Yves here. For a change, I have nothing to add to this fine if sobering article on nuclear war and numbing to the horrors of genocide and conflicts. Please do read it in full.
By Tom Valovic, a writer, editor, futurist, and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. He has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. Tom has written about the effects of technology on society for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, and others. He can be reached at jazzbird@outlook.com. Originally published at Common Dreams
As a political journalist, I typically monitor about six or seven print publications and a somewhat absurd number of online ones. But I recently noticed a disturbing trend—a slew of articles with titles like “Apocalyptic map shows worst U.S. states to live in during nuclear war” or “Nuclear Fallout: Is Your State Safe?” Then there’s my personal favorite “10 U.S. States with the Best Odds of Surviving Nuclear Fallout and the Science Behind Their Safety.”
The second article informs us in a blithe and matter-of-fact tone that “recent geopolitical tensions have reignited concerns over nuclear safety across the United States. According to a detailed risk assessment featured on MSN, states along the West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington) and East Coast (Florida, Maine, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio) have lower immediate fallout risks compared to central states.” And then, in a tone that could well be used to describe the best air conditioners to buy this summer, we’re cautioned that: “Even states considered safer are not guaranteed refuge from longer-term global impacts such as nuclear winter and widespread humanitarian crises.” Well good to know. Now we can all plan our summer travel accordingly. (As a brief aside, it should be noted that the MSN risk assessment article referred to is no longer available and has been yanked from the website. Curious.)
My first reaction upon seeing these articles was a kind of visceral astonishment. The tone was jarring and, frankly, appalling. Were these perhaps AI-generated pieces coming from a digital source that has no real idea of the emotional resonance required to discuss nuclear war? Quite possibly. Does this point to a design flaw in AI that will never really be eradicated? Also, quite possible. My second more measured reaction was that such articles might inadvertently expose flaws in the veneer of the rational calculus that underlies the basis for what we sometimes generously called modern “civilization.”
So, what’s behind this disturbing attempt on the part of various media outlets to normalize the prospect of nuclear war? For starters, articles like these speak to a deep cognitive dissonance around this topic that’s been evident in sociopolitical environment ever since the horror of Hiroshima. The meme-contour of these articles seems to invite a casual shoulder shrug with respect to the dark road that we’re now heading down and to minimize the powder keg of conflict looming in the Middle East. The matter-of-fact tonality about the possibility of nuclear Armageddon is deeply troubling. Articles such as these nudge us toward the psychologically unhealthy space of accepting a situation that should never be accepted.
Unpacking the Psychological Roots of Militarism
The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing described our socially conditioned and sometimes blithe acceptance of war and militarism as a form of mass psychosis, noting that “insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” In a brilliant essay on this topic, clinical psychologist Frank MacHovec noted that “Wartime behavior deviates markedly from cross-cultural social norms and values. The irrationality and emotionality of war is a radical departure from accepted normal behavior… Wartime behavior of and by itself meets current diagnostic criteria for a severe mental disorder.”
MacHovec goes on to discuss war as a function of Freudian death instinct:
We award medals to and hail as heroes or martyrs those who kill more of the enemy. One nation’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, even though it may be the same behavior… Victims are dehumanized into objects, and robot-like violence depersonalizes the aggressor in the process… Defense mechanisms of denial, externalization, projection, rationalization, and splitting block reality testing have the effect of reducing anxiety and protecting against stress. Violence then becomes part of the array of defense mechanisms. Emotion overrides reason and logic in public education and controlled news media that reinforce aggression.
Do Governments Persuade Us to Accept War as “Normal”?
As if our own unruly and erratic human impulses weren’t enough cause for concern, when it comes to the application of violence-as-solution, Western and other governments (often in a position of power as the result of war settlements and therefore having “something to defend”) spend a considerable amount of time and effort normalizing war in both popular culture and the political sphere. Here in the U.S., the CIA funds ceremonies and rituals in venues such as NFL games designed to promote acceptance of the so-called glories of war. Hollywood does its part with movies like Top Gun that position the violent extermination of enemies as noble or brave. In fairness to a broader perspective, we can and should posit that, as individuals, those who fight in wars are often in fact noble or brave in specific situations. Certainly, they have been persuaded to and are willing to risk their lives for a cause and this takes both courage and selflessness.
