October 29, 2006
Noah Feldman and the “Second Nuclear Age” Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:55 PM EST There is a long and interesting article by Noah Feldman in today’s New York Times Magazine titled “Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age.” Feldman points out that nuclear proliferation in the Muslim Middle East looks likely. Iran is close, and if Iran gets there, various other states (Saudi Arabia and Egypt chief among them) will be under significant pressure to follow. Feldman then wonders whether we should be peculiarly alarmed at the prospect of more Muslim regimes in possession of nuclear weapons. In other words, are weapons of mass destruction any more alarming when they are controlled by Muslim states than they are when controlled by anyone else? The standard anti-alarmist theory is that deterrence worked during the Cold War, so there is no reason to assume that it won’t work with Iran, etc. The anti-anti-alarmist theory is that Stalin and his successors were, in this respect at least, rational and relatively unadventurous, even cautious, but that there is no reason to assume that modern Islamist thinking is necessarily going to produce the same behavior. In other words, those current Islamists who claim exhilaration at the thought of martyrdom, by which they sometimes mean suicidal attacks on civilians, may mean what they say. Feldman performs the service of surveying the history of Muslim thought on the laws of war, and to a lesser degree surveys Muslim practice. A very short précis of Feldman’s argument: Islam has generally sought to restrain the violence of war by laws of war and has condemned violence against civilians; recently things have been different; the trends are not necessarily encouraging; and we cannot know how things will turn out. This seems uncontroversial. Feldman usefully points out that permitting violence against civilians, indeed celebrating violence against civilians, began as a response to Palestinian murders of Israeli civilians (Israeli women are asserted to be legitimate targets because they are conscripted as soldiers by an evil government), then spread to justifications of violence against American civilians (American civilians are asserted to be legitimate targets because they vote for evil governments), and is now used to justify violence against Muslim civilians. This is well-observed, and it suggests that various responses to Bush’s announcement of a war on terror, responses that sought to distinguish the acceptability of murdering Israeli civilians (“the right of resistance”) from murdering other civilians, may have been not only evil and cowardly but short-sighted, or, more baldly, remarkably stupid. Feldman ends rather equivocally: “An Islamic bomb would not be just the same as the nationalist bomb of a majority-Muslim state, nor would it be the same as a Christian bomb or a Jewish one. But its role in history will depend, ultimately, on the meaning Muslims give it, and the uses to which they put their faith and their capabilities.” Some readers may be puzzled by an omission: After canvassing the possibility that an Islamic bomb might mean the capacity for very long-distance genocide in the hands of murderous and suicidal lunatics, Feldman spends almost no time addressing the wisdom of using force to delay or destroy Iranian nuclear weapons facilities before they can produce a bomb. He may think that he doesn’t need to do so, and that he is rather demonstrating the need consider that possibility very seriously. But what is most useful about Feldman’s article is that it points out the limits of an analogy between a stable balance of terror during the Cold War—successful deterrence—and the prospect for deterrence in the future. Showing the limits of historical analogy is generally a sound procedure. It is interesting to reflect on one paradox: People who pride themselves on their lack of “Eurocentrism,” and on their awareness of the variety of perspectives in a multicultural world, seem the most certain that all cultures will handle nuclear weapons in the same relatively prudent fashion. People who rarely use the word multiculturalism without spitting seem to be the ones who are canvassing the possibility that different cultures may have ominously different views of nuclear weapons. Feldman may be an exception to this pattern. I haven’t noticed too many others.
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