Look at this article. I believe completely in everything that Lifton is saying about the numbing genocidal mentality that perpetuates itself through the inevitable deterrence usage of these devastating weapons.
I'd like to hear your thought's too.
World Policy Journal March 22, 2001
SECTION: No. 1, Vol. 18; Pg. 25 ; ISSN: 0740-2775
HEADLINE: Illusions of the Second Nuclear Age; dangers of nuclear weapons
BYLINE: Robert Jay Lifton
BODY:
By a perverse paradox, even though the danger of a nuclear calamity--whether by design, accident, or through an act of terror--has grown greater, most of us seem less inclined to talk or even think about it. The Cold War has ended, its ideological fevers have abated, and thus falsely reassured, so have our fears of a nuclear holocaust. Yet the weapons remain, arms control is at a standstill, a new administration's secretary of defense talks wistfully of resuming nuclear testing to upgrade an aging nuclear arsenal, and elsewhere the furies of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism rage as seldom before. We can usefully speak of a second nuclear age, with its fresh illusions about protecting ourselves from these weapons, even as the number of would-be nuclear acolytes continues its alarming increase.
The New Psychic Numbing
No discussion of psychic numbing with respect to nuclear weapons could have much meaning without what we might call a nuclear baseline. That baseline-that ultimate nuclear truth--lies in what the weapons do to human beings. So let me sum up in a few sentences what I learned about that nuclear truth while living in Hiroshima and interviewing survivors some decades ago--keeping in mind that the Hiroshima bomb was, by present standards, the tiniest of nuclear weapons. [1] From the split second during which one was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, one came to experience a lifelong immersion in death and a lifelong death taint--which I described in four stages. There was first the sea of death one encountered at the moment of the bomb blast, the sense of being inundated by ugly dying and of witnessing something close to the end of the world. Survivors retained lifelong images of ultimate horror. The second stage occurred shortly afterward, within days or weeks, in the form of grotesque symptoms of acute radiation effects: bleeding from all of the bodily orifices, severe diarrhea and dehydration, high fever and weakness, and again many deaths. The third stage came months or years, even decades later: delayed radiation effects, including an increased incidence of leukemias and other forms of cancer, left survivors feeling that they were constantly being stalked by death.
The fourth stage was the experience of the permanent identity of the hibakusha, or "explosion-affected person," meaning survivor of the atomic bomb, which for many included feelings of being as if dead. This had to do with both the survivors' profound identification with those who were killed by the bomb (whose number can never be known, with estimates ranging from 70,000 to 200,000), and with their own vulnerability to death. That identity and that death taint, it was feared, could be passed on to subsequent generations because of the possibility of hereditary transmission of radiation effects. So the immersion in death extended not only over one's entire lifetime but, at least in one's fears, to one's descendants as well.
We don't hear much about those human effects these days, but we would do well to have in mind this baseline as we confront the realities of nuclear weapons. The second nuclear age, which began after the end of the Cold War, is only about a decade old. But it follows upon a half-century of the existence of the weapons in the world, a salient factor in its psychological currents. We have, as the expression goes, "lived with" nuclear weapons for more than five decades, but this cohabitation is far from benign. Its consequences can be malignant in the extreme.
During the first nuclear age, from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s, there was a collective inclination toward muting our feelings about these weapons, especially our fear. But that fear periodically manifested itself. Immediately after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans experienced a confusing mixture of triumphalism and anxiety. The anxiety was again widely visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and still again during the extraordinary protests of the mid-1980s, including the nuclear-freeze and international physicians' movements. Awe, terror, and fear, along with what I have called imagery of extinction, the anticipation of the end of everything, were never far from the surface.
But during our second nuclear age, we have more or less become used to nuclear weapons as part of our landscape. To be sure, we have not lost that awe and anxiety, but as with any group of longstanding residents, there is a tendency toward acceptance. The second nuclear age--for the United States at least--has so far been a period of relative (and misleading) nuclear quietism, sustained even after the testing of weapons in India and Pakistan. The factor at work here is our relief at no longer living in a world in which the two superpowers kept each other in their nuclear sights, while repeatedly threatening to destroy the world in the name of something called "national security." That relief is real, a response to a good thing, or at least to an end of the worst thing imaginable.
