why we should all talk more about nuclear war

a philosophical long-read on how to take seriously the risk of the most catastrophic thing conceivable

TLDR:

• We can’t hold our politicians to account for the ways in which they risk nuclear war, unless we’re willing to talk about how catastrophic it’d be

• An easy way to mitigate the risks of accidental nuclear war would be for politicians to talk more about these risks, with each other, and in public

• If we don’t talk about the possibility of alternative tech-driven options to nuclear deterrence, then these options are less likely to become open to us, yet they could enable a better status quo

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It’s hard to think of anything more horrific than nuclear war. Yet how often do you hear politicians talk about it? How often do you talk about it, yourself? My aim here is to persuade you this should change. First, I’ll argue that we should all talk more about nuclear war because doing so would increase awareness of how catastrophic it would be. Second, because doing so would decrease the chance of it happening accidentally. And third, because doing so might enable us to find better strategies for avoiding it.

These are general arguments, in that I think humankind should’ve been talking more about nuclear war since the moment nuclear weapons were imagined. I think this even about the Cold War period, when people talked about nuclear war a lot, and were encouraged to do so through public information campaigns and the broadcast of muscular programming like Threads.¹ But we are where we are, and it’s a moment of particular relevance for nuclear-war talk, so let’s start with the latest risks arising.

The current moment

A week ago, it was reported that the US President had agreed to permit Ukraine to fire longer-range American missiles into Russia. The Russian President had previously suggested he’d interpret these missiles being used in this way as the direct involvement of a NATO country in the Russia-Ukraine war, and on Tuesday, Russia’s nuclear doctrine was updated to ‘lower the threshold’ for a nuclear strike in response to such behaviour. Various details about these matters are contestable, and nuclear policies are often purposefully oblique. But it seems likely that America’s change of approach has increased the risk of nuclear war. 

This isn’t to apologise for Russian aggression, however — not least, its invasion of Ukraine in the first place. Of course Russian aggression has increased the risk of nuclear war! Nor is to suggest I’m anything but a hardcore believer in the right to individual and collective self defence. Nonetheless, leaders in multiple countries, particularly the US and the UK, have been taking and threatening certain protective and retaliatory actions, in response to Russian aggression, which are also relevant to the risk of nuclear war. So, unless you’re happy to accept nuclear war as a reasonable response to aggression, then you should be concerned by what both Putin and Biden — and all other relevant power-holders — are doing.

We should also take note of upcoming political change. Some Americans voted for Trump because they perceived him as less likely than Harris to start, maintain, and escalate US involvement in overseas conflict. Trump has presented himself as a war-sceptic, whose commitment to preventing nuclear war is central to why he’s pushing for an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And, regardless of your wider views about Trump, you should probably take this idea relatively seriously, noting what it might say about his supporters,² and that it’s one of the topics on which he’s unusually consistent. As this implies, however, Trump is generally particularly unpredictable. Therefore, even if he did commit to ending US involvement in overseas conflict, he might nonetheless suddenly change his mind. And erratic behaviour doesn’t mix well with nuclear weapons.

Beyond that, perhaps you disagree with my implicit premise that the likelihood of nuclear war would generally decrease if America abdicated its position as the world’s wannabe policeman and sometime gunsmith, and the UK gave up its role as disciple.³ Perhaps you’re understandably concerned that, as Akshai Vikram recently argued, Trump might weaken the ‘nuclear umbrella’ by pulling out of NATO, thereby giving non-nuclear American allies a new incentive to go nuclear, and even “spark[ing] a nuclear arms race” in the Middle East. Regardless of your views on all this, however, unless you’re happy to accept nuclear war as a reasonable part of conflict, then you should take interest in America’s upcoming change of leadership.

Finally, new technology continues to astound. We live in a time of such progress that it’s increasingly hard to guess which long-term problems are about to receive technological solutions, never mind what those solutions will be. Suddenly, rocket boosters are catching rockets, and brains implants are making paralysed people walk! Both these examples involve the realisation of long-dreamed-of solutions, however. Whereas other solutions to long-term problems — solutions like Ozempic and the Dyson Airblade — seemingly appear from the ether.

