Those of us who were alive from the 50s through the 80s grew up with a fear of nuclear war. Obviously each person felt this fear to different degrees, but the knowledge was there for all of us, hovering in the background: two superpowers (and their allies) had world-destroying arsenals pointed at each other. Virtually no one on Earth would be untouched in the case of a full-scale nuclear exchange.
Some of us called for nuclear disarmament or a moratorium on adding any new weapons. Some of us imbibed the argument that the promise of “mutually assured destruction” was actually keeping us safe from a broader conventional war. Some argued that, horrifying though Nagasaki and Hiroshima were, they actually saved lives by ending the war in the Pacific theater sooner. Some even argued that Fat Man and Little Boy provided cautionary examples for the future—object lessons on the horrors of nuclear devastation that served to restrain further use of these terrible weapons.
Yet, no matter where a person stood on these issues, everyone had a healthy fear of nuclear war. With good reason.
In the years following the fall of the USSR, this fear faded to the point where most of us think about it less, even though the arsenals are still there. But in those ‘nuclear decades,’ it was baked into the cake of our cultural psyche. This naturally produced a lot of books, movies, and music about nuclear war.
Given the anarcho-libertarian focus here at the Freedom Scale, I would like briefly to touch on a unique aspect of this subject…
The libertarian argument on private ownership of weapons is essentially this: People have a natural right to defend themselves from aggression, and thus they ought to be free to possess and use the weapons required to effectively discharge this right. As such, there ought to be few restrictions on the right to own weapons. Or even no restrictions at all.
This naturally produces questions: Should people be allowed to own tanks? How about battleships? Nuclear and biological weapons? (The tone of these inquires ranges from respectful inquiry to slavering rage.) As it turns out, however, there are some pretty good answers here.
The first is that only states can afford to build and maintain major weapons systems, because only states have the power to tax and print money at will.
Even the richest men on Earth cannot afford to purchase anything more than a small arsenal, and they could not maintain that arsenal in the field for very long. The wealth they spent a working life accumulating (by providing desirable goods and services) would be quickly exhausted in any effort to transition from entrepreneur to warlord.
Still, libertarians (especially of the anarchist variety) are regularly treated to the following argument: Without governments, there would be no one to stop warlords. This argument withers upon any inspection, however.
First, we have governments now, and there are still plenty of warlords in the world. And pirates. And criminals. So let’s not pretend that government is some sort of magic shield.
But it would be worse without it!
Really? Worse than the 262 million people that governments killed in the 20th century, simply for the crime of opposing their government or being inconvenient to its plans? Worse than the 150 million war dead in less than 100 years, all in wars between states?
If our choice is states or warlords, states start at a deficit approaching a half a billion human souls. Warlords are going to have to work really hard to match that number. I think I’d rather take my chances with Jeff Bezos’ fleet of five battleships or Bill Gates’ three ICMBs.
(Note also that anarchism does not propose a world with no defense forces; the defense forces would just not be state-based.)
Virtually no one (besides governments) can afford weapons systems of any significant scale. And as it happens, there is a strong argument that none of the larger-scale weapons systems are morally legitimate anyway, because they all cause “collateral damage.” In other words, they cannot be calibrated only to kill and wound wrongdoers.
Suppose that Jones, in the course of his "just war" against the ravages of Smith, should kill some innocent people; and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, "give me liberty or give me death." The absurdity of this "defense" should be evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other innocent people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: "Give me liberty or give them death"—surely a far less noble battle cry.
War, then, even a just defensive war, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals themselves. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.
lt has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. But a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even "conventional" aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.
TL;DR: There is no justification for ANYONE to use nuclear weapons, or biological weapons, or any weapons that cannot be targeted only to those who have initiated aggression.
In the case of biological weapons especially, no one should even research them, let alone possess or use them. The risk of an uncontrolled catastrophe is simply too great.
Wuhan, and the rest of the bio-labs around the world, I’m looking at you. Fauci, and the rest of you sickos—don’t flatter yourselves that you are advancing the cause of research, or medicine, or science. You are working for the military industrial complex. You are working for psychopaths. You are working for your own egos and personal aggrandizement.
In the absence of the state, nearly all of the funding and incentive for bioweapons research simply evaporates. The same is the case for nuclear weapons. If states were to disappear, so would 99.99 percent of nuclear weapons.