The trouble is that in other ways the dangers associated with nuclear weapons are greater than ever: the continuing weapons-centered policies in the United States and elsewhere; the difficulties in controlling nuclear weapons that exist under unstable conditions (especially in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union); [2] and the eagerness and potential capacity of certain nations and "private" groups to acquire and possibly use the weapons. In that sense, the nuclear quietism is perilous. Or, to put the matter another way, we no longer manifest an appropriate degree of fear in relation to actual nuclear danger. While fear in itself is hardly to be recommended as a guiding human emotion, its absence in the face of danger can lead to catastrophe.
We human animals have built-in fear reactions in response to threat. These reactions help us to protect ourselves--to step back from the path of a speeding automobile, or in the case of our ancestors, from the path of a wild animal. Fear can be transmuted into constructive planning and policies: whether for minimizing vulnerability to attacks by wild animals, or for more complex contemporary threats. Through fear, ordinary people can be motivated to pursue constructive means for sustaining peace, or at least for limiting the scope of violence. Similarly, in exchanges between world leaders on behalf of preventing large--scale conflict, a tinge of fear--sometimes more than a tinge--can enable each to feel the potential bloodshed and suffering that would result from failure.
But with nuclear weapons, our psychological circuits are impaired. We know that the weapons are around--and we hear talk about nuclear dangers somewhere "out there"--but our minds no longer connect with the dangers or with the weapons themselves. That blunting of feeling extends into other areas. One of the many sins for which advocates of large nuclear stockpiles must answer is the prevalence of psychic numbing to enormous potential suffering, the blunting of our ethical standards as human beings.
In the absence of the sort of threatening nuclear rhetoric the United States and Russia indulged in during the 1980s, we can all too readily numb ourselves to everything nuclear, and thereby live as though the weapons pose no danger, or as though they don't exist. To be sure, we have never quite been able to muster an appropriate level of fear with respect to these weapons--one that would spur us to take constructive steps to remove the threat. We have always been able to numb ourselves in this regard, which must be seen as a basic human response to a threat that is apocalyptic in scope and so technologically distanced as to be unreal. But there were at least brief moments when we would awaken from our nuclear torpor.
Now there is little but torpor. The weapons have been accepted as belonging on our planet no less than we do, as if they were part of nature--like great trees or mountains that are old, established, immovable--rather than technological instruments of genocide that we ourselves have created.
Persistent Nuclearism
Another change from the first nuclear age is our relationship to the scourge of nuclearism. I have used this word to suggest a passionate ideology bound up with nuclear weapons: an embrace of the power of that which we most fear, a near-worship of that which we are so much in awe. Looking back at the mid-1980s, it is already difficult to believe the degree to which--only a decade and a half ago--nuclear weapons were held up as god-like devices that could maintain our "national security," protect us in the struggle against evil, assure a brilliant American future, and indeed keep the world going.
The good news about nuclearism is that it has been subjected to a great wave of intellectual and ethical criticism, and that it is no longer a respectable ideology in most thinking environments. It has become what the weapons scholar Sheldon Unger, in The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism, calls a "tarnished faith." The bad news, as Unger (along with others) also makes clear, is that such a sensible nuclear critique--what we can call ideological backsliding--does not extend to our present policymakers, nor for that matter to many leaders throughout the world. That is, nuclearism is all too alive, though I would not say well, among decisionmakers whose countries already possess, or wish to possess, these mystical objects. Here it is important to keep in mind the double character of the weapons. They are physical entities that are unprecedentedly murderous and at the same time they are perversely spiritualized objects. Nuclearism, then, is a beleaguered ideology, still in flux. Ideologies, like people, can be most d angerous when threatened and under duress. From that standpoint, the very force of the contemporary critique of nuclear weapons now being put forward by thoughtful and dedicated world statesmen could lead less thoughtful, less compassionate leaders and groups to reassert their devotion to and deification of nuclear weapons.
Trickle-Down Nuclearism
Even worse, nuclearism can "trickle down" (the Reaganite term is more accurate here than in its usual economic application) to smaller and smaller groups. Nuclearism arose initially in the country that produced the first atomic bombs, the United States, and could be observed in the intensity of our early commitment to the new weapon--and to its investiture, however inaccurately, as the "winning weapon" of World War II. The Soviet Union did not take long to evolve its own sustained version of nuclearism, so that, over the long years of the Cold War, that spiritual deformation was centered mainly in the two great superpowers--whatever its additional manifestations in France, England, and China. Other countries could and did have nuclearistic aspirations of their own, but it was very clear to everyone that vast resources of money, science, and technology were needed to create and maintain a nuclear arsenal.
