Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our seventh annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present one of the Third Place winners from Collin Van Son, a current student at the University of Denver.

For a field that prizes logic and rationality, nuclear strategy is ripe with contradiction. Even the most basic premise of nuclear deterrence—that the best way to prevent nuclear war is by preparing for it—seems paradoxical. In working toward an effective and ethical nuclear doctrine, today’s strategists would do well to acquaint themselves with two experts on the merits and dangers of self-contradiction: F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, and George Orwell, author of 1984.

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Living with Contradiction

In a 1936 essay published in Esquire magazine, F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”[1] Common sense would seem to disagree: in our day-to-day lives, holding two contradictory ideas is a recipe not for brilliance but indecisiveness—a fatal flaw in any strategist. But the logic of nuclear deterrence is far removed from our day-to-day experience. Indeed, the ability to tolerate self-contradiction—i.e., paradox—is a trait to be desired in all nuclear strategists.

Consider the doctrine of mutually assured destruction as enshrined in the Cold War nuclear postures of the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two superpowers possessed a collective 28,862 warheads that they were capable of delivering via bombers, inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).[2] By keeping their bombers on ready alert, burying their ICBMs in hardened silos, and sending their nuclear-armed submarines on stealthy underwater patrols, both sides had secured a second-strike capability. For American nuclear planners, this meant abandoning the idea of a splendid first strike; even if the U.S. launched an all-out surprise attack, enough Soviet nuclear weapons would survive to inflict devastating damage on the United States. The Soviets faced the same dilemma. Regardless of who fired first, mutual destruction was assured.

But mutually assured destruction (MAD) is more than just a standoff. It also poses a paradox. In the words of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the dawn of the MAD era, “Nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever. They are totally useless—except only to deter one’s opponent from using them.”[3] That is, the usefulness of nuclear weapons lies solely in their ability to prevent their own use. This self-negation complicates the theory of the nuclear revolution, whose early proponents believed the threat of nuclear weapons would make all forms of warfare less likely. Less than a year after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, strategist Bernard Brodie concluded, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”[4] But instead of witnessing a nuclear peace, the decades following Brodie’s pronouncement saw the U.S. and the Soviet Union engage one another in proxy wars around the globe. By allowing nuclear weapons to cancel themselves out, MAD had made way for another case of contradiction: the stability-instability paradox.

For an illustration of the stability-instability paradox, consider two scenarios. In the first, two nuclear-armed adversaries perceive themselves to be on the brink of nuclear war. This could be because State A’s arsenal is far superior to State B’s, leading B to fear a splendid first strike by A, and A to fear that B could fire first under a use-it-before-you-lose-it mentality. In the second scenario, the two powers are much more evenly matched, and both possess a secure second-strike capability. Since there are few incentives for either side to launch a first strike, both judge the risk of nuclear war to be relatively low. At first glance, the first scenario (strategic instability) appears far more dangerous than the second (strategic stability). But the overriding sense of danger which characterizes the first scenario will have the positive effect of encouraging both sides to act with caution and restraint. By contrast, the apparent safety of the second scenario will embolden both sides to engage in localized disputes or proxy wars. This propensity for low-level risk-taking increases the overall likelihood of conflict—and since even a small conflict carries a non-zero chance of going nuclear, it is not immediately clear whether strategic stability makes nuclear war more or less likely. Add to this the fact that the real world is far murkier than the two extremes outlined above, and one can see why “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time” is a requisite for nuclear strategy.

If the stability-instability paradox is an unintended consequence of mutually assured destruction, there is yet another paradox, this time an explicitly ethical one, at the center of MAD itself. As discussed, the stabilizing effect of MAD depends on the threat of massive retaliation—if you annihilate my society, then I will use my second-strike capability to annihilate yours. But is such a threat truly credible? Returning to the Cold War example, an all-out surprise attack by the Soviet Union would have left the United States shattered beyond recognition. With tens of millions of Americans dead and the nation’s largest cities reduced to rubble, those in charge of retaliating against the Soviets would be forced to ask themselves: What is the point? Deterrence having so obviously failed, what strategic or moral basis could there possibly be for firing back? Not only would a retaliatory strike kill tens of millions of Soviet civilians and raise the specter of a global nuclear winter, it would also do nothing to change the fact that the United States, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist. It follows that, having suffered an all-out nuclear attack, the only acceptable response is not to respond. Retaliation would be nothing less than genocidal nihilism.

But this conclusion, no matter how sound and ethically self-evident, threatens to unwind the entire logic of MAD. For if one side concludes that a nuclear second strike is too criminally insane to ever be carried out, then suddenly an all-out first strike begins to look like a feasible option for the other side. In essence, then, pledging oneself to a bare-minimum standard of ethics—“I shall not wage nuclear war when there is nothing left to protect or gain”—could actually make nuclear war more attractive for the side that strikes first, thereby calling into question whether such a statement, in light of its consequences, can truly be called ethical. Thus, the deterrent value of MAD comes to depend on each side’s stated or implied willingness to carry out mass murder to no end whatsoever. The implication for strategists is, to put it mildly, sobering: Mutually assured destruction proposes to keep the world safe by promising to destroy it for no reason other than spite.

