Australia State Library Reading Room, Melbourne, 2005, Photo: Daderot

The movement challenging US militarism is currently focused on the many problems associated with the war in Iraq. And, if there were no war in Iraq, the movement would be focused on the many problems with the war in Afghanistan. There are many crucial questions: How can we call attention to the enormous costs of both conflicts, measured both by destroyed human life and the incredible expenditure of social resources? How do we point out the self-defeating features of attempting to wage a "global war against terror"? How can we finally bring an end to a war that is not only opposed by a majority of the public but one that also lacks any credible rationale from even the political mainstream?

A savvy movement must also be concerned with questions of power, of the connection between the specific military strategies and broader geopolitical interests, of the continuities between Iraq and Afghanistan and previous military interventions, and of the similarities and the differences between the Bush administration and its predecessors.

The main contribution of Joseph Gerson's Empire and the Bomb is to remind us that any serious discussion of the structure and organization of US power cannot proceed very far without reintegrating the nuclear question back into the analysis. Thus far, the violence associated with Iraq and Afghanistan has been appalling but thankfully confined to conventional munitions. But atomic weapons are still present, especially in the incentives for proliferation that both wars continue to generate, in the Bush administration's renewed effort to deploy missile defense systems, and in the failure of the nuclear diplomacy with India and Pakistan which may have actually created greater freedom for the Taliban to use the tribal areas of Pakistan as staging areas for attacks on US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Gerson continually calls on us to include the nuclear into our critical vision.

He also says that we must pay attention to empire, to the "deadly connection" between the bomb and the management of US hegemony of the global market system.

Total War

Empire and the Bomb situates the historical development of the bomb, and its use by policy-makers to further US geopolitical aims, in the context of "total war." Total war targets not only an enemy's military forces but also its entire society, its very capacity to wage war. In this sense, total war significantly predates the nuclear era -- Gerson places its origins in the American Civil War which saw not only enormous loss of life on the battlefield but the deliberate destruction of large swatches of the South's cities and agriculture. General Sherman's destructive march through Atlanta and to the sea became only the earliest expression of the proposition that a nation's capacity to fight goes far deeper than the specific training of its soldiers and their supply with weapons. Total war encourages the adoption of war fighting strategies that attempt to destroy the other side's economic and technical base, transportation system, and even the very will to fight.

World War II, and the targeting of civilians and industry by all sides, furthered total war doctrines; postwar thinking about nuclear weapons brought them to an entirely new level. From 1945 on, it became possible for political and military leaders to actively plan the wholesale destruction of another country -- and the lives of millions of human beings. Not only did they just plan; they created actual capacity. And in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US leaders demonstrated not only the capacity but their willingness to actually take the lives of hundreds of thousands. The post-war system was designed to threaten total war again and again. For Gerson, this situation can be fully understood only through those philosophers and political theorists who have attempted to illuminate the depths of "systematic evil."

Empire

Most conventional critiques of nuclear weapons attribute the history of the nuclear arms race to some form of irrationality. For example, the technological imperative entails a blind effort to create something that appears to be better, even if what happens to be "better" happens to be a bomb. Game theorists point out shortcomings in the human capacity to appreciate the long-term negative consequences of seeking short-term advantages at opponents' expense, since those opponents are often then motivated to respond with their own escalatory innovations, and this undermines the sought-after security. Psychologists blame an arrogance of power rooted in a lack of confidence and other forms of weakness on the part of individual leaders.

Most people think of atomic bombs as abnormal because they threaten the very existence of civilization. In this view, their only defendable role is deterrence. By threatening an overwhelming second strike, no sane leader would ever order a first strike.

Gerson points out that this implied stability was never US policy. Instead, the Pentagon has thought of nuclear weapons as "normal" weapons in the sense that they can be used first and in support of geopolitical interests. Every presidential administration has therefore integrated nuclear weapons into its war plans on the assumption that they could very well be used. Gerson traces the terms successive administrations have used to describe this doctrine: "escalation dominance," "selected nuclear options," "coercive diplomacy," "preventive war," "discriminate deterrence," and "full spectrum dominance."