Below, I’ll argue that we should take seriously the idea that unforeseeable technological advancement could provide valuable new options for decreasing the risk of nuclear war. But new technology brings new threats as well as new opportunities, not least by ‘democratising’ catastrophe. Give a pirate a cutlass, and he’ll maim a few men; teach a pirate to launch a cyber attack, and he could end the world. Nonetheless, unless you’re happy to accept that our current approach to avoiding nuclear war is non-improvable, then you should take interest in the possibility of new options.

In this context, I’m going to make my three arguments.

We should try to raise awareness of catastrophe

My first argument is that we should all talk more about nuclear war because doing so would increase awareness of how catastrophic nuclear war would be.⁴ There are several parts to this argument. The first entails convincing you that nuclear war would be catastrophic; the second that by talking about nuclear war we can increase awareness of its catastrophic nature; and the third that we’re therefore obligated to talk about it more. The first part is easy: there are few arguments easier to win than the ‘nuclear war would be catastrophic’ argument. You just need to make your opponent read any account written by anyone who experienced and survived the otherwise inconceivably horrific effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Of course, you might respond, “But if nuclear war were to happen, then nobody would be here to experience its bad effects, so how can you call it catastrophic?” I’m sloganising this response, but many people depend on versions of it. And there’s a great line in RFK’s account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he refers to the tendency of military leaders to “take positions which, if wrong, ha[ve] the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know”.

The ‘we would all be dead’ response is dreadful for two reasons, however. First, millions if not billions of people could survive a nuclear war — many of them with unbearable physical injuries, and most of them likely to gradually starve to death whilst dealing with unbearable psychological devastation. Second, the ‘we would all be dead’ response suffers the same fatal flaw as arguments against the badness of death that are focused solely on the classic problem of whether death could be subjectively bad.⁵ That is, if we don’t treat death as an objectively bad thing to happen to a person, then we quickly descend into a hell. A hell in which life has no intrinsic value, in which everyone would be better off dead because life entails suffering, and in which torturous deaths are morally irrelevant because death, by its end, is obliteration.

None of this is to deny there are many other horrific things aside from nuclear war. Slaughterhouse-Five teaches us that we shouldn’t allow our necessary focus on the horrors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to override our necessary focus on the horrors of the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden. In other words, even if nuclear war were the most catastrophic possible event, that wouldn’t make it the only catastrophic possible event.

Anyway, I’m taking it as accepted that nuclear war would be catastrophic. This is different from concluding that we should all talk about it more, however. After all, many people don’t want to think or talk about nuclear war, because they find doing so hard. And I mean ‘hard’ as in both difficult and painful. Now, these people don’t deny the catastrophic nature of nuclear war: the reason they want to avoid thinking and talking about it is they’re aware of its nature! Rather, they’re making a different mistake: they’re preferencing their immediate comfort over their permanent obligations to humankind. Maybe this sounds grand. But one point I’m making here is that it’s not just politicians and other power-holders who should learn and share the truths of nuclear war. It’s all responsible adults.

Aside from anything else, we can’t hold power-holders to account unless we’re well informed about important matters, and willing to use our information for the good. And you don’t have to be a fan of social contract theory, like me, to accept you have some responsibility here. That is, you don’t have to believe that the power of our politicians lacks legitimacy without our consent for, and involvement in, their decision-making. You simply have to accept that their actions are the business of everyone those actions affect — which in the case of risking nuclear war, is all of us. This brings me back to Biden and Putin. It’s not apologism for Russian aggression to acknowledge that we’re more likely to influence the leaders of our own democracies than the leaders of overseas autocracies.

