There is an active, influential, and well-paid minority of experts and politicians in America who obviously think that intensifying dispute in between nuclear powers– and even nuclear war itself– is not truly that huge a deal.
These, naturally, are the sorts of individuals who elegant themselves “the adults in the room,” while people who proceed with vigilance, care, and regard for the guideline of law are to be regarded as traitors, cowards, or Russian representatives.
Consider, for instance, Sean Hannity’s March 2 recommendationthat the North Atlantic Treaty Company– which reallyindicates the United States– need to assault a Russian tank column with “some of [NATO’s] fighter jets, or possibly they can utilize some drone strikes and get the entire damn convoy.” For Hannity, this would not count as escalation since NATO might elect to not inform the Russians who carried out the attack, and after that Moscow “won’t understand who to counter.”
Meanwhile, assistance for a “no-fly zone” has been one of the more hazardous opportunities to escalation, since a no-fly zone would be a de facto declaration of war on Russia. Sen. Roger Wicker, for instance, has actually statedthe US must “seriously consider” a no-fly zone. Florida congresswoman Maria Salazar supports a no-fly zonefor the really profound factor that “freedom isn’t free.” (Thankfully, most members of Congress appear to acknowledge that a no-fly zone would indicate World War III.)
And then there are the experts who have outright dealt with the gravity of nuclear war with a great deal of hand-waving. NBC’s primary foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, in an evident referral to nuclear war, suggested the US must risk everything in order to damage a Russian convoy.
Sam Bowman, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, says that nuclear war “deserves risking” if it implies making war on Russia.
Unfortunately, extremely careless calls for escalation are not new, and belong to a long tradition that started during the Cold War. By this way of thinking, nuclear war is undoubtedly “worth it” if it indicates “triumph.”
Today, much of those requiring such things can be found on the center left– such as Engel– or among self-described “neoliberals” like Bowman. Back throughout Cold War I, however, the most enthusiastic fans of nuclear war were discovered in the ranks of Buckleyite conservatives. In either case, the capricious attitude toward nuclear war highlights the most unpleasant element of the “let the nukes fly” position: those who promote for “risking it” think they (or some small minority of policy makers) should choose for the entire human race how many millions will be sacrificed in nuclear flames.
Cold Warriors for Nuclear War
It is now generally ignored that leaders of the conservative movement actively campaigned for initiating a nuclear war. William F. Buckley himself, for example, proposed that Western civilization be compromisedin a nuclear war, if required, in order to incinerate the Russians.
In The JFK Conspiracy, David Miller notedthat lots of conservatives throughout the duration appeared to have bloodlust:
President Kennedy’s Choice in 1962 to avoid another invasion of Cuba angered practically every rightist in America … In a column of November 10, 1962, William F. Buckley, Jr. called for a nuclear war versus the Russians, arguing that “if ever a cause was simply, this one is, for the enemy integrated the ruthlessness and savagery of Genghis Khan with the fiendish efficiency of an IBM machine [Ah yes, that efficient Soviet Union!] … Much better the opportunity of being dead, than the certainty of being Red. And if we die? We die.”
Expense Buckley was far from the only American rightist to require nuclear war in the early 1960s. William Schlamm, a John Birch Society member who had helped discovered National Evaluationin the 1950s informed a Perfume, Germany audience in 1960 that the West need to be prepared to sacrifice 700,000,000 people in order to beat Communism.
Clarence Manion, a conservative radio pundit of the time, proposed a pile of ten million corpses in the name of “winning” the Cold War:
I am tired of hearing an old man like [Nobel Prize chemist] Linus Pauling cry his worry of death in a nuclear war … The length of time does he want to live anyway? If we must fall to Communism, I would rather it be over the remains of 10,000,000 charred bodies of which I would be proud to be one.
Better Dead than Red? Who Gets to Decide That for You?
Undoubtedly, the possible termination of humankind is no huge offer if one genuinely thinks that everyone is “much better dead than Red.” Ronald Hamowy, however, suggested that maybe it was a bad idea to allow Buckley– or anyone else– to decide for all whether death is more effective to communism:
Mr. Buckley chooses to be dead rather than Red. So do I. However I insist that all men be permitted to make that choice on their own. A nuclear holocaust will make it for them.
In assistance of Hamowy’s position, Murray Rothbard continues:
Anybody who wants is entitled to make the individual choice of “better dead than Red” or “give me liberty or offer me death.” What he is not entitled to do is to make these choices for others, as the prowar policy of conservatism would do. What conservatives are truly saying is: “Better them dead than Red,” and “provide me liberty or provide death”– which are the fight cries not of worthy heroes but of mass killers.
Ultimately, the conservative movement began to pretend these opinions had never ever been revealed at all. As Rothbard discussed:
The real directing message of the Conservative Motion was enunciated plainly in a public anti-Communist rally years ago by the honest and intense L. Brent Bozell: “To stamp out world Communism I would be willing to damage the entire universe, even to the furthest star.” It doesn’t take an extreme libertarian not to want to go the entire path, to dance the full dance, with Brent Bozell and the Conservative Movement, the theme of which is not “much better dead than Red” but “better you– and you– and you dead than Red.”
Of course, today’s advocates for de facto nuclear war are more coy about it than the Buckleys and Manions of the past. They don’t come right out and say, “I ‘d rather incinerate half the world than reside in a world where Russians conquered Mariupol!” They call for benign-sounding types of escalation like “no-fly zones” or simply “bombing a convoy.” Or the puzzling “Maybe we need to risk whatever.” Possibly that’s progress from the bad old days of 1962. Individuals who actually take nuclear war seriously, nevertheless, know that history has shown mobilizations and escalations have a long history of leaving hand and leading to very bad things far beyond what lots of politicians imagined was possible. As much as the proescalation crowd pretends otherwise, the truth is that not every problem in the world can be resolved with military action.