Should We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb?
by Scott Alan Metzger, Penn State University
My daughter loved singing duets with daddy when she was little, so one holiday she received a karaoke machine. I got her a selection of “80s hits” to sing, and one of her favorites turned out to be “99 Red Balloons” by Nena from (West) Germany. Her child-belting the now-historical and histrionic lyrics she could hardly understand about Cold War nuclear annihilation was adorable.
And then Putin’s Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine, setting off a proxy conflict that escalated in 2022. Nena’s old song doesn’t sound quite so outdated nor a child singing it quite so adorable anymore.
Nuclear weapons are one of the strangest cases of the impact of technology in history. They have only ever been used on two targets in one war, yet they completely rewrote the book on warfare for the future. They are almost invisible, rarely seen by most people, and many people under 40 may have gone their whole lives so far barely ever thinking about them. Nuclear fear of the early 1980s has been largely occluded from collective memory, overwhelmed by the more fun nostalgia (“Stranger Things” indeed). If many people have expressed nuclear fear in the past couple of decades, it’s more likely about nuclear power plants.
This is possible, at least in part, because nuclear weapons ironically exert their greatest influence in not being used. They have had virtually no influence on battlefield tactics and mostly are considered “strategic” weapons. Their implicit threat undergirds a strategy of deterrence—you won’t attack me because you know I can inflict annihilation on you in response. The horrific consequences of even a limited use of nuclear weapons are so grave that they seem to be an unambiguously negative technological development (when we even let ourselves think about them, that is).
Are nuclear weapons an exclusively negative technology? It is an unsettling but potentially highly important and relevant compelling question for social studies education seeking to seriously investigate a fuller impact of technology in history and on society. Deterrence, so far, has succeeded in its core promise—nuclear weapons haven’t been used again since 1945, nor have nuclear-armed great powers dared to wage total war against each other. The world has witnessed numerous small-scale, localized wars, some of them distressingly brutal, but none of them even a fraction of the scale of the 20th century’s world wars. As awful as recent wars have been, the world never has been more at peace, in terms of sheer numbers of conflicts, than the past 75 years.
Furthermore, the demands of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals have convinced most countries to drop out of the “great power” competition. By the end of the 20th century, most countries spent only a small fraction of their budgets on defense (many NATO members not even living up to their treaty obligation). The United States outspent the rest of the world by an enormous margin, with communist China starting to catch up only in recent years.
On the other hand, nuclear weapons also may be like a djinni impossible to put back in the bottle. The early nuclear club attempted, ineffectually, the keep out new entrants. Soviet espionage enabled them to join very early on; communist China joined some years later. Given the size and power of those countries, perhaps that was inevitable. Alarmingly, other countries that fought “hot” wars against neighbors developed nuclear weapons programs since the 1970s, most notably India and Pakistan (with Israel widely suspected but never publicly admitted). Now Iran and North Korea both appear to be on the verge of implementing a credible nuclear weapon. Rogue states and authoritarian regimes increasingly see nuclear weapons as an insurance policy against invasion or interference.
Some countries have given up nuclear weapons, not wanting to face the demands or international pressure of maintaining them. Ukraine famously turned over their Soviet missiles after the Cold War in return for guarantees of territorial integrity. Moving ahead to 2022, one must wonder if some Ukrainians regret the decision. Russia has maintained a smaller nuclear arsenal, at great and increasingly unsustainable expense. By 2021, Russia’s GDP fell out of the global top 10 (behind Italy, Canada, and South Korea). As Russia slowly sinks from “great power” status, Russian leaders may be tempted to use border conflicts and proxy wars to push back. Is this the flipside of deterrence? In essence, you won’t dare to interfere with limited regional aggression for fear of escalating to use of nuclear weapons.
In teaching about nuclear weapons as one of the most impactful military technologies, we are left facing a compelling question: Do the benefits of deterring “great power” total war outweigh the risks of nuclear weapon proliferation and possible future use? This entails evaluating whether global context decades after the end of the US-Soviet Cold War makes their use more or less likely. Certainly a global nuclear exchange on par with what could have happened between the US and Soviet Union is far less likely. But would India and Pakistan be tempted to use them in a renewed war, or would the North Korean or Iranian regimes use them for their own regional goals?
In our review of state social studies standards, Dan Krutka and I found that several states specifically identify atomic/nuclear weapons as a technology to be studied. In fact, it was one of the few examples of military technology specifically named in most of the standards. Teachers are supposed to teach about them, but standards documents provide precious little help (surprise, surprise). To do the kind of “collateral” teaching I’m laying out above, I think that one of the Civics of Technology critical questions about technology would be essential if not immediately obvious: Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?
It’s important to learn that the benefits and risks have not and still do not fall evenly. The US nuclear umbrella provides deterrence only to stipulated countries. Even some close partners, such as Taiwan, are not explicitly guaranteed. Countries that move to align themselves with the US and NATO, like Ukraine has, find themselves similarly unguaranteed. While the US, Western Europe, Russia, and China have enjoyed decades free of warfare in their own territories, proxy conflicts they have supported or engaged has brought destruction to smaller countries. Consider the hell that proxy conflict in Syria has created for a decade now. With US, Russian, Iranian, and Turkish interests all involved, there seems little impetus to halt the violence that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Even the refugee crisis fueled by the Syrian conflict affects Greece and Eastern Europe far more than the outside powers (except perhaps Turkey).
To close, nuclear weapons are a difficult but educationally powerful example of collateral framing of a technology beyond monolithic positive/negative reductionism. Yet, we only get the full picture when we consider less direct and immediately obvious consequences emerging from asking who is harmed or benefits from a technology. Despite living in a country that has benefited from nuclear deterrence, I can’t say I unequivocally love the bomb. And with tensions rising and international stability coming into question around the world, I certainly hope we all will learn to keep worrying at least a little bit.