Or: how I learned to stop worrying.

• Author: Jervis, Robert
• Position: Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda - Book review

John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 336 pp., $27.95.

It is easy to overlook the fact that the most startling characteristic of our era is that we are still here. John Mueller reminds us that with the dawn of the nuclear age, we became obsessed first with the idea of all-out nuclear war, then with the idea that nuclear weapons would inevitably spread throughout the world, and, lately, that nuclear terrorism would threaten our cities.

Whether an optimist, a pessimist, a political scientist, a policy maker or merely a person of a certain age, almost all of us and much of our sense of culture has been preoccupied by the atom.

At the start of the Cold War, many levelheaded American officials like George Kennan doubted that this conflict could last for long without either igniting world war or undermining American society. Others looked to a longer and brighter future, and as early as 1946, Bernard Brodie, the father of nuclear-deterrence strategy, believed that mutual and stable deterrence was possible. Others still foresaw nuclear power making electricity too cheap to meter or expected peaceful nuclear explosives to be a key to economic progress by cheaply building ports and canals. And more recently, Columbia professor Kenneth Waltz argued that while nuclear weapons would spread, the result would be to replicate the stability that characterized Soviet-American relations.

Meanwhile, observers of social life and culture saw an enormous impact of things nuclear; from the bikini to the changed and contested images of science and scientists as saviors or menaces, to the (in)famous clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told us how close we were to doom, all the way to visions of a freer, cleaner and better world. Whatever they believed about it, everyone knew we were living in the atomic age.

With the iconoclasm that typifies his work, Mueller will have none of this. Nuclear weapons have been remarkably unimportant; Albert Einstein had it exactly backward when he said that "the atom has changed everything save our way of thinking." For Brodie, the most important "twin facts" about the new bomb were that "it exists" and "its destructive power is fantastically great"; for Mueller, they are that nuclear weapons have had little impact on actual events and that their dangers have been vastly exaggerated. He summarizes his argument sharply: "nuclear weapons have had at best a quite limited effect on history, have been a substantial waste of money and effort, do not seem to have been terribly appealing to most states that do not have them, [and] are out of reach for terrorists. ..." Far from having nightmares about the bomb, we should "sleep well." A more critical summary would be the picture of Mads Alfred E. Neuman with his idiotic grin and slogan "What, me worry?" paired with the comic strip Pogo's "We have met the enemy and they are us," which encapsulates Mueller's argument that the unfortunate effects of nuclear weapons stem from our excessive worries about them. The failure of disasters to materialize is less the result of human contrivance than of the natural course of things, Mueller claims.

And that is really a central and rarely asked question. Is it to the credit of our clever policy makers and their wise strategies that we have thus far escaped nuclear Armageddon? Or is it instead simply the general social and historical flow of events that has led us to our current moment?

For Mueller, the benign consequences of nuclear weapons--or at least a lack of malign impact--occurred despite national policies, not because of them. The half-century of peace followed from the broad course of economic development and perhaps progress in human affairs. In other works, Mueller explains that a general aversion to war has emerged among world powers. (1) He argues that this trend has nothing to do with nuclear deterrence. For even without nuclear weapons, peace would have been maintained because conventional wars have grown too expensive and human beings seemed to have lost much of their taste for violence. Indeed, if anything, arms-control agreements have been more a hindrance than a help in lowering the level of nuclear arms because by drawing attention to these weapons, they magnified their importance. Similarly, most nations chose not to pursue nuclear weapons because they saw that the costs were great and the benefits few. Terrorists, presumably beyond many of these calculations, have found that the barriers in their way are simply insurmountable.

Underlying each of these claims is the general but not fully articulated theme that it is the impersonal forces and flow of history that brings us to where we are rather than conscious policy, either for good or for ill. In much the same vein, Mueller has earlier argued that we overestimate the value of democracy and underestimate the civilizing and restraining impact of capitalism. (2) For Mueller, then, the invisible hand works quite well, or rather there are lots of invisible hands out there, and if we worry too much and try to thwart them, we are likely to make things worse. One could take this perspective a step further and argue that academics and intellectuals, while having fun with their thoughts, create trouble for the rest of us by generating excessive fear and leading us to centralized policies when we would be better-off acting on our impulses and not looking for solutions from governments. This perverse line of argument is consistent with a strand of standard theories of international politics that maintains that many conflicts and wars are created by our thinking too much. Preventive wars come from the concern that the world will badly deteriorate unless the state attacks now (and it is not only the Iraqi case that looks foolish in retrospect). And people who understand the collective-action problem (Why clean the dishes when Susie, John or Mary may?) are less likely to be able to work together. After I have explained the logic of the prisoner's dilemma to my students and they learn that while mutual mistrust is unfortunate, trusting others who may not reciprocate can be worse, they are much less cooperative in the games that I play in class (but I hope not in the rest of their lives).

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Unlike Mueller, many attribute this long peace to wise policies and adept statesmen. War was prevented by the well-crafted strategy of nuclear deterrence that made it clear to even risk-prone leaders that aggressive actions could lead to the destruction of their countries. Those policies made sure that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would have meaningful incentives to launch a nuclear first strike even--or especially--in times of high tension. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) inhibited, if not prevented, proliferation. The agreement, adopted over strong...