After Arms Control
Experts and Disarmament in a Changed World
Andrew M. Lichterman 
"The history of technology is part and parcel of social history in general... Military history too can only be understood against the wider social background. For as soon as one begins to discuss war and military organization without due regard to the whole social process, one is in danger of coming to regard it as a constant, an inevitable feature of international behavior. In other words, if one is unable to regard war as a function of particular forms of social and political organization and particular stages of historical development, one will not be able to conceive of even the possibility of a world without war." [1]
About the worst thing one can say about a weapon in arms control discourse is that it is destabilizing. Proposals for new kinds of nuclear weapons are bad because they might require resumption of nuclear testing, which would be destabilizing (not because they are horrible instruments of mass death, and the new variants intended for use in entirely imaginable wars). Missile defenses are bad (should they be at all workable) because they will upset the balance between strategic nuclear offense and defense, and would be destabilizing (not because they are intended, when deployed in service of a policy of "preventive" wars, to defend attacking forces against the missiles of the defenders). New high-tech weapons can be criticized for being all manner of things except what they most truly are: the use of the most powerful societies' wealth and most highly developed capacities for the purposes of industrialized killing, attempts by people in power to make tools that will give them an overwhelming advantage over other people, that will let them force others to bend to their will by threatening them with death.
But stability, the touchstone and holy grail of all arms control-speak, is an illusion in the world we now inhabit. The choice of paths available today is far more stark than between "stability" and "instability." It is instead between justice and injustice, war and peace, and finally, in the words of Martin Luther King, "nonviolence and nonexistence." In truth, it has always been so, but the Cold War, and the ideologies that rationalized it, worked both to suppress our awareness and to postpone the full reckoning of accumulated injustice and latent violence. That time now is past.
Arms control as a professional discipline is entirely a creature of that Cold War world. Its organizing aspirations and intellectual assumptions are expressions of an extraordinary, singular historical moment. The Cold War was a mass of contradictions held in enormous tension, literally ready to explode at any moment. The bloc system that bound the great confrontation gave a superficial semblance of order, and did indeed impose certain kinds of order. It did so by holding in check great social forces by the threat of organized violence at all levels – from the midnight knock on the door to the Ford Bronco bearing death squads to rapid deployment forces to world-destroying nuclear arsenals. The possibility that the latter would be unleashed, perhaps triggered by lesser conflicts, placed "stability" at a premium for the elites who controlled and deployed all that force, and for the intellectuals and institutions that developed over decades to advise them.
But there was always subterranean movement, breaking out into paroxysms of violence, "small" wars made all the more intense by the huge quantities and destructive force of the "conventional" weapons built by great powers to prepare for the final conflict. Airplanes made to penetrate superpower air defenses in a nuclear war rained bombs on guerillas seeking liberation from generations of colonial rule; they in turn were provided with systems built by another superpower to defend against those bombers. The superpowers poured every implement of conventional warfare into client states in the world's most volatile regions, regions where resources and the fluidity of post-colonial politics provided both interest and opportunity, escalating skirmishes among rising regional elites into horrible wars that killed millions. But with the hand of nuclear-armed giants potentially behind every significant conflict, and with the potential for catastrophe ratcheting constantly upward as myriad political, ideological, and economic forces drove an insane arms race, stability became a goal perceived as both the best that could be achieved, and the only goal worth pursuing. Many conflicts were visible, but many more were submerged, kept below the surface by internal repression in both blocs, misrepresented ideologically as one or another heresy – against socialism, against "liberty" – that could be marginalized, criminalized, liquidated, dismissed.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the bloc system that justified and gave some controlling shape and form to both the arms race and the deployment of force to inflame or suppress other lesser conflicts, everything changed once more, except our way of thinking. The persistence of the weapons, and the institutions of the military-industrial complex despite the removal of their principal public raison d'être, contributed to the impression that the problems and range of solutions for arms control remained the same. But neither "stability" nor the official ideologies of the Cold War superpowers ever had expressed the aspirations of desperate populations – energies which now were unleashed.
