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Nuclear weapons, extinction, and the Anthropocene: Reappraising Jonathan Schell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2021

Rens van Munster Open the ORCID record for Rens van Munster [Opens in a new window]  and
Casper Sylvest Open the ORCID record for Casper Sylvest [Opens in a new window]
Rens van Munster*
Affiliation:
Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen
Casper Sylvest
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the Anthropocene, International Relations must confront the possibility of anthropogenic extinction. Recent, insightful attempts to advance new vocabularies of planet politics tend to demote the profound historical and intellectual links between our current predicament and the nuclear age. In contrast, we argue that it is vital to revisit the nuclear-environment nexus of the Cold War to trace genealogies of today's intricate constellation of security problems. We do so by reappraising the work of Jonathan Schell (1943–2014), author of The Fate of the Earth (1982), who came to regard extinction as a defining feature of the nuclear age. We show how a deep engagement with nuclear weapons led Schell to an understanding of the Earth as a complex, delicate ecology and fed into a sophisticated, Arendtian theory of extinction. Despite its limitations and tensions, we argue that Schell's work remains deeply relevant for rethinking human–Earth relations and confronting the Anthropocene.

Keywords

AnthropoceneExtinctionNuclear WeaponsJonathan SchellHannah ArendtEcology
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 294 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

1 See, for example, Burke, Anthony, Fishel, Stefanie, Mitchell, Audra, Dalby, Simon, and Levine, Daniel J., ‘Planet politics: A manifesto from the end of IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44:3 (2016), pp. 499–523CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrington, Cameron, ‘The ends of the world: International Relations and the Anthropocene’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44:3 (2016), pp. 478–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dalby, Simon, ‘Anthropocene formations: Environmental security, geopolitics and disaster’, Theory, Culture and Society, 34:2–3 (2017), pp. 233–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fagan, Madelaine, ‘Security in the Anthropocene: Environment, ecology, escape’, European Journal of International Relations, 23:2 (2017), pp. 292–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hamilton, Scott, ‘I am uncertain, but We are not: A new subjectivity of the Anthropocene’, Review of International Studies, 45:4 (2019), pp. 607–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 21.

6 Ibid., p. 1.

7 Ibid., p. 150.

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13 See also Alexander Zaitchik, ‘Jonathan Schell's warning from the brink’, The New Republic (22 May 2020), available at: {https://newrepublic.com/article/157779/jonathan-schells-warning-brink-fate-earth-book-review} accessed 13 January 2021.

14 Schell's position assumed that nuclear knowledge could not be uninvented. For a different perspective, see Bourne, Mike, ‘Invention and univention in nuclear weapons politics’, Critical Studies on Security, 4:1 (2016), pp. 6–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A more recent approach to nuclear disarmament that takes inspiration from Schell is Harold A. Feiveson, Alexander Glaser, Zia Mian, and Frank N. von Hippel, Unmaking the Bomb: A Fissile Material Approach to Nuclear Disarmament and Nonproliferation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

15 See especially Michael C. Williams, ‘In the beginning: The International Relations enlightenment and the ends of International Relations theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 647–65 (pp. 649–50) and Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See also Duncan Bell (ed.), Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); William E. Scheuerman, The Realist Case for Global Reform (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); Daniel J. Levine, Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

16 Mark Philp, ‘Realism without illusions’, Political Theory, 40:5 (2012), pp. 629–49. For studies of the place of nuclear weapons in realist thought, see Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University, 2003); Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

17 Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought during the Thermonuclear Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

18 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 22.

19 Ibid., p. 32.

20 Ibid., p. 195.

21 Günther Anders, ‘Commandments in the Atomic Age’, in Anders, Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude Eatherly Told in his Letters to Günther Anders (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1961), pp. 11–20 (pp. 15, 17).

22 Lewis Mumford, The Human Way Out (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2006 [orig. pub. 1958]), pp. 18–19.

23 C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958).

24 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 5.

25 Ibid., p. 174.

26 van Munster and Sylvest, Nuclear Realism, ch. 5; Munster, Rens van and Sylvest, Casper, ‘The thermonuclear revolution and the politics of imagination: Realist radicalism in political theory and IR’, International Relations, 32:3 (2018), pp. 255–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Lewis Mumford, ‘The human way out’, Manas, 14:48 (1961), pp. 1–4 (p. 1).

28 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (3rd edn, Munich: Beck, 1980), pp. 424–6, 429.

29 Anders, who was critical of a brand of future studies that lacked imagination and sought to predict and anticipate the future, described this as a demand for historians ‘turned forwards’. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2, pp. 424–6, 429. In The Fate of the Earth, Schell pointed out that ‘[u]sually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them. (Futurology has never been a very respectable field of inquiry.) But since we cannot afford under any circumstances to let a holocaust occur, we are forced in this one case to become historians of the future – to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience’ (p. 21).

30 Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Walter Mondale Campaign 1984’, box 76, fol. 8, MssCol 24254, New York Public Library.

