Sacrificial causalities of nuclear weapons: Takashi Nagai and Albert Wohlstetter

Abstract

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before.

Keywords

Antinuclear movement biography mythopeic analysis Nagasaki nuclear strategy politics of sacrifice

Introduction

The August 1945 atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki punctuated with extreme violence American victory and Japanese defeat in World War II, profoundly reconstituting both societies, and paradoxically linking them in a tight embrace through the postwar American occupation and emerging alliance. The bomb penetrated the social structure of both Japan and the United States, and of their evolving relationship. The two nations each experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. What human agency and purpose could be found under the imposing structural weight of a nuclear nation, whether for attacker or attacked?

This is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s.¹ In this juxtaposition and comparison, designed to reveal similarities in most-different cases, each figure is necessary to illuminate patterns in the other which might otherwise be overlooked (Lebow, 2015; Lijphart, 1971).

The basic notion of “sacrificial causality” refers to two realities, hidden in plain sight. First, all nuclear strategic claims seek to justify a threatened human sacrifice by nuclear strike in the future, by the threat’s effective achievement—causation—of peace and other national interests today. Second, all nuclear limitation and abolition proposals seek to use the historical specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the possible future human suffering of nuclear war they exemplify, to mobilize political support to effectively cause nuclear reductions today. Sacrificial causality claims cover the spectrum—that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now, or peace by abolition soon enough.

To underscore counterintuitive commonalities of nuclear strategy and nuclear abolition arguments, consider the idea of compellence. Thomas Schelling introduced the concept in his 1966 book, Arms and Influence, and illustrated it with the example of the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan:

The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a threat aimed at all of Japan. The political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo. . . The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destruction they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more. (Schelling, 2020: 17–18).

Schelling’s well-known argument, that the American atomic bombings constituted specific threats designed to compel politically the government of Japan to surrender, finds a surprising counterpart in the “traditional narrative told in Hiroshima about the city’s destiny.”

The narrative asserted that once leaders of nuclear-armed nations visited to Hiroshima, and met with the hibakusha, they would be irrevocably affected and the world would move toward nuclear abolition. The city was imagined as destined to play this essential role, not just of commemorating the nuclear attack, but to compel the abolition of nuclear weapons (Taylor and Jacobs, 2018: 6, emphasis added).

Hence, the traditional strategic story of the U.S. atomic bombing, and also the traditional story told by the city of Hiroshima peace movement about the bombing, both sound motifs of political and moral compellence. This provocative parallel adds to the challenge to reexamine, critique, and complexify such stories of sacrificial causality.

In this article I propose to show that the nuclear social-structural revolution after 1945 demanded from the first two nuclear nations a cosmological, mythopeic response. The argument is that stories, if not causally prior to ideas, norms, and law, are at least mutually imbricated with the ideological, moral, and legal. However, it seeks to dig deeper, to excavate the very origins of core stories of nuclear nationalism and internationalism using a methodological mix of biography,² cultural analysis,³ and illuminative juxtaposition.⁴

Theoretical reconnaissance

Dealing here with history, myth, ideology, narrative and discourse, why not take for my point of departure International Relations (IR) constructivism, or critical IR theory, or perhaps a Foucauldian approach? And why “mythopoeia”? Indeed, with respect to emphasizing the influence of ideas and cultural transformation I borrow much from the former approaches. However, significant flaws limit their usefulness.

When IR constructivism arose strongly in the 1980s and after the Cold War, it held great promise to explicate the origin and change of actors in world politics, including states. However, the promise of constructivism has been blunted, among other reasons, by the almost complete shift of constructivist scholars to idealist approaches (Barkin, 2010; Snyder, 2004), and the failure to seriously answer the agent-structure problem (DeMars and Dijkzeul, 2015, 2019). Nuclear weapons are physical, technological, and historical realities. They can only be understood taking full account of both material and ideational factors interacting in social and political reality (Barnett and Duvall, 2005; Boulding, 1990). This might be called a Weberian assumption.⁵ In both IR and sociology (from whence IR inherited the issue) the agent-structure problem has been recalcitrant to an extreme, prompting efforts to transcend, rethink, or bypass it (Braun et al., 2019; Klotz et al., 2006; Martin and Dennis, 2010).

