The Bomb

CrowdSource 10.21.2024

Oct 21, 2024

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: how to think about the atomic bomb.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

Pangs of Conscience

The Bomb lingers in our conscience. Oppenheimer and current events are only part of it.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Japanese Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations (Nihon Hidankyo in Japanese).
“At the Brink.” Last year, the New York Times launched a new series of articles about nuclear weapons in the 21st century.
72 minutes. Last March, journalist Annie Jacobsen published Nuclear War: A Scenario, in which she imagines the consequences from a North Korean first strike on the US. Most of the destruction takes place in the first hour.
90 seconds. The famous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — meant to represent the risk of nuclear war — has never been closer to midnight. (The “Clock,” however, has its critics.)

Is Nuclear Deterrence Immoral?

This was a live question in the early 1980s, when Cold War tensions ran high and the peace movement demanded unilateral nuclear disarmament. Recent events have made the question relevant once again.

Defending Deterrence. In 1983 the American establishment birthed two influential philosophical defenses of deterrence: a partial, liberal defense by New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier (Nuclear War and Nuclear Peace), and a conservative defense by Michael Novak (Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age), which took up an entire issue of National Review.
The Usability Paradox. Ethicist Joseph Nye, a leading thinker on deterrence in the 1980s, revisited the topic last year. He reports :“The heart of the nuclear deterrence dilemma remains the usability paradox. To deter, there must be some prospect of nuclear use … But how much usability is necessary for credibility?”
“Disarmament Propaganda.” As this critical review of Jacobsen’s book by Peter Huessy of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies suggests, the debate over the ethics of deterrence will soon return, as missile defense systems become more sophisticated and “strategic” use of nuclear weapons becomes tempting.

Thinking about the Bomb

Humanity’s new power to destroy itself has inspired deep thinking about human nature.

Günther Anders

The nature of the Bomb is such that humanity cannot grasp its massive new responsibility, argued German philosopher Günther Anders. In his 1956 essay, “Reflections on the H Bomb,” Anders writes:

Let us assume that the bomb has been exploded. To call this “an action” is inappropriate. The chain of events leading up to the explosion is composed of so many links, the process has involved so many different agencies, so many intermediate steps and partial actions, none of which is the crucial one, that in the end no one can be regarded as the agent. Everyone has a good conscience, because no conscience was required at any point.

Audrey Borowski published a useful introduction to Anders.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Teilhard de Chardin, the famous Jesuit paleontologist and theologian, was in awe of the Bomb. He believed it had ushered a decisive moment in human history. In a 1946 essay titled, “Some Reflections on the Spiritual Repercussions of the Atom Bomb,” he declares:

[…] the final effect of the light cast by the atomic fire into the spiritual depths of the earth is to illumine within them the over-riding question of the ultimate end of Evolution — that is to say, the problem of God.

Gregory Corso

The underrated Beat poet meditated upon the Bomb in “BOMB,” a 1958 poem shaped like a mushroom cloud. It begins:

Budger of history   Brake of time   You   Bomb
      Toy of universe   Grandest of all snatched sky   I cannot hate you
        Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt

Listen to Corso recite the poem here.

From the Crowd

Joseph Carter (of
New Releases
) responding to “The Vineyard and the Meth Lab” by Matthew Gasda (AKA
Novalis
):

I’m curious about how Gasda distinguishes genius and culture.
Is Gasda saying that genius could well, and probably does, exist on TikTok, but that our culture invariably means that this genius won't be discovered and appreciated? Or is he saying that our culture is such that it cannot even foster genius, that no genius can exist on TikTok at all?
To put it another way, I’m not sure if Gasda is arguing that there may be genius TikToks, but the culture lacks the capacity to recognize them as such OR if he is arguing that TikTok et al is destroying the ability of would-be geniuses (individual or collective) to produce works of artistic genius in the first place.
Is culture stuck because genius can no longer influence culture? Or is culture stuck because our culture no longer cultivates genius? I think that Gasda is saying the latter, but my hunch is that the former is a bigger issue.

yan castaldo
, in a thread under “It’s OK to Suspend Your Judgment (But Not Forever),” by
Santiago Ramos
:

… even in those “rarefied milieus”, the medium is dying. Novels/literature are fading in academia and we’re seeing fewer and fewer people pursue studies in literature as well as decreasing literacy overall.
Sensationalized as it may be, that viral Atlantic piece really was getting at something — novels aren’t just decaying as a hobby, they’re not even being appreciated by students would should be more than capable of analyzing them.
I know it’s always cool to say that “nothing changes and the youth today are no different,” using those quotes of people saying “the printing press would corrupt” or whatever, but I truly think phones/the Internet are different —especially since the generation USING them are the ones complaining. It’s not like TV, where parents hated it but kids felt unaffected.