31 See, for example, the critique of these two ‘nuclear prophets’, in Richard Routley, ‘Metaphysical fallout from the nuclear predicament’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 10:3–4 (1984), pp. 19–34.

32 Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Guenther Anders court papers, 1982 (2/2)’, box 53, fol. 9, MssCol 24254, New York Public Library. Anders added insult to injury by adding that he had been unable to finish Schell's book. The controversy was meted out in some detail in the German and American press. See Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Anders – Court Papers, 1982–1983’, box 54, fol. 4, MssCol 24254, New York Public Library.

33 Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (London: Allen Lane 2003), p. 355.

34 Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Personal Correspondence, 2011–2012’, box 116, fol. 78, MssCol 24254, New York Public Library.

35 See the literature referenced in fn. 1.

36 Burke et al., ‘Planet politics’, p. 501.

37 One notable exception is the interest Schell has attracted from historians and historically minded scholars in the field. Thus, in 2005 Schell participated in a Yale University seminar on ‘The Fire Next Time. The New Shape of Nuclear Danger’, moderated by John Lewis Gaddis and with contributions from Daniel Deudney and Campbell Craig, two scholars who have led recent efforts in IR to gauge the implications of the nuclear age for (realist) international relations as theory and practice.

38 Burke et al., ‘Planet politics’, p. 502.

39 Ibid., p. 517; see also Mitchell, ‘Is IR going extinct?’, pp. 7–8.

40 See, for example, Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 128–9. A similar narrative informs leading textbooks in the field; see, for example, Columba Peoples and Nick Vaughan-Williams, Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (2nd edn, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), ch. 7; Paul Williams (ed.), Security Studies: An Introduction (2nd edn, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), ch. 21.

41 Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Paul N. Edwards, ‘Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 68:4 (2012), pp. 28–40; Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. D. Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016); Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest (eds), The Politics of Globality since 1945: Assembling the Planet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

42 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 7.

43 Ibid., p. 61.

44 Ibid., p. 19.

45 Ibid., p. 20.

46 Ibid., pp. 73, 92. The concept of metabolism also plays a prominent role in Günther Anders's discussion of the nuclear condition. See Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, ‘Appetite for destruction: Günther Anders and the metabolism of nuclear techno-politics’, Journal of International Political Theory, 15:3 (2019), pp. 332–48.

47 Paul Ehrlich, John Harte, Mark A. Harwell, Peter H. Raven, Carl Sagan, George M. Woodwell, Joseph Berry, Edward S. Ayensu, Anne H. Ehrlich, Thomas Eisner, Stephen J. Gould, Herbert D. Grover, Rafael Herrera, Robert M. May, Ernst Mayr, Christopher P. McKay, Harold A. Mooney, Norman Myers, David Pimentel, and John M. Teal, ‘Long-term biological consequences of nuclear war’, Science, 222:4630 (1983), pp. 1293–300 (p. 1299).

48 Although some of these critics, including most prominently Edward Teller, had political grounds for their rejection of the nuclear winter thesis, they were right to point out that the results of Sagan's computer models were shrouded in uncertainty. While Sagan was vulnerable to charges of fearmongering and exploiting the risk of human extinction for political purposes, current scientific work upholds the validity of the nuclear winter thesis, although researchers continue to disagree about the threshold. For a discussion of the nuclear winter thesis and its reception, see Paul Rubinson, ‘The global effects of nuclear winter: Science and anti-nuclear protest in the United States and Soviet Union during the 1980s’, Cold War History, 14:1 (2014), pp. 47–69. For a review of the current state of the art in nuclear winter research, see Alexandra Witze, ‘How a small nuclear war would transform the planet’, Nature, 579 (March 2020), pp. 485–7.

49 Starley L. Thompson and Stephen H. Schneider, ‘Nuclear winter reappraised’, Foreign Affairs, 64:5 (1986), pp. 981–1005.

50 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 76.

51 Hence, ‘although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species’. Ibid., p. 95.

52 Jonathan Schell, The Abolition (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 21, emphasis added.

53 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 115.

54 Ibid., p. 93.

55 Ibid., pp. 110–11.

56 Jonathan Schell and Robert S. Boynton, ‘People's power versus nuclear power’, Daedalus, 136:1 (2007), pp. 22–9 (pp. 28–9).

57 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 177.

58 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

59 Jonathan Schell, ‘The politics of natality’, Social Research, 69:2 (2002), pp. 461–71; Jonathan Schell, ‘In search of a miracle: Hannah Arendt and the atomic bomb’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 247–58.