Now, however, there is all too much evidence that smaller, less wealthy nations--such as Israel, India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran--can entertain the possibility of stockpiling their own ultimate weaponry, or are already doing so. The Indian-Pakistani confrontation is instructive in both its terrible danger and its psychological nakedness. In both India and Pakistan, the leaders who ordered the detonation of nuclear weapons saw themselves as not only protecting their "national security" but as also enabling their nations to leap onto the world stage as great powers--of gaining global respect while evoking in others terror and awe. The reactions of many ordinary Indian and Pakistani people--the celebrations, the dancing in the streets, and the exuberant assertions of pride and triumph--were just as troubling. They were experiencing in themselves as individual people, as well as in their country, a new dimension of power bound up specifically with nuclear weaponry. The explosion of their country's nuclear weapon s had unleashed a triumphalist nationalism, a nuclearized nationalism.
As the weapons technology trickles down, so does the temptation to the mindset of nuclearism. Moreover, the effects of trickle-down nuclearism may now be seen among small, nongovernmental cultic groups, both religious and political, whose fevered imaginations are already primed for the possession of such destructive power. This new development--which may be characterized as the globalization of both weapons and weapons-centered ideology--changes the whole nuclear terrain.
The quintessential example here is Aum Shinrikyo, the fanatical Japanese cult known to the world mostly for its release of Sarin (i hate shartley) nerve gas in the Tokyo subways in March 1995, and also for the stockpiling and attempted use of biological weapons in the form of botulinus toxin and anthrax bacillus. [3] For its guru, Shoko Asahara, however, these chemical and biological weapons were essentially substitutes for the nuclear weapons he sought but found more difficult to acquire. They were, in his words, "energy-saving atomic bombs," and (as he and others have put it) "the poor man's nuclear weapons." Asahara's early and continuous obsession with Hiroshima and with nuclear weapons in general was the touchstone for all of his actions and imaginings concerning weapons of mass destruction of any kind. He predicted that Japan would be subjected to "many Hiroshimas" in the near future, and he went through the typical personal nuclearistic sequence from fear and awe of the weapons to passionate embrace of their power. He planned for a later, vastly greater release of Sarin gas in Tokyo as a way of triggering World War III, which he imagined taking the form of an all-consuming nuclear holocaust. That, in turn, would lead to Armageddon, which he and his disciples (and virtually no one else) would survive. That is, nuclear weapons would be the means for destroying a defiled world for the purpose of saving it.
Aum was remarkable in that its members combined these apocalyptic fantasies with attempts to acquire the weapons that could help them realize them. The cult crossed a terrible threshold by becoming the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world.
Those ultimate weapons encourage the formation of world-destroying cults. All that is needed is a guru who is paranoid and megalomaniac--who can instill in his followers an all-consuming sense of vitality and transcendence--and an apocalyptic vision based on a theology or ideology that requires not just anticipating Armageddon but making it happen. One can then speak of killing to heal, which is reminiscent of Nazi doctors, or of altruistic murder. (In Aum Shinrikyo this was called poa, a principle in which people of high spiritual attainment, by killing those of lower spiritual attainment, benefited them by enhancing their next incarnation, providing a higher level for their next life, and thereby offering a kind of immortality in being victimized.)
Such groups lay claim to what I call "ownership of death," which entitles one to kill on a massive scale with the expectation that member's of one's own group will survive, often as the only survivors. (Indeed, any group or nation contemplating the use of nuclear weapons is thereby claiming ownership of death.) In order to carry out this agenda, members of world-destroying cults engage in aggressive psychic numbing. They become devoid of empathy for people in the world outside the group, and killing is ennobled by being viewed as a heroic ordeal for the killers. Such was the sentiment expressed by Heinrich Himmler to his SS generals.
The ownership of death goes hand in hand with the powerful lure of ultimate weapons. Indeed, Shoka Asahara, Aum Shinrikyo's leader, demonstrated the special attraction of these weapons for megalomanic gurus. And as Aum also demonstrated, ordinary people can all too readily be drawn into a collective form of that destructive megalomania.
