NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

...American citizens would not be acting to defend their freedom...

...The people is the flow of generations who possess a constant identity, derived perhaps from kinship or ethnicity or race or religion or culture or history or some other bond preexistent to any individual and meant to outlast every individual...

...The government becomes all-observant, all-competent...

...I have rehearsed platitudes...

...He takes us away from the arid stretches of strategy and asks us to feel continuously, if we can, and feel keenly if only for an instant now and then, how utterly distinct the nuclear world is...

...Humanity is not to take any step that contains even the slightest risk of extinction...

...Even short of the full expression of that ideal, the challenge could be in the name of what Mill calls (in the first chapter of On Liberty) individual sovereignty...

...Just to mention a few: • the Levellers' insistence that every person has the equal right to be taken into account, and to count for one, and to be given an accounting, when regulations supposed to bind him are being discussed and enacted...

...All look like responses to genuine, sometimes profound problems...

...Indeed, the protection of rights and the restriction of governmental activity are jointly at the service of a free life...

...What it gives it can take away, like God...

...The key to Schell's success is that he makes human extinction the center of the whole subject...

...that truly means that we all do not exist for the sake of a mystique...

...Let us translate the word as "state-activism...

...The literature is rich in concepts and formulations...

...There may be something quixotic in even thinking to challenge them...

...If the use of nuclear weapons would be a revolution against the Constitution, the rationalization before the use is, in itself, an abstract revolution against it...

...It is of no moral account that extinction may be only a slight possibility...

...All of them seem plausible and are perfectly understandable...

...The hard theoretical work of moral-political individualism in the 17th century is done by the Levellers, Hobbes, and Locke...

...Even this subject, is infinitely more than a subject—the subject of human extinction— can become yet another source of boredom...

...And in doing that we enable our challenge to nuclear policy...

...The strength of folk-mystique decreases with the strength of the moral ideas of individualism...

...It is a passion that has come to infect even the office-holders in American democracy, even apart from nuclear policy, as if accession to office or position were like drinking from the river of forgetfulness—forgetfulness of the moral meanings of constitutional democracy...

...Statism is a vision of life in which people are means to the end of the survival of power, with society understood as one great quasi-military organization or power-base, and the state as not only its leadership, but also its reason for being...

...In the nuclear situation, one must be attentive to even remote 170 connections that may exist between human activity and human extinction...

...The deficiencies themselves teach lessons...

...Just as American government is not a state, so the American people are not a body...

...The users of nuclear weapons would have engaged in a revolution against freedom...

...society as discipline: the view that the state exists to transform superfluous or otherwise 171 ungovernable masses into docile and productive creatures...

...that it is not only distinct from but above society...

...Indeed the meaning of an individual life is supposed to come from incorporation into a body that has a supraindividual existence and destiny...

...Its influence has been preponderantly, if not purely, benign...

...their effects on the two occasions of their use are scarcely assimilable...

...At the same time—and I know it may sound frivolous to make this admission— he helps to enlarge moral philosophy...

...At whatever risks, the writers must take the subject away—at least for a while— from common sense and policy discourse, and entrust it to philosophy, to the capacity of philosophy to disclose the obvious, to reveal the obvious, which otherwise remains hidden and obscure in the unreal familiarity inflicted on it by common sense and policy discourse...

...the nuclear situation is covered over, in many parts, by secrets...

...I would hazard the view, however, that anyone who thinks that moral philosophy has a place in the discussion of the whole subject of nuclear weapons is very likely to find Schell's book of tremendous value...

...and in the unleashed emotions of indignation, retribution, and revenge that, if not acted on immediately in the form of escalation, can be counted on to seek expression later...

...The important point, however, is to see that those who use nuclear weapons are criminals, and at the least forfeit their offices...

...It is a passion common to authorities and establishments of all states, whether they possess nuclear weapons or not...

...The best name for the passion or the mentality is appropriately a foreign name and, also appropriately, a French one: e tatisme...

...I believe that only a renewed insistence on the individualist basis of legitimate government can begin to dismantle the nuclear rhetoric of American officials...

...namely, that where the state is regarded both by itself and by the population not as a mere protector of life against domestic or foreign violence but as the source of contented and adjusted and regularized life (through its welfarist policies and other interventions), it is subtly empowered to take the next step and become the source of mass death...

...By containing the possibility of extinction any use is tantamount to a declaration of war against humanity...

...He compels its attention to a subject that, long before, professional philosophers should have addressed...

...The American collective identity exists only through the Constitution, understood as an agreement of 168 consenting individuals, who give their consent as they grow up into adult citizenship...

...It is theoretically enough that any use is likely to lead to sizable uses, and that sizable uses cause massive ruin...

...I would assert that some individualist ideas found in 17-century English thought (which turns out to be Protestant in sensibility even where it is not Protestant in faith) alone underlie and inform the correct principles of political legitimacy, and that these principles are, in turn, the very principles of the American Constitution...

...Of course the chaos ensuing from a sizable exchange could make punishment irrelevant...