What they have in common is the imperative to modernize and, against any logic that genuinely respects human life, attempt to achieve meaningful superiority with nuclear weapons. Dan Ellsberg has compared this application to the "thief who points his gun at a victim's head during an armed robbery." Gerson agrees with Ellsberg's argument that "whether or not the trigger is pulled, US presidents [have] repeatedly pointed and used their nuclear 'guns' during international crises and wars."

Many are familiar with how close the world came to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Less well known is how often Washington has actually threatened to use nuclear weapons. Empire and the Bomb provides extensive documentation of these crises; one dramatic table lists 40 such incidents (pp 37-38). The nature of the issued threat varied from dramatically increased levels of strategic alerts to explicit presidential warnings and other forms of nuclear escalation. In other cases ranging from Korea and China to Vietnam and the Middle East, the possible use of atomic weapons was discussed as one of several military options. Gerson provides an extensive analysis of these histories. He focuses less on the specifics of nuclear weapons balance and more on how Washington thought the bomb useful in their management of the global system.

Gerson correctly points out that every president found a way of reminding the rest of the world that the US retained the option of using nuclear weapons first. Even Bill Clinton, sometimes thought to be the darling of arms control, stated that the United States "will continue to maintain nuclear forces of sufficient size and capacity to hold at risk a broad range of assets valued by… political and military leaders" (p. 207). There is no recognition of the constraints of nuclear stalemate here.

The Movement and Hope

Gerson reminds us we have to understand the depth of this system if we are to change it. And we need hope if we are ever going to achieve fundamental reform, let alone genuine nuclear abolition. But where will this hope come from?

Gerson provides one answer in the concluding chapter which offers a valuable account of the global movement against atomic bombs. He is clearly proud of that record and has personally played an important role in building and sustaining that movement. His description, though, is of a movement assailing a system from without. Another approach would have been to trace the actual achievements of the movement, not only by mobilizing millions against the arms race, but also as having a significant influence on the political culture. After all, measured by public opinion polls, US citizens hold far different, more peaceful, views on the role of nuclear weapons than do their leaders. Presidential candidates recognize that it no longer serves their partisan interest to campaign on promises to strengthen US "nuclear credibility." And significant constraints have been placed on some types of testing and some types of weapons. This is due in no small measure to the educative impact of the anti-nuclear movement. The danger of nuclear war has certainly not disappeared, but it is also important to recognize the partial victories.

Another source of hope is that the empire has created, even among establishment figures, less unanimity with regard to the utility of nuclear weapons than Gerson's narrative would imply (although he does briefly describe initiatives by Lee Butler, Andrew Goodpaster, Robert McNamara, Allan Cranston, and others). There remains a powerful existential recognition, within a significant part of the political elite, that nuclear weapons actual use against human beings would be unacceptable.

This awareness was present among some leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this awareness is reflected in McNamara's private understanding with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that nuclear weapons would not actually be used, and this awareness is present in the growing number of former political and military leaders who have disavowed strategic weapons for any conceivable purpose.

It would certainly be better if the United States was not as militaristic. It would be better if the barrier against nuclear use was institutionalized in policy and stronger treaties rather than in private "understandings." And it certainly would be better if retired officials spoke out more strongly when they were on the actual job.

In the face of the frightening history that Gerson describes so well, one cannot rely simply on fluctuating emotional revulsion against the actual use of atomic weapons that exists even among the powerful. But this widespread rejection, which exists throughout the world, and which is also a legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is perhaps the most important potential resource for building an alternative set of policies.

Nuclear weapons are different. And so is the reaction to them -- among most of the elite as well as within the public. An effective movement will not only have to mobilize against their military and political use but also draw upon the recognition, even among those whom the peace movement does not normally think of as allies, that they really can't be used. The nuclear age, as Albert Einstein observed long ago, requires a change in thinking with regard to national policy. The same applies to movement strategy as well.