Nuclear Lessons: The Sanity Clause

There were many influential figures in the history of nuclear weapons, but perhaps the most important didn’t actually exist: his name was Doctor Strangelove.

Strangelove came to symbolize the essential madness of nuclear war. In a previous essay, I wrote about how nuclear war was averted through a common global sense that it was suicidal and immoral. But there was another element to the consensus: that nuclear war was evidence of insanity. Not just madness in the loose sense, but in the sense of mental derangement. The view that came to prevail was that only a species that had gone mad would engage in a war that would destroy itself.

This was one of the psychological aspects of the Cold War nuclear stand-off—probably the healthiest, in that it was a factor in preventing nuclear war. But there were other psychological aspects that were less amusing or healthy, like helpless fear and anxiety, and dangerous projections and denial that threatened to provoke rather than restrain nuclear war. Now, in facing the prospect of a different kind of nuclear war or even the other potential catastrophes of our time, we are still haunted by these psychological spectres.

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