The West did little to channel these forces in any genuinely democratic direction, instead leaving vast hinterlands of both ex-Soviet and ex-client states to local elites. They cobbled together sovereignties of varying sizes in a kind of geopolitical bricolage, assembling the ubiquitous leftover Cold War armaments and arms trade channels, together with indigenous nationalisms long subordinated to the imperatives of one bloc or the other, into the means of authoritarian rule. The new and old sovereigns and warlords of the periphery further sustained and consolidated their power by selling off their domains' resources and labor power at bargain-basement rates to the corporate-dominated global market, now free to operate almost anywhere on earth. With the United States in the lead, the West deployed global institutions of trade and investment to extract the greatest possible wealth from these new frontiers. Impoverished populations numbering in the billions, and millions of urban, educated, and underemployed youth with the misfortune to be born someplace other than one or another global capitalist metropolis, found avenues of economic opportunity and political expression blocked at every turn. From their perspective, "stability" is preservation of an intolerable status quo.
And where there was resistance, the full panoply of high-tech violence, honed in a half-century of global confrontation, always was on call. The collapse of the Cold War impasse had released other energies as well: the most rapacious elements of global corporate capitalism, allied with institutions of the U.S. military-industrial complex looking for new roles, new justifications, and new profit opportunities of their own. After a brief period of ideological disarray in the immediate Cold War aftermath, they quickly re-consolidated their political and economic power, accelerating "globalization" efforts to force open all economies to corporate investment, resource extraction, and marketing. At the same time, they repackaged the Cold War military as a global gendarmerie to eliminate "terrorism" and "weapons of mass destruction" – but only when either exists as a weapon of the weak. These factions also have no interest in strategic "stability," but rather seek global dominance, a new missile boat diplomacy to assure their corporate economic partners access to markets and themselves an unending market for the high-tech means of violence.
It is precisely these elements that the Bush Administration best represents, but their power extends across the mainstream of American politics. It is now unchallengeable dogma in respectable U.S. foreign policy circles that the United States should view the end of the Cold War not as an opportunity for peace through de-militarization and disarmament, but rather as an opportunity for global military domination:
"A focused effort across multiple administrations and Congresses, involving the civilian and military leadership of the [US] Department of Defense (DoD), produced a broad vision, currently embodied in Joint Vision 2020, of what is needed to meet the range of emerging situations and expectations. That vision is intended to refocus goals from the marginal superiority of the Cold War to the dominance demanded across the spectrum of twentyfirst century challenges to US and allied national security." [2]
This view is not limited to the current administration. The Democratic Party foreign policy elite insists on its equal commitment to U.S. military superiority. A recent policy paper by the National Security Advisory Group, convened by Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, chaired by Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry and including Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright, Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel Berger, and Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark, painted the September 11 attacks as an "opportunity" to "make significant increases" in the military budget. It stated that Democrats should "support sustaining the increased military funding level for DoD that has occurred since 9/11. Funding DoD at this higher level will keep the U.S. military second to none, now and in the future." [3]
It is in all of this that we find the kernel of truth at the core of the Bush regime's contempt for the institutions, the language, and finally, the central intentions of Cold War arms control. We now live in a world that is fundamentally changed, where none of the most active contending forces are content with anything like "stability," but rather seek fundamental transformation of one kind or another.
This is perhaps the beginning of the true crisis of modernity, in the sense of a time of decision as well as emergency. This crisis was only postponed by the frozen politics of the Cold War, a stasis in which nuclear weapons played a central role. Now we no longer have the stasis, we have great and dangerous movement, but we still have the weapons. Eliminating them is of greater importance than ever, for this crisis is a conflict between forces so enormous that no one will be able to understand or control them. "Stability," still today the main focus of arms control discourse, will be an impossible goal. Genuine disarmament, beginning with nuclear weapons as an absolute and urgent priority, is the only form of "arms control" worth working for. This is not an unrealistic approach that denies that there is conflict in the world. It is a grimly realistic approach that sees a coming era of great conflict as inevitable, and that the existence of nuclear weapons in this new context likely will lead to one or more catastrophes of unprecedented magnitude.
