Surveying the historical record, we can find examples of societies so organized that they drifted towards catastrophe with a certain inevitability, systematically avoiding steps that could have changed this course. Our own society is an example, except that in this case the catastrophe that lies ahead involves national and perhaps global suicide. It is hardly unrealistic to surmise that we may be entering the terminal phase of history.

The course that we pursue is deeply rooted in our social institutions and relatively independent of the choice of individuals who happen to fill institutional roles in the political or economic system. Furthermore, the steps taken towards destruction have a certain short-term rationality within the framework of existing institutions and the kind of planning they engender. Such planning is largely a matter of short-term calculation of gain; this is entirely natural in competitive societies, where those who contemplate the longer term are unlikely to be in the competition when it arrives, and this natural framework of planning carries over to the political system that is, overwhelmingly, under the influence of those who own and manage the private society.

It is even possible to write philosophically on ethics and nuclear issues? In spite of the growing literature which seeks to apply ethical reasoning to nuclear issues doubts run deep here. They reflect more than hesitation between consequentialist and action-based conceptions of ethical reasoning, or over paradoxes of deterrence that can be generated by mixing these. We may even doubt whether nuclear arms and dangers either can or should be treated as ‘problems’ for ethical analysis. Won't methods that pass muster for diagnosing and discussing lesser, more local crises fail here, distract from other (perhaps more ‘realistic’) responses, and even risk further dangers? Perhaps philosophical inquiry is not only irrelevant, because it cannot help solve nuclear ‘problems,’ but also impossible because we cannot convincingly identify the deepest ethical difficulties, the real constraints on their solution, or the most promising agents of change.

In the current debate over nuclear strategy, various moral approaches are simply taken for granted. This is unfortunate because the particular strategic recommendations that are endorsed frequently depend upon the particular moral approach that is assumed. Obviously, if we are to rid this debate of its question-begging character, we need to evaluate critically the principal alternative moral approaches to nuclear strategy. I propose to begin this task by describing what is essential to a moral approach to nuclear strategy (Part I). I will then consider the three principal alternative moral approaches to nuclear strategy, the Utilitarian Approach, the Human Nature Approach and the Social Contract Approach (Part II), and relate them to just war theory, indicating why the Social Contract Approach should be favored over the other two (Part III). I will then conclude with some practical implications for nuclear strategy (Part IV).

One of the most outstanding characteristics of human beings is their adaptability. As we readily learn to take new conditions of life for granted, so we have learned to live with the bomb. For nearly forty years we have lived in the shadow of possible cataclysmic disaster brought about by human action; and we treat this unprecedented danger simply as a background, on which we focus only occasionally, to the common business of living. What else is possible, save persistent hysteria? But, as part of a mechanism for avoiding hysteria, we are in danger of rendering the topic unreal to ourselves even when we are explicitly considering it, by treating it as an abstract question. We use the concepts of first strike, retaliation, megadeaths, and so forth, which we apply in just the spirit of those discussing strategy for a board game, while averting our minds from what it is that we are actually talking about. Indeed, if our concern is purely strategic, this does no harm, since the question then involves something isomorphic to a problem in a conceivable board game.

The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union has reached a stage of unparalleled destructive potential. Fueling the race are not only an immense series of mighty technological developments but also each side's unremitting quest for both security and power. Thus, each side is animated by intense competitiveness with and deep distrust of the other.

My primary purpose in this essay is not to examine the historical background or the current status of this murderous competition but rather to inquire into what can and should be done to avoid its dangers. For this purpose, we must make the most intensive possible use of reason. For reason gives us the surest way to attain truth, including practical truth about what ought to be done in the various predicaments that confront human beings.

Introduction

Issues in public policy have been challenging and remaking moral theory for two centuries. Such issues force us to question fundamental principles of ethics while they cast doubt on our ability to generalize from traditional intuitions. No issue poses more remarkable difficulties for moral theory than nuclear weapons policy. Because the consequences of their deployment and therefore possible use could be grievous beyond those of any previously conceivable human action, these weapons frame the conflict between outcome-based, especially utilitarian, and action-based deontological moral theories more acutely than perhaps any other we have faced. Just because nuclear weapons may bring about the most grievous outcome imaginable, they elevate concern with outcomes over concern with actions. More generally, they wreak havoc with the focus on the morality of individual choices and actions, set limits to the notion of intention and the doctrine of double effect, call into question the so-called just-war theory, and overwhelm the intuitionist basis of much of ethical reasoning.

It takes (at least) two to make a war, and of those combatants, one (at least) must start it. If nobody starts the war, there won't be a war. This is as true in the nuclear era as it ever was. But if any given party is certain that he would lose any war initiated by him, then presumably he would not initiate a war. One way for A to make certain that B would lose any war B starts is by having an unstoppable superpowerful weapon of retaliation at hand.

Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, is in a large part an earnest, aphoristic essay on individual responsibility in these times. Consider a representative passage: ‘With the generation that has never known a world unmenaced by nuclear weapons, a new order of the generation begins. In it, each person alive is called on to assume his share of the responsibility for guaranteeing the existence of all future generations.’ I have no doubt that many people in most countries — citizens of representative democracies in particular — know this call and feel in some dim and tentative way that there must be special individual responsibilities that have evolved with that defensive, strategic and political doctrine we know as nuclear deterrence. And how could we expect otherwise?

From time immemorial all weapons have been a product of human knowledge. Today the relationship is reciprocal. A great deal of the new knowledge being created at this moment is a product of weaponry. The transition occurred in World War ll, and, in the West, was institutionalized by the new ways of funding research and development put in place in 1945-47 in the U.S.A.

Presumably this makes some difference to what we find out. Brains and equipment are dedicated to the production of knowledge and technologies useful in time of war. Our Physical Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Indexus Medicus — our repositories of references to new knowledge — would look very different if we had different research priorities. That means that the content of our new knowledge is much influenced by the choice of where to deploy the best minds of our generation.