Elliot went on from counting to examine how this silent nation assembled itself, the manner of its murder. He found the weapons to have been hardware and privation: big guns, small arms in combat, small arms in massacre, aerial bombs; ghettos, camps, sieges, occupations, dislocations, famines, blockades. Behind the weapons Elliot encountered a phenomenon more basic and more malign: the war machine evolving across the decades into a total-war machine and the total-war machine managing variously and intermittently to create areas of total death: Verdun, Leningrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima.
The most compact, efficient, inexpensive, inexorable mechanisms of total death are nuclear weapons. Since 1945 they have therefore come to dominate the field. “The lesson we should learn from all this,” I. I. Rabi remarks, “and the frightening thing which we did learn in the course of the war, was… how easy it is to kill people when you turn your mind to it. When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people, you realize how vulnerable they really are.”
The change from a total-war machine capable of gouging out pockets of total death in a living landscape to a total-death machine capable of burning and blasting and poisoning and chilling the human world is Oppenheimer's turn of the screw. Elliot elaborates:
The hundred million or so man-made deaths of the twentieth century… are more directly comparable with the scale of death from disease and plague which was the accepted norm before this century. Indeed, man-made death has largely replaced these as a source of untimely death. This is the kind of change that Hegel meant when he said that a quantitative change, if large enough, could bring about a qualitative change. The quality of this particular change becomes clear if we connect the present total of deaths with the scale of death inherent in the weapons now possessed by the large powers. Nuclear strategists talk in terms of hundreds of millions of deaths, of the destruction of whole nations and even of the entire human race.
Less efficient machines required two-thirds of a century to assemble a nation of the dead; the nuclear death machine could manage it in half an hour. The nuclear death machine has become capable of creating not merely cities of the dead or nations of the dead but a world of the dead. (Even before detailed studies appeared of the potentially widespread disaster known as nuclear winter, the World Health Organization had estimated — in 1982 — that a major nuclear war would kill half the population of the earth: two billion people.) Therefore, Elliot deduces:
The moral significance is inescapable. If morality refers to relations between individuals, or between the individual and society, then there can be no more fundamental moral issue than the continuing survival of individuals and societies. The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time.
This identifies what we are talking about — the modern phenomenon of total death, that is, not capitalism versus communism or democracy versus the police state — but does not explain how we arrived at the brink of so absolute an abyss. Elliot supplies a clue to the answer in his discussion of the First World War. “The one thing that stands out overall,” he observes, “is that at no time, before, during or after the war, was there a living organic structure in society [e.g., church, political party, custom, body of law] with sufficient strength to resist the new man-made and machine-made creation: [organized] death.”
War is ancient. That it traditionally exposes to maximum danger a biologically surplus and relatively powerless subset of the population — young males — suggests that in some circumstances of traditional intersocial conflict it confers reproductive advantage. Nor were mass slaughters ever rare. The Old Testament regularly celebrates their carnage. The histories of empires bulk thick with them.
World war differed not only in scale but also in essential organization from such more limited earlier conflicts. Total death differs from the surround of mass slaughter in its time-dependent, assembly-line linearity. Both kinds of violence emerge from a distinctly modern process: the nation-state parasitizing applied science and industrial technology to protect itself and to further its ambitions.
Though it dominates the world, the nation-state owns no long history of legitimacy. It developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its nationalism “a doctrine invented in Europe,” writes the political scientist Elie Kedourie, that “pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own… Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.”
Not the least triumph of this doctrine is that such propositions have become accepted and are thought to be self-evident, that the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having. These ideas have become firmly naturalized in the political rhetoric of the West which has been taken over for the use of the whole world. But what now seems natural once was unfamiliar, needing argument, persuasion, evidences of many kinds; what seems simple and transparent is really obscure and contrived, the outcome of circumstances now forgotten and preoccupations now academic, the residue of metaphysical systems sometimes incompatible and even contradictory.
Nationalism differed radically from the hierarchical feudal organization that preceded it in the West. It offered every member of society who was included within its definition the security, invested with powerful emotion, of merger into a welcoming crowd. Not the king or the nobility but the people would be its essential polity:
The power of the state, when nationalism succeeded in acquiring it — enlarging such power in the process — amplified that essential tension. Whole populations discovered political and emotional investment in their national causes. But outlanders became certainly more alien; the Other was confirmed in his Otherness; and between nation-states so radically divided — divided, as they believed, by nature itself — opened gulfs of threatening anarchy. Bridging them was difficult in the best of circumstances and no hierarchical authority survived to mediate as the Church had once done. In international affairs the worst case came to be counted the most reliable.
Then industrial technology and applied science enormously amplified the nation-state's power and when the smoke cleared the cities of the dead and gradually the nation of the dead revealed themselves to view. “Once men lose all grip on reality,” observes Barbara Ward, “there seems to be no limit to the horrors of hatred and passion and rage they can dredge up from their psychological depths, horrors which normally we use all our social institutions to check. Unleashed nationalism on the contrary removes the checks.”
Which suggests, reverting to Elliot's clue, that no living organic structure could be found sufficiently strong to resist the new death organization because the entire nation was implicated: the death organization was the nation-state itself. It followed that once mechanisms could be devised with which to attack civilian populations, civilian populations would be attacked. The enemy was the enemy nation, which was no more than the corporate body of all the enemy citizens, each of whom, in uniform or not, regardless of age or sex, was individually the enemy.
But the nation-state was not the only new political system invented in early modern times. Through the two centuries of the nation-state's evolution the republic of science had been evolving in parallel. Founded on openness, international in scope, science survived in the nation-state's midst by limiting its sovereignty to a part of the world which interested the larger system hardly at all: observable natural phenomena. Within that limited compass it proved spectacularly successful, lighting up the darkness, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes. And finally with the release of nuclear energy its success brought it into direct confrontation with the political system within which it operated. In 1945 science became the first living organic structure strong enough to challenge the nation-state itself.
The conflict between science and the nation-state that has continued and enlarged since 1945 is different from traditional forms of political conflict. Bohr visited the statesmen of his day to explain it but chose to be diplomatic rather than blunt. He explained that with the coming of nuclear weapons the world would arrive at an entirely new situation that could not be resolved by war. The situation might be resolved by statesmen sitting down