For arms control intellectuals, whether their skills lie in science or policy, it also is a moment of choice – and commitment. They must decide whether to continue in their accustomed role of advising governments on efforts to "control" arms to achieve the illusory goal of "stability," or to leave the comfort of the castle and join with ordinary people working for peace. Governments still may seem to be where the action, the chance of "having an impact," lies. They are huge, organized entities, with many subsidiary institutions in their orbit, institutions that also offer safely circumscribed projects and careers. But the governments of the most powerful states today clearly are bent on the preservation of privilege through violence, with little hope of a real change in direction without fundamental social transformation.
The professional discourses of arms control and disarmament, whether focused mainly on policy or technical matters, largely are structured for those actually or virtually in the position of advising governments. Particularly in times of growing international tension, it is very difficult for professionals in these fields, working within mainstream institutions in the most powerful states, to move outside the prevailing assumptions and ways of describing the world that justify the "national security" policies of the state in which they live. Arguments that challenge these assumptions (or even that identify them as assumptions rather than neutral descriptions of reality) fall outside the realm of acceptable debate in the capitals towards which their efforts are oriented.
The alternative for scientists and other "experts" is to seek to bring their skills and knowledge to the still inchoate, fragmentary, and relatively marginal movements seeking a nonviolent path to a different, more equitable world. There is a pressing need for unprecedented alliances between those who have a detailed understanding of the technologies and the enormous, complex institutions spawned by a half-century of high-tech arms racing, and genuinely international peace movements. Together, we need to construct a new discourse about armaments that places nonviolence at its center. We need an analytics and politics structured to give ordinary people the information they need to decide what is best for them, and to help them decide what kinds of movements they should build and actions they should take to make the world a safer place. In the realm of arms control and disarmament, this new perspective must look beyond the professed positions of states to the real forces at work driving militarism and war. In the realm of law, it must change the terrain upon which interpretation takes place, providing an expanded, exemplary international legal discourse that is principled, coherent, internally consistent, and nonviolent.
For all of this, we need new roles for skilled people. We need them working in institutions firmly grounded in local and regional contexts, where they can hear what people want, see the impacts of decisions made in distant centers of power, and work with their counterparts in the emerging movements for economic justice and ecological balance to understand where we want to go, and how we are going to get there. We need new kinds of "experts" better suited to a world where local organizations, to be effective, often must have considerable "in-house" expertise on issues ranging from environmental science and law to arms control treaties, and where organizations close to centers of power may need new ways of operating if they are to avoid being subsumed in one or another national foreign policy "consensus" that is morally unacceptable, legally insupportable, and globally unworkable. We must think about what kind of training, motivation, and support these new professionals would need to commit their lives to progressive social movements and alternative institutions, and to be an accountable and effective force for change.
There is far more to this than providing the same kind of information and analysis to a different clientele. Groups which are trying to democratize technology decisions provide a vital perspective, outside the institutions which profit or gain power from military production or other complex technologies, that can begin to build an alternative ground for political, ethical, and even scientific judgment. Anyone who has, for example, participated in the formulation or critique of health studies or environmental reviews on programs where large interests are at stake knows that the information upon which scientists and other professionals exercise their skills is accumulated in highly politicized contexts. While this does not change the nature of the phenomena being studied, it can determine what we learn about them – and what we don't. What data will be collected, what kind of studies funded, and even how the studies will be conducted often are hotly contested where millions or billions of dollars are riding on the outcome of "scientific" studies concerning the impacts of proposed projects. Grassroots groups that will be affected both are motivated to pay attention to this level of detail for proposals affecting their locale and are able to bring to bear "local knowledges" about ecological and social conditions. Such perspectives often are more accurate and useful for any real understanding of the effects of the military-industrial complex, or any other technology choice, than the cookie-cutter application of expert paradigms by clock-punching consultants and bureaucrats.