While I join critical theory in opposing positivism,⁶ nevertheless, I cannot proffer my scholarship as wielding the political force to emancipate oppressed groups or individuals.⁷ Nor do I presume to hold the moral or intellectual authority to deconstruct, in a reductive sense, anyone else’s work or words. Indeed, I have lived inside, at different times, each of the stories of nuclear abolition, nuclear strategy, and Takashi Nagai. I seek not to dismantle them, nor pit them against each other, but instead to draw them into deeper, and perhaps more revealing, conversation.

Foucault’s theoretical sensibility is attractive in several respects that are relevant to understanding nuclear stories: the profound sense of the hidden and open operations of power, historical range, commitment to “political spirituality” as courageous pursuit of truth, refusal to make universal political and moral judgments (and therefore, the strong attention to the particular), sense of the tragic in human affairs, and delineation of the radical encompassment of the stories in and under which humans live.⁸

I have so far resisted this enchantment. Foucault’s anthropology of the human person misses the mark, in its radical relativism (on a pilgrimage toward nihilism without ever arriving), and its vision of life and society as a pervasive struggle for power against everyone else. The truncated anthropology makes for flawed social science.⁹

And so, with these more obvious theoretical paths reckoned flawed, I take a road much less traveled, but not entirely untrod. My theoretical point of departure is an anthropology of the human person as incorrigible storyteller. We humans have never existed, and probably could not survive, individually or collectively, in a condition of storylessness. For better and worse, we are raised and sustained in storied communities.

Not only do stories live inside peoples’ heads, but people live inside their stories as well. We are encompassed by our stories, and live them out by enacting them together. Human stories are, among many other things, cosmological—they narrate a cosmos and our local place in it.¹⁰ This distinguishes a storytelling approach from most IR constructivism, for which political ideas, identities, ideologies and norms live inside people, rather than people living in the story, inhabiting their incanted cosmos.

There is a diffuse but growing literature on the human proclivity and aptitude for storytelling, and mounting awareness that stories are somehow constitutive of human persons and communities—that we make stories and our stories make us. Recent natural science research on storytelling in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology is synthesized by a literary scholar and a journalist in popular books titled, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Gottschall, 2012), and The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Make Them Better (Storr, 2020). These authors breach a wall to open a dialog between science and the humanities, and ironically borrow positivist cultural authority from the scientists, who provide measurable evidence for the constitutive centrality of stories in human affairs.

Political philosophers sound the theme, often in a communitarian key: Taylor (1994) points to the “dialogic” character of human life, through which we define our identities in conversation with others (p. 32). MacIntyre (1981) argues that each person finds a way forward in life by answering the question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” (p. 216). Sandel (2005) proposes, “I move in a history I neither summon nor command which carries consequences nonetheless for my choices and conduct.” (p. 168). They agree that we receive our stories as much as we construct them—an essential corrective to the notion that we construct reality in its entirety with our entirely self-constructed narratives.

Hannah Arendt offers a highly original account of the central importance of the vita activa in public political space, and the parallel importance of recounting such exemplary political action as stories in history, literature and poetry. In her first major work, Arendt argued that totalitarian thought renders men superfluous by first abolishing the meaning of all human lives (Arendt, 1976: 457). In response, she proposed, our two most powerful forms of opposition and remedy are:

. . . the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence. (Arendt, 1998: 324)

The enormous moral significance that Arendt attributes to stories recounting exemplary political events and actions is closely linked to her views on thinking and judging. As if in provocation to future generations, the first page of Arendt’s book on Judgment was coiled in her typewriter, still blank, on the day she died in 1975.¹¹ If Arendt’s insights are sometimes idiosyncratic, she left us with the invitation to use our own judgment.

