Atomic doom is not a necessary process that comes over us and has to be accepted. Every step depends on men who take it on the road to disaster; the discovery of natural phenomena as well as their translation into technology, the order to make the bombs as well as the order to drop them and its execution. We must recognize the difference between Man’s work, which is up to us, and the work of nature, which we can master only to a degree.
-Karl Jaspers
If in ancient warfare we could talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a “field.” The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier.
-Paul Virilio
The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is, to a set of relations among States.
-Deleuze and Guattari
The going under of the nuclear sovereign and in some ways the sovereign more generally confronts two different images of sovereignty. The first image is anthropocentric, or the Schmittian Ideal of one Man in charge. The second image is the anthropomorphic sovereign where the fiction of the state is maintained by the constitutive and performative utterances of a sovereign to cover over the lie of the state. Neither is sufficient. The first misses the point entirely, i.e. by what means can there be a fulcrum within a political order called the sovereign. The second focuses too entirely on the lie or ‘social construction’ of the state—the discursive arrangement that produces an image of unification—thus missing the actual material arrangements of power that make it possible, seemingly, for one individual to end the world with 6000 nuclear weapons or to order the death of a single person.
Initially nuclear weapons seemed to solidify even complete the decisionistic model of sovereignty once and for all. In Virilio’s reading of Schmitt’s the state of emergency became permanent and democracy ended once it became possible for a single individual to decide to got to war and to finish that war in 30 minutes. At first glance Virilio’s apocalyptic diagnosis seems accurate. Nuclear weapons at their current numbers could destroy the entire planet and given the structure of the United States nuclear command any Congressional or popular attempt to stop the war would be in vain. This is the backbone of Virilio’s argument. Politics and a democratic balance of power require time. Time to react, time to respond, time to debate, time to strategize, time to implement and ICBMS nullify time.
But Virilio is wrong. The threat of the extreme case has obscured the actual or present case that presents new opportunities for intervention. Politics, whether micro or macro, does not begin and end with the sovereign decision; the sovereign decision (both expressively and in its enactment) emerges from a relay of forces, connections, and other previous decisions, resonances, forces, and actants that are presupposed in each subsequent iteration of the sovereign decision, and layered in multiple streams of time. Even an increasingly automated nuclear arsenal requires the participation of literally millions of people and countless networks, objects, tectonic stability, stable solar flare activity and on and on. The decision only appears singular when Virilio truncates time to the moment the president ‘pushes the button.’ We are not as of yet in that moment so other temporal rhythms abound and each part of the nuclear assemblage follows a different temporal course.
The physical infrastructure of the nuclear arsenal for instance decays at every level. Even steel and concrete are not permanent and must be repaired and replaced. However the Department of Defense does not in fact have an industrial capacity of its own nor has it successfully deployed robots to run the nuclear silos or mined enough uranium or manufactured enough tritium to maintain the weapons we currently have. The liability of a neo-liberal system of procurement and production (including its all volunteer army) is that seemingly top secret and sequestered sites of nuclear stewardship bleed into the everyday economy of Americans citizen and the broader ecology of the planet.
Certainly the sovereign decision is a powerful, expressive, performative act of individuation for the sovereign and highly affective in mobilizing populations, but it is not self-constituted or self-causal. The process of individuation and mobilization necessitates a field of relations and resonances from which the sovereign decision emerges. The decision is also not decisive. Instead it territorializes the relations from which it emerges through its resonant modulation. The enunciation of a sovereign decision (a distinct inquiry from the ‘making of a decision. Certainly no less emeshed but nonetheless ought to remain analytically different) is something like a refrain, the sovereign—in so far as it is constituted by the enunciation of decisions—is a condensation point for national ethos, affect, and institutional identity making. Each decision is constitutive not of the ‘sovereign’ as is the case in Schmitt’s analysis but of a sovereign point of identification or reified, dogmatic consistency which can be recognized but need not remain static or immobile.
Again however such a node is only possible because of its attachments whether physical or resonant (both material) to the complex system of tradition, culture, wires, telephones, satellites, nuclear silos, television cameras, previous sovereign decisions, personal affective characteristics, character, etc. This list is not exhaustive by any measure however it gestures in the direction of what I am trying to get at. The sovereign is not an individual, at best it is an iterative series of moments of performative or expressive individuation resulting from a complex interface with machines, networks, affective fields. The assemblage has a life of its own that cannot and should not be reduced to a single point simply because that is most consistent with our common sensibilities.
In some sense the sovereign is a prosthesis or interface to be worn by whoever is elected to office. (President as first-person-shooter?) This does in part explain why there is so little transition time between each sovereign and so little variation in war powers. It is reference point or index for a history of actions and events made more complex by the function it is meant or believed to serve. It is the titular focal point of an assemblage that if recognized as such would undermine its own function. An assemblage that function because it can inspire belief in it is unity not its dispersed and multivalent organization.