Finally, I should address the objection that talking about bad things might make them more likely to happen. I’m not referring to superstitious ideas like jinxing. But rather, the suggestion that, for instance, if you talk to your depressed friend about suicide, then your depressed friend might be more likely to kill themself. Everything I’ve read suggests this isn’t true: that you should talk to your friend, and doing so might save their life. But talking about nuclear war shouldn’t come with this anxiety. I mean, you don’t need to worry about becoming responsible for having made someone suddenly begin to consider the conditions in which they might or might not use their power to cause a nuclear war. If they genuinely hold this power, then they’d be insanely irresponsible if they hadn’t already thought about this! Nonetheless, as with your possibly suicidal friend, if you don’t talk about the possibility of nuclear war, then it’s much harder to try to prevent it.

We should try to prevent accidental catastrophe

I’m now going to make a short second argument: that talking more about nuclear war would decrease the chance of it happening accidentally. I bet you’ve read about Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet satellite-system monitor who prevented catastrophe by deciding that the ‘incoming US nuclear missile’ signal he’d received was a false alarm. The fact that you probably had a meme of this story tweeted into your timeline, with jokey emojis appended, is itself a signal that we should talk more about nuclear war — and do it more seriously.

The most frightening thing I’ve read this year, however, was a one-page article entitled ‘Seven Things Mistaken for an Incoming Nuclear Attack’. As its title suggests, false signals shouldn’t be our only cause for concern. Further near misses have involved an exploding satellite, the sun’s reflection on clouds, a scientific experiment, a faulty computer chip, a flock of geese, and even a bear. As I wrote recently, an instrumental benefit of knowledge-based space-tech advances, particularly in the domains of Earth observation and communications, is the widening of access to information that can prevent these potentially catastrophic confusions.

An easier way to improve access to such information, however, would be for politicians to talk more about these risks — with each other, and in public. Ideally, politicians from all nuclear nations would go further than this. They’d also institute reliable systems for distinguishing between projectiles, hot lines for communicating with each other in times of possible confusion, and many other standard and more innovative options for reducing the risks of accidental nuclear war. Some of these safeguards are already in place — as shown on Thursday, when Russia gave advance notice to the US before firing a non-nuclear missile into Ukraine. Nonetheless, talking more about the risks of confusion is a simple way to mitigate the problem of nations, such as North Korea, whose politicians are currently unwilling to agree to certain safeguards.

Moreover, in that all accidental nuclear wars are unintended (in a direct sense), then when talk has the potential to prevent confusion, it typically doesn’t require complex communications strategies, but just an increase of plain speaking.⁶

We should try to move past deterrence

This brings me to my final argument: that we should talk more about nuclear war because doing so might enable us to find better strategies for avoiding it. Here, particularly, I mean that we should talk more about our range of possible options. For decades, humankind’s status-quo strategy for avoiding nuclear war has been nuclear deterrence. That is, a manufactured stalemate situation of rationalised inhibition, in which mutual understanding that any nuclear aggression will be met by nuclear retaliation depends on mutual fear of the catastrophic effects of nuclear weapons.⁷

I’ll admit that the part of me that likes playing overly complex resource-allocation worker-placement Eurogame boardgames, and reading Robert Nozick, is attracted by the intellectual elegance of this strategy. But the part of me that’s a vulnerable biological thing, endlessly excited by being alive, is not. In fact, I find it incredible that we now so rarely hear anyone — let alone any leading politician — publicly suggesting there could ever be any other reliable strategy than deterrence. Game theory is great. And the contemporary deterrence system is extremely mature, as the defence dudes say.⁸ But finding a way to prevent nuclear war — as opposed to persistently and aggressively inhibiting it, through the threat of bringing it about — is a goal we shouldn’t have effectively abandoned.

I want to make clear at this point that I’m happy to depend, for my argument, on the moral inadequacy of the aggressive nature of the deterrence solution. But it’s worth noting that, on its watch, the world has been moving further away from its disarmament targets. Growing tensions between ‘the West’ and both Russia and China have incentivised various increases in nuclear resources.⁹ As indeed have shifts in the power balance caused by other developments, such as the economic growth of China, and Russia’s interest in space weapons. In other words, it’s not just that deterrence depends on persistently threatening to literally pulverise human beings in the name of saving humankind. It’s also that it seems to create — or at least fail to stop — a race to the biggest possible nuclear arsenal. And this makes me wish that Bertrand Russell were still around. I mean, I accept I’m biased towards him because The Problems of Philosophy was the first philosophy book I ever read. I’m also well aware of his many flaws — including the serious flaws within his attempts to inspire nuclear disarmament.¹⁰ But at least he tried!

