A Physicist's Manifesto for Appeasement

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine my recurring nightmare has been to wake up to the headline:

First Nuclear Strike Since 1945: 100 Dead!

A low-yield airburst over an abandoned airfield might produce such damage, with minimal contamination if done carefully.

It would fit the profile regularly rehearsed in Russia’s ZAPAD military exercises: escalate with a tactical nuke to de-escalate from a land grab against a NATO country.

That such a possibility is real was reflected by the decision in January this year to move the Doomsday Clock, maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to “85 seconds to midnight”.

In his new book, 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist’s argument against rearmament, the acclaimed scientist Carlo Rovelli makes an impassioned plea for nuclear disarmament, and gainst the current round of rearmament Western countries have engaged in following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

I admire Rovelli. Not only for his groundbreaking work in theoretical physics, but for the explanatory power of his book Helgoland, which traces the origin story of quantum physics.

So it pains me to say that his book as at best, facile and at worst - when read alongside his statements on the Ukraine war - a sustained apologia for appeasing Russian imperialism.

At the core of Rovelli’s book is the story of the debates, mistakes and questionable choices that led physicists in the 1940s to build a nuclear bomb. He believes the US decision to begin the Manhattan project was “irrational”, because the war was always going to be won through conventional means. And that it left humanity with a catastrophic capability for self destruction.

But woven around this story is a narrative about today that relies on crude parallels and outright historical revisionism, wrapped up in simplistic logic that – bizarrely for someone trained in scientific rigour – does not cohere.

The trouble begins when Rovelli tries to explain the march to war in the late 1930s. Germany armed itself, “as it has today” he interjects, and then demanded border adjustments along cultural and linguistic lines “as happened not long ago after the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

These asides are fatuous: Germany is only rearming itself today after an agonising debate, following Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The only “border adjustment” Germany achieved during the collapse of Soviet communism was reunification of the two Germanys, which was the overwhelming desire of people on both sides of the Berlin Wall. There is no way that either of these acts can be compared with those of Nazism.

He then claims the Allies showed “little enthusiasm” for an anti-German alliance in the 1930s, and that this explains Stalin’s sudden embrace of a strategic pact with Hitler on 23 August 1939.

Well, Carlo, it’s a lot more complicated than that. So “little enthusiasm” did France show for collective security that it signed a mutual defence treaty with the USSR in 1935, as did Czechoslovakia.

The reasons Stalin sacked Maxim Litvinoff in May 1939 and installed Molotov, telling him to “clear the Jews out of the foreign ministry” are disputed by historians. Either way, it led to the Soviet crime of the century – a new, strategic alliance with Nazism that destroyed the morale of millions of left-wing European workers.

And as late as the Autumn of 1940 Stalin considered actually joining the Axis – a move that would have left communist parties from France to Japan accepting permanent Nazi rule.

Rovelli continues the story of the 1930s:

“Russia, frightened by Hitler’s expected continental triumphs, rushes to rearm itself (as it is doing now). Germany, worried (as now) by the abrupt acceleration of Soviet rearmament…does what was planned from the beginning: it invades Russia.”

This gets the sequence plain wrong. Soviet rearmament began in 1927, spurred by the spurious concept of the “Third Period”, which predicted the triumph of fascism everywhere, and an imminent attack by Britain and France.

For sure, the triumph of Nazism, the repudiation of disarmament, and the Spanish Civil War all spurred the USSR towards greater rearmament, but the idea that this was a simple tit-for-tat escalation driven by irrational fears is outlandish.

Rearmament in the 1930s was a rational response to the deterioration of collective security and the collapse of the League of Nations. Those who started late got conquered.

And there is no valid parallel between Russian rearmament today and that of 1930s. Russia began its hybrid offensives in its “near abroad” with Georgia in 2008, seized Crimea in 2014, engaged in prolonged asymmetric warfare in the Donbas ever since, and mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with an explicit ethno-nationalist aim of destroying its language, culture and sovereignty.

The only possible way you can interpret these actions as defensive, is if you view them through the dirt-smeared lens of “NATO aggression” – a trope all too familiar on the Italian Stalinist left.

Unfortunately, Rovelli has a track record of echoing the “NATO aggression” trope. On the eve of the Russian invasion, he tweeted:

Five words are sufficient to stop the Ukraine madness: "NATO won't expand to Ukraine". So hard to say them?

Subsequently Rovelli signed a “peace” declaration accusing NATO of aggression against Russia in Ukraine, called for the population of Ukraine’s Donbas region to be allowed to vote to join Russia, and framed the 2014 Euromaidan uprising as a Western-backed “coup”.

None of these utterances are repeated in the book, which instead sticks the same kind of saintly appeals for peace that Jeremy Corbyn has become renowned for.

Rovelli’s chapter on the Manhattan Project contains the moral-philosophic heart of the argument. It was the product of “exaggerated fear”:

“It is fear, unmotivated and irrational fear, that (then as now) makes us aggressive.”

Since we find ways within civil society to mitigate aggression – rule of law, constitution, human rights – why can’t we do the same in relations between states, asks Rovelli?

For certain it is a human genetic trait that fear drives aggression. And we have certainly erected ways to mitigate such aggression between states: the UN Charter, its convention on the law of the sea, and numerous multilateral agreements – for example the nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

But there is an entire academic discipline – International Relations – founded on the observation that, for states, in certain circumstances, armed conflict can be rational.

The realist view in IR, which assumes a baseline of inter-state anarchy and self interested action, may not rank alongside theoretical physics as science. But as a framework for understanding conflict it is ubiquitous in academia, and cannot be lightly ignored in favour of admonishing governments to “do good”.

Armed with the conviction that all inter-state rivalry is irrational, Rovelli makes the sweeping claim that Israel vs Iran, Russia vs Ukraine, Japan’s rearmament in the face of Chinese expansionism etc are each irrational actions.