...One's life is not supposed to be arranged or designed by government nor have meaning or coherence given to it by government...

...Society lives by its discipline, which is felt mostly as benign, and which is often not felt as discipline or felt at all...

...If one gives up everything, it is not for the people, but for the rights of other individuals, including the unborn...

...Injury to the dignity of free being can be subtle, hard to talk about...

...But apart from this direct if dreamlike connection between the sources of state-activism and the will to deathlike stillness, I would suggest that the various encroachments of state-activism help to do the awful work of subtly, indirectly, but inexorably emboldening officials to think with an ever deepening seriousness the nuclear thoughts they express publicly, and of conditioning people to depend, comply, go along, trust, even to the extent of accepting policies that threaten massive ruin and the possibility of human and natural extinction...

...Each has numerous sources, some of them commendable, some petty or sordid, some of them arising from society, some instigated by the power-interest of public bureaucracies...

...I do not mean to read off an honor roll...

...I believe the "logic" of this tendency, as we say, is that officials become confirmed in their sense that they, too (like their counterparts in unfree societies), may dispose of the fate of the people...

...q 172...

...From a long historical perspective, individualist ideas are recent and hence seem odd or aberrant...

...He is persuaded, even if he does not say it in so many words, that we cannot just inch up to the nuclear situation, so to speak...

...I would simply say that this tendency constitutes a fertile source of the possibility of extinction...

...For the time being, let us assume that the possibility of extinction will be mostly ignored, or even derided, as Sidney Hook, for one, has already derided it...

...Included in this overall contention is the consideration, advanced with great skill by Richard Falk and supplemented by Jeremy Stone, that the formulation and possible execution of nuclear policy is inherently undemocratic because it is substantially removed from the public political process, and is constitutionally infirm because it supposes overriding executive power...

...My proposed idea is that as this tendency grows—and it is already quite far advanced—people will, to an increasing degree, come to accept the government as a state...

...And so far the worst speculative connection is not exemplified in American society...

...Schell's perspective transforms the subject...

...They tend to be boring, even when well written...

...Philosophy instigates a rupture and then tries to redefine the field...

...And people, the accumulation of individuals, must be understood as of course always indefeasibly retaining the right of self-preservation, and hence morally allowed, indeed enjoined, to take the appropriate preserving steps...

...Resistance must be offered from within the ideal, not from collectivism or communitarianism, which are both on the side of making a people systematically docile and ready for mobilization...

...Even more than statism this conceptualization is alien, of the Old World...

...Further, the idea that political society is founded in an agreement of individuals made for the sake of acknowledging and protecting rights—rather than in a sacralized inertia or inheritance, or in kinship or ethnicity or any other nonindividualist mode—is crucial to all three political theories...

...My hope is to suggest some of the ways in which individualism holds within itself some great philosophical resources needed in the struggle to see the nuclear predicament truly and to protest and resist its perpetuation...

...The conventional use is totally dissimilar from statism...

...Individuals never lose their identity as individuals...

...I would like to propose the idea—it is no more than a hypothesis— that the growth of state-activism in a democracy is the growth, as well, of that compliance creating and resting on dependence that makes it easier for the government to think of itself as a state—but not only in our earlier sense of an entity whose survival is held to be equivalent to the survival of society itself, but in the related but separate sense of an entity that is indispensable to all relations and transactions in society...

...Notice what underlies the pretended right to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons...

...its career has been continuous in the English-speaking world (and elsewhere) since that time...

...This ideal of free being is under relentless attack...

...We ordinarily associate such thinking with absolute monarchy, or with modern party and military dictatorships...

...Remote as the connection may seem, the encouragement of state-activism, or the failure to resist it, contributes to nuclear statism, and thus to the disposition to accept and inflict massive ruin and, with that, the unwanted and denied possibility of extinction...

...The ends are one end, only one end: to acknowledge and protect the rights of individuals...

...The abstract right of resistance, founded in individualist ideas, vindicates the effort to remove the office-holders responsible for the use...

...Individualist forms of self-love may help to check the horrors of group self-love...

...Such sacrifice is no part of any agreement between consenting individuals, no part of the social contract that creates and sustains a legitimate structure of government...

...The very notion of rights becomes bloated because of obsession with interests and claims and turns false to itself...

...It would be a hopeless task to try to give it a tidy meaning...

...It is not simply that anxiety from its very nature often gives way to boredom, or at least to an effort to become bored, so as not to let anxiety give way in turn to despair...

...The ties of citizenship are not mystical or transcendental...

...If officials of a legitimate government use nuclear weapons or threaten to do so, and whether or not the people suffer retaliation, the officials have so grossly violated the principles of the system that they must be understood as having intended its moral destruction, and therefore to have created a situation in which a revolution against them is abstractly justified in behalf of the very system they have subverted...

...words about it must be produced...

...They have a powerful indirectness: talk about the failure of talk...

...If we insist that even a so-called special or limited use carries with it the immediate or delayed possibility of escalation, then we simply say that the rationalization of any use of nuclear weapons is the most extreme form of statism, and therefore is the most extreme form of illegitimate or antiConstitutionalist doctrine...