That said, these qualities of selflessness are often exploited to persuade us that that war itself is somehow an acceptable solution to periodic disagreements that arise between the governments of nations. Adding nuclear acceptance to the mix is when the notion of more severe psychological aberration comes in. Far from being “diplomacy by other means,” our best historians have shown us that wars often benefit economic elites in power. Even worse, modern warfare has shown a disturbing tendency to focus on harming civilian populations. History reveals that, here in the U.S., elites have at times funded both sides of a conflict or stood to gain from both supplying armaments and rebuilding in the aftermath. We see this in extremis in President Donald Trump’s bizarre plans to turn Gaza into a resort area.
The cold hard fact is that many wars are fought for all the wrong reasons: territorial domination of economically important resources (such as oil in the case of Iran and Iraq); economic benefits associated with supply chains; or the mere continuation of empire. But when the possibility of nuclear war becomes either conveniently ignored, gamed, or normalized by any given administration including those of Presidents Trump or Joe Biden and with willing complicity from the mainstream media, then I suggest it crosses the line into the territory that Laing alludes to. It also suggests a potent reason why trust in government is at an all-time low.
Another angle on the psychology of this dynamic is offered by Dr. Kathie Malley-Morrison, a former professor of psychology at Boston University and a member of Massachusetts for Peace Action. In “No, I Can’t Help! Psychic Numbing and How to Confront It, ” she provides a valuable perspective on odd and even bizarre psychological responses to the nuclear war threat that involve either magical thinking around notions of “surviving” or garden-variety denial:
Warnings about the dangers inherent in the availability of nuclear weapons in Russia, the United States, its allies, and other nations can be heard right, left, and center across the political spectrum… Why, then, do we not hear of massive actions against the continued development and sales of nuclear weapons, and the threats by nuclear power countries to use them? One of the answers is psychic numbing—a psychological phenomenon that can affect both individuals and entire cultures in ways that allow atrocities—and existential threats—to grow and spread.
Malley-Morrison points out that psychic numbing is also called “compassion fade.” The article goes on to clarify further:
At the individual level, psychic numbing is a psychological process of desensitization to the pain and suffering of others, particularly as the number of people experiencing pain and suffering increases… Exposure to information about genocides or nuclear holocausts or other catastrophes involving more than a very few people may lead to an emotional shutdown; the very idea of such horrors can seem too painful to tolerate.
She then cites the work of Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist, while observing that “whole societies or cultures can also be subject to psychic numbing. Within militarized societies, numbing, desensitization, and a general sense of pseudo-inefficacy— the feeling that some problems are so beyond one’s control that one is helpless to solve them—may even be encouraged.”
War and unchecked militarism are unquestionably one of the greatest causes of human suffering. Is humanity now at an existential crossroads where we must simply reject it as an option and wake up to the folly of our own collective self-programming? Given the realities of large-scale polycrisis, a third world war with nuclear, AI, and autonomous weapons in the mix is the last thing humanity needs. Further, it seems abundantly clear that, as governments around the world falter in their efforts to effectively deal with the multi-headed hydra of polycrisis, many are once again falling back on a familiar pattern of state-sanctioned violence against other nations as a “solution” and a means to bolster the power of incumbency.
Sadly, even when large segments of the populace oppose militarism (as is clearly the case here in the U.S.) it has become abundantly clear that our own government will do whatever it pleases without regard to democratic input or sentiment. This might lead us to wonder whether a 2014 Princeton University study stating that true democracy in the U.S. is a thing of the past might not have been painfully accurate. Clearly, the corporate profit-driven machinery of the political establishment and military-industrial-complex can now steamroller over public opinion with cavalier impunity, aided and abetted by both political parties. And while a certain situational adaptability is likely one of the best qualities of the human species, paradoxically, it might also be one of the worse.
There is a four part series on BBC R4 that asks the question “Are we wired for war”.
On the individual level I don’t feel the majority are ‘wired for war’, but on the state level the desire for war seems to go ballistic.
jd: but on the state level the desire for war seems to go ballistic.
How else are the psychopath class going to create and maintain hierarchies of inequality? War is the health of the state.
Homo sapiens did not live like this for most of our species’s history. Consider the situation of a human predator preying on other humans. In a Paleolithic group of twenty to forty hunter-gatherers, that predator’s scope for predation was inherently limited. Perhaps they could threaten the group’s members and even kill one or two to compel the others to comply with their demands. Yet those others might still combine against them or simply flee while they were sleeping.
Around 10,000 years ago, one intelligent predator therefore developed a more effective strategy, which was to point to some neighboring tribe as a threat, attack any dissenting members of their own group as cowardly and disloyal, and excite the rest with stories about seizing whatever the other tribe had—food, women, access to a body of land or water—that they themselves desired.
cf Herman Goering: “Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.”
