In October 1945, George Orwell wrote an article titled “You and the Atom Bomb” for the socialist publication Tribune. Orwell’s piece makes a compelling argument against the atomic bomb, noting the myriad ways in which it maximizes state power and enables a handful of empires:
“From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose—and really this the likeliest development—that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.”
In spite of his commitment to democratic socialism, Orwell’s contentions here are decidedly libertarian. At the core of his polemic is the premise that nuclear weapons grease the wheels of statism by allowing the world’s superpowers to hold the global population hostage. Orwell dispels the most optimistic argument put forward by proponents of the atomic bomb, namely that such technology would inaugurate a new era of peace. That peace, however, would be maintained by the threat of mutual assured destruction. The ruling class would be permitted to amass even more power, all while waving the banner of “peace through strength” and stockpiling tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. The threat of nuclear war would facilitate the exponential growth of the state. Rather than reaping a peace dividend, it would use the prospect of nuclear annihilation to expand its empire, thereby exerting its awesome tyranny over both its own citizenry and billions of foreign civilians.
It should come as no surprise that the advent of the atomic bomb kicked off a period of heightened American military intervention abroad. The Cold War undoubtedly fueled that trend, but at the heart of the Cold War was an arms race that nuclear technology accelerated. For over forty years, the world’s two greatest superpowers sought to expand their influence over weaker states. Rather than discourage military aggression, the availability of atomic weapons encouraged the United States to embark on costlier, deadlier foreign adventures. The prospect of mutual assured destruction meant that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had any incentive to back down or avoid conflict. Both powers, bolstered by their respective nuclear arsenals, felt inclined to pursue militaristic agendas with relative impunity.
When the Cold War ended, the specter of nuclear annihilation receded, at least temporarily. But the September 11 terrorist attacks allowed the George W. Bush administration to tap into the American public’s fears of a nuclear holocaust. The unipolar moment posed no hindrance to the neoconservative lobby. It convinced the American public that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. 73% of Americans supported the initial invasion of Iraq precisely because they believed that the United States risked eventual nuclear attack if it didn’t launch a preventive war. In the two decades since, U.S. military interventionism has only grown more brazen. Much in the same way that the Iron Dome incentivizes Israel to pursue a belligerent foreign policy, America’s vast nuclear arsenal allows the U.S. to sidestep any concerns that its actions abroad will engender blowback.
At the end of his article, Orwell writes:
“Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace.'”
Orwell correctly deduces the paradox at the heart of the Cold War. In actuality, it was a series of hot wars marked by a lack of direct hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union. And like all hot wars, it necessitated the erosion of individual liberties and the deployment of propaganda to expand the national security state and its military apparatus. The costliness of the atomic bomb—the U.S. government spent the modern equivalent of $30 billion on the Manhattan Project—meant a compounding of state power, one that would further exacerbate the asymmetry between government authority and individual liberty. After all, an atomic bomb is too expensive a weapon to be attained by anybody without access to a wealthy government’s revenue stream. As a result, it proved incapable of erasing the “distinction between great states and small states.” Nor did it crystallize a future in which the “power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened.” On the contrary, it strengthened the health of the state.
Technology is often the handmaiden of authoritarianism. Whether it takes the form of the atomic bomb, mass surveillance, social media, or artificial intelligence, technology has a habit of accelerating statist trends, rendering the citizen more and more powerless. The more complicated a technology becomes, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to reproduce it, and the more burdensome it becomes for non-elites to harness its potential in service of non-statist aims. Orwell’s warning of “two or three monstrous super-states” holding the world captive with their nuclear weapons has proven prophetic. As Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton argues, the only recourse is abolition.
