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The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Hans J. Morgenthau
Hans J. Morgenthau
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

The nuclear age has ushered in a novel period of history, as distinct from the age that preceded it as the modern age has been from the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages have been from antiquity. Yet while our conditions of life have drastically changed under the impact of the nuclear age, we still live in our thoughts and act through our institutions in an age that has passed. There exists, then, a gap between what we think about our social, political, and philosophic problems and the objective conditions which the nuclear age has created.

This contradiction between our modes of thought and action, belonging to an age that has passed, and the objective conditions of our existence has engendered four paradoxes in our nuclear strategy: the commitment to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise, paralyzed by the fear of having to use it; the search for a nuclear strategy which would avoid the predictable consequences of nuclear war; the pursuit of a nuclear armaments race joined with attempts to stop it; the pursuit of an alliance policy which the availability of nuclear weapons has rendered obsolete. All these paradoxes result from the contrast between traditional attitudes and the possibility of nuclear war and from the fruitless attempts to reconcile the two.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 23 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1964

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References

1 The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, G.P.O., 1962), p. 435 f.Google Scholar, published under the joint auspices of Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, has written the epitaph to this piece of science fiction: “The terms ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ are often used to describe the amount of radioactivity produced by a fusion weapon (or hydrogen bomb) relative to that from what might be described as a ‘normal’ weapon. The latter may be defined aB one in which no special effort has been made either to increase or to decrease the amount of radioactivity produced for the given explosion yield. A ‘clean’ weapon would then be one which is designed to yield significantly less radioactivity than an equivalent normal weapon. It should be noted, however, that a clean fusion weapon would inevitably produce some radioactive species. Even if a pure fusion weapon, with no fission, should be developed, its explosion in air would still result in the formation of carbon-14 and possibly other neutron-induced activities. If special steps were taken in the design of a fusion device, e.g., by salting (9.11), so that upon detonation it generated more radioactivity than a similar normal weapon, it would be described as ‘dirty.’ By its very nature, a fission weapon must be regarded as being dirty.”

2 “How to Plan to Beat Hell,” Fortune, Vol. 67 (January, 1963)Google Scholar, no. 1.

3 It is of interest to note that these habits of thought and action had already become obsolescent in the period before the First World War. “From 1872 to 1913, this rigorous competition in the building up of armies went on, every government spending as much money as it could persuade its people to pay or the national economy would support … without, however, any corresponding increase in security being felt. In fact, the proportionate strength of the various armies was not greatly different in 1914 from what it had been in 1872, but the feeling of insecurity was much greater than it had been forty years earlier.” (Schmitt, Bernadotte E., “The Origins of the First World War” in Medlicott, W. N., ed., From Metternich to Hitler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 186–87Google Scholar.

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