Trickle-down nuclearism also exists in our own country, notably in certain fanatical right-wing groups. Timothy McVeigh's destructive instrument in Oklahoma City was the low-tech fertilizer bomb. But the same book in which he found a description of how to make such a bomb--a visionary neo-Nazi novel called The Turner Diaries that he revered and carried everywhere--ends in a nuclear apocalypse, from which only the noble exemplars and revolutionaries of the "white race" emerge victorious. Their nuclear triumph includes the mass slaughter of all Jews and nonwhites, first in the United States and then continent by continent across the globe, another example of destroying the world in order to save it.
The larger point is that trickle-down nuclearism can tap the widespread human potential for fantasies of world destruction and organize the fantasies so that they become concrete and even respectable. To be sure, such malignant fantasies can hardly be eliminated by a test ban treaty or by any single international or domestic act. But the very existence of these weapons is a constant stimulus for world-ending fantasies, along with the potential means of carrying them out.
Nuclear Dynamic/Superpower Syndrome
Nuclear weapons beget nuclear weapons. This has been the case since the moment of their appearance. During the Cold War, for instance, each new weapon served as a stimulus for an opponent's improved version. But now the existence of the weapons directly stimulates both material and psychological proliferation, so that even without their use, they sustain the dynamic of nuclear globalization: all can be drawn to the source of ultimate power. Nuclear weapons anywhere call forth nuclearism everywhere, which creates more weapons and weapons projects, which in turn deepens and extends the nuclearistic mindset. In the process, the weapons become a source of motivation for their own use.
Even weapons advocates--those deepest into nuclearism--sense that these weapons are instruments for evil. But the lure of ultimate power becomes irresistible, to the point that this awareness of evil must be suppressed--all the more so when one justifies the acquisition of such power with the claim that it will be used for noble purposes. Then one's enemies, rather than the weapons themselves, become the repositories of evil. However quietly they may sit in silos or even in virtual space, nuclear weapons are never innocuous.
Bound up with the nuclear dynamic, but not much addressed, are various currents of superpower psychology. America's superpower status, what we may call its "superpower syndrome," is inexorably tied--not only militarily and politically but psychologically--to its nuclear domination.
A superpower, by definition, transcends ordinary limits of power. When, as today, there is only one nation so designated, its leaders and its citizens as well run the danger of feeling themselves to be part of something that is more than natural, that is mystical, even omnipotent and deified (tendencies hardly absent from American history in general). Above all, a superpower cannot be vulnerable, and any indication of vulnerability or weakness must be negated. Within that mentality, other countries might suffer horrendous damage in a nuclear war, but the superpower must emerge unscathed. Hence the persistent American illusions about antiballistic missiles and national missile defense, and the commitment (disturbingly strong in the new Bush administration but hardly absent elsewhere) to a project that does not and cannot work--cannot ever effectively counter incoming nuclear missiles--while radically undermining worldwide arrangements for actually reducing the nuclear threat.
The superpower syndrome adversely affects other nations as well. They may become deeply resentful of the superpower's aggressive claims to omnipotence and its resistance to sharing the international responsibilities of ordinary nations. At the same time, they may find themselves becoming deeply dependent upon the superpower as the only source of effective action in the world. But the most profound danger of this syndrome is its denial of the universal vulnerability to nuclear holocaust. This denial in turn further feeds the illusions of nuclearism.
Toward Denuclearization
Looking psychologically and historically, then, at our second nuclear age, we can come to what I believe to be a simple set of conclusions. We need to replace psychic numbing with awareness, and to expose and counter the new versions of nuclearism as well as the older ones. We need to probe ever more deeply the trickle-down effects of existing weapons, including especially their psychological effects. And we need to take steps, as citizen activists and concerned intellectuals, to denuclearize the world. We need to start here at home and renounce our weapons-centered superpower status, thereby freeing ourselves to pursue saner, life-enhancing projects. We ought to heed the words of Seneca, the Roman philosopher and dramatist: "Power over life and death--don't be proud of it. Whatever others fear from you, you'll be threatened with."
Robert Jay Lifton is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books, including Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, which won a National Book Award, and Who Owns Death?
Notes
This essay is a modified version of a talk given in November 2000 at a conference, "The Second Nuclear Age and the Academy," sponsored by the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College, the Continuing Education Center of the CUNY Graduate School, and The Nation Institute.
