Successful dictators have spent years on the preparatory campaign to build up (in Trotsky’s words) “the class which is called to realize the new social system,” or put in contemporary language, to build a movement of followers and a political party that can win votes. For Lenin the preparatory campaign started in the 1890s, when he gained an influential position in the clandestine Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. At the Second Congress of that party, in Brussels in 1903, he created his Bolshevik faction, a more militant organization that he led and inspired until his return to Russia in April 1917. By that time, generous German financial assistance enabled him to create a legitimate party press, as well as an illicit network of Bolshevik cells ready to use violence.15 Thus the Bolsheviks, as a minority party in the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, concentrated in their hands a significant share of the state power of Russia’s Provisional Government. At the same time, Lenin strengthened his network of illicit military detachments for the forcible overthrow of the government that his followers had infiltrated.16
For Hitler, the political phase started in 1920, when he became the leader of the new National Socialist Party. He then wrote and propagated Mein Kampf, and gained an ever larger following thanks to his powerful oratory. He promoted an ideology that appealed to German nationalism, and also exploited the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany as a rabble-rousing theme to stimulate hatred and violence useful for his campaign. Although the economic crisis of the Weimar Republic in the end helped Hitler to seize power, his charisma among masses of Germans had deeper roots. He was a relentless and effective campaigner well before he achieved total power. On a single day in 1932, for example, he gave speeches in Aachen, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden. He appealed to a lower-middle class that felt politically neglected; he articulated the social anxieties of this class; and he evoked enthusiasm with the histrionics and pageantry that the Nazis so ably displayed.17 He was thus able to gain a strong, legitimate foothold in the parliament of the Weimar Republic, while retaining control over his storm troopers so competent in using violence. Then the Reichstag fire (more on which below) gave Hitler a double assist. First, it offered a political and legal pretext for Hitler to grab total power; and second, it created a psychological crisis among the German people that made them accept Hitler’s power grab. In the event of a nuclear power-grab, the extreme national security crisis of a sudden nuclear detonation would provide legal justification for the new leader to declare emergency powers, and the profound emotional shock would make the people inclined to tolerate the emergency rule.
It is prudent to remember not only the horror of Hitler’s well-known abominations but also the danger of his political-psychological skills that carried him from victory to victory—from 1932 until 1941. Only late in 1941 did Hitler’s strategic folly emerge, first in his conduct of the campaign against the Soviet Union following the German army’s Blitzkrieg advances to the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, and shortly thereafter Hitler’s absolutely fatal mistake—the unnecessary declaration of war against the United States.
The dual-power stratagem has been widely used by insurgents and terrorist organizations. It has been used by the Basques, who fomented terror attacks to seek independence from Spain but also established a legitimate political party, Batasuna, allegedly independent of the Basque terrorist organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or “Basque Country and Freedom” in Basque language). The Spanish government tolerated this duplicitous game for many years until in 2002 it finally outlawed the Batasuna Party. That decision has since been criticized by many European newspapers as “undemocratic.” In Ulster, Sinn Fein continues to function as a legal political party allegedly independent of the Irish Republican Army (the militant IRA feared for its terrorist acts). Sinn Fein has successfully cast itself as a peaceful political movement opposed to terrorism but sympathetic to some of the “just” goals of the IRA. It has made itself the principal interlocutor with the British Government. The well-known connections between the IRA and Sinn Fein have hardly spoiled this “dual-power stratagem.” It is no secret in Ireland, England, and the United States that Sinn Fein’s leader Gerry Adams belonged to the IRA in the past and had been in charge of the Belfast IRA operations at a time when its units killed fourteen soldiers as well as civilians.18 Adams refused to condemn several IRA bombings that caused grievous casualties, yet his party obtained millions of dollars in private contributions from well-meaning Americans who want Ulster to be fully independent of London, in a unified Eire. The dual-power stratagem (backed by conventional explosives) might yet work for Sinn Fein, if it is willing and strong enough to maintain a compromise settlement, and if both camps in Ulster can convince their extremists to end the use of violence.
The availability of nuclear weapons, of course, would transform the dual-power stratagem. The aspiring dictator could prepare to employ two or three nuclear weapons for maximum political impact, without mounting a military campaign across national borders and without support by another nation or by a foreign terrorist organization. He would not provide the attacked nation any targets for a counterattack. He would thus render useless the most advanced offensive weapons and the most powerful nuclear deterrent forces of the victimized nation. He would heed Machiavelli’s advice: “Any harm you do to man should be done in such a way that you need not fear his revenge.” He would seem to be nowhere and everywhere.
He might have his nuclear bombs smuggled into the nation he plans to attack, or he might
