Nuclear War is Inevitable

 

Slavoj Zizek, "In what sense nuclear war is inevitable"

In an interview in September, a Russian general named Alexander Vladimirov said something that should make us shudder.

“For the transition to the use of weapons of mass destruction, only one thing is needed: a political decision by the supreme commander-in-chief [Vladimir Putin],” the author of Russia’s “war bible” warned in an interview with journalist Vladislav Shurygin, as reported in the Daily Mail.

“The goals of Russia and the goals of the West are their survival and historical eternity. And this means that in the name of this, all means of armed struggle available to them will be used, including such a tool as their nuclear weapons,” he said. “I am sure that nuclear weapons will be used in this war — inevitably, and from this neither we nor the enemy have anywhere to go.”

Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” has angered many Indian movie-goers due to the Bhagavad Gita reference during an intimate scene. Many have taken to Twitter, wondering how the censor board cleared the scene. A statement from Save Culture Save India Foundation said, “We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on life of a scientist.”

My reaction to this reaction is exactly the opposite one: The Bhagavad Gita advocates a horrible ethics of military slaughter as an act of highest duty, so we should protest that a gentle act of passionate love-making is besmirched by a spiritualist obscenity. In order to find our way in the ongoing mess, we should perhaps bring out the horror that sustains the “spiritualization” of carnal passion.

Is Vladimirov not doing something similar in the quoted passage? He presents a self-destructive murderous passion in terms of a higher “historical eternity.”

However, his remarks should absolutely not be dismissed as a strategic threat in the ongoing Ukrainian war. Even if it is meant like that, it possesses its own logic which can push agents to actualize what they thought was only a threat. We are here beyond the mutually assured destruction logic which functioned well to prevent nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War. Mutual destruction is simply presented as inevitable since “neither we nor the enemy have anywhere to go.”

One should note the strange term “historical eternity” used in the claim that “the goals of Russia and the goals of the West are their survival and historical eternity.” What does this mean? Such details clearly demonstrate that the situation described by Vladimirov relies on a series of radical choices, as if both Ukraine and Russia are fighting for survival and thus don’t have anywhere to go. (Russia denies Ukraine’s very identity and existence, while nobody expressed any interest in changing Russia’s borders.) Russia is also fighting for survival only if we understand by “Russia” a much larger space of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. The “historical eternity” spoken of is this eternal notion of Great Russia.

This is why Vladimirov doesn’t speak about Russia’s justified defense against the Ukrainian attack, and even uses the expression “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” — it is not a question of who is guilty since we are dealing with fate, with a struggle to death where such minor questions like “who started it?” become insignificant.

So what is to be done in such a situation? To begin with, one should read the situation closely to detect signs that may point in a direction different from the simplistic linear development.

In mid-September, the Moscow Times reported that Cuba uncovered a human trafficking ring aimed at recruiting Cubans to fight as mercenaries for Russia in its war in Ukraine as Moscow seeks to increase the size of its forces. Cuba’s Foreign Ministry released a statement in which it said that authorities were working to “neutralize and dismantle” the network.

One should, of course, immediately raise the question: Did Cuba, a tightly controlled country, really just now all of a sudden discover such a ring? They must have known about it for quite some time, so the true question is why did the Cuban government decide now to make this “discovery” public? Does it mean that even Cuba, a staunch supporter of Russia in its war against Ukraine, decided to distance itself from Russia’s dangerous adventure?

More generally, the only possible principled and at the same time pragmatic approach is to take cognizance of Russian nuclear threats but ignore them at the level of diplomacy and military strategy. The worst thing to do is to succumb to Russia’s blackmail and follow the logic of “we shouldn‘t provoke Russia too much” — one should just continue to help Ukraine while making it clear that no one wants to appropriate any part of the Russian territory (in its borders before the occupation of Crimea, of course). Russia should be pushed into a position in which it will be clear that, if it uses nuclear weapons, it did this on its own, not reacting to a threat to its territory.

We live in a strange time in which the scenario of a global nuclear war neutrally coexists with the culture war of populist neocons against “cancel culture,” while in the developed West life mostly appears to go on as usual — in the summer of 2023 people in Europe mostly worried about the possibility that bad weather and flight cancellations will ruin their holiday.

Our true madness resides in this peaceful coexistence of radically different options: It is possible we will all perish in a nuclear war, but what really annoys us is “cancel culture” or populist excesses, and ultimately we don’t really care even about this but just about our daily lives. Rationally we know these three levels (not to mention ecological disasters) are interconnected, but we continue to act as if they are not.