The Age of ‘Trickle-Down Nuclearism’ Is Almost Upon Us

The recent furor over the Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is over for now, but a crucial dimension of the problem is with us more than ever--the dangerous emotional attraction the weapons hold not only for governments but for small, fanatical groups. The fact is, we’ve entered an age of “trickle-down nuclearism.”

The emotions we normally imagine nuclear weapons invoking are terror, repulsion and a kind of awe. We seldom consider the ways in which the psyche can move from terror to awe to a radical embrace of the weapons as a means of claiming and experiencing their infinite power.

This mind-set--I have called it “nuclearism”--could in the years of the Cold War be found among strategic and military planners in both superpowers, involving as it did an exaggerated dependency on, and identification with, weapons that came to seem godlike in their capacity for destruction but also in their capacity to stop destruction. In those years, the potential agents for destroying the world also came to be considered the main means for achieving “national security,” protecting the peace and keeping the world going.

At least in that era when a nation required vast resources of money and technology to create and maintain a nuclear arsenal, such emotions were kept somewhat within the bounds of the great powers. Now mid-sized and even quite small nations can consider stockpiling their own ultimate weaponry--and as the weapons trickle down, so do the emotions. Even worse, after more than five decades of life with nuclear weapons, proliferation is about to gain a new meaning, for the weaponry soon enough will be potentially within the grasp of small, nongovernmental cultic groups, both religious and political, whose fevered imaginations are primed for the possession of such destructive power. This new development changes everything.

The glaring example here is Aum Shinrikyo, or Supreme Truth, the fanatical Japanese cult known to the world mostly for its release of sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subways in March 1995 and for its stockpiling and attempted use of botulinus toxin and anthrax bacillus. For its guru, Shoko Asahara, and his leading disciples, however, these chemical and biological weapons were essentially substitutes for the nuclear weapons he sought but found more difficult to acquire. They were, in his words, “energy-saving atomic bombs,” and (as he and others have put it) “the poor man’s nuclear weapons.”

Asahara’s early and continuous obsession with Hiroshima and with nuclear weapons in general was the touchstone for all of his actions and imaginings concerning weapons of mass destruction of any kind. He predicted that Japan would be subjected to “many Hiroshimas” in the near future. And he planned for a vastly greater release of sarin gas in Tokyo as a way of triggering World War III, which he imagined taking the form of an all-consuming nuclear holocaust. That, in turn, would lead to a biblical Armageddon, which only he and his disciples would survive. That is, nuclear weapons would be the vehicle for destroying a defiled world for the purpose of saving it.

Aum was remarkable in combining these apocalyptic fantasies with actual attempts to acquire the weapons that could realize them. In that way, the cult changed our world--and not for the better. It crossed a terrible threshold by becoming the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world.

Asahara and Aum also demonstrated the extraordinary lure of the weapons for megalomanic gurus and leaders--or even for ordinary people who could be drawn into a megalomanic enterprise. Trickle-down nuclearism also exists in our own country in certain fanatical right-wing groups. Timothy McVeigh’s destructive technology in Oklahoma City was the fertilizer bomb. The same book in which he found a description of how to make such a bomb--”The Turner Diaries,” a neo-Nazi novel that he carried everywhere--terminates in a nuclear apocalypse from which only the noble exemplars and revolutionaries of the “white race” would emerge. Their nuclear triumph includes the mass slaughter of all Jews and nonwhites, first in the United States and then on all continents, as their means of destroying the world to save it.

To to sure, such malignant fantasies can hardly be eliminated by a test ban treaty or by any single international or national act. Yet the very existence of nuclear weapons in the world, even without their actual use, provides a constant source of trickle-down nuclearism--a constant stimulus for world-ending fantasies along with the potential means of carrying them out. Any steps to diminish or abolish nuclear weapons and their testing also help diminish that interaction of weapons and megalomania--and encourage us to pursue saner life-enhancing projects.