Without the state, who remains who would even want one?
Terrorists are mostly angry at, or trying to overthrow, states. (Not entirely, but mostly.) In the absence of the state, where does John Q. Terrorist get the technology or materials to make such weapons?
ICBMs are pretty much out of reach. Small devices might be possible, though the average terrorist does not have his own uraninite mine. And on the off chance he did, he would still need to extract it and refine it. It is much easier to steal the materials and technology from a state, or be given them by some corrupt operative of a state. States give terrorists their motivation and their method.
So who’s left?
Without the state, large-scale, long-distance war is nearly impossible. Regional combatants certainly will not want to use weapons that will destroy the very area they live in, or for which they are contending.
That just leaves us with über-rich psychopaths in mandarin-collar jackets, stroking white cats while plotting outré schemes for world domination. But how many of those are there, really?
First, they have to get rich somehow. In the absence of the state, that requires entrepreneurship. So what happens to suddenly convert the entrepreneur into Hugo Drax or Goldfinger?
Hubris, perhaps. But so far, the only one who seems to come close—if the conspiracy theories about him are true—is Bill Gates. So we somehow have to imagine that in stateless world, Bill Gates makes a ton of money and then spends it all on his plans for a final solution.
He might be stopped before he executes his plan. (Contrary to the common arguments against anarchism, there would be mechanisms for doing so.)
He might execute his plan. But, as rich as he is, that plan would still be small-scale by comparison. ONLY the state has the ability to execute global-scale violence. Only the state provides a vector for ideologues and creepy billionaires to deploy their weird objectives on a global scale.
Without the state, Gates could get rich, convert his wealth into vectors for destruction, and perhaps execute a plan. Maybe even one with truly horrifying results. And then no one would ever give him money again, and angry mobs would wreak a terrible justice upon him. The video of that justice would go viral, serving as a message to all would-be Bond villains of the future.
And all of that is hypothetical anyway. Here in the real world, we have states with 14,000 nuclear warheads, the incentive to use them, and the money to build as many as they like. Here in the real world, states HAVE used them, killing 200,000 people at least. Here in the real world, existing nuclear arsenals have the power to kill everyone and everything several times over.
Please don’t tell me that hypothetical Bill Gates is more dangerous than that.
Today’s #FreedomMusicFriday is dedicated to the hope of a world free of nuclear weapons.
And, on a personal note, I would like to say that I am ashamed that I ever in my life argued for anything other than such a world.
“Breathing” By Kate Bush:
An unborn baby contemplates being born into a nuclear holocaust.
“Red Skies” By The Fixx:
A nuclear exchange is imminent.
“Cruise” By David Gilmour:
A sardonic look at the justifications for nuclear war
“New Frontier” By Donald Fagen:
A lighter, romantic take on the climate of fear that produced fallout shelters in people’s backyards
“Talkin' World War III Blues” by Bob Dylan:
Humor and truth in this organic expression of the fear we all felt. A fear we should probably still feel.
Excellent post. So many of us are simply over the military industrial complex and the war machine. I reference the song by Oingo Boingo entitled Weird Science often in my mind. I hope for science that actually improves the condition of mankind and ecological systems rather than the destructive applications we have mostly devised. I was in Fermi Lab years ago, too, as it was part of University of Chicago. I recently looked into their budget and upcoming projects, which are in the billions of dollars, over budget, mismanaged, etc. I can think of so many more HUMAN and HUMANE ways to spend billions of dollars rather than particle colliders and such. My dad knew Thomas Dolby of She Blinded Me With Science fame and said Mr.Dolby was very clever. He did an album entitled The Golden Age of Wireless. It is my opinion that not all of it has been golden. Important face to face interaction has been lost and the surveillance state grew into a dystopian nightmare. I don’t have the answers but I am tired of war machines, destruction, surveillance and sickness for profit being the outcome of scientific endeavors. You are a very persuasive writer. I hope your readership grows. Folks where I work are reading your work now.
You might be interested in a song by a band called The The: Armageddon Days (Are Here Again). A DJ I used to know turned me on to it when I was still a “fancy girl” who hung out with powerful people. That seems like an entirely different lifetime. I watched the video and wondered why said people were portrayed in a poor light by the artist. I fully understand now, though. It seems like an appropriate song for the times we are living in.