The Obvious, Darwinian Truth About Nuclear Weapons

and why we never hear it

Before 1945, the human species lived with the sure and certain knowledge that no matter what any of its members did, they would be unable to destroy the world.

Think about it. No matter how many civilizations the Romans destroyed, no matter how many cities the Mongols razed or the British flattened with incendiaries, no one could destroy the entire human race, much less all life on the planet.

Then human beings started making things like this:

Meanwhile, back in 1859, this guy

came out with a book called On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has largely been borne out, and its fundamental lesson that species must adapt to changed circumstances in their environment or become extinct is now common knowledge.

The knowledge that the existence of nuclear weapons changed the age-old certainties was slow to be accepted by many, and is still rejected by those whose incomes or wealth depend on us not thinking about it. In 1945, while Oppenheimer lamented he had become death, the destroyer of worlds, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had killed fewer people than earlier firebombings of Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden.

For that matter, Israel has already dropped more total explosive power on Gaza than the Hiroshima bomb.

It wasn’t until the hydrogen bomb was invented in the 1950s that this hot Darwinian truth became the new reality in the public mind, reflected in everything in the culture from radiation-mutated monsters to backyard bomb shelters to duck-and-cover drills to the skimpy two-piece swimsuit named for the Pacific atoll where one of the new weapons was first tested.

Those whose careers depended on Forever War did their best to convince themselves and those who had the authority to use the Damned Things that a war with nuclear weapons was winnable. They’re still at it, writing position papers and proposals for ever newer nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and pleas for gazillions for impossible defenses.

Fortunately, since Truman no national leader has ever authorized the use of nuclear weapons for the very simple reason that they knew a nuclear war could easily kill us all. No one can win a war if everyone’s dead. This message is also strong in our popular culture, as exemplified in everything from this

to this

If you haven’t seen both of these films, please do so. They both arguably saved the planet on different occasions, after all.

Clearly, nuclear war isn’t evolutionarily viable for the entire human species, much less any single nation. It’s just not a viable option. But let’s not stop there. If nuclear war is suicide by extinction, then anything that could reasonably be expected to cause one isn’t a viable option, either.

The obvious truth is that war itself is no longer evolutionarily viable for the human species. Put all of the identity politics and historic national guilts and grievances aside. Put aside all the ideologies or religions conceived by humans before The Bomb aside. What worked for some nations before nuclear weapons existed can no longer work for them now. War, ethnic cleansing, genocide, economic and imperialist exploitation that can lead to war, none of them make any kind of longterm sense at all anymore. They are obsolete to anyone who seriously thinks about it.

Only a tiny percentage of any national population, much less the global one, profit from war. If the majority was actually making the decisions, we wouldn’t be in danger of being in any kind of war at all, much less a nuclear one.

Since war is no longer a viable option because it can now lead to planetary suicide, it stands to reason that a tiny minority of people who profit from the system and the policies which cause war should not hold positions of power over the rest of us. And that leads to the obvious conclusion that the economic system that values profit over evolutionary viability—capitalism—is no longer viable itself and needs to be replaced by something that is.

Revolution. It’s the evolutionarily viable thing to do.

Thank you for reading, good day, and good luck.