These sources and insights on human storytelling do not fall together into a theory, or even a rough conceptual framework. But they do point in a general direction. I want to call that direction mythopeic analysis, a concept drawn from J. R. R. Tolkien. There are two reasons for the relevance of Tolkien for this discussion. First, his entire opus of stories and poems, and essays on stories and poems, points to most of what I find useful in the approaches mentioned above. Paradoxically, Tolkien’s sensibility shares much with Foucault’s: awareness of power and tragedy, attention to the particular, courageous pursuit of truth, and sense of our paradoxical encompassment in our own stories.¹² Foucault garnered notoriety and authority from his personal and intellectual transgressions. Tolkien transgresses as well. First, along with Arendt, Tolkien breaches the border between fiction and history, either of which may recount past social and political models and envision new ones. Second—in an epistemological alternative to positivism and a serious transgression of it—Tolkien broaches the possibility, and kindles the hope, of a medieval-inspired reenchantment of the world.¹³

Tolkien is also relevant to this discussion for his use or coining of the terms myth, mythopoeia, and fairy-stories in two essays and a poem in the 1930s (Tolkien, 1963, 2001; Tolkien et al., 2014). (I am interested in his broader claims, beyond questions of fairy-stories as a literary form.) In discussing these words he is famously elusive, playful when expected to be precise, issuing invitations (to visit the “realm of fairy-story”) rather than making arguments. Beyond the simple derivation of Greek term “mythopoeia” as “myth-making,” Tolkien never attempts to define the term or address it analytically. He is more direct, but no less elusive, in a discussion of “myth” in Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics:

The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. . .. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. (Tolkien, 1963: 14–15).

It is beyond the scope of this article to scrutinize Tolkien’s sources. However, there is an alternative—we may listen in to characters from The Lord of the Rings. For example, Sam Gamgee asks his master Frodo Baggins, between battles in Chelob’s Lair, “I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” (Tolkien, 1973: 362). Embedded in this scene is both the imposition of the cosmological social structure of Middle-Earth (including material reality and tales), and also the receptivity of Sam and Frodo from which their agency springs.¹⁴

A mythopeic, cosmological approach is not a framework or theory in the conventional sense of predicting what a researcher should expect to find. Instead, it is a door-opening perspective, encouraging researchers to look harder, in new places, using new methods, for new unexpected things. The approach is in an embryonic stage of development; therefore, let this article provide evidence of the potential fruitfulness, or foolishness, of the approach.

If the nuclear revolution changed everything, as many have intuited, it did so less by the physics and more by the stories that we have told and retold about it (Jervis, 1989). And this complex, international social formation endures only so long as we continue to live in the stories, and to spend and work profligately on building and maintaining institutions imagined within those stories. This social structure of deterrence is examined in the “fourth wave” of deterrence theory (Adler, 2009; Lupovici, 2010; Schmid, 2019). Consider deterrence, nonproliferation, nuclear arsenals, credibility, nuclear umbrellas, the western alliance system, stability, the international community, arms control. These have been very real and enduring social and material facts. But all of them are now seriously called into question (Doyle, 2020; Fitzpatrick, 2016; Ford, 2018; Green, 2020; Lieber and Press, 2020; Roberts, 2016; Walker, 2012). If what we thought was rock is turning to sand and shifting under our feet, then this is an opportune time to examine more closely the deeper origins of the stories that constitute the social facts of nuclear weapons and strategies.

Takashi Nagai

Takashi Nagai, born in Matsue, Japan in 1908, was a Catholic convert from scientific atheism, a physician and radiologist, and a military veteran of Japan’s wars with China in the 1930s. He was living with his wife Midori and two children and working at a hospital in Nagasaki when an American B-29 dropped the atomic bomb on the city on August 9, 1945. Despite the fact that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima 3 days before, the local government and citizens of Nagasaki were left completely unprepared.

Nagai was Chief of the Radiology Department at Nagasaki Medical University. When the bomb detonated at 11:02 AM, he was at his desk in the Radium Room, preparing to teach, only 700 m from the center of the blast. His immediate and spontaneous response to the catastrophe is documented in his “Atomic Bomb Rescue and Relief Report,” which he submitted to the President of the Nagasaki Medical University 58 days after the bombing (Nagai, 1945). Nagai had no reason to think that this report would ever reach a large audience.

