Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom

Scarry (The Body in Pain) takes a long, hard look at America’s nuclear arsenal and finds its existence to be completely incompatible with democracy. She shows how “out-of-ratio weapons”—those that allow a single person or small number of people to kill millions—are by their nature monarchical rather than democratic. Despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution gives the power to declare war to the legislative rather than the executive branch and places the distribution of armaments in the hands of the population as a whole through the Second Amendment, current executive policy arrogates these rights to itself. Scarry’s work is an appeal to the American citizenry and to that of other nuclear powers to reassert their control over these weapons in order to abolish them. While her main arguments are straightforward and readily understood, she strays into lengthy forays on political philosophy and examples of questionable relevance. While 30-plus pages devoted to translations of The Iliad make the point that as long ago as Homer, the consent of soldiers was crucial in the prosecution of warfare, this and other arguments could have been made with more brevity. Specialists will applaud this work, but it will miss the mark with the general public, which most desperately needs to read it. (Feb.)