Theory Brief #7: Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023), ‘The War That Must Not Occur’

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023), The War That Must Not Occur (translated by Malcolm Debevoise). Stanford University Press.

What is the “war that must not occur” of which the French philosopher and Stanford professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy speaks? All wars are aberrations best avoided, of course, manmade errors in the universe’s (at times overlong) arc bending toward justice, but there is one impermissible mistake that stands above all others: the ever-present, ghoulish specter of nuclear war.

When the economist and nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling’s Proud Prophet war game was run in 1983 with some 200 military and political participants over 12 days, an estimated half a billion people were killed in the (simulated) first rounds of nuclear exchange between the then-regnant superpowers — with an additional estimate of half a billion dead from radiation and starvation. (The report of the 1983 war game, only partly declassified in 2012, is woefully uninformative, with huge chunks of text redacted from public view, at times to an almost comical degree.) In her summary of the war game (a term that is, of course, a horrific euphemism), Condoleeza Rice notes that “large swaths of the planet were rendered uninhabitable by radiation,” but not before lamenting that “NATO was no more” — a fact hardly likely to register in the minds of those presumably left to roam the wastelands of an ever-deepening nuclear winter.

Nuclear war is in short, in the words of Schelling (and quoted by Dupuy in this book), “the most spectacular event of the past half century […] that did not occur.”

But is this relatively irenic nuclear age one that is so by necessity? Rational choice theory would have us believe so. Every major nuclear onslaught by some nuclear superpower, such as, say, Russia, would be counteracted by a second strike of such overwhelming force that the original aggressor would be annihilated, thereby deterring the original strike from occurring in the first place.

Or at least, so the theory goes. To a sophisticated philosopher like Dupuy, however, who is interested in time, contingency, and necessity, it is simply not true to say that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) necessarily “works,” to keep us safe from the threat of global cataclysm, because the apparent “necessity” of holding the thousands of currently existing nuclear warheads in check through rational deterrence can only ever be verified retroactively, from the vantage point of whatever actually happened. If the world goes up in flames, blown apart by an exchange of thousands of nuclear Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), then MAD will have been shown to have been an erroneous theory; and even as we continue to live in a world without nuclear war, we can never rest assured that deterrence works, is real, or has the force of “necessity”: The necessary property of an event will only ever appear retroactively, Dupuy suggests.

The theorists of MAD, who really are mad theorists, as Dupuy wisecracks, are just as wrong as a figure like C. P. Snow, the English “Two Cultures” essayist, physicist, and novelist, who in 1960 pronounced that unless there significant nuclear disarmament took place, “thermonuclear war within the decade was a ‘mathematical certainty’.” Snow was proven wrong, of course. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of nuclear armament — and yet, no thermonuclear war resulted.

Could the theorists of MAD be proven equally wrong at some point in the future, but in the opposite direction? Could their casual certainty that nuclear war is mutually held in check by the balance of terrible forces? Since history is not like a chemistry experiment, playing out in one direction alone, without the possibility of controlled repetition in the strict sense, the only form of empirical verification of claims to necessity available to us is to actually run through history itself. Every simulation is fiction, and every thought experiment, or war game, is a fabrication. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction could at any juncture in time be proven wrong.

On occasion, Dupuy notes, we have come dangerously close to its falsification. In 1961, for instance, the Soviet submarine B-59 lost contact with Moscow off the coast of Florida after being struck by a U.S.-released depth charge and very nearly let off a T-5 nuclear torpedo in response, with all the predictably horrifying results that would have followed. Were it not for the “tangled hierarchy” of the commanding officer and his subordinate onboard (in which the submarine captain’s second-in-command was his fleet-wide superior, who therefore felt he had the authority to refuse to cosign on the launch order), a billion lives might very well have been lost in the atomic exchange that could very well have been unleashed by this initial series of misunderstandings. The margins are slim, and all casual talk of necessity and contingency falter when faced with Hegel’s “slaughter bench of history.” More recently, in 1995, the Norwegian rocket incident, as it has come to be known, involved a scientific experiment launched from the northern Norwegian Andøya Base that ultimately resulted in Boris Yeltsin’s cheget (nuclear briefcase) being activated for fear of an impending American ICBM. To think that for a moment, the fate of humanity lay in the hands of a president often seen in public too inebriated to legally drive a car, much less decide whether to launch a thousand nuclear warheads. As Dupuy writes,

What has allowed nuclear deterrence to work until now, and may allow it to go on working, is the indeterminacy of the future in a conception of time that makes the future necessary. […] As long as the future has not been actualized, it must be conceived as including both the catastrophic event and its non-occurrence — not as disjunctive possibilities, but as a conjunction of states of which one or the other will prove a posteriori to have been necessary once the present has selected it.