Though protected by concrete walls, the hospital patients and staff were affected by the blast, radiation, and subsequent fires. Within a short time, twelve injured staff members responded as a remnant of the 11th Medical Corps. They were nurses, medical students, and two doctors, and Nagai emerged as the leader.

Nagai intuited that he and his surviving colleagues needed a sense of purpose, solidarity, and hope. From the beginning, he embodied and conveyed positive agency in one of the most oppressive social structural circumstances we might imagine, through four roles: as physician, scientist, Japanese citizen, and humanist.

In the first minutes after the blast, four of the twelve volunteers realized that they were bleeding, several were blinded temporarily, and all had been heavily irradiated and lost clothing in the blast. This group had years of camaraderie, but each member was at risk of psychological collapse in a wrecked hospital amid a leveled city, the ruins of both rapidly catching fire.

Nagai (1945) responded first as physician (p. 13). After gathering the group in front of the entrance, he gave the order, “Help people first and equipment second.” The team now had a sense of purpose—to rescue and evacuate patients and injured staff from the hospital, whom they moved to relative safety on a nearby hillside. The corps began treating patients from both the hospital and nearby neighborhoods, as they would continue to do for almost 2 months, with few medical supplies to treat baffling new radiation diseases.

Nagai responded also as a loyal Japanese citizen. By 4:00 PM, the front half of the hospital was in flames. Nagai (1945) wanted to carry a flag, so they painted with their blood on a white bedsheet the Hinomaru—the red, rising sun that was the symbol of the Japanese nation (p. 16). This gesture initiated a project that Nagai would embody and propose for the remaining 6 years of his life: to recast the Japanese warrior ideal of sacrifice for the Emperor into a new ideal of sacrifice for the people and peace. For these 12 Japanese citizens, the flag now meant that they were not passive victims; they were not defeated by this war or by this bomb. They were not crushed, whether by their injuries and surrounding carnage, or by the immense structural forces of culture, science, politics, and war that had created them.

On the second and third days, the members of the medical corps each returned to their own houses, but found nothing left. Nagai visited the remains of his family home and found only the bones of his wife Midori, which he cremated, and her melted rosary. His mother-in-law and two children had been evacuated to safety over the mountain and survived unharmed.

Despite his horrific personal losses, as a clinical radiologist trained in atomic physics, Nagai focused his scientific gaze on the reality before him. The first two chapters of his Report offered a capsule primer on atomic theory and structure, and a detailed description of the Nagasaki bombing with informed speculations on the causes of the particular effects that he had observed. The largest portion of the report entailed a preliminary description and classification of injuries and symptoms they observed, and evaluation of the efficacy of their experimental therapies.

Though Emperor Hirohito had announced Japanese surrender in an ambiguous radio message on August 15, and the formal surrender occurred on September 2, Nagai considered his team still at war. The Report comments frequently on their fear of daily overflights by “enemy planes.” Nevertheless, his conclusion looked beyond the end of the war, already facing the overwhelming challenge of rebuilding. Nagai (1945: 72) observed a paradox: “At this time of tragedy, it shows the triumph of science. How can I face this fact?” Though still in mourning for the victims of the bombing, he also sympathized with the American atomic physicists and indeed all scientists including himself who were implicated in building the bomb. His heart and mind cried out in hope for some transformation of the physical, scientific, and moral miseries of Japan and the world.

As the American occupation ensued, Nagai was bedridden by the combination of preexisting leukemia and radiation from the bombing. Friends helped him build a hut on the site of his destroyed home, where he stayed for the rest of his life, writing, corresponding, and meeting with a continuous stream of visitors, with his children often at his bedside.

