John Buell

Beyond Crackpot Realism

Throughout the history of the nuclear age, fear, nationalism and secrecy have interacted in ways that sustained the nuclear arms race and increased the risks even to the leaders in that race. Manhattan Project scientists believed that US deployment of this weapon would make international control unlikely and would increase the likelihood of a dangerous arms race. They also knew that it was only the precursor to weapons far more lethal, 1000 times the power of the weapons dropped on Hiroshima.

Some sought to convey these reservations to the President. Their communication never reached him, only to be classified and kept from the public. Daniel Ellsberg points out that several Manhattan Project scientists later “expressed regret that they had deferred to the demands of the secrecy managers.”

What we are left with – especially in the text books--instead is a sanitized picture of the initial use of the bomb, that it was deployed to save hundreds of thousands of US and even Japanese lives, a perspective now questioned by most scholars. Another scholar who never withheld his dissent is just as relevant today as during his own lifetime.

At the height of the Cold War, the radical sociologist C Wright Mills coined the term crackpot realism to characterize the militant Cold Warriors, the Cheneys and Kristols of his day. Political economist Robert Higgs has elucidated Mills’ provocative concept: Crackpot realists “explain that childish things, such as keeping the country at peace, simply won’t get the job done. Sometimes, the public must recognize that as a no-nonsense response to the harsh situation we face, the serious people have to drop some bombs here and there in order to reestablish a proper arrangement of the world’s currently disordered affairs. So “practical” are these serious people, however, that they understand nothing beyond their noses and outside the circle of their own constricted understanding and experience. Especially when these movers and shakers deal with matters of war and peace, they continue to make the same sorts of disastrous decisions over and over, constantly squandering opportunities to maintain the peace, almost invariably painting themselves into corners of their own making, and all too often deciding that the only option that makes sense in their predicament is to bomb their way out.

These serious people are fools. They seem to know what’s going on, and how to right what’s wrong with the world, only if one accepts their own view of how the world works…. Especially when these movers and shakers deal with matters of war and peace, they continue to make the same sorts of disastrous decisions over and over, constantly squandering opportunities to maintain the peace, almost invariably painting themselves into corners of their own making, and all too often deciding that the only option that makes sense in their predicament is to bomb their way out.”

Finally Mills explores the depth psychology of these leaders in language that might help explain the involvement of some fundamentalist evangelicals in this movement: “[A] high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems. Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle. They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles. … So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.”

No mathematical model can tell us the likelihood of World War III, but we can say that a genuine realism would suggest negotiations to take weapons off hair-trigger alert. Peace groups, both in South Korea and internationally should encourage both governments to re-establish a hot line and to keep diplomacy alive. Realism today must also include a healthy distrust of the nuclear establishment and their spokespersons. These weapons are intrinsically dangerous, even sitting in their aging silos or submarines. Anti-nuclear activists should continually remind the media and our citizens of the interests secrecy has served. Beyond that, although literal nuclear disarmament may not be feasible, dramatic unilateral steps are possible. A vast scaling down of our stockpile — especially the most dangerous — might make us safer and also encourage a process of mutual de-escalation beneficial to everyone.

Nuclear war is not a basketball game. In a nuclear exchange, if even one or two thermonuclear bombs land, vast sections of the country will be uninhabitable, even before nuclear winter sets in. Victory is a defeat for winners and losers alike. The only realistic goal is a world free of nuclear weapons.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and writes regularly on labor and environmental issues. Email jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2018

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