MAD Thinking: Accepting the Fate of Nuclear Catastrophe Is the Only Solution for Avoiding It

Dupuy is perhaps the most important thinker of catastrophe today. In both How to Think About Catastrophe (Dupuy 2023a)¹ and The War That Must Not Occur (Dupuy 2023b), he focuses on the potential catastrophe of nuclear annihilation and, in particular, the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD) that aims to prevent it from happening.² A key observation driving Dupuy’s enquiry into nuclear catastrophe is how, since 1945 when the United States detonated the atomic bomb in Japan, has the further use of nuclear weapons been averted? Can one mount a rational explanation of nuclear deterrence to account for this? Dupuy’s underlying thesis is a profoundly paradoxical one: to avoid nuclear catastrophe, that is, for nuclear deterrence to work, it is necessary to think its future occurrence as being necessary.

The challenge of providing a rational basis for explaining nuclear deterrence in this way is something that strategic thinking – such as Rational Choice Theory or Game Theory – fails to do. According to Dupuy (2023b, 98), theories of strategic thinking inevitably fall into paradoxes and contradictions: “there is no unanimous response to the question whether nuclear deterrence is effective … no argument that does not provide support for a contrary argument … no line of reasoning that does not take the form of a paradox”. More pointedly, from the perspective of strategic thinking nuclear deterrence in fact does not work for two reasons. Firstly, the threat of retaliation is not credible: “so long as the agent who threatens a lethal and suicidal nuclear escalation if his demands are not met is minimally rational, we can be sure that when push comes to shove – say, after the first strike has destroyed part of his territory – he will not carry out his threat. Here it is the future catastrophe’s lack of credibility that undermines the principle of nuclear deterrence” (Dupuy 2023a, 136). The second reason why strategic thinking fails to provide the rational basis for nuclear deterrence is the prudential paradox, which states that for deterrence to work, it must work perfectly, but if it works perfectly it fails (Dupuy 2023b, 104). That is, it fails to serve as a deterrence.

Given the failures of strategic thinking, Dupuy (2023b, 99) argues, “If we are to be able to make progress in thinking about nuclear war, there is no option but to resort to philosophy”, more specifically, “we must enter into metaphysics”. The challenge for Dupuy is how to think of nuclear deterrence in a way that the threat or necessity of nuclear annihilation remains credible. Dupuy’s argument draws on Hegel’s logic of modalities, which emphasises a connection between a given actuality and its plurality of corresponding real possibilities (Johnston 2018, 98). Stephen Houlgate (1995, 43) provides the simple example of rain: “When the air pressure, temperature, and so on, are right, it is no longer just possible that it will rain; it rains- necessarily”. The point not to miss is that it is only once the rain has started that we can we see that the conditions were right for it to rain (and, therefore, also the not-yet-actual possibilities for it to stop raining). In other words, the effect (the rain) retroactively generates its own causes (the conditions).

In the same way, Dupuy (2023b, 115) argues “the future is necessary – it has always been necessary – but only once it has been actualised”. Of course, one cannot wait for the actuality of a nuclear catastrophe to discern the conditions that made it both possible and avoidable. Nobody will be left to make this assessment. The solution, according to Dupuy, is a new metaphysics of time in which it becomes necessary to assume the fate of a nuclear catastrophe to fully discern the contours of its concrete possibility (and therefore its avoidance). Dupuy proposes a metaphysics of projected time, which operates in a loop where the future is fixed (as necessity) and counterfactually determines the (otherwise open) past. Or, as Slavoj Zizek (2023), following Dupuy, writes, “We should first perceive the catastrophe as our fate, and then, projecting ourselves into it, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities on which we can today act”. Projected time stands in contrast to “occurring time”, which is synonymous with strategic thinking and is the typical way we think about time unfolding from a fixed past towards an open future with a range of options or choices available. Occurring time fails to assume the necessity of nuclear catastrophe, falling into the same traps outlined earlier regarding strategic thinking.

At this point, however, Dupuy claims that he has only formally resolved the challenge presented by the prudential paradox. For if the future is simply necessary, then no form of deterrence will work. That is, if the fixed future point in the loop of projected time is simply the catastrophic event itself, then “the signals it would send back toward the past … would trigger the actions that would keep the catastrophic future from being realised” (Dupuy 2023a, 140). The very thing which sends the signals back toward the past would cease to exist. For Dupuy, the solution for overcoming this obstacle is that the future in projected time, albeit necessary, must also remain uncertain. In other words, “As long as the future has not been actualised, it must be conceived as including both the catastrophic event and its non-occurrence – not as disjunctive possibilities but as a conjunction of states of which one or not the other will prove a posteriori to have been necessary once the present has selected it” (Dupuy 2023b, 136). For Dupuy (2023b, 123), this “indeterminacy of the future in a conception of time that makes the future necessary” is what has enabled nuclear deterrence to work since the 1945 bombing of Japan by the United States. In other words, the logic of MAD works if we assume not only the escalation towards mutual destruction as the fateful reality of the future but also its failure to work as a coexisting part of this same reality.

This leads Dupuy to argue there must be a glitch in the closure of the loop of projected time. Or, as he sums it up, what is needed for nuclear deterrence to work is “an image of the future that is sufficiently catastrophic to be repellent and sufficiently credible to give rise to the actions that will keep it from being realised, barring an accident” (Dupuy 2023a, 141). Far from disempowering us from being able to do anything to stop nuclear catastrophe, it is this “fact that our fate has the status of an accident” (Dupuy 2023a, 142) that provides the opening for our freedom to not commit such an error and to ensure nuclear deterrence continues to work.

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Timothy Bryar

Timothy Bryar is an independent researcher and writer. His research focuses on dialectical materialist approaches to peace and conflict issues, in particular structural violence. He holds a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Sydney and has over a decade of experience working on peace and conflict issues in the Pacific Islands region. He is author of the blog www.oceaniahypothesis.com.

Notes

¹ The book was first published in French in 2002. It was not published in English until 2023.

² The final chapter of How to Think About Catastrophe focuses on nuclear annihilation. The War That Must Not Occur is, in its entirety, an extensive elaboration on this chapter.