(1.) Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991 [1968]). See also, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Avon, 1995).
(2.) Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000).
(3.) Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).
I'd like to hear your thought's too.
World Policy Journal March 22, 2001
SECTION: No. 1, Vol. 18; Pg. 25 ; ISSN: 0740-2775
HEADLINE: Illusions of the Second Nuclear Age; dangers of nuclear weapons
BYLINE: Robert Jay Lifton
BODY:
By a perverse paradox, even though the danger of a nuclear calamity--whether by design, accident, or through an act of terror--has grown greater, most of us seem less inclined to talk or even think about it. The Cold War has ended, its ideological fevers have abated, and thus falsely reassured, so have our fears of a nuclear holocaust. Yet the weapons remain, arms control is at a standstill, a new administration's secretary of defense talks wistfully of resuming nuclear testing to upgrade an aging nuclear arsenal, and elsewhere the furies of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism rage as seldom before. We can usefully speak of a second nuclear age, with its fresh illusions about protecting ourselves from these weapons, even as the number of would-be nuclear acolytes continues its alarming increase.
The New Psychic Numbing
No discussion of psychic numbing with respect to nuclear weapons could have much meaning without what we might call a nuclear baseline. That baseline-that ultimate nuclear truth--lies in what the weapons do to human beings. So let me sum up in a few sentences what I learned about that nuclear truth while living in Hiroshima and interviewing survivors some decades ago--keeping in mind that the Hiroshima bomb was, by present standards, the tiniest of nuclear weapons. [1] From the split second during which one was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, one came to experience a lifelong immersion in death and a lifelong death taint--which I described in four stages. There was first the sea of death one encountered at the moment of the bomb blast, the sense of being inundated by ugly dying and of witnessing something close to the end of the world. Survivors retained lifelong images of ultimate horror. The second stage occurred shortly afterward, within days or weeks, in the form of grotesque symptoms of acute radiation effects: bleeding from all of the bodily orifices, severe diarrhea and dehydration, high fever and weakness, and again many deaths. The third stage came months or years, even decades later: delayed radiation effects, including an increased incidence of leukemias and other forms of cancer, left survivors feeling that they were constantly being stalked by death.
The fourth stage was the experience of the permanent identity of the hibakusha, or "explosion-affected person," meaning survivor of the atomic bomb, which for many included feelings of being as if dead. This had to do with both the survivors' profound identification with those who were killed by the bomb (whose number can never be known, with estimates ranging from 70,000 to 200,000), and with their own vulnerability to death. That identity and that death taint, it was feared, could be passed on to subsequent generations because of the possibility of hereditary transmission of radiation effects. So the immersion in death extended not only over one's entire lifetime but, at least in one's fears, to one's descendants as well.
We don't hear much about those human effects these days, but we would do well to have in mind this baseline as we confront the realities of nuclear weapons. The second nuclear age, which began after the end of the Cold War, is only about a decade old. But it follows upon a half-century of the existence of the weapons in the world, a salient factor in its psychological currents. We have, as the expression goes, "lived with" nuclear weapons for more than five decades, but this cohabitation is far from benign. Its consequences can be malignant in the extreme.
During the first nuclear age, from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s, there was a collective inclination toward muting our feelings about these weapons, especially our fear. But that fear periodically manifested itself. Immediately after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans experienced a confusing mixture of triumphalism and anxiety. The anxiety was again widely visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and still again during the extraordinary protests of the mid-1980s, including the nuclear-freeze and international physicians' movements. Awe, terror, and fear, along with what I have called imagery of extinction, the anticipation of the end of everything, were never far from the surface.
But during our second nuclear age, we have more or less become used to nuclear weapons as part of our landscape. To be sure, we have not lost that awe and anxiety, but as with any group of longstanding residents, there is a tendency toward acceptance. The second nuclear age--for the United States at least--has so far been a period of relative (and misleading) nuclear quietism, sustained even after the testing of weapons in India and Pakistan. The factor at work here is our relief at no longer living in a world in which the two superpowers kept each other in their nuclear sights, while repeatedly threatening to destroy the world in the name of something called "national security." That relief is real, a response to a good thing, or at least to an end of the worst thing imaginable.
