Psychology of the Nuclear Threat—2019

Freud “struggled to understand and explain the fundamental nature of humankind, the biological bases for aggression and war and the psychological roots of destructive and self-destructive behavior and intent in both the individual and the group.” (Levine & Simon, 1988, p. 2) In his attempts to do so, he was no doubt deeply influenced by his experience of and reaction to the First World War. The devastation and the number of casualties and deaths produced by that war were exponentially greater than any war that had preceded it. (For a very gripping first-hand account of what that war was like at the front lines and in the trenches, see W.R. Bion's [1997] War Diaries).

Freud's thoughts about the inherent destructiveness of mankind and the inevitability of war are reflected in his writings on the Death Instinct (e.g., Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920), his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (Freud, 1915), and his correspondence with Einstein (Freud, 1933). He did not live long enough to see the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He did not experience the nuclear arms race with its balance of power resting on a policy called mutually assured destruction or hear warnings that the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the cold war confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union had grown so large and the possibility of command and control of those weapons had become so fragile and uncertain that any outbreak of hostilities between the two super powers was likely to produce an exchange of nuclear missiles that would produce a condition called “nuclear winter,” and effectively annihilate all of mankind and eliminate life on earth as we know it.

We can only imagine his response, but what of ours? It is striking to note the relative weakness, even absence, of our recognition and response—as citizens and as psychoanalysts—in the face of increasingly overwhelming evidenc