This is not an easy conclusion to stomach, nor should it be. In fact, as the following section seeks to demonstrate, one of the most dangerous things a nuclear strategist can do is to desensitize themselves to their discipline’s contradictions. Like pebbles in a shoe, the paradoxes of nuclear strategy should make themselves felt in every step the strategist takes. Not only is this deeply unsatisfying, it can also be personally painful at times. Small wonder, perhaps, that the essay in which Fitzgerald extolled the virtue of self-contradiction was titled “The Crack-Up.”

George Orwell on the Danger of Internalizing Contradiction

George Orwell wrote of the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” Fitzgerald would likely call this the mark of a first-rate intelligence.[5] But this quote from Orwell’s novel 1984 refers to something far more sinister: doublethink. In Orwell’s dystopian vision of England-turned-surveillance-state, doublethink represents the internalization and weaponization of paradox. As explained in the novel, doublethink means:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies…to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.[6]

Some of these features of doublethink—“to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it”—can be leveled as critiques of nuclear strategy, whose practitioners contemplate the mass murder of millions and do so in the name of peace. Consider the fact that Strategic Air Command (SAC), which operates U.S. nuclear bombers and ICBMs, has for its motto, “Peace is Our Profession.” Though Strategic Air Command arrived at a variant of this motto three years before 1984 was published, it is hard not to see it as an homage to Orwell’s fictional state, in which “[t]he Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.”[7] One could also point to the most sophisticated Cold War-era U.S. ICBM, the MX missile, which was capable of carrying up to 12 independently targeted, 300-kiloton thermonuclear warheads—enough to replicate the destruction of Hiroshima more than 276 times over.[8] The MX’s more popular name? The Peacekeeper. As Orwell might argue, “These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”[9]

One may be tempted to dismiss the significance of this so-called doublethink; slogans and nicknames are, after all, only words. But this is to miss the core of Orwell’s argument that the language we use shapes the way we think. The implications this has for nuclear strategy were captured in vivid detail by Carol Cohn in her landmark article “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” In it, Cohn describes her immersion in the world and the language of nuclear planners, and how it began to change the very way she thought:

Like the White Queen [of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass], I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Not because I consciously believed, for instance, that a “surgically clean counterforce strike” was really possible, but instead because some elaborate piece of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the possibility of those strikes, as well as on a host of other impossible things.[10]

As Cohn tells it, a nuclear discourse populated by euphemisms (“collateral damage”) and oxymorons (“clean bombs”) is more than just discordant—it is dangerous. This is because such language “makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about, and from the realities one is creating through the discourse.”[11] For example, referring to a class of nuclear weapons as “tactical nukes” obscures the fact that, in the words of strategist Thomas Schelling, “However few the nuclears used, and however selectively they are used…their consequences will not be tactical. With nuclears, it has become more than ever a war of risks and threats at the highest strategic level.”[12] By slipping contradictions like “tactical nukes” into the day-to-day language of nuclear strategy, doublethink-like practices threaten to obscure the true cost of nuclear war, in the same way that calling a weapon of mass destruction a Peacemaker calls into question what peace really means.

Now, all professions rely to some degree on jargon and abstraction, and nuclear strategy is no exception. The goal, then, should not be to purge or rewrite the nuclear lexicon. Indeed, if strategists were forced to abandon the term “countervalue strike” and instead refer to “civilian mass murder attacks” when giving presentations or talking to colleagues, the very unpleasantness of doing so would likely drive most strategists out of the field entirely, leaving only those few who have no qualms about contemplating mass murder—and these are the very people we should be keeping far away from nuclear strategy. The only acceptable alternative involves threading a difficult cognitive needle. Like Fitzgerald’s first-rate intelligence, nuclear strategists must learn “to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” Doing so, however, is inherently frustrating; when faced with a paradox, our immediate instinct is to try to resolve it. But as Orwell makes clear through the concept of doublethink, attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable achieve only the corrosion of language and thought. Contradictions should be seen not as flaws but as fundamental features of nuclear strategy. Does this consign nuclear strategists—and, by extension, the societies they serve—to perpetual discomfort? Likely it does. But discomfort at the thought of nuclear use can hardly be considered a bad thing. This points to perhaps the most important paradox of our nuclear age, one best articulated by Fitzgerald himself: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”[13]

Collin Van Son is a graduate student (Master of Arts in International Security) at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

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Header Image: Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, 2021 (Carrie Campbell).

Notes:

[1] Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Crack-Up.” Esquire, February 1936.

[2] Norris, Robbert S., and Hans M. Kristensen. “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 66, no. 4 (July/August 2010), 81.

[3] McNamara, Robert S. “The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misperceptions.” Foreign Affairs 62, no. 1 (Fall 1983), 79.

[4] Brodie, Bernard. “Implications for Military Policy.” In The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, 62. New Haven: Yale Institute of International Studies, 1946.

[5] Orwell, George. 1984. 1949. Reprint, Signet Classic, 1961.

[6] Ibid.

[7] “Strategic Air Command.” U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission. Accessed May 6, 2023. https://www.centennialofflight.net/essay/Dictionary/SAC/DI185.htm.; Orwell, 1984.

[8] Gregersen, Erik. “Peacekeeper Missile.” In Encyclopaedia Britannica. n.d. Accessed May 6, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/technology/missile.

[9] Orwell, 1984.

[10] Cohn, Carol. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12, no. 4 (Summer 1987), 713.

[11] Ibid., 715.

[12] Schelling, Thomas. Arms and Influence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 111. Emphasis added.

[13] Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up.”