THERMONUCLEAR MONARCHY is the
problem ARM ALL or NONE, the solution.
So now we (or at
least the 0.03% of us who care to hunt for it) discover that U.S. military
spending is not actually being cut at all, but increasing. Also
going up: U.S. nuclear
weapons spending. Some of the new nukes will violate
treaties, but the entire program violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
which requires disarmament, not increased armament. The U.S.
policy of first-strike and the U.S. practice of informing other nations that
“all options are on the table” also violate the U.N. Charter’s ban on
threatening force.
But do nuclear weapons, by the nature of their technology,
violate the U.S. Constitution? Do they violate the basic social contract and
all possibility of self-governance? Thus argues a new book called Thermonuclear
Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry.
It’s not unheard of for people to see out-of-control nuclear spending as a
symptom of out-of-control military spending, itself a symptom of government
corruption, legalized bribery, and a militaristic culture. Scarry’s
argument suggests a reversal: the root of all this evil is not the almighty
dollar but the almighty bomb.
The argument runs something like this. The primary purpose
of the social contract is to create peace and prevent war and other
injury. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause 11) bans the
making of war without the approval of both houses of Congress. This approval was to be required not just for
an existing military to attack another country, but for a military to be raised
at all — standing armies not being anticipated. And it was understood
that an army would not be raised and deployed into war unless the
citizen-soldiers went willingly, their ability to dissent by desertion not
needing to be spelled out (or, let us say, their ability to dissent by mass-desertion,
as desertion in the war that led to the Constitution was punished by death).
And yet, because this point was so crucial to the entire
governmental project, Scarry argues, it was in fact spelled out — in the Second
Amendment. Arms — that is 18th century muskets — were to be freely
distributed among the people, not concentrated in the hands of a king.
“Civilian” control over the military meant popular control, not presidential. The decision to go to war would have to pass through
the people’s representatives in Congress, and through the people as a whole in
the form of soldiers who might refuse to fight. By this thinking, had the
Ludlow Amendment, to create a public referendum before any war, passed in the
1930s, it would have been redundant.
Before the 1940s were over, in Scarry’s view, a Ludlow
Amendment wouldn’t have been worth the paper it was written on, as the
existence of nuclear weapons erases Constitutional checks on war. With nuclear
weapons, a tiny number of people in a government — be it 1 or 3 or 20 or 500 —
hold the power to very quickly and easily kill millions or billions of human
beings, and other species, and very likely themselves in the process.
“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands
of a few, but we can’t have both,” said Louis Brandeis. We may have
democracy, or we may have thermonuclear bombs, but we can’t have both, says
Elaine Scarry.
Each of the series of presidents beginning with Truman and
running up through Nixon is known to have repeatedly come close to choosing to
use nuclear bombs, something the public has learned of, each time, only decades
after the fact. No more recent
president has said he didn’t come close; we may very well learn their
secrets on the usual schedule. When you add to that insanity, the long
string of accidents, mistakes, and misunderstandings, the damage of the testing
and the waste, and the repeated ability of ploughshares activists (and
therefore anybody else) to walk right up to U.S. nuclear weapons to protest
them, it’s amazing that life exists on earth. But Scarry’s focus is on
what the new ability to kill off a continent at the push of a button has done
to presidential power.
While wars since World War II have been non-nuclear, apart
from depleted uranium weapons, they have also been endless and
undeclared. Because presidents can nuke nations, they and Congress and
the public have assumed that a president on his or her own authority can attack
nations with non-nuclear weapons too. Now, I suspect that the
military industrial complex, corrupt elections, and nuclear thinking all feed
off each other. I don’t want a single person who’s trying to clean up
election spending or halt fighter-jet production to stop what they’re
doing. But the possible influence of nuclear thinking on U.S. foreign
policy is intriguing. Once a president has been given more power than any
king has ever had, one might expect some people to do exactly what they’ve done
and treat him like a king in all but name.
