Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons by Anne Harrington & Jeffrey Knopf

Author:Anne Harrington & Jeffrey Knopf [Harrington, Anne & Knopf, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, Arms Control, History, Military, Nuclear Warfare, Political Economy
ISBN: 9780820355641
Google: 22LRDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 41861072
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF INDETERMINACY

Suppose we stand the formula of French economic planning I mentioned earlier on its head so that now it is a question instead of “achieving by concerted deliberation and study an image of the future that is sufficiently pessimistic to be repulsive and sufficiently credible to give rise to actions that will prevent it from being realized.” Immediately, we run up against a paradox. As one of the detectives of the future in Spielberg’s film Minority Report—inspired by a marvelous short story of the same name by Philip K. Dick, itself a variation on Voltaire’s devastating anti-Leibnizian tale Zadig—says, “It’s not the future if you stop it.”22 How can the concept of coordination by means of the future be applied to a case in which agreement is reached about a future that is not a future at all, since it is a matter of acting in such a way that this future does not occur?23 What form does the endogenous fixed point assume in this case?

In order for the expected catastrophe to exert a deterrent effect on the present, it is necessary that the catastrophe be part of the future—written down, as it were, on the great scroll of history. But if this is the case, we are doomed. It is necessary, then, that both the occurrence of the catastrophe and its nonoccurrence be part of the future. What does this and mean if it is not a contradiction? The answer is to be found in the philosophy of quantum information. As long as the box containing Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat remains unopened, we must say that it is both dead and alive, or more precisely, that the living state and the dead state coexist in a relation of superposition. Opening the box puts an end not to what is too often called “uncertainty” but to what in German is called Unbestimmtheit, which should be translated as “indeterminacy.” For the prospect of future catastrophe to have a deterrent effect, it is similarly necessary that coordination be achieved with reference to a future that is at once fixed and indeterminate. The endogenous fixed point is the superimposition in it of catastrophe and noncatastrophe.

This vindicates Bernard Brodie’s quotation above and illuminates Robert McNamara’s blind spot. Were the several dozens of “near-misses” during the Cold War failures of deterrence? Quite the opposite: it is precisely these un-scheduled expeditions to the edge of the black hole that gave the threat of nuclear annihilation its dissuasive force. “We lucked out,” McNamara says. Quite true, but in a very profound sense it was this repeated flirting with apocalypse that saved humanity. Those “errors” were the condition of possibility of the efficacy of nuclear deterrence. Accidents are needed to precipitate an apocalyptic destiny. Yet unlike fate, an accident is not inevitable: it can not occur.

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