DEALING WITH THE NUCLEAR THREAT

...urges us implicitly to put life, not freedom, above all else...

...The limits to government set by Kateb are transgressed by the threatened use of nuclear weapons—such governments thereby become statist...

...Instead, Kateb wants a universalistic interpretation of human rights to ground the attack on nuclear weapons and on state interventionism...

...Thus, the obvious conclusion that Kateb wants us to draw from the slogan of "no use" is to press for total nuclear disarmament...

...And surely he sees the continuity between the so-called minimal state based on the principle of protecting the rights to life and property, and the welfare state that simply extends the principles of security of life from existence and property to well-being...

...Indeed, one might be tempted to derive, in the nuclear age, an absolute pacifism from a Kantian categorical imperative, and traces of such argumentation are present in Kateb's essay...

...Thus, whatever Kateb says otherwise about the legitimacy of the U.S...

...Despite his references to the Levellers and his mention of the "political rights" to vote and hold office, neither democracy nor the notion of a political public sphere play any role in Kateb's argumentation other than the instrumental one of protecting the rights of the private individual...

...Second, more subtly, he attempts to use the whole nuclear issue to justify his version of philosophical individualism based on a number of seventeenth-century naturalright theories...

...Kateb explicitly calls upon writers to withdraw the subject of human extinction from both common sense and policy discourse and to "entrust it to philosophers...

...My initial reaction was similar to the one I had upon reading the work on the subject most admired by Kateb, The Fate of The Earth: to acquiesce speechlessly, for what can one say when confronted with the topic in this way...

...Only the further democratization of formally democratic states and of civil societies that already guarantee individual rights can counter the negative aspects of statism...

...The nuclear situation does create a radical discontinuity with the past: for the first time human extinction is conceivable not as the result of some natural disaster, but as the work of our own hands...

...But even if there is no such hope, it follows from Kateb's argument that I as a moral individual must insist on the destruction of the weapons in my own country where I have some say, regardless of how much the other side may benefit from such a policy...

...By implication, the common-sense standpoint does not take the moral issue seriously enough, while a political approach dissolves it into strategic or instrumental considerations...

...Nevertheless, the last few pages of Kateb's essay reveal that state-activism with or without nuclear weapons is the real target of his individualism...

...But as long as the enemies of freedom can be deterred, the choice may not be an absolute one—humankind can hope to have both...

...Kateb, by depriving precisely the legitimate governments of means of defense (why should conventional weapons of mass destruction escape his strictures...

...But it is hard to see how his cultivated moral individualism can measure up to this task...

...We can only pressure our own superpower...

...First, he would force us to confront the threat to human existence posed by nuclear weapons, and persuade us to embrace the position of "no use...

...cannot press effectively for the disarmament of the USSR (especially given the impossibility of any autonomous movements there parallel to our own peace movement...

...Since we exist within a system of states that will last either until the emergence of a world empire (undesirable) or a stateless or federated world society (unlikely), it is naive to think that at least some states will not seek to have the most advanced weaponry available...

...It may not be obvious but it is an inevitable and only thinly disguised trend of Kateb's argument that he is advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament...

...Indeed, it seems to me that Kateb's purpose is almost the reverse of what he states: he does not simply use moral individualism to demonstrate the immorality of nuclear weapons...

...It is to Kateb's credit that he has reopened the discussion...

...For Tocqueville, statism derives from insufficient political democracy and a surfeit of atomization and individualization...

...But the link between state-activism and extinction suggests itself and a cultivated individualism must be enlisted against such activism...

...Such an outcome is hardly good evidence for the moral philosophy he seeks to defend...

...But deterrence as it now operates, however dubious morally, can be done away with through unilateral fiat only at great political and moral cost...

...We will use them if . . . ; we will make them and use them if...

...It cannot be assumed that any country possessing such weapons would never at least threaten to use them...

...it is one of misrepresentation for political purposes...

...Distinctions between tactical and strategic weapons, be359 tween limited strikes and all-out attack are technically and morally dubious...

...362...

...Only by keeping the three together can we hope to survive the nuclear age in a condition of freedom...

...But surely Kateb knows that it was precisely in the name of providing security (of life) to every individual, that Hobbes justified absolute amoral political power and transferred the sovereignty of the individual to the state...

...For the very point of having them is to ensure that others take the possibility seriously enough not to provoke their threatened use...

...The various groundings of individualistic naturalright theory available to seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury thinkers—nature, physics, God— are not so readily available to us...

...In short, Kateb's argumentation tends to involve an absolute opposition between the values of life and freedom, even if he marshals the forces of individual freedom on behalf of life...

...To argue, in such a context, that all governments which have/threaten to use nuclear weapons are illegitimate is to imply that the only polities that are worth defending (those that respect rights and are formally democratic in Kateb's view) must be defenseless in order to retain their legitimacy...

...Hobbes was all too eager to trade off freedom for life and security with all of the well-known statist consequences in his theory...

...With respect to Tocqueville, the error is more serious than that of omission...

...Individual sovereignty should replace and control state prerogative...

...Accordingly, the only acceptable purpose of legitimate governments is to secure individual rights...

...Third, more subtly still, he attacks etatism, which, in our context, amounts to the politics and culture of the welfare state...

...The issue of the deterrent, about which Kateb is uncompromising, is nevertheless the Achilles' heel of his analysis...

...Surely if they have accomplished nothing else, the peace movements (not even mentioned by Kateb) have shown that only the democratization of existing public spaces and the creation of new ones can place the nuclear issue on the agenda...

...II KATEB IS RIGHT TO ARGUE that any use of nuclear weapons carries the real danger of escalation to a general nuclear war and hence, extinction...

...This distinguishes his position from that of Hobbes, one of Kateb's models...

