with alarming frequency. In 1958, member of a B-47E bomber over South Carolina accidentally released a nuclear bomb, which mercifully happened not to have its core inserted. In 1960, signals from the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Radar bounced back off the moon as it rose over Norway, triggering an automatic alert of imminent attack. In 1966, four thermonuclear weapons fell off a B-52 following a mid-air collision in Spain. Last February, the test firing of a Trident missile from a Royal Navy submarine failed for the second time in a row. What if the failure is in the other direction?

Opposing nuclear weapons doesn't mean you have to believe in immediate unilateral disarmament. It simply means that you show leadership by reducing your nuclear capacity rather than increasing it, and then use that leadership to try to secure international progress towards full multilateral disarmament according to a realistic timetable. 

Our problem is that we are not prepared to have any meaningful conversation about this at all. Those Mail articles are probably the most substantial debate about Britain's nuclear capacity that we will have this election, and they barely mention it, except for three or four semi-comprehensible paragraphs in Glover's comment piece. They're all framed by party political positioning, just as Starmer's commitment to the weapons is. On the substance, there's not a bat squeak of debate, not the slightest rumour of an argument. It's as if we've forgotten what they are.

Christopher Nolan's film has done very well. He has an Oscar and a knighthood. The Tories use him on their infantile social media posts about how wonderful this country is. But if that film was supposed to spark a debate about this weapon then it has definitively failed.

The bomb is the single most terrifying invention in the history of man. And yet we have become so shallow that we treat it as proof of our political virility, without the slightest recognition of what it is and what it could do. We are children with a loaded gun, waving it around in the air and acting like cowboys.

Odds and sods

I honestly didn't mean for all this to come out on the same week that my colleague Dorian Lynskey publishes his book on the end of the world. But it did, which is a nice excuse to talk about it. I'm biased, obviously, but it is an immense piece of work: epic in scale, astonishing in its breadth and depth, crammed full of tiny stories and vast narratives, threaded by gloriously funny lines. It is an autopsy of our fears and a testament to our hopes. It's a work of humanism. Available here.