Absolute power

THERMONUCLEAR MONARCHY
Choosing Between Democracy and Doom
Elaine Scarry
W W Norton & Company
582 pages; $35

The problem posed by nuclear weapons - that they work by holding their possessors hostage, with the threat of catastrophic retaliation if used - has confounded thinking about them since the beginning of the nuclear age. One of its earliest analysts, the American physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb, once compared the two dominant nuclear powers of his day and ours, the United States and Russia, to "scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life". Oppenheimer chose not to note that scorpions, a species almost as well known for belligerence as Homo sapiens, would sooner or later take that risk. We humans have not done so, at least not so far. But while circling each other warily during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union occupied themselves with stockpiling enough weapons to freeze out food production with nuclear winter and destroy the human world.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was some expectation that nuclear weapons might be recognised as Cold War relics. Encouragingly, four nuclear states - Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and South Africa - voluntarily disarmed. But these most destructive of weapons turned out to have apparent value as guarantors of national security and tokens of national prestige. The superpowers negotiated reductions in their arsenals even as a secondary wave of proliferation began or continued in Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, while Iran and Iraq have so far been restrained from going nuclear.

Today there are about 17,300 nuclear weapons in the world, most of them American or Russian, with a combined destructive force equivalent to 1,500 pounds of TNT for each and every man, woman and child on earth.

Thermonuclear Monarchy is only the latest in a long series of efforts to think through the question of how to eliminate these terrible and useless weapons, efforts that go back all the way to the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, prepared by a group of experts led by Oppenheimer himself for submission to the newly formed United Nations. Elaine Scarry is a literary critic and social theorist who teaches at Harvard, best known for her highly original 1985 book, The Body in Pain, an examination of the role of wounding in the authentication of belief.

That earlier work broke new ground. There are useful insights in Thermonuclear Monarchy as well, but over all it fails to persuade. It explores the baleful political consequences of limiting the control of nuclear weapons to a select few, and the authority to launch them to even fewer - in the case of the US, to the president alone in what amounts to his monarchical power.

Ms Scarry illustrates her point most effectively early on, quoting Richard Nixon in 1974, when he was threatened with impeachment. He told reporters, "I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead." Well, he didn't dare, and no one has dared since Harry Truman in 1945, in the last days of a long and terrible war, the worst in human history, hoping to put an end to it.

Why no one has dared, so far, is the crux of the matter, but that is not a story Ms Scarry chooses to tell. Why we Americans collectively agree to tolerate concentrating world-destroying power in the hands of one fallible human being is another story Ms Scarry bypasses, though it goes a long way towards explaining the peculiar logic or illogic of accumulating weapons so destructive that our only hope of surviving them has been to prepare to strike first and destroy an enemy's weapons before he has time to launch them against us. Why our elected leaders continue to believe that such genocidal weapons are legitimate and moral in our hands, but illegitimate and immoral in the hands of our enemies, is yet another mystery Ms Scarry chooses not to investigate.

I am not reviewing the book Ms Scarry didn't write. In a 1999 interview she said she had already spent 13 years working on the subject of "Thermonuclear Monarchy," and she has previously rehearsed most of its arguments in shorter essays and books. Twenty-eight years is surely a gestation sufficient to justify expecting a comprehensive examination of a problem, even so world-scale a problem as nuclear weapons.

Instead, Ms Scarry constructs a legally interesting but highly abstract argument about the consent of the governed. She clarifies what the Second Amendment was about before it was trivialised into merely a guarantee of personal pistol-­packing. That amendment, she says, provided a second level of consent by the people, after the consent of both Houses of Congress, to a president's taking the nation into war. It's an inspiring picture, but Congress long ago ceded most of its war-making power to the imperial presidency, and the termination of the draft after popular resistance to the (undeclared) Vietnam War mooted the "well regulated militia" of the amendment. A professional army ultimately answers to the commander in chief, not to the people.

It comes as no surprise to arrive at the final page of this long-gestated, often eloquent if also often tedious book and find in its last paragraph the claim that the constitutional provisions for declaring war and mustering the militia only look like inadequate tools because "they are at present lying unused on the ground," that "we should use whatever tool" - unspecified - "can best accomplish the dismantling," and that "if there is a better tool, please tell us what it is, and help us to see how to use it." I would have thought the rich literature of nuclear disarmament had already done that. The difficulty isn't that the kit of tools is missing the right wrench. The difficulty, despite several close calls, is that no one in authority believes the damned things will go off, and so everyone wants to play with them, like treasure hunters wallowing in a vault of golden coins laced with guardian scorpions, like children discovering the loaded gun their parents thoughtlessly neglected to lock away.

©2014 The New York Times News Service