This is not an easy conclusion to stomach, nor should it be. In fact, as the following section seeks to demonstrate, one of the most dangerous things a nuclear strategist can do is to desensitize themselves to their discipline’s contradictions. Like pebbles in a shoe, the paradoxes of nuclear strategy should make themselves felt in every step the strategist takes. Not only is this deeply unsatisfying, it can also be personally painful at times. Small wonder, perhaps, that the essay in which Fitzgerald extolled the virtue of self-contradiction was titled “The Crack-Up.”
George Orwell on the Danger of Internalizing Contradiction
George Orwell wrote of the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” Fitzgerald would likely call this the mark of a first-rate intelligence.[5] But this quote from Orwell’s novel 1984 refers to something far more sinister: doublethink. In Orwell’s dystopian vision of England-turned-surveillance-state, doublethink represents the internalization and weaponization of paradox. As explained in the novel, doublethink means:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies…to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.[6]
Some of these features of doublethink—“to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it”—can be leveled as critiques of nuclear strategy, whose practitioners contemplate the mass murder of millions and do so in the name of peace. Consider the fact that Strategic Air Command (SAC), which operates U.S. nuclear bombers and ICBMs, has for its motto, “Peace is Our Profession.” Though Strategic Air Command arrived at a variant of this motto three years before 1984 was published, it is hard not to see it as an homage to Orwell’s fictional state, in which “[t]he Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.”[7] One could also point to the most sophisticated Cold War-era U.S. ICBM, the MX missile, which was capable of carrying up to 12 independently targeted, 300-kiloton thermonuclear warheads—enough to replicate the destruction of Hiroshima more than 276 times over.[8] The MX’s more popular name? The Peacekeeper. As Orwell might argue, “These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”[9]
One may be tempted to dismiss the significance of this so-called doublethink; slogans and nicknames are, after all, only words. But this is to miss the core of Orwell’s argument that the language we use shapes the way we think. The implications this has for nuclear strategy were captured in vivid detail by Carol Cohn in her landmark article “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” In it, Cohn describes her immersion in the world and the language of nuclear planners, and how it began to change the very way she thought:
Like the White Queen [of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass], I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Not because I consciously believed, for instance, that a “surgically clean counterforce strike” was really possible, but instead because some elaborate piece of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the possibility of those strikes, as well as on a host of other impossible things.[10]