The Bells of Nagasaki, which ultimately became his most popular book, was not allowed by American occupation authorities to be published in Japan until 1949, 2 years before his death (Nagai, 1984). However, his national and international reputation had been sown 4 years earlier by his funeral address at the Urakami Catholic Cathedral, located near the Nagasaki Medical University where Nagai worked, and also 700 m from the epicenter of the bomb. A funeral was held on November 23, 1945 for the 8000 Catholics who had died in the bombing. In this address Nagai articulated the source of his hope and his proposal, not only for his fellow Catholics, but also for all Japanese, and indeed for the whole world. He expressed himself in theological language, but the address was in another sense an “empirical” work based on immersive social research of listening to the people around him for the previous 3 months since the bombing and surrender.

Nagai felt deeply the longing of the people in his audience to transcend their tragic circumstances. Many Japanese were simply crushed psychologically and spiritually, with no hope to rebuild, either believing that the bombing was a punishment from God and that the people who died were evil and were suffering in hell, or else hating themselves individually and collectively for their contribution to the senseless violence of the war, and their subsequent defeat and powerlessness. A few spirited young men could find hope only through the determination or fantasy to restart the war, in order to avenge both the Americans and their own incompetent leaders and wrench some kind of victory from defeat (Nagai, 1984: 99–110).

Perhaps most of all, Nagai was moved by the faith of his wife Midori in life, and her melted rosary beads that he had found with her bones after the bombing. Nagai knew that the deepest source of his hope—as a physician, scientist, citizen, and humanist—was his faith; and particularly as a Catholic who had married into the dramatic and singular history of the Catholic community of Nagasaki. For more than two centuries, under the Tokogawa Shogunate, Japan had largely closed itself off from the world, severely limiting trade with Western powers, and brutally suppressing the Catholic faith brought by Western missionaries. Before this “Seclusion Era,” Nagasaki had been the largest center of Catholicism in the country. Even during the 200 years of exceptionally thorough religious suppression, with no priests or official church presence, some Catholics of Nagasaki had sustained their faith in secrecy, passed it on to their children, and awaited the return of the priests after 1859 (Doak, 2011: 12–13). The ancestors of Midori’s parents—Nagai’s in-laws—had been lay leaders through the period of underground faith and martyrdom (Glynn, 1988: 59).

Nagai’s emerging proposal for a new Japanese sacrificial ideal was shaped deeply by this Nagasaki Catholic legacy. As he prepared his funeral address in November 1945, Nagai had all of these recent and historical social facts on his mind; they all needed to be enfolded in a common story.

At the open-air funeral held in and around the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral, Nagai spoke in memory of the Catholics who had died in the bombing. He had heard that Nagasaki was not the first target planned by the American pilots, and he also wondered why the bomb exploded over Urakami Cathedral, rather than over the munition factories farther south.¹⁵ He speculated that, “It was the providence of God that carried the bomb to that destination.” Going on, he sought a path by which some good could be found in the evil of the war (Nagai, 1984: 107–109):

. . . The human family has inherited the sin of Adam . . . Joyfully we have hated one another; joyfully we have killed one another. And now at last we have brought this great and evil war to an end. But in order to restore peace to the world it was not sufficient to repent. We had to obtain God’s pardon through the offering of a great sacrifice . . . Only when Nagasaki was destroyed did God accept the sacrifice. Hearing the cries of the human family, He inspired the emperor to issue the sacred decree by which the war was brought to an end.

How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace! . . . Eight thousand people, together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life. All without exception were good people whom we deeply mourn.

. . . We Japanese, a vanquished people, must now walk along a path that is full of pain and suffering . . . But this painful path along which we walk carrying our burdens—is it not also the path of hope which gives to us sinners an opportunity to expiate our sins? . . . Let us give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for the sacrifice. Let us give thanks that through this sacrifice peace was given to the world and freedom of religion to Japan . . .

Nagai’s funeral oration articulated a hybrid claim—not only an unverifiable mystical claim, but also a social-scientific causal claim that the sacrifice of the Urakami Catholics had brought peace to the world, with God as the intervening variable. Is any part of Nagai’s social-scientific causal claim potentially subject to confirmation or disconfirmation with historical evidence? Does consideration of Nagai’s alternative explanation cast any doubt on conventional historical explanations of Japanese surrender?