To return to the sequence of events outlined above, from the predator’s viewpoint. While before your group were more or less egalitarian foragers, you have just had them successfully raid another group, thus creating a heirarchy—a system of inequality with yourself on top, your warriors below you as junior predators, the rest of your group below them, and however many of the other tribe you enslaved at the bottom. Most crucially, you now control any surpluses of food—and everything else, consequently—that your group acquires.
And so on. All the rest of so-called ‘civilization’ proceeds from this, for bad and good.
Do animals have wars? Why yes they do from ants to social mammals like our closest relatives the primates. If one accepts evolution then it’s hard not to see competition between species and social groups within species as one of the drivers. Thought has nothing to do with it.
Of course the cold algorithmic nature of Darwin’s theory outraged many in the 19th but in the 21st we can hardly both accept and reject it as convenient. The question is how to we act on our self knowledge. What’s really unnatural is to deny our connection to the thing that made us and to which we perhaps owe some deference.
Is there something about history that suggests that aggression and fighting are not part of our human makeup? Perhaps all those psychiatrists should read more history before declaring war to be abnormal and a syndrome.
The difference with nuclear weapons is that the death dealing is so effective that their use threatens the user’s own survival and so clash with an even more powerful instinct. This is why some of the Los Alamos scientists felt the atomic secrets should be shared with the Soviets. And indeed until the Russians got the bomb there were those in the Pentagon planning the complete destruction of Russia once they had built enough bombs to do the job.
And as we’ve seen since that time the advent of nukes haven’t stopped war. The quest for dominance goes on.
So here’s suggesting the psychiatrists are part of the problem including their refusal to accept what’s really going on. The only true weapon against war is rationality and self awareness. If Darwin were still around he would say job one for any species is to promote its continuation. And nukes threaten this. Psychiatry has little to do with it.
I remember very well how during the Cold War people were really afraid of nuclear war, and that is probably why it didn’t happen. Nowadays it looks like people have lost fear of nukes.
One of the possible reasons is that during the Cold War, it was assumed it would involve mass attacks on cities and that it would result in mass destruction and an unlivable planet (MAD), whereas nowadays most discussions involve small tactical nukes aimed at military targets, and the idea that any use of nukes would be limited and remain contained. (Big mistake imo).
Another factor might be that the elites believe that they will somehow be shielded from any consequences, as has been the experience throughout their lives. Perhaps they even expect to profit from it.
During the Cold War, common people had nice life that they did not want to lose. Nowdays, nuclear war could be seen as a debt jubilee. :)
Regarding war in general, it always amazes me how indifferent the media / politicians/ general public are to military deaths, as if soldiers lives don’t count, don’t have parents, spouses, children, friends…
For example, we don’t know exactly how many soldiers are killed in the Ukraine war every day, but it must be in the hundreds per day. I read somewhere that civilian deaths in Ukraine was just about 1.2 per day in the past months (still 1.2 too much of course), but that is news when it happens. Nobody talks about hundreds of military personnel killed on a daily basis, or maimed for life in a lost war.
That is not exclusive to this war. Human psychology around war is very strange…
Yes, we are being groomed for war. Here in Finnish taxpayer funded news the top headers are Russia/Evilly-evil-Pootin and sports. Even two braincells is enough to tell why. It would be interesting to see how many would want to go fight in a war. In Sweden, not that many, according to recent link here in nc.
I wonder if it is deemed OK for lunatics like Lindsey Graham to be wildly pro-war while a female presidential candidate is quietly rejected for bragging about a “Most Lethal” military. Probably both pass the test of lethality for most numbed and dumbed citizens. Meanwhile the Congressional majority automatically increase nuclear readiness and development of “tactical” nukes. I hope we can widely forward this survival aid!
It will probably take a limited nuclear exchange to decondition the population from acceptance of nuclear war risk. This may be avoided if steady advances in conventional weaponry make nuclear weapons obsolete, just as the advent of nuclear weapons made chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction obsolete. AI drone swarms, precision guided missiles, and cyber attacks may similarly render nukes unnecessary. Iran already has demonstrated the potential deterrent capability of its missile arsenal. Expanding it would be a better idea than building a useless nuclear bomb.
There were 528 atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons from 1945 to 1996, that’s an average of 10 nuclear bombs going off every year for half a century.
How many nukes would have to go off to create nuclear winter?