...This is my crucial point...

...therapeutic welfarism: the view that the state must go beyond relieving misery to nurturing, healing, and cultivating the masses...

...If individuals do nothing truly and gloriously individualist...

...Whenever a nuclear power is also one of the latter regimes, then the disposition among a compliant population is to get used to the idea that the state, as the source of practically all benefits and penalties—all those outside the intimate sphere and many inside it—has the right to dispose of the fate of the people in any way it sees fit...

...It is true by definition, but let us make it explicit: the doctrine of nouse excludes any first or retaliatory or later use, whether sizable or not...

...they are never transformed into mere members or parts of a totality...

...The extension of this point is to say that, just as the idea of the state, where it exists in a constitutionally limited representative democracy is a serious and perhaps fatal predemocratic impurity, so the idea of the people is a pernicious atavism...

...Statism is totally at war with the culture and practice of individual personal and political rights...

...I do not see what other implication can be drawn from any rationalization of the use of nuclear weapons in a sizable exchange...

...But the role of statism in the nuclear situation is not confined to this function...

...As Locke wrote to educate people in the always radical belief that they are entitled to resist rulers who refuse to acknowledge basic individual rights, so we today must try to use the possibility of human extinction to alert each other to the new threat, a threat more dire than any Locke could have imagined...

...I believe that the specifications and the actuality, in fact, show a closer approximation to legitimacy than any other political system in the world...

...I mean to refer especially, at this point in our discussion, to moral-political ideas enunciated during the Puritan Revolution in England and in the next generation, ideas that naturally undergo both expansion and refinement in succeeding generations, in England and America...

...The emphasis is on the death of millions of individuals...

...These elements comprise the no-use doctrine...

...Put most broadly, it is not a world recognized by the moral ideas that underlie and inform the principles of political legitimacy...

...paternalism: the view that the state is expected to remain indifferent to no sort of behavior, no matter how private, but must endorse what it does not penalize, and become the moral parent and preceptor of otherwise wayward, weak, self-indulgent, or stubbornly transgressive creatures...

...The justification is that these platitudes of individualism are not really platitudes...

...Locke thought that popular attitudes were the ultimate deterrent of tyranny, and that only if people were used to entertaining a deep suspicion of their own inclination to docility would rulers think hard before asserting absolutist and arbitrary claims...

...Michael Walzer has already made this point in Just and Unjust Wars [Basic Books, 1977...

...The use of nuclear weapons establishes the right of any person or group, acting officially or not, violently or not, to try to punish those responsible for the use...

...Of course, theories by themselves cannot act, but action is always imbued with theory in some rough form or other, and with the feelings and passions that are aroused by theory and that, to begin with, help to arouse theory...

...167 Officials may not recognize their rhetoric and themselves in this description...

...If I have to die in doing my duty, I nevertheless am the one who dies...

...The state, in this conceptualization, is the life of society in its normal workings, the main source of initiative, response, repair, and redress...

...Still, let us use it, all the while hearing etatisme...

...that it has rights (not merely duties...

...Now, when the matter is put thus, it soon becomes apparent that such a way of conceiving of a people does not answer to American experience...

...From these considerations— presumably the considerations that guide our lives—the absolute impermissibility of using nuclear weapons emerges...

...By bringing the nuclear predicament into conjunction with moral philosophy his words give a new urgency to both...

...In the nuclear age, the deterrent effect of popular attitudes is much harder to estimate...

...But we might say that they have come just in time...

...Acceptable sacrifice, on the other hand, is what preserves the rights of individuals, and if some die, they are supposed to die with the sense that without their sacrifice the rights of their fellows—all of whom share the risk equally—could have been lost...

...Yet as Schell says, human extinction (as well as the extinction of most species in nature) is not the intention of anyone in power...

...The usual view is that individualism, in any version and in all its components, is obsolete, and that, when it is held on to in spite of the fact that the modern world is so different from the one in which individualism was born and perhaps played a benign part, it becomes obstructive and hence dangerous...

...Well, then, let us engage nuclear doctrine on the subject of massive ruin...

...To say it again, foolhardiness is needed...

...Citizens would insist, contrary to official nuclear doctrine, that a special or limited use is as unacceptable as a sizable use, because the potentiality of a sizable use is present in the other kinds...

...it intervenes everywhere...

...His anxiety was for France and the Continent, not for America...

...Most obviously, a sizable exchange of strategic nuclear weapons can, by a chain of events in nature, lead to the earth's uninhabitability, to "nuclear winter," or to Schell's "republic of insects and grass...

...the theory of the possession and possible future uses of these weapons is often technical or arcane, and it is probably infected with jargon so as to discourage public discourse...

...The way it sees fit seems the unavoidable way...

...We would call it a modest free being...

...Nevertheless, every effort must be 164 made to cultivate the sense, and to disseminate it, and perhaps spread it upward to officeholders, that using nuclear weapons puts users at war against the world, including the citizens of their own country...

