From: Jackie Hulme <cadwallader@igc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Date: 27 Jul 92 13:58 PDT
Subject: Chapter I - Part I
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1473800111:000:16734
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cadwallader    Jul 27 13:58:00 1992


896
 
July 27, 1992
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
 
Chapter 1
IF DETERRENCE FAILS - CONFRONTING NUCLEAR ENTRAPMENT
 
Once upon a time it happened to my people, and now it happens to all 
people. And suddenly I said to myself, maybe the whole world, 
strangely, has turned Jewish. Everybody lives now facing the unknown. 
We are all, in a way, helpless. --ELIE WIESEL
 
THIS IS a book about the threat nuclear weapons pose to the human 
future, about the cast of mind that created and maintains threat, and 
about an alternative, hopeful direction. In its exploration of the 
sequence from a genocidal mentality to a species mentality, the book 
first confronts the general nature of nuclear rapment andcl then 
seeks insight from a major genocide that has already taken place.
 
ULTIMATE ABSURDITY
As we enter the last decade of this century, almost everybody is 
aware that nuclear weapons pose unprecedented peril. Even the 
governments of the two superpowers, long behind their people on such 
matters, have agreed that there can be "no winners" in a nuclear war, 
and seem to be moving toward unprecedented cooperation. And both 
express support for the liberating revolutions taking place before 
our eyes in most of Eastern Europe. Yet the weapons remain 
dangerously in place because of a mode of thought that is 
considerably less understood, a set of sttitudes and policies that 
can be called nuclear absurdity.
        The absurdity consists of our detailed arrangements, in concert 
with the Soviet Union, for our extinction and theirs. In the name of 
national security, we and they threaten actions that could destroy 
the world. The absurdity is a matter not of philosophical stance but 
rather of deep unreason and loss of ethical bearings in maintaining a 
situation of ultimate danger.
        The term DETERRENCE, central to nuclear discourse, is the basis 
of a fundamental confusion. Deterrence has two very different 
meanings -- as a word, and as a body of theory and policy specific to 
nuclear weapons. The original verb, to deter, literally means <to 
frighten from> or to restrain by fear. From the time of the sixteenth 
century, the word has been associated with legal policy, with the 
idea of imposing strong punishments in order to prevent evil or 
criminal behavior. To be sure, there was a longstanding military 
tradition of maintaining sufficient strength to discourage or prevent 
one's enemy from attacking, as in Theodore Roosevelt's famous use of 
the adage <Speak sortly and carry a big stick.> But deterrence as an 
elaborated military policy took shape mainly with nuclear weapons.
        For instance, when John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under 
Eisenhhower, announced the American deterrence policy of the early 
1950's, he drew an analogy to the legal arrangements of local 
communities <to punish any who break in and steal.> The analogy has 
been shown to be misleading: there is no overall world legal system 
to establish, and limit the violence of, the <punishment>. Rather, an 
assumed transgfression could lead to a world-destroying punishment -- 
the entire process dependent upon psychological signals and 
interpretations (see Chapter 7).
        the United States and the Soviet Union have constructed vast 
genocidal systems, which they justify by the claim of "deterrence." A 
genocidal system is not a matter of particular weapons structure or 
stratevic concept so much as an overall constellation of men, 
weapons, and war-fighting plans which, if implemented, could end 
human civilization in minutes and the greater part of human life on 
the planet within days or even hours. Unlike any previous weapons or 
natural disasters, nuclear weapons could destroy much of the earth's 
animal and plant life as well, whether by the effects of the 
explosions, by the subsequent deadly radiation, or by creating a 
<nuclear winter> brought about by changes in the earth's climate 
owing to debris in the atmosphere which would block out the sun's 
rays. This genocidal system, then, could mean terminal genocide -- 
recently (published 1990) labeled <omnicide>, or the destruction of 
all life.
        For the <credibility> or believability, of deterrence policy, as 
its proponents emphasize, requrires GENUINE WILLINGNESS TO USE THE 
WEAPONS under certain conditions, such as actual or imminent enemy 
attack. Hence, deterrence policy goves rise not only to a genocidal 
system but to a <genocidal mentality>, which can be defined as a 
mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to 
produce, deploy, and maccording to certain standards of necessity, 
use weapons known to destroy entire human populations -- millions, or 
tens or hundreds of millions, of people. And that genocidal mentality 
can become bound up with the institutional arrangements necessary for 
the genocidal act.
        Deterrence policy also requires that we constantly "modernize" 
the genocidal system by means of "new generations" of nuclear weapons 
and equally new strategic plans for their potential use. Even with 
greatly improved relations with the Soviet Union and much official 
talk on both sides of extensive arms control (written late 1989), 
there are at the same time reports of improved weapons "so 
devastating that they could penetrate the deepest underground 
[soviet] bunkers", combined with "calls for advanced new Stealth 
reconnaisance planes capable of flying more than four times the speed 
of sound to ferret out critical Soviet targets, including mobile 
missiles." We seem as entrapped as Sisyphus in his perpetual, vain 
endeavor to push a heavy rock to the top of a steep hill. At the top 
of our steep hill, never quite reachable, is genuine "national 
security" in the nuclear age. Thus, George Kennan speaks of our
 
        piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of 
destructiveness upon old ones ... helplessly, almost involuntarily: 
like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like 
lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamelin marching 
blindly along beside their Pied Piper. And the result is that today 
we have achieved, we and the Russians together ... level os 
redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational 
understanding.
 
        Kennan conveys the blindly compulsive way in which we have 
sought safety from the weapons and at the same time avoided taking in 
what the weapons would do when used. Our difficulty is that we cannot 
or will not (in Martin Buber's phrase) "imagine the real." that 
deficiency in imagination is reflected in the bland circumlocution 
"if deterrence fails..." One need only contrast the innocuous 
implication of the phrase (that if one thing fails, we try something 
else and, in one way or another, manage) with what would actually 
result: millions of incinerated human bodies surrounded by rubble. 
Moreover, as General Brent Scowcroft, a leading authority on national 
security, has pointed out, "Detyerrence is a very ambiguous notion. 
It cannot be demonstrated unless it fails, in which case you knew it 
was not there." To which we would add that if deterrence (as 
prevention) fails, it will be because of deterrence (as policy).
        Nuclear absurdity becomes eerily manifest in the dangerous 
contradictions surrounding what is called "command and control", the 
arrangements for maintaining communications and for conveying orders 
in the event of war or new-war crisis, including the behavior of the 
president as commander in chief. This is, so to speak, the final 
common pathway of the genocidal system. But simply putting the 
command-and-control mechanism on alert -- that is, systematically 
"preparing for" nuclear emergency -- can send the very signals to 
one's adversary that will bring on that emergency. For, as one 
observer put it, dangerous "brinkmanship" is not just rhetoric but 
"an inherent feature of opposing strategid forces that are programmed 
for first strikes."
        Each American president since the Second World War has had to be 
briefed about his role as the ultimate decision maker in a nuclear 
crisis. But each has been in some way odd or inadequate -- whether 
having ":an almost morbid" interest in the process (Carter), showing 
extreme avoidance as "the great neglecter" (Nixon), or <acting like 
an automaton> and <saying things like, *What do I do now?* Do I push 
the button?*> (Reagan). All too appropriate here is George Kennan's 
1981 admonition to super-power leaders: <You are mortal men. You are 
capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands -- there is 
no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in his hands -- the 
destructive powers sufficient to put an end to divilized life on a 
great portion of our planet. No one should wish to hold such powers.>
        A central danger of command and control is the inevitable 
emphasis on speed -- on launching one's weapons before they are 
destroyed on the ground. That emphasis, in turn, creates increasing 
reliance on technology that approaches <launch on warning>, or all-
out retaliation in response to a warning signal of nuclear attack. A 
writer on nuclear issues, Daniel Ford, was struck by the absurdity of 
command and control, its grossly inadequate telephone arrangements 
recalling the scene in the 1964 film DR STRANGELOVE in which Peter 
Sellers (as Captain Mandrake), desperate to contact the Pentagon to 
advise it to recall US nuclear bombers on their way to Russia, has to 
break into a Coca-Cola machine to get the necessary coins. Our 
helplessness before our own tecnology of destruction, caricatured in 
that scene, was more or less confirmed by the highest authority on 
the US command sustem, Air Force Lieutenant General Robert Herres, 
when he spoke of "the so-called hair-trigger posture>: *The 
technology put us in this posture. We don't like it at all.* Whether 
we like it or not, that posture includes arrangements for firing the 
weapons in the absence of anyone surviving at central command so that 
<the decapitated United States and Soviet military establishments 
would be reduced to the status of pea-brained dinosaurs.>
        In 1960, Herman Kahn wrote of a hypothetical <Doomsday Machine>: 
that is, <a device whose only function is to destroy all human life,> 
which it could do by means of a computer programmed <so that if, say, 
five nuclear bombs exploded over the United Sttes, the device would 
be triggered and the earth destroyed.> Even Kahn, no opponent of 
nuclear weapons, ultimately rejected the Doomsday Machine because it 
was not difficiently controllable and killed too many people too 
automatically. He also doubted whether NATO or the United States or 
the Soviet Union would be willing to spend billions of dollars <to 
give a few individuals this particular kind of life and death power 
over the entire world.> Here Kahn was wrong. The parties involved 
have been willing to do just that: we have the equivalent of a 
Doomsday Machine in place right now. The claim could be made that its 
function is not ONLY <to destroy all human life,> since the weapoons 
are supposed to serve deterrence -- but, then, so was Kahn's 
original, then hypothetical, Doomsday Machine.