You would have to be pretty deluded to believe that if a State like Utah gets nuked, then all you have to do is move to somewhere like Iowa to be safe. Nuclear war does not work that way which was brought home to me in a 1984 book called “The Cold and the Dark” by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts. A nuclear war means a nuclear winter with a cold, frozen dark wasteland, no possibility of growing food and all ground water frozen solid. At the same time a TV film came out called “The Day After” showing different Americans living through a nuclear attack-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
This was made before we became aware of a nuclear winter but one scene stuck out. The remnants of the radiation-poisoned community of farmers were having a meeting and disheveled government reps were telling the farmers that the ground would be contaminate with radiation so best to bulldoze it aside to which the farmers said that that was the topsoil that they were talking about. Something to remember.
This article is valuable for two themes: The uselessness of the endless media of the digital age, all requiring enormous amounts of fodder (opinions). Twenty-four hours a day, these unreliable fonts of lies, bullshit, and propaganda are publishing, publishing, publishing. What?
Second, the article likely throws into high relief how little influence psychologists and psychiatrists have these days. That’s a story unto itself.
Here in Italy, Donatella di Cesare, a philosopher and Germanist, has been pointing out necropolitics repeatedly. A commenter here at Naked Capitalism pointed out to me that the concept is not new to di Cesare. The diagnosis of the politics of death has been around for some time.
Necropolitics leads directly to another problem with the current arms races and war profiteering, the firearms in plays by Chekhov. If a gun arrives on stage in act I, it has to go off at some point in the play. I sometimes think that Chekhov lets the revolver go off all to easily, but this article points out how those with weapons see no reason to act responsibly. Then, as people in the U.S. of A. say endlessly, “It was a tragedy.”
I think that the author slips, somewhat seriously, by writing: “The cold hard fact is that many wars are fought for all the wrong reasons.”
I prefer Smedley Butler’s cleaner-and-simpler formulation: War Is a Racket.
We see this racket with people who think that having a war on their résumé will advance their political careers: Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Kamala Harris, Kaja Kallas, the execrable Tammy Duckworth, wounded in war and thoroughly enamored of war. We see this racket in the boys using the military and war as, what?, résumé inflation and beards: Pete Buttigieg, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham.
Watching Ukraine and the proxy genocide (as the author notes, deaths covered up), Palestine and the genocide (deaths covered up), Iran, Sudan, DR Congo, Myanmar (do we even mention Myanmar anymore?), I see no purpose to look for “right reasons.” I am not much of a Buddhist, but I believe that casting about for “right reasons” for war using Buddhist ethics would be a much-desired impossibility.
I shuddered in 2016 when I learned of Obama’s parting gift to the MIC as he was leaving office of a ten year, ten trillion dollar nuclear upgrade that would include the development of “battlefield nukes”. Upgrading for safety, or even better for paring down? Perhaps. Battlefield nukes, however, seemed psychotically stupid.
I lived through and remember the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. Watching my father gather canned foods, water, batteries and flashlights into cardboard boxes with shaking hands and carrying them into the cellar as the crisis peaked was perhaps the most terrifying moment of my life. I was 10. I agree fully with Yushan above. We were terrified of nukes and rightfully so, not to mention years of duck and cover drills each week in grade school. We have learned subsequently that we came within mere millimeters of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in at least two instances it was Soviet officers who chose humanity over protocol that averted it. Thus we are alive today, only to have to deal with this issue again. The last months of the Biden admin were similar, especially at the end, with neocons edging toward a nuclear confrontation in Ukraine. Twice in one lifetime? That is truly over the top.
I believe that neoconism based on the ideology of zero/sum attracts and nurtures psychopaths. When I was young, I was crazy for fireworks. At a young age, I even searched out, library not internet, the formula for gunpowder and started making my own. Despite my best efforts, thank goodness, no one was injured. It is my firm belief that deep in their hearts neocons are desperate to use a nuke. In their twisted minds, this will bring the world to its knees in awe of the awesomeness of the American empire. Nonsense. In reality, they just want to do it. For them, it would be the ultimate orgasm and whatever plans and schemes they come up with, the ultimate goal is always to create the circumstances where they can “justify” pulling the nuclear trigger.
In my opinion, neoconism, Zionism and fascism all share a similar mindset based on the ideology of zero/sum. And this mindset is like a malignancy in the body of humanity. In the Collective West, this has been metastasizing before our eyes. In this age, war must be averted at all costs because the irrationality or “death wish” behind it will grab the chance and push it to the limit. The movie “Fail-safe” with Henry Fonda as the US president in the 1960s expressed the hope of innate goodness and rationality surmounting the irrational evil of annihilation. However, looking at the caliber of the Western political elite today, that is a forlorn hope. IMO, any substantive chance to avert global catastrophe will have to come from the bottom up. Same as well in regards to cascading global warming effects where any hope for a dignified, sustainable existence for living beings on this planet lies not in zero/sum human conflict but in win/win cooperation.