...The further horror is that there might be fantasies in which the gravest problem becomes the Swiftian solution to other grave problems, in which nuclear war becomes the solution to many of the problems of overpopulation...

...Official rhetoric refers to massive casualties and massive destruction as the maximally worst possible outcome, and then almost always as a result of a sizable exchange, not as a result of escalation from a special or limited use...

...State" is not a constitutional word...

...This is Schell's endeavor...

...As long as some groups of people feel that no matter how many of them die, as long as some survive the people survives—and that, furthermore, a people is what it is by contrast with others, with other peoples—the road to massive ruin and to possible extinction is more easily traveled...

...One task of a renewed and revised individualism is to challenge everyday state-activism...

...At the same time, unfortunately, it is clear that other nuclear powers (or possible or potential ones) share to varying degrees in folk-mystique...

...We can do it," he says, "only if we don't quite know what we're doing...

...Praise to those who have succeeded in not killing the subject of human extinction, who have not, to begin with, made the whole subject of nuclear weapons just another issue...

...One often notices, as well, a recurrent unsteadiness in nuclear discourse: writers seem to regret what they said earlier or to lose or bury their point, or change their minds without seeming to notice...

...The metaphysical aspirations intrinsic to certain forms of individualism, if taken to heart, fortify persons in the task of overcoming within themselves all that cooperates with the possibility of extinction...

...On the other hand, I would like, in other papers, to begin the effort of showing that the relation to human and natural existence that individualism sponsors best conduces to the will to preserve that existence in the face of the possibility of its nuclear extinction...

...If that must be the case, then so be it...

...I think they are seriously wrong...

...No nuclear power has publicly taken into account, except casually and perhaps cynically, the possibility of extinction contained in any use whatever of nuclear weapons...

...165 What is legitimate government...

...What must be seen is that the absolute end can come about even though no one intends it...

...And what, after all, could possibly serve as a deterrent, not to meditated policy but to a calamitous decision made by one or a few in a moment of rage or horror or panic or fear or confusion...

...The point is to try to remind people in all democracies that their very principles— ultimately individualist—must, if taken seriously and purely, set them in opposition to all governments, including their own, especially their own, when they claim the right to use nuclear weapons...

...By definition a government that is entitled to make laws and policies, that is, to make regulations binding on all people in a society...

...Citizens, however, may find in the perspective of extinction a powerful impetus to think about the nuclear situation, and to act as they can...

...Or, at least, the rules and procedures specified in the Constitution accord perfectly with the principles of legitimacy, even if the American actuality, for one sort of large reason or other, shows only an imperfect, even though substantial, legitimacy...

...Even more important, we must not forget that he thought that democratic despotism was much more likely in those democracies in which individualism was narrowly or weakly developed, and in which, therefore, the power of a full moral individualism had never corroded the statist pretensions of political authority...

...Yet how can there be consistent faith in rights when masses of people become passive victims...

...I would like to be able to show, however, that its greatest benignity, its profoundest mission, is to be the most adequate idealism in a world radically discontinuous with the one in which individualism was born...

...Even if we choose to leave aside the rhetoric concerning limited or special nuclear uses, and also to leave aside the massive numbers of deaths in other countries, we are compelled to take in the fact that the American government says it is willing to have the American people endure countless deaths...

...We must reject the advice of those who in brief and undeniably interesting sentences advise us to keep quiet, so that we do not reveal the nuclear situation's true absurdity and thus somehow make the worst more likely to happen...

...Even though their own government does not acknowledge and protect rights, any legitimate government must do so insofar as it can...

...They are rights of mind, expression, movement, activity, and association...

...A theoretical barrier to such casualties and destruction is simultaneously a barrier to the nuclear source of the possibility of extinction (to leave aside such sources as biological and chemical warfare...

...I do not say that any of these ideas is free of the need for elaboration, adaptation, revision, or correction...

...What are the ends...

...As far as I can tell, Giinther Anders, the distinguished German philosopher, is the one who first insisted that adequacy to the subject required dwelling on the possibility of human extinction...

...These words, provoked by a Berlin crisis, suggest that it is possible to kill a subject by anguished attention...

...Indeed, the overwhelming passion in these ideas is a passion for order, for stillness, for regularity, for predictability, for a coherence that can exist only as the result of a drastic purification of human inclinations and actions, and a continued exercise of fundamentally undemocratic authority in every area of society...

...The origins of most but not all its important components lie in 17th-century Protestant England and America...

...Under pressure, however, a people that habitually relies on the state may turn into a too easily mobilizable population: mobilizable but otherwise immobile...

...Locke's notion of having property in oneself, his notion of the person as including one's motions, actions, and exertions...

...Thus the possibility of extinction would become most real when the urgencies of economic survival had become most imperious, and the individual most pitilessly dwarfed...

...161 The weapons are hidden...

...But I do not see what the expressed determination to risk or engage in a sizable exchange of nuclear weapons could mean except that the idea of statism has been accepted...

...If political freedom institutionally survived the use of nuclear weapons, its essence would have been spiritually maimed, perhaps destroyed irretrievably...

