together and negotiating for mutual security. If they did so, the inevitable outcome of such negotiations, given the understandable suspicion on every side, must be an open world. To Winston Churchill and apparently also to Franklin Roosevelt Bohr's scenario appeared dangerously naive. In his role as spokesman for the republic of science Bohr certainly carried news of danger, but he was never naive. He was warning the statesmen that science was about to hand them control over a force of nature that would destroy their political system. Considering the slaughter that political system had perpetrated upon the twentieth century, he was polite enough not to add, the mechanism of its dismantling had turned up none too soon.
The bomb that science found hidden in the world and made manifest would destroy the nation-state paradoxically by rendering it defenseless. Against such small and cheap and holocaustal weapons no defense could ever be certain. The thickest shields, from fighter aircraft to Star Wars, could be penetrated merely by multiplying weapons, decoys and delivery systems. The only security from the bomb would be political: negotiation toward an open world, which would increase security by decreasing national sovereignty and damping out the violence that attended it.
The consequence of refusing to negotiate would be a temporary monopoly followed by an arms race. That road to nowhere looked so much more familiar than Bohr's open world, which even Oppenheimer sometimes confused with World Government, that the nations preferred it and took it. The bomb might be a wall, but until the wall was tested escalation by escalation, new weapons system by new weapons system, who could prove that clever men — or threatening enemies — might not find a way under its fastness or around? Nuclear weapons might also be enterprise and profit and steady work. They might secure the citadel. They might permit the nation not to send its favored sons to war. More significantly, they would deter major war and freeze into permanence the political status quo. The nation-state could roll on into perpetuity with its sovereignty intact.
So it seemed along the way. So it still seems to many. But rather than a guarantor of sovereignty the arms race has proven a
Bohr would surely emphasize that the result of either course — negotiation or arms race — must be the foreclosure of the nation-state. Negotiation to an open world would replace the nation-state with some more tolerant and peaceful and international arrangement that recognized the reality of the bomb. Alternatively the death machine that we have installed in our midst will destroy the nation-state, ours and our rival's, along with most of the rest of the human world. The weapons with which the superpowers have armed themselves — collectively the equivalent of more than one million Hiroshimas — are linked together through their warning systems into a hair- trigger, feedback-looped contrivance, and no human contrivance has ever worked perfectly nor ever will. Each side is hostage to the other side's errors. The clock ticks. Accidents happen. Nuclear war would abolish the nation-state as certainly as negotiation but instead of a living, open world would replace it with a world of the dead, a world completely closed.
Science is sometimes blamed for the nuclear dilemma. Such blame confuses the messenger with the message. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann did not invent nuclear fission; they discovered it. It was there all along waiting for us, the turn of the screw. If the bomb seems brutal and scientists criminal for assisting at its birth, consider: would anything less absolute have convinced institutions capable of perpetrating the First and Second World Wars, of destroying with hardware and callous privation 100 million human beings, to cease and desist? Nor was escalation inevitable. To the contrary, it resulted from a series of deliberate choices the superpowers made in pursuit of national interests.
But if the arms race is not a creation of science (however much men trained as scientists and applying the discoveries of science may have helped it along), what constitutes that republic's armament in its continuing conflict with the nation-state?
Oddly from the perspective of previous conflicts, science's highly effective armament is the basic scientific principle of openness. Science fights the exclusivity of the nation-state, an exclusivity that has revealed itself capable of preparing to convert the living world into a dead world of corpses, by sharing its discoveries freely — in Oppenheimer's words, by “turn[ing] over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.” That deep trust in the promise of openness to remake the world must inspire even at the brink of the abyss. Science in conflict with the nation-state demonstrates how an open world could function without chartered violence. The effectiveness of such profound civility is obscured at present because it necessarily operates from within the nation-state itself. Turning around and looking back across the half-century since 1945 demonstrates its power: it forced an end to world war, in itself an enormous deliverance.
If the arms race now makes that deliverance seem a leap out of the frying pan into the fire, science's response has been to continue to confront the nation-state with the facts and probabilities it discovers in the course of its daily work. Nuclear winter, whatever its level of severity, is one of those probabilities. Damage to the ozone layer is another. The likelihood of widespread epidemics after a nuclear war and of mass starvation because of disruptions in food transport are two more. The nation-states may have understood that nuclear weapons spoil war. The continuing arms race unfortunately demonstrates they have not yet understood that the nationalist system of exclusion and international confrontation has now become suicidal. Each new contribution to understanding — more knowledge turned over to mankind — must further erode that stubborn and potentially geno-cidal ignorance. Additional knowledge will certainly continue to emerge. It is not likely to prove massive armaments a blessing.
Change is possible. Americans who want the Soviet Union to change first, as Henry Stimson did, should realize that they can only pursue that cause peacefully; the Soviet Union controls a deterrent fully as dangerous as the United States' deterrent. And patriots may need reminding that the national security state is not where holy democracy began. The American Revolution foresaw a future much like Bohr's open world, in part because the framers of that revolution and the founders of the republic of science drew from a common body of Enlightenment ideas. The national security state that the United States has evolved toward since 1945 is significantly a denial of the American democratic vision: suspicious of diversity, secret, martial, exclusive, monolithic, paranoid. “Nationalism conquered both the American thesis and the Russian antithesis of the universalist faith,” writes Barbara Ward. “The two great federated experiments, based upon a revolutionary concept of the destiny of all mankind, have ended, in counterpoint, as the two most powerful nation-states in history.” But other nations have moderated their belligerence and tempered their ambitions without losing their souls. Sweden was once the scourge of Europe. It gave way; the empty fortress at Kungalv testifies to that. Now it abides honorably and peacefully among the nations.
Change is possible because the choice is bare: change is the only alternative to total death. The conditions have already been established, irrevocably, for the destruction of the human world or its modification into some more collegial commonality. The necessity now is to begin to dismantle the death machine. The energies rich and intelligent peoples have squandered on the elaboration of death need to be turned to the elaboration of life.
Bohr's great vision of the complementarity of the bomb can bring hope to the prospect of change. The death machine's suicidal destructiveness is ample reason to work for its dismantling. But although that road is now necessarily longer, the promise still holds, as it has held from the beginning, that negotiating away from chartered violence will be identical to negotiating toward an open world. Democracy has nothing to fear from such a world.
Negotiation is in fact already ongoing, partly by necessity, partly by inadvertence. It began when the United States and Great Britain decided to build nuclear weapons secretly and spring them on the world in surprise, thereby precipitating an arms race with the Soviet Union that eventually came to stalemate. It continued when the United States resisted preemptive war in the brief years of its nuclear monopoly; when new delivery systems made defense impossible and thereby further undermined national sovereignty; when nations tolerated overflights and then satellite reconnaissance of their previously sacrosanct territories. It elaborates in custom and tradition every time confrontation leads to prudent stand-down or front- or back-channel resolution. It progresses as commoners in every country slowly come to understand that in a nuclear world their national leaders cannot, no matter how much tribute and control they exact, protect even their citizens' bare lives, the minimum demand the commons have made in exchange for the political authority that is ultimately theirs alone to award.