In 1980 I was in SAC.
We would exercise operating the base from shelters and monitoring everyones’ radiation exposure, as if the base were to remain….
Prior to that assignment I was usually involved in NORAD exercises. On the site I was second rank and drew overnight duty on battle staff….
We often had time to read files one had reports of nuclear weapon test damages. It was classified,but did nothing to sell limited nyclear war to me…..
In SAC we assumed we were first salvo targets. Our observation: “the living would envy the dead”. Very unofficial!
We survived a few close calls….
When I saw an X post by Neil Degrasse Tyson attempting to explain to/convince us that modern nuclear weapons are not like the older ones and we needn’t worry, I realized (1) here was a willing tool of the neocons. And (b) We’re fk’d…
Will say; he was roundly vilified in the comments.
WT family blog. I didn’t see the tweet, but do not doubt the claim.
Even our “rebooted” Carl Sagan doesn’t live up to the original (just like every other form of contemporary cultural reboot). Sagan was a devoted anti-militarist and devoted a long segment in his “Cosmos” series to the perils of civilizational self-destruction.
Beyond outright denialism, it is difficult to get our heads around the intertwined polycrisis the West faces – over reliance on digital technologies, with their potential for crime and failures of security and personal privacy; the out of control climate crisis already stressing the planet’s organic populations; the economic crisis of the West caused by de-industrialisation and the exponential growth of financialisation; the social crisis arising from migration and the toxic imbalance of wealth and power in formerly industrialised countries leading to a collapse in social cohesion; and the real shift in world power from the West to the Rest – it is simpler and more convenient to contemplate the use of nuclear weapons against adversaries as an easy fix with limited unwanted side effect or blowback, Netanyahu being the great exemplar, and where the crazed Bibi goes the West follows, for instance, Starmer’s proposal to acquire at least 12 new fighter jets that can carry nuclear bombs. If not for the intention of delivering nuclear weapons, why else would the tenth rate government of a third rate country 40% of whose population are living precarious lives in terms of economic and social wellbeing even think about this escalatory acquisition?
For Reagan and Gorbachev, nuclear war was unthinkable, for the likes of Lindsey Graham, Macron, Starmer, Kallas and other political, moral and intellectual pygmies who can only comprehend the simplest solution to complex problems (including, sooner or later, Trump), using nuclear weapons to hold on to the West’s place in the world is totally a rational and wholly acceptable option.
A US tactical nuke release (no doubt, that the US would be the first to the post-1945 bottom) will create a smaller death toll than Gaza. Welp, looks like that the unthinkable has been normalized implicitly.
Back in the 70s or maybe the 80s (I have trouble these days decding what happened in April as opposed to May) there was a special made-for-tv movie starring Jason Robards about the horrible consequences of nuclear war. Some psychologists or psychiatristsl or whatevers stated that young children should not be allowed to watch this movie because it would “damage” them. And all throughout the 50s and 60s there were books, movies and tv shows (I especially remember there were some Twilight Zone episodes) that did a much better job than did warnings from “science” (social and physical) about how bad a nuclear war could be. I don’t follow what movies are current these days and don’t watch much TV but my guess is that the public is no longer being fed this kind of fare. That’s too bad because those movies and tv shows probably were quite effective in alerting people to the horrors that might be in store for them.
I have observed the “normalization” talk about the use of nuclear weapons. However measured and apparently wise the chin stroking purveyors seem, it is stark staring lunacy. The only sane nuclear weapons policy is their dismantling. There was a time when “everyone” agreed that nuclear war was unwinnable and as another commenter said, “the living would envy the dead.” Now there seems to be the childish notion that somehow “it” will happen to “them” but not to “us.” Unlike Wile E. Coyote we cannot runoff a cliff, stop suspended in mid air, fall to the floor of the canyon, and arise battered and dizzy but unscathed ready for the next cartoon adventure. The use of even one nuclear weapon is a no cartoon adventure. How many die in a “limited exchange?” Who are they? Where are they? What are the “limits’ on radioactive fallout? How much is too much? Oh, you have a shelter? Isn’t that special. What about your cousins who live down wind? That shelter … Stocked for how many days, weeks, years? And so on and so forth. Check out Tom Lehrer’s “So Long Mom, I’M off to drop the Bomb” on YouTube.