60 Harrington, ‘The ends of the world’; Mitchell, ‘Is IR going extinct?’. This lack of attention to Schell is mirrored in scholarship that has sought to extend Arendt's thought to the analysis of war and nuclear weapons. See, for example, Anne Harrington, ‘Power, violence, and nuclear weapons’, Critical Studies on Security, 4:1 (2016), pp. 91–112; Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Anthony F. Lang and John Williams (eds), Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Reading Across the Lines (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

61 Akeel Bilgrami (ed.), Nature and Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

62 Schell, ‘The politics of natality’; Schell, ‘In search of a miracle’, p. 247. The fact that both Günther Anders, Arendt's first husband, and her close friend Karl Jaspers had written philosophical works on the implications of the bomb for modern life only added to the mystery. The explanation for this near silence in Arendt's work is still a matter of speculation. Patricia Owens has recently suggested that Arendt's systematic failure to acknowledge the imperial history of the US and the genocide of Native Americans was more than a product of her Eurocentric education. Rather, sidestepping these issues was crucial for Arendt in order to uphold her vision of the US as the promise of post-totalitarian politics. Patricia Owens, ‘Racism in the theory canon: Hannah Arendt and “the one great crime in which America was never involved”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:3 (2017), pp. 403–24. The questions raised by American nuclear weapons – ranging from the morality of their use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their threat of use in Korea, and their expansive testing in the Pacific to the detrimental effects on the democratic system in which they were invented, produced, and stockpiled – can be seen to pose a similar challenge and may help explain Arendt's lack of sustained engagement with the topic.

63 Schell, ‘In search of a miracle’, p. 248. To be sure, Arendt did write one essay on the bomb (‘Europe and the Atom Bomb’, 1954) and mentioned the nuclear peril in On Revolution and On Violence. The subject also loomed large in The Human Condition (1958). Yet her published work contains no sustained analysis of the nuclear condition. Her posthumously published manuscript The Promise of Politics (2009) contains a range of original, if fragmented, reflections on the topic, but it really was Schell who extended her political theory to an analysis of nuclear weapons and extinction.

64 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958).

65 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 171.

66 Ibid., p. 147.

67 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Death in the nuclear age’, Commentary (1 September 1961), available at: {https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/hans-morgenthau/death-in-the-nuclear-age/} accessed 2 October 2020.

68 Morgenthau, Hans J., ‘Four paradoxes of nuclear strategy’, American Political Science Review, 58:1 (1964), pp. 23–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 35).

69 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 3. See also the discussion in Oliver Belcher and Jeremy J. Schmidt, ‘Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene’, EPD: Society and Space (2020), available at: {DOI: 10.1177/0263775820953855}.

70 Vetlesen, Arne Johan, ‘Post-Hiroshima reflections on extinction’, Thesis Eleven, 129:1 (2015), pp. 89–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 98).

71 Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Untitled Manuscripts and Notes, 2011’, box 86, fol. 8., MssCol 24254, New York Public Library. This paper has recently been published: Jonathan Schell, ‘Nature and value’, in A. Bilgrami (ed.), Nature and Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), pp. 1–12 (p. 1).

72 Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Untitled Manuscripts and Notes, 2011’. See also Schell, ‘Nature and value’, p. 1.

73 Jonathan Schell Papers, ‘Untitled Manuscripts and Notes, 2011’. See also Schell, ‘Nature and value’, p. 7. See also Jonathan Schell, ‘The human shadow’, in Bilgrami (ed.), Nature and Value, pp. 13–24 (p. 19).

74 Schell, ‘Nature and value’, pp. 3, 6; Schell, ‘The human shadow’, p. 15.

75 See, for example, LeCain, Timothy, ‘Against the Anthropocene’, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 3:1 (2015), pp. 1–28Google Scholar (p. 14); Mitchell, ‘Is IR going extinct?’, pp. 10–11.

76 Schell, ‘Nature and value’, p. 8.

77 Ibid., p. 9.

78 Ibid., p. 10.

79 Eckersley, Robyn, ‘Geopolitan democracy in the Anthropocene’, Political Studies, 65:4 (2017), pp. 983–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Schell, ‘Nature and value’, p. 5.

81 Schell, The Fate of the Earth, p. 161.

82 Routley, ‘Metaphysical fallout from the nuclear predicament’; Vetlesen, ‘Post-Hiroshima reflections’. But see also Marder, Michael, ‘Natality, event, revolution: The political phenomenology of Hannah Arendt’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 44:3 (2013), pp. 302–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Apart from Schell's prominent inclusion in a volume of prominent scholars and practitioners analysing the notion of nature and the place of humans within it (Bilgrami, Nature and Value), this is also evidenced by the establishment of The Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture Series on the Fate of the Earth (Type Media Centre), where prominent scholars and practitioners explore the nuclear-environment nexus. See: {https://typemediacenter.org/jonathan-schell/} accessed 2 October 2020. See also Zaitchik, ‘Jonathan Schell's warning from the brink’.

84 Science and Security Board of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, ‘Closer Than Ever: It is 100 Seconds to Midnight’, 2020 Doomsday Clock Statement, available at: {https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/} accessed 22 January 2021.

85 Schell, ‘In search of a miracle’; Schell, The Unconquerable World; Schell, Jonathan, ‘The unfinished century’, in Schell, J., The Jonathan Schell Reader: On the United States at War, the Long Crisis of the American Republic, and the Fate of the Earth (New York: Nations Books, 2004), pp. 173–211Google Scholar.