There have been many stupid ideas advanced in the name of libertarianism. Ayn Rand, who hatched more than one of them, infamously supported patents and copyrights—examples par excellence of statist interference in the free market.
It has been reported that Rand is Donald Trump’s favorite novelist and The Fountainhead his favorite novel. That is almost certainly untrue, but if Trump has read The Fountainhead, then there is every reason to presume he enjoyed it tremendously—particularly “that” scene. Trump’s second term as President of the United States is still in its infancy, but already his assaults on liberty around the globe have left an enduring legacy of shame. After he unleashed a barrage of tariffs in honor of “Liberation Day”—an event that “liberated” trillions of dollars in value from the stock markets—it is tempting to argue that of all the stupid ideas put forth by libertarians, the stupidest of them all must be any suggestion that there is a “libertarian case for Trump.”
Libertarians should never forget that there is something far more odious than Trump’s power to decimate markets: his command of a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying all life on earth.
A single nuclear weapon might kill millions of innocent people. Current estimates put the number of American nuclear warheads in the thousands, kept fit and ready for active deployment by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s perversely misnamed “Life Extension Programs.” If anything counts as the stupidest libertarian article of them all, it would be one that promotes the idea of nuclear weaponry as a guarantor of freedom, rather than what it plainly is: an instrument of indiscriminate death and destruction.
This brings me to my nominee for the contested distinction of stupidest libertarian article ever written: “Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation or Monopoly?” by Bertrand Lemennicier.
The central theme of the article is evident already from the title. Professor Lemmencier sees a world in crisis, confronted with a fateful choice between two fundamentally different futures: one where nuclear weapons remain in the hands of an elite few nations or one in which they have been “democratized,” in his deliberately provocative way of putting it.
Error #1
I count at least five errors in Lemmencier’s overarching argument and the way he frames the issue is the first of them. He sets up a false dichotomy, where the only “choice” we have is between a world with a few nuclear states and a world with many nuclear states. His subtitle—“Proliferation or Monopoly?”—implicitly rules out a third option: nuclear disarmament. Whether that option is realistically attainable or not, there is no justification for assuming it away from the outset. Libertarians should never dismiss the possibility of beating swords into plowshares.
Preserving that possibility becomes all the more important when one considers that the only two options that Lemmencier allows essentially collapse into just one. He repeatedly emphasizes that a “cartel” of nuclear states—like all cartels—is inherently unstable, giving rise to an incentive structure that encourages each of its members to cheat the system. In the last analysis, therefore, Lemmencier does not see any durable alternative to nuclear proliferation. Indeed, he explicitly argues that, as the costs of developing nuclear weapons decline, it will become “more necessary” for non-nuclear states to possess them. To a libertarian, however, it is neither necessary nor desirable for states to exist, let alone for them to be armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Error #2
Second, Lemmencier uncritically assumes that nuclear weapons are capable of being deployed for purely defensive purposes. He draws no important distinction between a hydrogen bomb and, say, a slingshot, instead seeing all weapons—“small or large”—as legitimate means of self-defense and equally-suited to that task. That is not, however, the standard libertarian view, which was aptly expressed by Murray Rothbard in his seminal essay, “War, Peace and the State.” In an often-quoted passage, Rothbard writes:
It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. But another answer that the libertarian is particularly equipped to give is that while the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed, if the will is there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even “conventional” aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction…. We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.
Amen.
Error #3
Lemmencier’s failure to see that fundamental difference leads directly to his third major error. He thinks that “the real probability of [nuclear] weapons being used is quite low,” amounting to less than “.45 percent.” He bases that, in part, on the idea that “the only time in history where nuclear weapons were used was when the United States was able to do it without retaliation.” Although this perspective is not uncommon, it is lamentably naïve and mistaken. As Joshua Mawhorter reminds us, nuclear weapons are a standing threat to inflict instant genocide; they are “used,” not only when they incinerate innocent lives, but wherever and whenever their capacity to do so has its intended, coercive effect. Once we see that, just as a gun may be used to commit a crime without actually firing a shot, a nuclear warhead can be used in the same manner. Realizing that, our eyes are opened to the reality that nuclear weapons have been in near-constant use since their invention. The suggestion that there is a vanishingly low probability of their use is myopic.
Error #4
Fourth, and relatedly, Lemmencier persistently characterizes nuclear weapons as “a means of dissuading potential aggressors,” never recognizing that some means of “dissuasion” are themselves acts of aggression. He argues that “[p]ossession of nuclear weapons by all players is a good and not a bad. Indeed, the more countries possess such dissuasive weapons, the wider will be the territory of peace and stability….” But that requires an Orwellian reversal, where we redefine a state of constant conflict between nuclear powers as “peace.” Lemmencier makes this problem painfully apparent when—without irony—he argues that “[t]he terror equilibrium was as guarantor of peace in Europe during the cold war.” It should be obvious that a “terror equilibrium,” by way of the mutually-assured destruction of millions of civilian lives, is a horrific breach of the peace, not its guarantor. One suspects that if Lemmencier watched Dr. Strangelove, the lesson he would take from it is to stop all this fighting what we need are more war rooms.
Error #5
Fifth, and finally, we come to the methodological process underlying the argument. The bulk of his article is devoted to developing a formal, “game theoretical” model that supposedly illuminates the logic whereby nuclear proliferation among nation-states leads to their peaceful co-existence. The model purports to show that “an arms race between two nuclear countries to establish a power equilibrium should decrease the odds of an armed conflict. The more deadly the weapons become, the more they are dissuasive.” Hence, the greater the number of nuclear-armed states, the lower the probability of a nuclear war. His conclusion is that—as the number of nuclear powers “approaches infinity”—the frequency of nuclear war “will approach zero.”
It is difficult not to simply apply a reductio ad absurdum of the entire position. If the abolition of war truly required an infinite number of states—each armed with its own doomsday device capable of destroying millions of lives in mere minutes—then the cure would be worse than the disease. A libertarian should not agree that freedom is enhanced where the threat of aggression is intensified and institutionalized to the maximum possible extent. Before accepting the peculiar doctrine that we could, and should, create peace through the threat of global annihilation or threat thereof, libertarians would do well to remember what Socrates taught: that it is better to suffer an injustice than to perpetrate one.