The trouble is that in other ways the dangers associated with nuclear weapons are greater than ever: the continuing weapons-centered policies in the United States and elsewhere; the difficulties in controlling nuclear weapons that exist under unstable conditions (especially in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union); [2] and the eagerness and potential capacity of certain nations and "private" groups to acquire and possibly use the weapons. In that sense, the nuclear quietism is perilous. Or, to put the matter another way, we no longer manifest an appropriate degree of fear in relation to actual nuclear danger. While fear in itself is hardly to be recommended as a guiding human emotion, its absence in the face of danger can lead to catastrophe.
We human animals have built-in fear reactions in response to threat. These reactions help us to protect ourselves--to step back from the path of a speeding automobile, or in the case of our ancestors, from the path of a wild animal. Fear can be transmuted into constructive planning and policies: whether for minimizing vulnerability to attacks by wild animals, or for more complex contemporary threats. Through fear, ordinary people can be motivated to pursue constructive means for sustaining peace, or at least for limiting the scope of violence. Similarly, in exchanges between world leaders on behalf of preventing large--scale conflict, a tinge of fear--sometimes more than a tinge--can enable each to feel the potential bloodshed and suffering that would result from failure.
But with nuclear weapons, our psychological circuits are impaired. We know that the weapons are around--and we hear talk about nuclear dangers somewhere "out there"--but our minds no longer connect with the dangers or with the weapons themselves. That blunting of feeling extends into other areas. One of the many sins for which advocates of large nuclear stockpiles must answer is the prevalence of psychic numbing to enormous potential suffering, the blunting of our ethical standards as human beings.
In the absence of the sort of threatening nuclear rhetoric the United States and Russia indulged in during the 1980s, we can all too readily numb ourselves to everything nuclear, and thereby live as though the weapons pose no danger, or as though they don't exist. To be sure, we have never quite been able to muster an appropriate level of fear with respect to these weapons--one that would spur us to take constructive steps to remove the threat. We have always been able to numb ourselves in this regard, which must be seen as a basic human response to a threat that is apocalyptic in scope and so technologically distanced as to be unreal. But there were at least brief moments when we would awaken from our nuclear torpor.
Now there is little but torpor. The weapons have been accepted as belonging on our planet no less than we do, as if they were part of nature--like great trees or mountains that are old, established, immovable--rather than technological instruments of genocide that we ourselves have created.
Persistent Nuclearism
Another change from the first nuclear age is our relationship to the scourge of nuclearism. I have used this word to suggest a passionate ideology bound up with nuclear weapons: an embrace of the power of that which we most fear, a near-worship of that which we are so much in awe. Looking back at the mid-1980s, it is already difficult to believe the degree to which--only a decade and a half ago--nuclear weapons were held up as god-like devices that could maintain our "national security," protect us in the struggle against evil, assure a brilliant American future, and indeed keep the world going.
The good news about nuclearism is that it has been subjected to a great wave of intellectual and ethical criticism, and that it is no longer a respectable ideology in most thinking environments. It has become what the weapons scholar Sheldon Unger, in The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism, calls a "tarnished faith." The bad news, as Unger (along with others) also makes clear, is that such a sensible nuclear critique--what we can call ideological backsliding--does not extend to our present policymakers, nor for that matter to many leaders throughout the world. That is, nuclearism is all too alive, though I would not say well, among decisionmakers whose countries already possess, or wish to possess, these mystical objects. Here it is important to keep in mind the double character of the weapons. They are physical entities that are unprecedentedly murderous and at the same time they are perversely spiritualized objects. Nuclearism, then, is a beleaguered ideology, still in flux. Ideologies, like people, can be most d angerous when threatened and under duress. From that standpoint, the very force of the contemporary critique of nuclear weapons now being put forward by thoughtful and dedicated world statesmen could lead less thoughtful, less compassionate leaders and groups to reassert their devotion to and deification of nuclear weapons.
Trickle-Down Nuclearism
Even worse, nuclearism can "trickle down" (the Reaganite term is more accurate here than in its usual economic application) to smaller and smaller groups. Nuclearism arose initially in the country that produced the first atomic bombs, the United States, and could be observed in the intensity of our early commitment to the new weapon--and to its investiture, however inaccurately, as the "winning weapon" of World War II. The Soviet Union did not take long to evolve its own sustained version of nuclearism, so that, over the long years of the Cold War, that spiritual deformation was centered mainly in the two great superpowers--whatever its additional manifestations in France, England, and China. Other countries could and did have nuclearistic aspirations of their own, but it was very clear to everyone that vast resources of money, science, and technology were needed to create and maintain a nuclear arsenal.