I’m not going to talk further about the moral and practical costs of nuclear deterrence, however. Indeed, for the sake of my argument, I’ll accept that deterrence has been the best option we’ve had to date. Rather, I’m going to argue that if we don’t talk about the possibility of alternative options, then they’re less likely to become open to us, yet they could enable a much better status quo.

In particular, I’m concerned that we’ve come to see deterrence as a satisfactory solution to the risk of nuclear war, rather than a placeholder workaround to rely upon until we find a better option. There’s a useful analogy to be made with abortion, therefore. That is, I think abortion has become generally seen as a satisfactory solution to the contraception problem — i.e., how to have sex without the risk of creating a baby — rather than a placeholder workaround for certain difficult cases. Indeed, to some people, abortion has become not only a satisfactory solution, but a celebrated one.

Yet, the contraception problem effectively became satisfactorily solvable with the invention of the pill. And defending the general use of the pill doesn’t require the difficult arguments required to defend the general use of abortion. This isn’t to ignore the easier arguments we can use to defend the use of abortion in certain limited situations. And by ‘a satisfactory solution’, I don’t mean the only satisfactory solution! Of course you’d struggle to find anyone who celebrates abortion but opposes the use of condoms. Rather, it’s to argue that seventy years after the invention of the pill, the fact that abortions take place so often is a moral failure of humankind. And one way of explaining this failure is to see abortion as a case in which a placeholder workaround has become misinterpreted as ‘hey problem solved'. And one cost of this misinterpretation is that we stop working towards a better solution. A solution that, here, involves enabling easy access to the pill for every woman who needs it (or better, easy access for men to a comparable pill).

Returning to my ‘abortion plus condoms’ comment, however, we shouldn’t ignore the idea that technological advancement offers the potential for multiple satisfactory solutions. This is particularly relevant to problems with contours that can change as our conditions change. In other words, what if people develop an intolerance to the pill? Or someone hoards the materials we need to make it?

If, in this context, we were to look beyond nuclear deterrence as a placeholder workaround, then what might count as a satisfactory solution to the ‘nuclear war problem’, at least in current conditions? At the extreme, is there anything we could do to achieve Russell’s dream, and obviate the possibility for nuclear war, entirely?

First, we can surely set aside the hope, at least for now, that there’s a route to every nuclear nation agreeing to disarm. Or, as a second-best result, to all these nations agreeing to a ‘no first use’ policy.¹¹ Moreover, unlikely agreements aside, it seems that for as long as humankind knows how to make nuclear weapons, the risk of nuclear war will remain. Indeed, as Riddley Walker tells us, even if nuclear war itself were to cause humanity to forget how to make nuclear weapons, we’d likely want to work it out again. Second, we also have to set aside the idea that peace-seeking nations could simply give in to ‘nuclear blackmail’, and let one strongman nuclear state take control over the otherwise disarmed world: we shouldn’t settle for subjugation, and doing so wouldn’t obviate the possibility of nuclear war, anyway. Aside from anything else, don’t forget the pirate!

It seems clear, therefore, that our best hope lies in making nuclear weapons impotent.¹² So, I’ll finish by returning to the unforeseeability of technological development. That is, I’m not going to list current projects with relevance to solving the nuclear war problem, as I want to emphasise that many possible options won’t have been imagined, yet. As it happens, my current assumption is that we’re looking either for a new-defence-tech space-based update to Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ forcefield, or some kind of take on a radar-jammer. But as you can tell from my language, I’m not an engineer. And I didn’t foresee Uber or Deliveroo, never mind Ozempic or the Airblade.

When the stakes are so high, however, and substantial intellectual and financial investment in the development of innovative competing technological options could take place alongside useful but inherently inadequate placeholder deterrence, isn’t it worth considering the possibility of a better status quo? We’ll never know unless we start talking about it.

