Aerial view of the World Trade Center ruins, five days after the terrorist attack in New York City.
(Continued from “The Bomb in the Mind.”)
The Ground Zero of the World Trade Center attack shares a designation with the Ground Zero of the Hiroshima bomb — a designation which links the two events in the American mind. For all the talk about weapons of mass destruction in the years after September 11, 2001, however, the weapons used in New York were common commercial passenger jetliners, a transportation technology not yet a century old itself.
By 2001 America was the sole global nuclear superpower, having surpassed the nuclear capabilities of any other claimants to the title decades before. The last time that abolition, rather than non-proliferation, of nuclear weapons, which continue to possess a far more devastating destructive power than even chemical or biological WMDs, was poised to become a central tenet of American military policy was during talks between US President Ronald Reagan, a long-time nuclear abolitionist, and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986. In final chapter of The Seventh Decade, Jonathan Schell carefully describes what appeared to be the very sincere attempts of Reagan and Gorbachev to entirely dismantle their nuclear arsenals over a ten year period, only to founder on Reagan’s misguided advocacy of the Star Wars SDI project, to which Gorbachev could not agree, even after Reagan proposed to share the completed technology with the Soviet Union.
Only with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the quick end of the Cold War in 1989 was America able to claim sole nuclear dominance, especially after it was revealed that the nuclear war capabilities of the Soviet Union had been deteriorating for years and the cost of the arms race had devastated the Soviet economy. America’s nuclear policy, with the loss of the United States’ most ideologically and militarily powerful enemy, was suddenly without direction; from preparation for nuclear war, the attention turned to nuclear non-proliferation. At no time, though, was the United States willing to cede any kind of military or nuclear prominence. It was now in a decision to dictate to the world who could or could not have the bomb. “Nuclear disarmament — once the province of diplomacy and international cooperation — was for the first time to be pursued by military force, including the overthrow of regimes, in a projected series of what can be called disarmament wars,” Schell writes (Schell 102). What’s more, America’s manifest destiny could now be extended around the world, after having overrun the North American continent, making the world safe for the American nation-state alone, if not democracy and capitalism themselves.
But the enemies of the United States, as the World Trade Center attack demonstrated, were not other nation-states, but unpredictable groups of ideologically-driven terrorists supported by much smaller and less militarily powerful rogue states. Bush in the aftermath of September 11 was driven to declare a “war on terror” itself rather than any particular contender to the throne of nuclear dominance. But wars against vague abstractions like terror are unwinnable.
To be a US citizen in the years after September 11 was to be a combatant in this unwinnable war that the government declared in our name. America’s imperial dreams of global domination and international manifest destiny were accompanied by fearful nightmares of arbitrary attack from nearly any quarter, not merely the Eastern Bloc; nuclear devastation could come not at the hands of a nation-state but from small cadres of individuals acting in the name of their own god or destiny, as the WTC attackers proved; Schell’s book describes the means by which these cadres could quite easily acquire or develop a nuclear weapon of their own.
This new conception of manifest destiny and post-9/11 survivors’ guilt is a subtext to Neil LaBute’s recent The Break of Noon. Before this, though, there were a variety of responses by American dramatists to the nuclear dilemmas of the post-war world in the closing years of the Cold War, among them Arthur Kopit’s 1984 End of the World with Symposium to Follow and Lee Blessing’s 1988 A Walk in the Woods, both of which enjoyed Broadway runs following premieres at resident theatres. I will look at these soon.
First, two thoughts re “The Bomb in the Mind” (to which comments are now closed). One: I wonder whether the history of mathematics and mathematical science falls within or without Jonathan Schell’s notion of science becoming, so to speak, action oriented. It’s beyond me to say. But it’s conceivable (judging from limited understanding on my part) that Kepler’s analysis of planetary motion, for instance, and Newton’s of gravitation weren’t originally practical, actionable pieces of knowledge. They had a great impact on thinking (as attested by John Donne’s “new philosophy calls all in doubt”) and did increase science’s powers of predicting the heavens, but it was hard otherwise to use them until much later.
Two (a mere quibble): Bacon didn’t write in English, so in a sense he didn’t speak of “operation.” He used the term “scientia operativa,” which I take to mean applied science as opposed to the kind of science Aristotle had developed. However, “operation” does seem to be the standard English term for what Bacon was talking about (judging from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Now, on to the present post. My distaste for President Reagan is highest in regard to his Reykjavik decision. Will say no more on that.
Isn’t it an overstatement to claim (I’ve corrected a typo in the post) that after the Cold War’s end, the U.S. “was now in a [position] to dictate to the world who could or could not have the bomb.” Maybe that’s what the country’s leaders have wanted to believe, but they haven’t dictated the nuclear disarmament of ANY country since then, including Russia, nor have they prevented North Korea from conducting nuclear tests or Iran from doing whatever exactly it’s doing. And the “nuclear disarmament… to be pursued by military force” that Schell speaks of isn’t full multilateral disarmament, of course. It doesn’t even show much concern for most of the existing weapons states.
It’s rather off the track of George’s posts, but one point on the subject of nuclear weapons not mentioned in Richard Rhodes’s otherwise impeccable histories often occurs to me in discussions of this kind. During and after World War II, the U.S. aimed to keep secret any information about how a nuclear weapon could be made. Norbert Weiner, writing in Cybernetics and Society, pointed out a major problem with that effort: not that information could be stolen (as it was, by Klaus Fuchs) but that, once two working weapons had been used, it became clear to the entire world that they were practicable. Previously, the release of substantial energy from fission was known only to be possible in principle. The Manhattan Project work had to be done in order to find out whether the principles could be applied in any usable way; after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everyone knew they could make a bomb.
I look forward to reading later posts on this from George, as I’m not acquainted with the plays he mentions in his final paragraph.