Pathfinders – Big Red Button
Last year Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow caused a minor stir with A House of Dynamite, an earnest and compelling warning against nuclear war in the tradition of Fail Safe (1964), or its comedy twin Dr Strangelove (1964). Unlike her other films it probably won’t win any gongs though, because it annoyed a lot of people.
Note, this paragraph contains spoilers. Critics complained that the film wasn’t a ‘proper’ story, with a beginning, middle and end, but instead was a looping repeat of the same chain of events from different character viewpoints. Nor did it have an ending. The viewer is just left hanging. Does the missile blow up the city? Does the US launch a retaliatory strike, and against whom? We don’t find out. But that’s ok, because the ending wasn’t the point.
The point of Dynamite is how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place. ‘We all built a house filled with dynamite… and then we just kept on livin’ in it,’ says one character. Jacobin magazine sniffily objected that the film doesn’t really say anything, and is essentially an ‘impotent and unserious exercise in handwringing’. We might sniffily object in turn that anyone who doesn’t advocate the immediate abolition of capitalism is also merely handwringing. Which would include all of the left including Jacobin magazine.
Because while capitalism has done a lot of good things for humanity, it’s also an out-of-control profit-making machine that comes with some catastrophic downsides. Runaway global warming isn’t even the worst of these. We can probably survive that, as a species. But who would survive nuclear Armageddon? Who would even want to?
For all the Boomer generation’s supposed privileges, like free higher education, affordable houses, job security and career advancement, they still had to grow up in the Cold War under the shadow of the Bomb, not knowing whether each day would be their last. Now Gen Z and Gen Alpha, on top of their other problems, may come to know what that feels like. ‘On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history’.
Who’s got nukes?
Nine countries today have a total of around 13,000 weapons, down from the Cold War’s 60,000, but arsenals are increasing again. You can see the distribution at a glance at armscontrol.org. Most belong to Russia and the US, but China is fast playing catch-up. These are not just nukes, but BIG nukes. ‘For example, the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea’ (ucs.org).
Who wants nukes?
Basically, every country’s ruling elite, following the National Rifle Association’s argument that in an armed society, you’re safer if you’re packing heat too. Ukraine gave up its nukes in 1994 and what happened? It got invaded. Iran keeps being bombed by Israel, but who dares bomb nuclear North Korea? The lesson is obvious and unavoidable. Disarmament is for losers. To paraphrase Mark Carney at Davos, if you’re not at the nuclear table, you’re on the menu.
There are fewer total nukes than in the Cold War era, so why is the threat worse today? Because treaties are easier when there are only two sides to negotiate. After the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War finally settled into stasis with arms control treaties. Now there are three major nuclear powers, and more on the way. In February this year the 2010 START nuclear non-proliferation treaty expired, and no nuclear power shows any interest in reviving or replacing it. Instead, with Russia fighting in Ukraine, China threatening Taiwan, India and Pakistan having cross-border skirmishes, and the US under Trump threatening to remove the ‘extended deterrence’ umbrella from its own NATO allies, the gloves are off. Any country that can get its hands on nukes and more nukes is going gangbusters to do just that, and never mind other internal costs like health and social welfare.
The upshot is proliferation. Now even America worries that, despite its gigantic arsenal, it won’t have enough to go round if adversaries like Russia and China decide to join forces. There is a terrifying escalatory logic at play, as the Economist points out. A country may opt for ‘minimal deterrence’, having just enough nukes to survive a first strike and still deliver unconscionable devastation on enemy cities. But beyond minimal deterrence, military planners aim for ‘damage limitation’, which means having enough missiles to take out all the other side’s nuclear silos, submarines and mobile launchers. If this capacity is achieved, it only drives the other side to acquire further weapons, and so on indefinitely (‘Nukes of Hazard‘).
Even if war is not the immediate result, this multi-sided arms race makes the prospects of any binding arms treaty look more remote, and the chances of a Fail Safe-like accidental launch greater than ever. But we, the vast majority of the world’s people, didn’t do this. We are merely the grunts who do all the work of maintaining what we like to call civilisation. It’s the rich who have built a world of dynamite and are sitting on top of it, smoking fat cigars. Our only mistake is continuing to support and vote for the market system which created the rich, and their nukes, in the first place.
J Robert Oppenheimer, the self-styled ‘destroyer of worlds’, was along with Einstein a founder of the Doomsday Clock that now ticks perilously close to midnight. There’s still time for humanity to claw its way back from the brink, and use its miraculous science and technology purely for the collective benefit, but only if it stops deluding itself. Capitalism is not sustainable, nor our best option. It’s a death cult with a Big Red Button.
PJS