...The terms of the debate are thus considerably and misleadingly narrowed: they reduce to a set of moral either/or propositions: Either we are for or against human life...

...III THE CORE OF KATEB'S ESSAY iS that the doctrine of moral individualism bequeathed to us from seventeenthcentury Protestant England and America is the best philosophical tradition for showing the illegitimacy of governments having/threatening use of nuclear weapons, and for justifying the right 360 of resistance...

...Knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons involves in itself a threat that is here to stay and in some sense is identical with the issue of deterrence...

...And even if such a consequence is only a possible one—Pascal's wager could apply equally to this other, infinitely evil outcome...

...He also cites the Arendtian and Foucaultian critiques of the welfare state, without, however, bothering to mention that the latter two insisted upon the interconnection between the individualism of natural-right theories, especially Hobbes's, illusions of individual sovereignty in the private sphere, and statism...

...Kateb is trying to do three things...

...I can neither go along with this way of posing the issue nor restrict my comments to the purely moral plane Kateb delineates...

...It was Tocqueville who advocated a multiplicity of participatory public spaces in civil society as the only solution to individual passivity and to statism on the part of formally democratic governments with paternalist tendencies...

...This very revealing statement maintains that the solution to statism is more individualism...

...Far be it from me to deny the catalogue of rights inherited from the natural-right theory of Locke and his forerunners...

...Indeed, the paternalism, instrumentalism and therapeutic welfarism he criticizes have been fostered precisely on the basis of the individualist principles and the specific "purposes of government" that he defends...

...government/system, in effect, all nuclear powers have illegitimate governments...

...Using his own version of Pascal's wager, Kateb at this point takes leave of all politics...

...But Kant was also a philosopher of freedom who could not possibly admit heteronomy even in defense of life...

...either we are for or against life-threatening nuclear weaponry...

...Assuming for a moment that statism is evil and individualism is good, Kateb's scenario can only mean that the states with the highest degree of statism and the lowest level of human rights would be in a position to dictate to those embodying the opposite principles...

...Taoism would do just as well in revealing the absolute immorality of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...If the choice were life or freedom, anyone would probably choose life...

...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...

...And I support without reservation politics aimed at mutual reduction to the barest minimum of nuclear stockpiles...

...The political paradox involves a moral one...

...But the particular and exclusively moral terms in which Kateb poses the issues point us away from addressing the political dilemmas of the nuclear age...

...As a regulative principle, "no use" or "total disarmament" could play the important role of pushing for the greatest possible reduction of arsenals...

...The error of the peace movements, one that Kateb shares, is their effort to resolve the nuclear issue on the basis of moral commitment alone, forgetting politics in two senses: the reality of the state systems and the desirability of a democratic polity...

...It is obvious that, by definition, having nuclear weapons carries the threat of their use...

...He even cites the famous Tocquevillian linkage between privatization, individualization, and statism (democratic despotism...

...But today argumentation with respect to these rights requires free public spaces and open democratic discussion...

...Following Hobbes and Locke, Kateb implicitly derives all the other rights from the absolute right to life of every individual...

...And yet, there is something disturbing about the way in which he addresses the subject...

...and France) of a "limited" first use in case of massive conventional aggression in Europe by the Soviets...

...I shall, instead, insist upon the indivisibility of the moral and political dimensions of the issues and pose some political questions that are unfortunately buried in Kateb's moralistic argumentation...

...Obviously the point is that those governments having nuclear weapons threaten (some) innocent individual's life and are thus rightfully resisted in the name of individual rights...

...But Kateb clearly wants this principle to function as the political guideline for judgments about the legitimacy of governments...

...The old selfevident truths are no longer self-evident—they have to be argued for...

...Let me address each point in turn...

...Certainly one can refer back to this set of doctrines, but it is not the only tradition of moral philosophy adequate to the task...

...Yes, Kateb does know all this...

...Surely he knows that Locke's extension of the right to life to the right to property presupposes a strong and fully sovereign state able to protect both...

...The full exercise of individual rights in internal politics could lead to the international collapse of these rights...

...From the normative point of view there is little difference between these warnings...

...Those that rely on a deterrent are, he suggests, illegitimate...

...We must believe or hope that our exemplary unilateral actions will be imitated by others...

...It is thus surprising that Kateb did not choose the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant to sustain his case...

...I would thus argue, against Kateb's dogmatic individualism, that individual rights are not the given, unquestionable substratum of the political process, but rather, that democratic public spaces within which rights can be posited are the core of individual rights...

...The position of Kant is not based on dogmatic assumptions and involves a far more universalist attitude to the dignity and rights of all human beings than anything to be found in the seventeenth century...

...Iv THE KEY COMPONENTS of the seventeenth-century theories upon which Kateb draws to vindicate the right to resist illegitimate nuclear governments are the Hobbesian right to self-preservation and the Lockean notion of having property in oneself...

...For it is not, as Kateb would have it, 361 Tocqueville's thesis that democratic despotism derives from insufficient individualism...

...From the political and common-sense point of view (I insist on both), this moral position translates into the advocacy of unilateral nuclear disarmament— we in the U.S...

...Clearly Kateb wants none of this—limited representative democracy as it exists is as far as he is willing to go along the path of democratization...

...Moreover, this principle would invalidate the unacceptable policy position of the U.S...

...The philosophical position he defends with respect to this issue is a coherent one...

...either we passively accept raison d'etat or we consider every state that threatens to use nuclear weapons to be illegitimate...

...Rather, he intends to utilize the explosiveness of the nuclear issue to legitimate the tenets of a dogmatic philosophical position...

...Indeed, the warnings do not even have to be uttered: possession and knowledge are in themselves threatening...

...Given the scope of the danger, deterrence is identified with the same immorality as actual use on any scale...