Now, however, there is all too much evidence that smaller, less wealthy nations--such as Israel, India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran--can entertain the possibility of stockpiling their own ultimate weaponry, or are already doing so. The Indian-Pakistani confrontation is instructive in both its terrible danger and its psychological nakedness. In both India and Pakistan, the leaders who ordered the detonation of nuclear weapons saw themselves as not only protecting their "national security" but as also enabling their nations to leap onto the world stage as great powers--of gaining global respect while evoking in others terror and awe. The reactions of many ordinary Indian and Pakistani people--the celebrations, the dancing in the streets, and the exuberant assertions of pride and triumph--were just as troubling. They were experiencing in themselves as individual people, as well as in their country, a new dimension of power bound up specifically with nuclear weaponry. The explosion of their country's nuclear weapon s had unleashed a triumphalist nationalism, a nuclearized nationalism.
As the weapons technology trickles down, so does the temptation to the mindset of nuclearism. Moreover, the effects of trickle-down nuclearism may now be seen among small, nongovernmental cultic groups, both religious and political, whose fevered imaginations are already primed for the possession of such destructive power. This new development--which may be characterized as the globalization of both weapons and weapons-centered ideology--changes the whole nuclear terrain.
The quintessential example here is Aum Shinrikyo, the fanatical Japanese cult known to the world mostly for its release of Sarin (i hate shartley) nerve gas in the Tokyo subways in March 1995, and also for the stockpiling and attempted use of biological weapons in the form of botulinus toxin and anthrax bacillus. [3] For its guru, Shoko Asahara, however, these chemical and biological weapons were essentially substitutes for the nuclear weapons he sought but found more difficult to acquire. They were, in his words, "energy-saving atomic bombs," and (as he and others have put it) "the poor man's nuclear weapons." Asahara's early and continuous obsession with Hiroshima and with nuclear weapons in general was the touchstone for all of his actions and imaginings concerning weapons of mass destruction of any kind. He predicted that Japan would be subjected to "many Hiroshimas" in the near future, and he went through the typical personal nuclearistic sequence from fear and awe of the weapons to passionate embrace of their power. He planned for a later, vastly greater release of Sarin gas in Tokyo as a way of triggering World War III, which he imagined taking the form of an all-consuming nuclear holocaust. That, in turn, would lead to Armageddon, which he and his disciples (and virtually no one else) would survive. That is, nuclear weapons would be the means for destroying a defiled world for the purpose of saving it.
Aum was remarkable in that its members combined these apocalyptic fantasies with attempts to acquire the weapons that could help them realize them. The cult crossed a terrible threshold by becoming the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world.
Those ultimate weapons encourage the formation of world-destroying cults. All that is needed is a guru who is paranoid and megalomaniac--who can instill in his followers an all-consuming sense of vitality and transcendence--and an apocalyptic vision based on a theology or ideology that requires not just anticipating Armageddon but making it happen. One can then speak of killing to heal, which is reminiscent of Nazi doctors, or of altruistic murder. (In Aum Shinrikyo this was called poa, a principle in which people of high spiritual attainment, by killing those of lower spiritual attainment, benefited them by enhancing their next incarnation, providing a higher level for their next life, and thereby offering a kind of immortality in being victimized.)
Such groups lay claim to what I call "ownership of death," which entitles one to kill on a massive scale with the expectation that member's of one's own group will survive, often as the only survivors. (Indeed, any group or nation contemplating the use of nuclear weapons is thereby claiming ownership of death.) In order to carry out this agenda, members of world-destroying cults engage in aggressive psychic numbing. They become devoid of empathy for people in the world outside the group, and killing is ennobled by being viewed as a heroic ordeal for the killers. Such was the sentiment expressed by Heinrich Himmler to his SS generals.
The ownership of death goes hand in hand with the powerful lure of ultimate weapons. Indeed, Shoka Asahara, Aum Shinrikyo's leader, demonstrated the special attraction of these weapons for megalomanic gurus. And as Aum also demonstrated, ordinary people can all too readily be drawn into a collective form of that destructive megalomania.