...nor is one supposed to be helped too much, or saved from oneself, or looked at closely or continuously...

...Tocqueville's prescient analysis of democratic despotism must never be forgotten...

...Derivative from this contention is the right of other governments and people to compel forfeiture when prudence allows, if the citizens of the responsible government do not or cannot move...

...If it is not impossible it must be treated as certain: the loss signified by extinction nullifies all calculations of probability as it nullifies all calculations of costs and benefits...

...But the link between state-activism and extinction suggests itself, and a cultivated individualism must be enlisted against such activism and in behalf of avoiding massive ruin and the possibility of extinction...

...and rights that pertain to suspects, defendants, and prisoners...

...Schell thus helps to open up the subject for exploration...

...But the object of defense in American terms is the Constitution...

...Still, such foolhardiness is needed...

...Individualism is the name of many moral ideas...

...It would be well to insist on talking about it...

...In disagreeing I acknowledge that there can be no common agreement on what words actually do give life to the theme...

...It is not merely a war crime or a crime against humanity...

...Nuclear discourse must vividly register that distinctiveness...

...The English translation, statism, is rather pale and not at home in the language...

...They are the real revolutionaries...

...Schell's work attempts to force on us an acknowledgment that sounds far-fetched and even ludicrous...

...and cultural illiberalism: the view shared by conservatives, radicals, and a few others that the state should somehow make up for the lack of community in modern life, and the alleged presence of pathological alienation and anomie...

...163 Abstractly put, the connections between any use of nuclear weapons and human and natural extinction are several...

...Their relations are fundamentally abstract, even though entailing severe sacrifices on necessary occasions...

...A so-called tactical or "theater" use, or a socalled limited use, is also prohibited absolutely, because of the possibility of immediate escalation into a sizable exchange...

...The subject that is not a subject must be discussed...

...The contribution is indirect but insidious and pervasive, and consists of the general tendency to leave citizens in a condition of dependence that borders on helplessness...

...Any moral philosophy is bound to place human extinction at the center of nuclear discourse...

...In modern life, representative and constitutionally limited government gives, or is supposed to give, that assurance...

...Let us say that this statism is the belief that a government is not a mere government but a state and that as such, it is the locus of identity of a society...

...Hobbes's conception of the unrenounceable right to self-preservation, his notion of the right of every individual to transfer allegiance if his safety depends on it, his emphasis on the moral priority of avoiding premature, violent death, and his manifest reluctance to vindicate conscription...

...Political rights involve the rights to vote and hold office...

...They are fundamental considerations that can wither through complacent or irritable inattention...

...In truth, folk-mystique is so theoretically repellent in an American context that we need not make the effort of determining whether it may be the underlying meaning of official nuclear rhetoric...

...Yet all of them conduce to transforming government into the state, and getting people into the habit of looking up to it...

...Freedom is the term used to refer to all those rights to which the American Constitution is devoted...

...From a broad range of possible meanings, we may confine ourselves for the moment to the sense present in nuclear rhetoric...

...My further sense is that a renewed understanding of the moral ideas of individualism is vital to the effort to challenge state-activism...

...Individual rights are not always abridged when government acts to substitute itself for the individual and tries to lead our lives for us...

...or because, even if there were not an immediate escalation, the possibility of extinction would reside in the precedent for future use set by any use whatever in a world in which more than one power possesses nuclear weapons...

...THOUGH A GOOD NUMBER OF WRITERS help US understand the nuclear situation, only a few have manifestly set out with the sense that unless they made special efforts their language would fail them, fail their subject, fail us...

...Such a war is waged by the user of nuclear weapons against every human individual as individual (present and future...

...Yet we could not do without much of this writing...

...Among these disaster-laden ideas are: • ecological holism or humanism: the view that the state must treat society as one great source of excess, waste, and pollution...

...I have said that statism is one of the main ideas that are implied in official (and lay) rhetoric rationalizing the use of nuclear weapons...

...in the first instance, resistance to common sense and policy discourse...

...There are no certainties of analysis on these possible connections...

...The American political system, as specified by the Constitution, is thus one case of political legitimacy...

...One is supposed to be free, autonomous, selfreliant...

...I would like to be able to show that, most generally, in the midst of the nuclear situation, individualism is easily the most powerful idealism, the one most able, when taken seriously, to elicit, articulate, and justify resistance...

...The virulent practitioners of 169 state-activism are, of course, the police-state, tyranny, despotism, and totalist rule in all their varieties...

...I must eschew folk-mystique...

...In their withering, the way is eased for massive ruin and for the possibility of extinction...

...The tendency of executive officials (and some in the legislative and judicial branches) to conceive of government as a state will thus be met by the tendency of people to accept that conception...

...All nuclear roads lead to the possibility of extinction...

...The agreement, the social contract, is made and sustained for the sake of individual rights...

...One might think that there was a latent death wish in this passion, something akin to the death wish present in utopian thought...

...But beyond that, there is no need for further insistence on a point that governments ignore or deride—that is, the possibility of extinction...