The irony is that the development of miles of fiberoptic networks, new technological interfaces and mobility was supposed to save the centralized and hierarchical sovereign form from its obvious strategic liability—that of being an easy target. However in increasing its ‘survivability’ it has also opened innumerable points of access to the supposed center. Each access point whether it be technological, affective, or economic that can recenter, or reterritorialize the sovereign assemblage. I do not want to make this sound ‘easy’ or ‘painless’ however as this ‘dispersed’ or redundant network system has become ‘everyday’ increasingly the President has been unaware of exactly who is in control or even at how many levels the Nuclear-sovereign-assemblage can be engaged or reterritorialized.
The former Soviet Union has faced the dark side of this arrangement in the phenomena of ‘loose nukes’. In general the loss of sovereign control is seen as a ‘tragedy’, a prelude to destruction. As a result, the positive sites of intervention are less frequently recognized. However even the ‘dark side’ of losing control has a silver lining. North Korea has not been invaded and is now receiving significant food aid to relieve an ongoing famine in part because of it furtive nuclear development no doubt aided by the ‘loose nuke’ phenomena even if only the phenomena of ‘loose lips’ in the transfer of information.
It is also the case that the nuclear-sovereign-assemblage requires a massive industrial capacity to continue its day-to-day operations not to mention the difficulty of disposing of the waste made in its production. At both ends of the nuclear fuel cycle—mining and disposal—the Department of Defense lacks the industrial and waste management capacity to sustain either effort. Once private businesses, public and private land, and public finance become involved so to new population gain access to the assemblage and indeed become part of the assemblage. Effective divestment of South Africa and blood diamond producing countries demonstrate that the neo-liberal state apparatus cannot survive in isolation. The protest of many Indian nations from the Western Shashone in Nevada, the Navajo in New Mexico, to the Lakota Sioux, to allow new uranium mining and waste disposal on their land has politicized what was thought to be unpoliticizable. In each protest or hearing before the court the nuclear fuel cycle and its connection to a history of genocide and subsequent irradiation of the Indian survivors must be confronted. The Lakota Sioux—who have fought the expansion of Uranium mining and milling in the Dakotas—have as of December 20th, 2008 successfully succeeded from the United States and declared themselves a newly independent nation.
I will refer to this phenomenon as the neo-liberal liability a liability that is created from the economic and material assemblage required to support the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to oppose capitalism because of its dispersed and differentiated machinic capabilities however the logic of capitalism—flow—is at odds with the necessities of the Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage—secrecy and carceral terroritoriality, the restriction or repression of flow. New lines of flight are created by the attempt to enhance the survivability of the sovereign. As the assemblage becomes more distributed and more complex a new fragility emerges. The assemblage is not fragile, the redundant network system enhances its ability to ‘survive’. However it undermines its ability to remain aborescent to sustain the identity necessary for centrality and hierarchy.
As will be discussed later in the dissertation networks can lead to new forms of control, even strengthen the ability to regulate or manage populations however the networked model in so far as it achieves its goal of decentering and detargeting can only direct or re-direct flow it cannot effectively damn it up.
By way of a crude time line one could say that sovereignty in the United States can be characterized by three periods. 1. The Republican model where by the inherent advantage or tendency towards centralization through war plays out as a juridical struggle between the three branches of government (pre-media the role of the American public is limited but not non-existent). 2. The Imperial model where by the development of nuclear weapons enables the president to ignore the other two branches because war can begin and end without a single soldier putting their boots on. 3. The empire model where by the means of war becomes dispersed such that the sovereign’s function is more like a refrain to give consistency to a dispersed network pluripotential networks each on the cusp of escaping the state/military apparatus and becoming highly destructive war machines.
The transition from each stage roughly is cybernetic in so far as they are periodized by the evolution of ‘codes’. In the first model a code of conduct or an expectation of behavior, the gentleman sovereign. Second the monopoly of force the attempt to centralize the C3I of nuclear war through a centralization of codes vested in the president. Lastly the dispersal of codes such that the system can maximize survivability but can no longer maintain hierarchy or sovereignty in relation to war. Instead the sovereign survives as an expressive point of identification not as the causal entity of war. War then becomes more obviously emergent. Resonances and relations throughout the Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage exist in a continuum between non-war and war depending on the necessity for testing, alert, or accidental machinic statements such as weather balloons, reactor meltdowns, or acute paranoia.
The point is that the war/non-war distinction is not determined by an efficient causal chain—as in banal readings of Schmitt—where the Sovereign decides and presto-chango we are now in a state of war. The emergences of war follows a non-linear, multi-nodal, and thus often unpredictable temporal progression with many stages in between a state of war and a state of peace, although I don’t want to deny these shifts can take place rapidly. What the subsequent chapters will make apparent is that this refusal of the two images of sovereignty one anthropocentric, the other anthropomorphic will be necessary in other kinds of war and are not merely the product of automation and technology. The technology of ‘humans’ is no more predictable or linear once the field of affect, and non-human actants are introduced into the micro-geography of warfare. Nuclear weapons may have provoked the rethinking of the terrain of war’s emergence—as objects often do—but it is not its cause or inventor.
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