Trickle-down nuclearism also exists in our own country, notably in certain fanatical right-wing groups. Timothy McVeigh's destructive instrument in Oklahoma City was the low-tech fertilizer bomb. But the same book in which he found a description of how to make such a bomb--a visionary neo-Nazi novel called The Turner Diaries that he revered and carried everywhere--ends in a nuclear apocalypse, from which only the noble exemplars and revolutionaries of the "white race" emerge victorious. Their nuclear triumph includes the mass slaughter of all Jews and nonwhites, first in the United States and then continent by continent across the globe, another example of destroying the world in order to save it.
The larger point is that trickle-down nuclearism can tap the widespread human potential for fantasies of world destruction and organize the fantasies so that they become concrete and even respectable. To be sure, such malignant fantasies can hardly be eliminated by a test ban treaty or by any single international or domestic act. But the very existence of these weapons is a constant stimulus for world-ending fantasies, along with the potential means of carrying them out.
Nuclear Dynamic/Superpower Syndrome
Nuclear weapons beget nuclear weapons. This has been the case since the moment of their appearance. During the Cold War, for instance, each new weapon served as a stimulus for an opponent's improved version. But now the existence of the weapons directly stimulates both material and psychological proliferation, so that even without their use, they sustain the dynamic of nuclear globalization: all can be drawn to the source of ultimate power. Nuclear weapons anywhere call forth nuclearism everywhere, which creates more weapons and weapons projects, which in turn deepens and extends the nuclearistic mindset. In the process, the weapons become a source of motivation for their own use.
Even weapons advocates--those deepest into nuclearism--sense that these weapons are instruments for evil. But the lure of ultimate power becomes irresistible, to the point that this awareness of evil must be suppressed--all the more so when one justifies the acquisition of such power with the claim that it will be used for noble purposes. Then one's enemies, rather than the weapons themselves, become the repositories of evil. However quietly they may sit in silos or even in virtual space, nuclear weapons are never innocuous.
Bound up with the nuclear dynamic, but not much addressed, are various currents of superpower psychology. America's superpower status, what we may call its "superpower syndrome," is inexorably tied--not only militarily and politically but psychologically--to its nuclear domination.
A superpower, by definition, transcends ordinary limits of power. When, as today, there is only one nation so designated, its leaders and its citizens as well run the danger of feeling themselves to be part of something that is more than natural, that is mystical, even omnipotent and deified (tendencies hardly absent from American history in general). Above all, a superpower cannot be vulnerable, and any indication of vulnerability or weakness must be negated. Within that mentality, other countries might suffer horrendous damage in a nuclear war, but the superpower must emerge unscathed. Hence the persistent American illusions about antiballistic missiles and national missile defense, and the commitment (disturbingly strong in the new Bush administration but hardly absent elsewhere) to a project that does not and cannot work--cannot ever effectively counter incoming nuclear missiles--while radically undermining worldwide arrangements for actually reducing the nuclear threat.
The superpower syndrome adversely affects other nations as well. They may become deeply resentful of the superpower's aggressive claims to omnipotence and its resistance to sharing the international responsibilities of ordinary nations. At the same time, they may find themselves becoming deeply dependent upon the superpower as the only source of effective action in the world. But the most profound danger of this syndrome is its denial of the universal vulnerability to nuclear holocaust. This denial in turn further feeds the illusions of nuclearism.
Toward Denuclearization
Looking psychologically and historically, then, at our second nuclear age, we can come to what I believe to be a simple set of conclusions. We need to replace psychic numbing with awareness, and to expose and counter the new versions of nuclearism as well as the older ones. We need to probe ever more deeply the trickle-down effects of existing weapons, including especially their psychological effects. And we need to take steps, as citizen activists and concerned intellectuals, to denuclearize the world. We need to start here at home and renounce our weapons-centered superpower status, thereby freeing ourselves to pursue saner, life-enhancing projects. We ought to heed the words of Seneca, the Roman philosopher and dramatist: "Power over life and death--don't be proud of it. Whatever others fear from you, you'll be threatened with."
Robert Jay Lifton is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books, including Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, which won a National Book Award, and Who Owns Death?
Notes
This essay is a modified version of a talk given in November 2000 at a conference, "The Second Nuclear Age and the Academy," sponsored by the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College, the Continuing Education Center of the CUNY Graduate School, and The Nation Institute.
(1.) Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991 [1968]). See also, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Avon, 1995).
(2.) Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000).
(3.) Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).
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