...Citizens may, instead, challenge the right of any government, their own included, to threaten or to inflict massive casualties and destruction, or to act so as to risk or actually bring on such casualties and destruction to their own people...

...Thus when we notice the presence of statism, overt or implicit, in the rationalizations of nuclear policy offered by American officials, we are thrown into a world not recognized by the Constitution...

...Analogously, the use of nuclear weapons, by containing in an immediate or delayed manner the possibility of extinction, is in Locke's phrase "a trespass against the whole species," and places the users in a state of war with all people...

...My concern here, however, is not with the mentality of unfree societies, but rather with that of democratic societies...

...The threat is all the greater because the injury to individuals inflicted by state-activism can remain unfelt...

...In making human extinction the center, Schell is trying to force us to abandon the usual way of considering the subject...

...No-use is the imperative derived from the possibility of extinction...

...What I mean to suggest is that as long as we take the problem of political legitimacy seriously, and as long as we take the American Constitution as the specification of a legitimate form of government, we will be taking the individualism of individual rights seriously...

...To respond with nuclear weapons, where possible, only increases the chances of extinction and can never, therefore, be allowed...

...I must therefore eschew the idolatry that consists in thinking that I survive in a supraindividual body...

...Even if nuclear weapons did not exist, and there were no possibility of extinction, the fight against state-activism would have to be carried on...

...The aim of the punishment is to deter later uses, and thus to try to reduce the possibility of extinction, if, by chance, the particular use in question did not directly lead to extinction...

...Lowell's few lines may escape that condemnation: they are memorable...

...Wmay distinguish several kinds of inspiration to state-activism...

...they would simply be enlisted in mass death...

...in the contagious effect on nonnuclear powers who may feel compelled by a mixture of fear and vanity to try to acquire their own weapons, thus increasing the possibility of use by increasing the number of nuclear powers...

...Thus, following Tocqueville, we may say that anti-individualism provides no remedy for the deficiencies: the remedy is to be sought from individualism itself...

...indeed to kill even a subject that is not a subject in the conventional sense at all...

...We cannot say whether one day official rhetoric will systematically incorporate the perspective of extinction, and do so for some purpose other than justifying an intensified arms race...

...Mill's theory of individual sovereignty is all the more relevant in the nuclear age: the dwarfing inherent in state-activism serves nuclear statism...

...an acknowledgment that the possibility of extinction is carried by any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how limited or how seemingly rational or morally justified...

...In the case of the United States, government rhetoric invokes freedom as the value that may be defended by nuclear weapons...

...In fact, state activism carried out by disciplinary dictatorships can appear doubly attractive, as it does to even so magnanimous a soul as Hans Jonas in his important recent book, The Imperative of Responsibility...

...An association of strangers and immigrants is made civil by adherence to the idea and practices of individual rights...

...At least, one could hope that state-activism would be discussed more, and that obstacles to its almost noiseless spread would be interposed more often...

...Thus the survival of the government is here conceived as only the means to the continuation of the people, but the people is not simply the numerous individuals who comprise it...

...subject of human extinction that does not kill it by boredom...

...Allow that most of the thousands of words one has read on the encompassing theme of nuclear weapons, and the fewer words on the specific theme of human extinction, fail...

...One may distinguish simply between personal and political rights...

...Yet, looked at globally, the problems of overpopulation, ecological damage, and poverty seem so immense that, as I have admitted, state activism appears attractive...

...So far are common sense and policy discourse from being adequate, they falsify the subject...

...It must treat them without such contempt, if it is not to dwarf them...

...And this is where the moral doctrine of individualism makes its contribution...

...But I think that there is a much deeper passion than a concern for freedom that underlies the pretended right to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons...

...and as new predicaments arise in society, it moves first to define and attempt a resolution of them...

...Government is guilty of genocide committed against its people when it causes passive multitudes to die...

...Just as the people are used to the idea that the state has the right to dispose of their fate, so the state gets used to the idea that it may even use nuclear weapons in disposing of its people's fate...

...I simply disagree with this adverse judgment...

...All these tendencies are therefore at the service of a potentially lethal dependence and compliance...

...The subject of extinction, the subject that is infinitely more than a subject, is thus wrapped in the encompassing subject of nuclear weapons, which often emerges as less than a subject...

...The constitutional tragedy is that the American political system has always been animated by a dread of statism, and by a calculated effort, reinforced by strong common feelings, to avoid its importation from the Old World...

...We owe each other respect for rights, with all the duties attaching to such respect...

...But I must single out, at the start, one book, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, published in 1982...

...Other than full strategic uses are not confined, no matter how small the explosive power: each would be a cancerous transformation of the world...

...and the members of the Seminar for their warm response and vigorous skepticism — G.K...

...Yet later generations can and did bring them in relation, and picked and chose elements from their thought, and worked on them and added to them...

...The moral ideas that underlie and inform the political system that is acclaimed as the only legitimate one in the modern age—namely, constitutionally limited representative democracy— exclude absolutely both sets of superstition...

...But it is Schell, writing as a citizen of the first nuclear state, who has had the great effect on opinion...