1. This recent BBC Archive article reports that the “main reason” Barry Hines wrote Threads — his famously hard-hitting 1980s TV film about nuclear war — “‘was to get people thinking about nuclear weapons, as “a lot of people don’t know anything about it’”.

2. For instance, in his discursive take on Trump’s views about war, William D. Hartung references Trump’s well-known “I will expel warmongers” line, concluding that, “If past practice is any indication, Trump will not follow through on such a pledge. But the fact that he felt compelled to say it is at least instructive.”

3. The biggest ‘political’ change of mind I’ve had over the last twenty years is on interventionism. I’ve gone from a badly-informed teenage liberal interventionist who supported the UK’s involvement in the Iraq War, to being deeply sceptical that successful intervention is ever feasible, particular when it involves non-nearby countries. I’m also almost fully convinced that physical harm can only be justified on the grounds of defence.

4. I should acknowledge that there are some people who talk about nuclear war a lot. I had to check that CND still exists, but beyond that, there’s a movement in contemporary philosophy called ‘longtermism’. One of the core longtermist ideas is something like this: if the effects of a possible event would be catastrophic, then we should expend massive effort on preventing that event, even if the chance of its occurrence is very slight. Focus on the severity rather than the likelihood! Now, I have problems with longtermism as a movement. Partly because I find the idea of philosophy movements off-puttingly cultish, but also because most longtermist positions are underpinned by consequentialist reasoning, which, as I’ve written here before, I think is bad and wrong. Regardless of all that, however, the longtermists shouldn’t be allowed a monopoly on taking seriously the severity of possible events.

5. See Thomas Nagel’s essay Death (also published in Mortal Questions), which is wonderful, but for the most part falls into this trap.

6. This isn’t to deny that sometimes confusion is intended. For instance, as Steven Pifer discusses, Russia’s ‘nuclear signalling’ is sometimes ‘saber rattling’ or ‘bluff’. But whilst, as Pifer concludes, purposeful misdirection could be catastrophically ‘misinterpreted’, these are further-order cases in which the value of straight-talking is limited. Whereas I’m focusing on simple cases in which there is no intention from any relevant actor even to imply the possible use of nuclear weapons.

7. Some definitions and descriptions of nuclear deterrence include reference to a punitive element. As you might realise from some of the points I make in this piece, I’m interested in thinking about this more, not least because I believe that deterrence isn’t an adequate justification for punishment. (Indeed, I’m not fully convinced that punishment, as opposed to defensive action, can be adequately justified, at all.) But I’ll save talking more about this for another time, and focus here on nuclear deterrence as a threatening kind of inhibition, rather than as punishment.

8. I’m happy to accept that nuclear deterrence strategies have improved, in terms of tracking effectiveness and other values, and that they might well continue to do so.

9. For instance, as Wyn Bowen discusses, the 2021 UK Integrated Review included the lifting of the country’s ‘overall nuclear warhead stockpile ceiling’, although he also argues that we should consider whether this reflects an attempt at efficiency savings. And you can read on the US DOD website about the way in which “the nuclear modernization program of record, while necessary, may be insufficient moving forward”.  It’s also worth noting that progress on the Obama-Putin New START treaty, which is aimed at reducing and limiting nuclear arms, has been halted (and on some counts reversed), since Russia suspended its involvement in 2023.

10. If you want to know more about the flaws in Russell’s disarmament campaigning, read Alan Ryan’s Bertrand Russell: A Political Life. If you want to know more about Russell’s general flaws and you’re into escapist fun, read Katherine Tait’s My Father, Bertrand Russell.

11. Just in case you’re unaware, neither the US nor the UK has a NFU policy.

12. Sure, on some level, this will simply shift the problem downstream, in that bad actors will then focus on reversing impotency, by trying to find their way around whatever technological solution has brought it about. But serious barriers reduce bad action! And yes, even if we were to remove the nuclear threat, humankind would likely continue to discover new ways to destroy itself. But again, none of this means we should give up on preventing nuclear war.