Carrying a big stick – ideas of the atomic age

The political concept of “Speak softly and carry a big stick” took root during the presidency Theodore Roosevelt and ultimately helped to shape the US’s foreign policy. This was true both in the early nineteen hundreds and also in the mid-to-late nineteen hundreds when the focus of the nuclear-arms race evolved to essentially become “Forget about the speaking part, just carry the biggest stick.”

If we analyze the Big Stick ideology, the atomic age, and especially the ensuing nuclear-arms race, we find traces of ideological themes from previous generations and centuries. Many of the ideals of the atomic age and nuclear arms race found root from earlier imperialist movements. For example, in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Machiavelli declares,

“Hence it comes that all armed prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed prophets have been destroyed.”

“From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved. The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved”.

The concepts of ‘being feared is more important than being loved’ and the importance of being armed are similar to that of Roosevelt’s philosophy of carrying a big stick and represent an imperialistic and militaristic philosophies.

However, there are some important ramifications that come with atomic technological development. That stick (i.e., atomic weapons), as Katherine Chipman explains excellently in her blog post, can become a monster. So much so that eventually the creator speaks out against it, as in the way J. Robert Oppenheimer did.

Also, Professor Meg Jacobs said in her MIT open-course syllabus,

“The dropping of the first atomic bomb at the end of World War II ushered in a new era in American history. From here on, warfare posed the threat of total annihilation and Americans lived with anxiety over atomic weapons. But nuclear power also promised a path to a prosperous future.”

 Atomic energy is a big stick, a very big stick. For that there is no question. However, atomic energy, like any other tool (e.g., the internet), can be used both for good or ill. The perennial question is how do we harness and benefit from atomic energy’s great uses, without having it become, like Katherine said, a “monster”.


 

Atomic bomb over Nagasaki.  Source: nisei.hawaii.edu