        At the heart of nuclear war planning is ignorance and fantasy. 
As a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated, <Nobody can 
come up with any realistic situation as to what would happen during a 
nuclear war. We are groping in the unknown.> Strategists and decision 
makers have created a surreal universe in which war-fighting 
scenarios give rise to alaborage regulations concerning <emergency 
action messages,> in the midst of nuclear holaucaust, including the 
status and available numbers of nuclear weapons and the relaying of 
<significant event[s] or incident[s]>; accompanying civil defense 
plans include careful arrangements for the forwarding of amil; and 
the weapons continue to proliferate beyond any possible advantage or 
use. There is a special, self-enclosed logic to it all -- the logic 
of social madness.
        Depsite great hopes for an improved relationship between the 
United States and the Soviet Union, the danger of our weapons 
arrangements persists as both countries continue to devote prodicious 
resources to the improvement of nuclear weapons and to the 
militarization and nuclearization of space. The danger expands, 
moreover, as the weapons proliferate to other countries with no clear 
limits in view. Great Britain, France and the People's Republic of 
China acknowledge their possession of useable nuclear weapons; India, 
Pakistan, south Africa, and Israel either possess weapons or could 
quickly produce them; and Brazil and Argentina will soon reach that 
capaicyt. third World countries are racing wo acquire both ballistic 
missiles to <deliver> conventional, chemical, or nuclear warheads 
(about twenty of these countries are thought to possess them now): 
and <the poor man's nuclear weapons,> the term applied to chemical 
weapons because of their relative cheapness (it is believed that 
somewhere between fourteen and twenty nations [including the United 
States] throughout the world have chamical arsenals). There is the 
added specter of bacteriological weapons, also easy to acquire and, 
although difficult to control, as lethal as nuclear weapons. Finally, 
what is called <conventional> weaponry is proliferating, in advanced 
forms, throughout the First, Second and the Third worlds.
        Much attention now shifts, and with good reason, to the Third 
World, where relatively unstable governments are acquiring powerful 
weaponry. Such recognition all too often assumes that the superpowers 
are <stable,> and no longer the problem. The truth is that, with 
arsenals approaching ffifty thousand weapons, they remain very much 
the hub of the problem, and their example energizes all other weapons 
races, especially in the third World. Thus, any conflict anywhere 
holds the potential of ending in the destruction of the human 
species.
        A grave danger is the potential loss of control over the 
enormous worldwide man-made weapons constellation. One authority, 
referring almost specifically to the command-and-control apparatus, 
speaks of <systems of incomprehensible complerxity>, and adds, <Our 
intuitive, gut reaction is that the operation of anything so large 
and complicated must be dangerously unstable.> Or, as he goes on to 
state, <The war systems of the United States and tye Soviet Union are 
now so jumpy and apprehensive, so quick and potentially incontinent 
in response, so convinced that they know what must be done, that they 
have the capaicith to leap from crisis to war all by themselves. Such 
a war would be <accidentak> only in the sense that it was not what 
the belligerents *wanted*>, <The mechanism does not perform as 
expected; the slave will not obey,> is the way a general student of 
technology puts it in referring specifically to the command-and-
control system.
        Herberty York, one of America's most experienced weapons makers 
and arms control advocates, directly describes, in his Race to 
Oblivion, two *absurd situations*  in regard to our weaponry: The 
first is that, although our military power has been steadily 
increasing, *at the same time our national security has been rapidly 
and inexorably decreasing*; and the same thing is happening to the 
Soviet Union. And the second,
 
not yet so widely regognized [,]...lies in the fact that in the 
United States to power to decide whether or not doomsday has arrived 
is in the process of passing from statesmen and politicians to lower-
level officers and technicians, and eventually, to machines.
        Thus we seem to be heading for a state of affairs in which the 
determination ... will be made either by an automatic device designed 
for the purpose or by a pre-programmed President who, whether he 
knows it or not, will be carrying out orders written years before by 
some opertations analyst. Such a situation must be called the 
ultimate absurdity.
 
        That *ultimate absurdity* is also relfected in a saying among 
strategists and commentators: <Nobody believes it [the possibility of 
carrying out arrangements for fighting and winning a nuclear war] but 
the system belives it."
 
-----------------------------
 
Although the Cold War has officially ended, increased competition 
between nationally-directed defense contractors is locked in intense 
competition for weapons sales, and, as the BNL-Iraqi scandal 
illustrates, the process of offsetting and private profit 
underwritten by public funds is accellerating the arms race.
 
----------------  

Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america