In other words: There’s no way to tell which future will have been necessary until after the fact, which may involve the smoking, irradiated ruins of civilization — or not.

One of the surprising figures in agreement with Dupuy’s argument is none other than Donald J. Trump. Dupuy quotes a statement by Trump in the book’s epigraph, from 1990, just as Fukuyama’s end of history was unfolding and well before anyone could seriously imagine Trump’s presidency (was it already then “necessary”?):

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everyone knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.

What bullshit indeed. Mistakes happen. Trump comes across as presciently pragmatic, and cautious in a way the liberal-centrist idealists of international relations theory do not. Dupuy does not accept the conventional view “since 1945…that atomic weapons regulate themselves, that their very power makes them self-neutralizing,” and dismisses it as a “feeble line of reasoning.” But more than mistakes, the technical feasibility of humanity self-destructing in a mass nuclear exchange ushers in a new epoch of history, on Dupuy’s account. Drawing on the work of the German philosopher Günther Anders, Dupuy discovers how the German philosopher Anders “recognized that on 6 August 1945 [i.e. the atomic bombing of Hiroshima], human history had entered into a new phase, its last.” Far from being hyperbole, Dupuy convincingly shows that it is precisely this suspended possibility of self-annihilation, which remains forever a threat thenceforth, that remakes our relationship with the world:

History, Anders said, became obsolete that day. Now that humanity was capable of destroying itself, nothing could cause it to lose this ‘negative all-powerfulness,’ not even a general disarmament, not even a total denuclearization of the world’s arsenals. Apocalypse having been inscribed in our future as fate, henceforth the best we can do is to indefinitely postpone the final moment. We are now living under a suspended sentence, as it were, a stay of execution.

We can no longer live in easy comfort about a forthcoming future. Some of the most unnerving parts of this book are when Dupuy draws heavily upon the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s 2017 memoirs, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear-War Planner. Dupuy relates Ellsberg’s shock at learning that Cold War planners figured that the number of dead to follow in a nuclear exchange would be six hundred million people, “the equivalent, as he takes care to point out, of ‘a hundred Holocausts.’”

Why would nuclear disarmament not pull us out of this new epoch, this new logic of history, which is what Dupuy suggests is the obsolescence of history? Because the relevant science is now known, the relevant technology has been developed, and there lurks forever the possibility that some nation might stash away a stock of fissile materials, if not warheads, even in the vanishingly unlikely situation that all nations were to voluntarily proclaim disarmament and agree to further nonproliferation.

Hence, the chilling line toward the end of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), delivered by the film’s eponymous protagonist: “I believe we did.” This is in reply to Einstein’s probing question (at least in the movie — the dialogue is Hollywood make-believe) about the fears the Los Alamos research group had before the Trinity test of July 16, 1945, that it might cause the Earth’s atmosphere to ignite, setting in motion a globe-spanning destruction. In Nolan’s movie, Oppenheimer asks Einstein whether he can recall this initial fear that the scientists might destroy the whole world. Einstein replies: “I remember it well. What of it?” — “I believe we did.” In other words, the meaning of Oppenheimer’s invention might very well still be the undoing of human existence on this planet — a very “Dupuyean” way of thinking. Dupuy’s terrifying claim is that we have no way of knowing for sure whether this won’t someday happen, and so we might as well treat it as a foregone conclusion.

Some might not be entirely convinced by Dupuy’s muscular claim that “apocalypse” has now been “inscribed in our future as fate,” and earlier in The War That Must Not Occur, Dupuy seems to treat this abyssal fatalism more as a pragmatic exhortation to act: “It needs to be assumed, as I say, that the worst is going to occur, and, for just this reason, everything that can be done must be done to ensure that it will not occur.” But whatever one feels about the substance of Dupuy’s argument regarding necessity and contingency, it is difficult to imagine that one could take the threat of nuclear warfare too seriously. With the world rapidly moving away from nonproliferation and disarmament, the deepest, darkest fears of the Cold War planners ought, if anything, to be resuscitated. Russia’s November 2023 decision to withdraw from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a step in the wrong direction. And Ukraine’s lesson from Russia’s February 2022 invasion must surely be that voluntarily giving up its weapons of mass destruction — around 1,700 nuclear warheads after the Soviet Union’s dissolution were left on Ukrainian territory — was a terrible idea. And Iran, as Dupuy notes in passing, must surely, too, have drawn the appropriate conclusions from Bush and Cheney’s apparent plans in the early 2000s to “destroy [Iran] by means of a preemptive attack” rather than enter into protracted negotiations “to prevent it from equipping itself with atomic weapons.”

But if the war that must not occur is in some sense unavoidable, as this book seems to suggest, then let us at least recombine our efforts and energies, banding together across countries and continents, to attempt to postpone it for as long as humanly possible.

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Originally published at www.victorshammas.com (link).