In addition to incorporating excluded knowledges into our understanding of the natural and social world, there is a critical need for analysis of the way that entire areas of inquiry have been shaped by the particular mix of secrecy, fear, and concentrated economic and political power specific to militarized science and technology over the last half century. Information about nuclear weapons materials and function never has been, and hardly can be, the product of open scientific inquiry as it commonly is understood. Much of the experimental data on nuclear materials and phenomena relevant to nuclear weapons function is secret. Almost any judgment, any interpretation of data, concerning nuclear weapons-relevant science is also an immediate act of political commitment, of taking sides in budget and policy battles in which billions of dollars will or will not be spent, in which many careers may rise or fall. And yet most public debate about nuclear weapons – for example, about whether new experimental and manufacturing facilities are needed to keep U.S. nuclear weapons "reliable" – proceed as if the information, and particularly public information, about nuclear weapons is reliable. All we can rely on is that most of the information the public sees will first be shaped and screened by those who control it.
The answer to this is not conventional "experts" engaging in debates about "nuclear weapons science" on behalf of grassroots groups – a debate they almost always will lose, because why should anyone believe an "outsider," one who has no access to the latest and most up-to-date "secret" information? What we need instead is people with adequate knowledge of the relevant science, but also with an understanding of how societies make technology choices, and the relationship of those choices to the nature and direction of scientific institutions. Conventional scientific experts tend to focus mainly on how something can or can not be accomplished through the application of science and technology, as opposed to why that goal should or should not be pursued. The most important questions facing humanity today fall on the intersection between "how" and "why," requiring us to decide when we should choose not to do things that may be technologically achievable. Our ability to avoid self-inflicted catastrophe in the coming decades likely will turn on how well, and how democratically, we are able to make these choices.
Scientists (and other professionals) are trained in a way which implicitly presumes that they will be exercising their skills as specialists within large hierarchical organizations, seldom questioning the interests their work will serve. We will need more generalists, people with greater sensitivity to the relationship between knowledge and information and the social context which produces them. They will need to be able to work together effectively across conventional disciplinary lines, and across the boundaries which separate the well-defended terrains of professional knowledges from the understanding and participation of the ordinary people affected when professional knowledges are deployed in the service of power. The shape of the knowledge and institutions produced by these new professionals, their context further transformed by everyday engagement with social movements attempting to bring to consciousness and democratize the technology choices which today are not only unreachable but often invisible, cannot be anticipated. But it is unlikely to resemble the scientific world of today, dominated by competitive hierarchies dedicated to the pursuit of technologies of control.
We have arrived at this dangerous moment through an extraordinary confluence of historical forces. Both nuclear weapons and the Cold War were the consequence of the social and technical developments that made a military-industrial complex possible. Although we think of the Manhattan project as the prototype, parallel applications of newly institutionalized forms of rationalized technical advance, drawing on unprecedented social resources, were occurring in the warring states in such areas as aircraft technology, electromagnetic spectrum research, and even cryptography.
The unquestionable draw on social wealth necessary for the rapid development of these enormous organizations only could have happened in the setting of total war, which in turn was symptomatic of the collision of rapidly modernizing industrial powers with conflicting imperial ambitions. Nuclear weapons, the most fearsome product of these institutions, played a significant role in preventing any lasting de-mobilization after World War II, sustaining the state of total war emergency, even in the absence of total war, for over half a century.
One key task, as people who think about science and technology from the perspective of movements for a more just, democratic, and sustainable society, will be to develop an understanding of how historically determinate the world we have made and every institution in it is – "normal" science, "normal" politics, "business as usual." This is of central importance in a time when new military-industrial complexes are springing up, modeling themselves on the old in every particular, from diverting resources from human needs, to contaminating land and water through unaccountable war production, to placing faith in threats of unimaginable violence to resolve (or to freeze in place) our deepest conflicts. The most important challenge facing those who study the world as it is may be showing how it could be different.
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