The Ring of Doom in the postmodern world

J.R.R. Tolkien did not like it when people tried to find analogies in LOTR or any of his other writings. He wanted people to take his books at face value, not try to read meanings "into" them from the outside. Regardless, many people have found analogies in LOTR, most commonly images of world war. Despite Tolkiens' protestations, this makes sense because he did fight in World War I. After seeing Peter Jacksons' films, particularly the "Council of Elrond" scene in FOTR, a new analogy arose in my mind - that of the Ring as the terrible power of nuclear weapons in our postmodern world. The scene is like a mythological IAEA - all the races of Middle-Earth gather to debate the fate of the Ring, and to decide who will be the Ringbearer. There is a lot of argument and conflict over this issue; jealousy and suspicion abounds; precious unity is sacrificed to the thought of using the Ring as a weapon to defeat Middle-Earth's enemies. In the meantime, the Ring again appears as a character in its own right; through it, Sauron watches the feuding council members with presumed glee, knowing that their misguided notions will divide them and make his victory more certain. We have a vision of the Ring in fire, surrounding the councillors and consuming them, though all are unaware of this except Frodo. Only Frodo sees that to use the power of the Ring as a weapon plays directly into Sauron's hands. Only Frodo understands that, as tempting as it might be to use the unsurpassed power of the Ring for good, the very act of using it results in an evil completely out of proportion to whatever good may result. Even banishing Sauron from Middle-Earth, using the power of the Ring to accomplish this, would not be worth the cost - being enslaved by the Ring and forced to create his own dictatorship. For the Ring allows no one who wears it to remain good, regardless of their original intentions. This is the power of nuclear weapons in our postmodern world. Now that the Soviet Union is over, the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction is over; and the temptation to use nuclear weapons has only grown. The Bush administration is a prime example of this. The Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 was a reaffirmation of the position that, not only will nuclear weapons not be retired from our arsenal, they are central to our national defence strategy. A 1993 ban on small-yield devices was lifted, and the Pentagon is now busy designing and making these devices, to use in battlefield operations. Even from a pragmatic point of view, this is madness. Our only hope that WMD's will not be used on the battlefield is restraint. Once either side uses them, the restraint is lifted, and both sides may use them without compunction. Such is the logic of war. But nuclear weapons are WMD's, plain and simple; an engineer may protest that a small-yield device is not WMD (no "mass" there), but any state's army attacked by them can only conclude that WMD's are on the table afterwards. And our troops (and possibly ourselves) will suffer the consequences. Ramping down our pursuit of nuclear weapons would assist in our attempting to persuade countries like North Korea that we are honest brokers; as it is, North Korea decided getting nuclear weapons was the best way of defending itself! A reasonable supposition, if we are in a zero-sum game and nuclear weapons are the best asset to have. Which is exactly what our leadership thinks. The most powerful way this has been brought to my mind is by watching The Fog Of War, by Errol Morris. Robert McNamara asks: is it right and proper that the world's most powerful weapons are on 24-hour alert, able to be launched after a 15-minute warning? That is the state of the US arsenal today. Imagine, God forbid, that Manhattan is destroyed with a suitcase nuclear weapon, and it is traced to Iran. Do we nuke Tehran for this? Do we need to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people because we were attacked? Or do we use whatever conventional weaponry we have and change the regime? The more likely that nuclear weapons are considered vital to our armament, the more likely we will use them. And the waiting period can be short. World War II was the most just war of the 20th century, in the minds of many, and yet McNamara feels uncertainty about the massive firebombing of all of Japan's major cities (this is independent of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). How much evil do we have to do, he asks, to do good? How much killing is necessary? My argument is that we can do however much killing we need to using conventional means. It is better that way anyhow, since it does not allow us to detach ourselves from the suffering we are causing. I understand that war is sometimes unavoidable. But nuclear weapons are the most destructive forces ever created. They are a Ring of Doom. They are seductive because they are so powerful. But if we are not careful, we, like Boromir, will find ourselves consumed by them. They are capable, in fact, of consuming the whole of the earth. No other technology can do this - it is truly mythological in its scope. For this reason they, like the Ring, must be destroyed. We must continue our mission of nonproliferation - but we must not consider ourselves outside of the treaty. Unfortuately many in Congress and the White House itself think, like Boromir, that the Ring can be used, that we can control it, that it does not control us. The military-industrial complex is a corrupting influence everywhere it reaches into our society, but the nuclear aspect is the most ominous. I hope there are enough of us who witness, like Frodo, to the futility of using Doom for good, and eventually succeed in the argument that these weapons must be ended.