...indeed, some have complained about its prose, as if to say that Schell, more than most, "talks our extinction to death...

...The theory of rights recognizes no difference between one's fellows and foreigners as far as negative moral entitlements are concerned: everyone has an equal claim not to have rights violated, even if positive claims to increased well-being may be nationally confined...

...but the attack could not score its successes unless we cooperated...

...All help to furnish the mental universe in which the official mentality of nuclear statism is at home, and hence unwittingly and maybe even paradoxically prepare the way for massive ruin and the possibility of extinction...

...If taken seriously they erect theoretical barriers (alongside those of common humanity and the theory of just war) to the right of any would-be legitimate government to claim that it can ever use nuclear weapons...

...In cooperating we forget the ideal, or let preliminary aspects of it, like the pursuit of interests and self-regarding claims, exhaustively define the whole ideal...

...No one can say how great the possibility is, but no one has yet credibly denied that by some sequence or other a particular use of nuclear weapons may lead to human and natural extinction...

...Individualism in the form of personal and political rights bars a government whose legitimacy rests on acknowledging and protecting those rights from acting in any way that risks or causes massive ruin at home or that threatens or inflicts it abroad...

...The whole subject is distant, invisible, unreal, except in an occasional moment of crisis...

...The moral doctrine of individualism, in some of its principal components is, I 162 believe, the doctrine for the nuclear age...

...But though still short of this extreme, American society is full of serious tendencies of state-activism that indirectly cooperate with the possibility of extinction...

...Further, how can there be consistent faith in rights when mass death is inflicted on others...

...THE THEORETICAL WORK On individual rights, done in the 17th century, contained the basic claims, the basic arguments and, equally important, the articulation of the basic sense of human dignity that permeates the claims and arguments...

...I would claim for this book the distinction of giving greater life to the subject of nuclear weapons than any other...

...I ndividualist moral ideas, as they get translated into political theory, preponderantly allow for conscripted participation, if necessary, for the common defense...

...The social contract allows only defensive war for the sake of rights...

...We certainly do not think that such a belief is compatible with our Constitution or with the moral ideas connected with political legitimacy in general...

...The doctrine of no-use is based on the possibility of extinction...

...its conventional use has been confined to foreign policy, where the United States is one sovereign entity in a world of sovereign entities...

...that its survival can be secured at any cost to its own society or to others...

...Legitimacy is found when the form of government is such as to give as much assurance as is humanly possible that it can serve the ends for which government exists and which only government can serve...

...But in a matter that is more than a matter, more than one practical matter in a vast series of practical matters, in the "matter" of extinction, we are obliged to treat a possibility—a genuine possibility— as a certainty...

...THE HIGHEST WORTH OF SCHELL'S BOOK lies in his insistence that we should all contemplate the nuclear situation from the perspective of possible human extinction, and be overcome by the obligation, no matter what, to try to avoid human extinction...

...The former are listed abstractly in the Bill of Rights or derived from it...

...Thus not only do the theory of the just war and elementary notions of common humanity disallow any policy that risks or causes massive ruin, but the 166 underlying moral principles of the American political system independently do so as well...

...Transgressors convert an otherwise tolerable condition into a state of nature that is a state of war in which all are threatened...

...It is hopeless suddenly to reverse these tendencies of state-activism in the United States or other nuclear democracies...

...Common to all these ideas is what Foucault refers to as the problem of the modern plebs, the solution to which is the creation of order by the training and enlistment of energies that threaten gross disorder...

...Entrusted with so much everyday power, the entire corps of officials must easily find confirmation for the rationalization of the use of nuclear weapons proposed by the foreignpolicy sector of officialdom...

...Government may abide by the constitutional limitations on itself, and nevertheless fill up too many vacant places in a person's life, thus leaving too little raw material out of which a person develops on his or her own...

...On the other hand, it may be said that the implicit meaning of this rhetoric is not, Let society perish as long as the state survives, but, Even if millions die the people lives on...

...These figures are diverse, and looked at in retrospect they appear in contention with each other, whether or not they were or could have been aware of each other...

...There may be a strong, if subterranean, bond between the state as indispensable to all relations and transactions in everyday society, and the state as entitled to dispose of the fate of society in nuclear war, even though officials receive no explicit confirmation of this bond by the people...

...they only name it...

...That work has been going on since the first statements of the 17th century...

...We do not exist for each other...

...But the consideration of extinction cannot rest with the possibility of a sizable exchange of strategic weapons...

...Put briefly, part of my aim is to suggest that certain individualist ideas in the realm of political theory (one sector of moral philosophy) point to the conclusion that no use of any nuclear weapon, of any size, for any purpose, by any country, is morally permissible, and that those responsible for any use forfeit their right to remain in office, even where they duly hold office in a legitimate government...

...In another form it makes another contribution...

...or, at most, as one more subject, one more item of policy in an immeasurable thicket of policies, foreign and domestic, that press for attention...

...I only mean to refer to the hypothesis offered independently first by Hannah Arendt and then by Michel Foucault...

