What does ‘survival’ mean and require in an age of nuclear weapons?
Laura Considine discusses the key points from her new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article at - Thinking through and beyond survival in a nuclear age
I have been researching nuclear weapons politics for several years now and am animated by the question of what it means to live in a nuclear world, a world in which some states have the capacity to inflict such extreme violence. The question I ask myself in this article is: given that extreme violence, what can the aim of nuclear politics be? This article comes from my increasing discomfort with the assumption that in a nuclear age the core of politics should be about ensuring ‘survival’. This is because survival has become embedded into both the doctrines of nuclear armed states and into international law as a justification of both the possession and use of nuclear weapons. As such, any action up to and including nuclear war can be taken in the service of an unspecified aim of ‘survival’.
Survival has also always been at the centre of the discipline of International Relations. Traditional IR theory has taken the survival of the state to be the purpose and driver of international politics. While multiple critical approaches have questioned this assumption from a variety of perspectives – including the subject, means and requirements of survival – I felt that amidst the swirling of all these debates, something about survival itself remained fundamentally intact. The intention of this article, therefore, is to question what survival means and does as the purpose of nuclear weapons politics and, through this excavation of nuclear survival, of IR more generally.
The article argues that in the wake of the thermonuclear revolution, nuclear strategists struggled to square the intense and immediate violence of nuclear weapons with traditional ideas of victory and defeat, as the extreme power that came with nuclear weapons brought with it an extreme vulnerability to the other side’s weapons. Survival thus became inseparable from its negation as annihilation. These debates have not been resolved in the decades since. In fact, scholars such as Michael C. Williams have argued that the fundamentally contradictory nature of deterrence makes this tension irresolvable. The article links this tension to the paradox of survival as annihilation in the nuclear age and further argues that a politics based on this paradox will become entrapped within it. Consequently, I argue that ‘survival’ and its implications should be questioned rather than taken for granted as an assumed goal.
One place to start with this questioning is with the more particular issues of how and when survival and annihilation are used as categories and who and what they encompass and exclude. The article shows that scholars, policymakers, and activists have given very different answers to these questions over the past decades. For nuclear strategists, survivability has generally referred to the weapons themselves, since survival is focused on maintaining a second strike capability. This is not to say that individual strategists prioritise weapons over people but that the logic of nuclear deterrence is such that that prioritisation becomes naturalised. Carol Cohn famously claimed that the weapon itself was the referent of nuclear strategy discourse and more recent work by Jacques Hymans, Shampa Biswas and Anne Harrington has engaged with the idea of the weapon as a deified or fetishised object. I thus argue that we should interrogate how survival functions in the logic of nuclear strategy. One response to the deterrence logic has been the reframing of survival to focus on humanity as its referent. This approach has been at the forefront of disarmament discourse. Yet this reframing, as well as requiring the constitution of a political community in whose name survival can be spoken, does not resolve the survival paradox but redirects it – if survival has been tied to annihilation, then simply changing the referent does not obviate this problem. Survival has not only smoothed out the differential impacts of prior nuclear violence, as seen in the legacies of nuclear testing, but such discriminatory violence was also done in the name of ‘the good of mankind’.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes survival as a relative condition. He writes that ‘survival is targeted on others, not on the self. We never live through our own death; but we do live through the deaths of the others, and their death gives meaning to our success: we are still alive’.[1] I find this to be very helpful in thinking about the logic of survival and the international in a nuclear age. It prompts me to ask not only ‘whose survival?’ but ‘survival relative to whom or what?’ In a world in which the potential for violence is so extreme, what is it possible or justifiable to sacrifice for an unspecified goal of ‘survival’ and what would that survival actually look like? I do not have answers to these questions, but the article argues that they are worth asking and that those asking such questions need to engage with the existence of nuclear weapons.
[1] Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Survival as a social construct’, Theory, Culture & Society, 9:1 (1992), pp. 1–36 (p. 10).
Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525000105
This particular article is open access, however BISA members receive access to RIS (and to our other journal European Journal of International Security) as a benefit of membership. To gain access, log in to your BISA account and scroll down to the 'Membership benefits' section. If you're not yet a member join today.
Photo by Tyler Rutherford on Unsplash