Scarry believes that we’re suffering from the false idea that
we’re in a permanent emergency, and that in an emergency there’s no time to
think. In fact, the Constitutional constraints on war were intended
precisely for emergencies, Scarry argues, and are needed precisely
then. But an emergency that can be dealt with by raising an army is
perhaps different from an emergency that will leave everyone on earth dead by
tomorrow either with or without the U.S. government having the opportunity to
contribute its measure of mass-killing to the general apocalypse. The
latter is, of course, not an emergency at all, but an insistence on glorified
ignorance to the bitter end. An emergency that allows time to raise an
army is also different from an emergency involving 21st century “conventional”
weapons, but not nearly as different as we suppose. Remember the desperate
urgency to hit Syria with missiles last September that vanished the moment
Congress refused to do it? The mad rush to start a war before anyone can look
too closely at its justifications does, I think, benefit from nuclear thinking
— from the idea that there is not time to stop and think.
So, what can we do? Scarry believes that if nukes were
eliminated, Congress could take charge of debates over wars
again. Perhaps it could. But would it approve wars? Would it
approve public financing, free air time, and open elections? Would it ban its
members from profiting from war? Would people killed in a Congressionally
declared war be any less dead?
What if the Second Amendment as Scarry understands it were
fulfilled to some slight degree, that is if weapons were slightly more
equitably distributed as a result of the elimination of nukes?
The government would still have all the aircraft carriers and missiles and
bombs and predator drones, but it would have the same number of nukes as the
rest of us. Wouldn’t compliance with the Second Amendment require either
the madness of giving everybody a missile launcher or the sanity of eliminating
non-nuclear weapons of modern war-making along with the nuclear ones?
I think the historical argument that Scarry lays out against
the concentration of military power in the hands of a monarch is equally a case
either for distributing that power or for eliminating it. If large standing armies are the greatest
danger to liberty, as James Madison supposed on his slave plantation, isn’t
that an argument against permanently stationing troops in 175 nations with or
without nukes, as well as against militarizing local police forces at home? If
unjustified war and imprisonment are the greatest violations of the social
contract, must we not end for-profit mass incarceration by plea bargain along
with for-profit mass-murder?
I think Scarry’s argument carries us further in a good
direction than she spells out in the book. It’s a thick book full of extremely lengthy
background information, not to say tangents. There’s a wonderful account
of the history of military desertion. There’s a beautiful account of
Thomas Hobbes as peace advocate. Much of this is valuable for its
own sake. My favorite tangent is a comparison between Switzerland and the
United States. Switzerland decided that air-raid shelters would help
people survive in a nuclear war. While opposing and not possessing
nuclear weapons, Switzerland has created shelters for more than the total
number of people in the country. The United States claimed to have
concluded that shelters would not work, and then spent more on building them
exclusively for the government than it spent on all variety of needs and
services for the rest of us. The nuclear nation has behaved as a
monarchy, while the non-nuclear nation may preserve a remnant of humanity to
tell the tale.
Scarry ends her book by stating that Article I and the Second
Amendment are the best tools she’s found for dismantling nuclear weapons, but
that she’d like to hear of any others. Of course, mass
nonviolent action, education, and organizing are tools that will carry any
campaign beyond the confines of legal argumentation, but as long as we’re
within those confines, I’ll throw out a proposal: Comply with the
Kellogg-Briand Pact. It is far newer, clearer, and less ambiguous than
the Constitution. It is, under the Constitution, unambiguously the
Supreme Law of the Land as a treaty of the U.S. government. It applies in
other nations as well, including a number of other nuclear weapons
nations. It clarifies our thinking on the worst practice our species has
developed, one that will destroy us all, directly or indirectly, if not ended,
with or without nuclear: the practice of war.
The treaty that I recommend remembering bans war.
When we begin to think in those terms, we won’t see torture as the worst war
crime, as Scarry suggests, but war itself as the worst crime of war. We
won’t suggest that killing is wrong because it’s “nonbattlefield,” as Scarry
does at one point. We might question, as Scarry seems not to, that Hawaii
was really part of the United States in 1941, or that U.S. torture really ended
when Obama was elected. I’m quibbling with tiny bits in a large book, but
only because I want to suggest that the arguments that best reject nuclear
weaponry reject all modern war weaponry, its possession, and its use.
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