...But even they need not argue about whether extinction is a possibility...

...I say this, knowing that some aspects of individualism do help to push democratic government in the direction of becoming a state, and to push the state into state-activism...

...Only that government is legitimate that by its form gives assurance that it will acknowledge and protect the rights of individuals...

...The subjects of illegitimate governments— for example, the people of the Soviet Union—are covered equally by this imperative: the claim to individual rights is not a confined, parochial matter, but universalist in nature...

...I wish to reach to the individualist substratum of these arguments, and to their frame...

...This point becomes especially evident when we see that American nuclear rhetoric explicitly refers to a protracted nuclear war, and thus to the readiness to accept massive numbers of American deaths...

...The form is best called—once again a French name is most apt—dirigisme, the unremitting direction by the state of all facets of life...

...The Constitution, if it is understood in a way that stays faithful to the moral ideas of individualism that underlie and inform it, certainly does not allow millions of individuals to be passively sacrificed for any purpose...

...BY CONTINUOUSLY EXPANDING THE SCOPE of governmental activity, these tendencies work against one of the principal constituent elements of individualism, the idea that each person should be subject to the smallest possible amount of government regulation that goes beyond insuring the obligation that binds individuals as well as the government: the acknowledgment of and respect for rights...

...if indeed some of them behave foolishly or disreputably, government must nevertheless not treat them as if they were only machines made to function smoothly...

...But if there is any resource at all— in regard to the United States—it lies in the renewal of that component of individualism that prizes noninterference in the life of the individual for the sake of his or her exploratory self-making, for the sake of what I call democratic individuality...

...The form of the punishment cannot be specified...

...John Locke, a principal individualist political theorist, says that in a state of nature every individual retains the right to punish transgressors or assist in the effort to punish them, whether or not one is a direct victim...

...not as citizen of this or that country...

...All that citizens have to do is to focus on massive casualties and massive destruction...

...Looking to it, they must end by looking up to it...

...People's dependence on it will gradually condition their attitudes and their sentiments...

...A hypothetical war to compel foreign officials who have used nuclear weapons to leave office is a derivation from this conception...

...EVEN WHEN THE SPECIFIC THEME OF HUMAN extinction is left aside, the plain fact is that the whole subject of nuclear weapons resists the effort of translation into language that is alive...

...This, in turn, can only mean that officials think that as long as the executive upper echelons survive intact, and with them a corps of military and police, all else that is needed is enough people left alive to supply the means necessary for the government—that is, the state—and its purposes...

...Most of those who are sensitive to the radical discontinuity of the present time in relation to all preceding generations claim that the only adequate idealism must be collectivist...

...it continues with great vitality today...

...Such compliance strengthens the readiness of officials to think seriously about using nuclear weapons...

...It may be, however, that this very indirectness is a great poet's way of instructing us in the foolhardiness of trying to say something about the This article is a revised version of the first of three lectures given at Princeton University under the auspices of the Christian Gauss Seminary in Criticism, on the subject of Human Extinction and Moral Philosophy...

...I wish to mention not particular policies, and the motives and interests behind them, but some main ideas that inspire the policies that give state-activism its fields of intervention...

...I wish to thank the director, Victor Brombert, and his committee for their kind invitation...

...the doctrine of no-use excludes any first or retaliatory or later use, whether sizable or not...

...He himself acknowledges that there is a difference between possibility and certainty...

...WHAT IS STATISM...

...That massive ruin carries with it the possibility of human extinction gives citizens the most drastic incentive to resist all policies that lead to massive ruin and death, even though, so far, government apologists and others deny or deal cynically with such a possibility...

...The irony is that, of course, they do not discuss extinction...

...He is not the first to do so...

...The modern energies fueling this passion are immense...

...All executive and administrative officials, or almost all, tend to be statists, whether they are initially disposed to be, or only become so after a while in office...

...Because this situation is radically discontinuous with all other past and present dangers, those who think about it must create a break with any discourse that tends to make the nuclear situation resemble, or resemble too closely, any other danger or predicament...

...No-use is the imperative derived from the possibility of extinction...

...The individualist disdain, the well-bred contempt for authority—I do not mean complacent cynicism— is gradually forgotten...

...In any case, the point is that official nuclear policy violates the principles of legitimate government...

...It is also the case that the subject of human extinction lends itself more than any other to language that fails...

...It is not only a war against the country that is the target...

...Here then—in the possibility of massive disaster—is the theoretical battleground...

...When the purpose is to defend the state at whatever cost, then one should say that nuclear doctrine has passed altogether out of the sphere of our political theory...

...Again, this success depends on the theme of human extinction...

...It cannot rest with the imperative that a sizable exchange must not take place...

...instrumentalism: the view that every individual right is only provisional and probationary, and may be abridged when not put to virtuous or commendable or socially productive uses...

...Above all, in dealing with foreigners, massive ruin must not be inflicted...

...Its purpose is one: to remain and continue to bear the true existence and meaning of society, even when millions have been passively victimized unto death...

...Of course, not all who read the book praise it...

...I die my own death...