What is the “sacrificial causality” in Nagai’s story? On its face, Nagai’s claim that the sacrifice of 8000 Nagasaki Catholics allowed God to bring peace to the world is both outrageous and outlandish. However, Japan had already offered the lives of 2.7 million of its own citizens for the prosecution of the war. These deaths had been portrayed explicitly to the Japanese people as sacrificial in the context of emperor worship and the warrior ideal (Dower, 2000: 45). The same warrior ideal had justified the sacrificial killing of more than 20 million Asians by the Japanese in conquered and occupied areas from Manchuria to New Guinea. They were sacrificed to the anticolonial ideal of expelling Western powers and taking back “Asia for Asians” (Miscamble, 2011).

In that larger context and at that time, Nagai’s claim of sacrificial causality may have seemed less inconceivable. As Miyamoto (2012) argues, “Nagai’s interpretation of the bombing turns on a sacrificial logic similar to that of the Japanese national narrative: it glorifies those who have died at war, surrounding their memories in a sacred aura of sanctity.”

Nagai’s sacrificial causality would be easier to dismiss out of hand if there were definitive and settled answers to the historical questions of how the Pacific war came to an end with domestic peace and social stability in Japan, with broad international peace across Asia, and both accomplished in a swift and decisive manner. This was perhaps the least likely outcome of the war from a standpoint only a few months earlier in 1945.

There were several plausible scenarios in which the war could have ended much less decisively, instead with continuing violence and chaos in Japan and East and Southeast Asia for months or years to come. Emperor Hirohito feared, with good cause, that if he had delayed even a few days or weeks longer in forcing a consensus for surrender in the government cabinet, then he and the government would have been overthrown by militarists in the army. They would almost certainly have prolonged the war to a bitter end with more months of bombings and a bloody invasion (Frank, 1999: 345). Indeed, Hirohito’s personal decisiveness in facing down the military oligarchy in this instance was entirely out of character with his record of more than a decade as a wartime emperor (Bix, 2000). With no surrender, President Truman planned to drop the next available atomic bomb on Tokyo, which would have decapitated the government, leaving no legitimate authority to issue a surrender declaration that could have commanded obedience by the Japanese people at home and the Japanese military spread across Asia (Frank, 1999: 327). Finally, under any scenario that would have significantly prolonged the war, the U.S. military had already issued new targeting orders effective August 11 to attack the entire Japanese coastal railroad system with conventional bombs, precipitating mass famine within months (Frank, 1999: 350–355).

Even after Hirohito finally made his decision to surrender, a military coup attempt was foiled only because every key officer either opposed the coup or committed ritual suicide rather than disobey the emperor. Another attempt almost succeeded to intercept the audio tape of Hirohito’s radio address of surrender before it could be broadcast. And Japanese leaders harbored significant uncertainty as to whether their overseas troops would obey the surrender order, even if they did hear it from the Emperor himself (Frank, 1999: 346).

Frank (1999: 359) concludes his exhaustive study of the end of the Japanese empire with this assessment:

The explicit or implicit premise underlying much of the great controversy over the end of the Pacific war is that the actual termination was the worst possible outcome and that some other course could have brought peace earlier, or at least without the use of atomic weapons. But the real question about this historical moment is why the Japanese government surrendered as early as it did and why Japan’s armed forces capitulated in an organized fashion at all.

According to Frank, therefore, the causal factors offered by historians are not sufficient to explain the timing, extent and finality of the Japanese surrender. Indeed, the conjuncture of all the following events—that the Emperor would surrender (1) before a domestic coup or civil war, and (2) before Truman dropped the next atomic bomb on Tokyo, and also (3) before bombing the railroads caused mass famine; and in addition that (4) the coup attempt would fail, and finally that (5) Japanese military leaders and forces abroad would almost universally obey the surrender order—all this appears quite astonishing in retrospect. None of the conventional historical explanations of Japanese surrender, whether separately or in combination—neither the atomic bombings on August 6 and 9 nor the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on August 8—are sufficient to account for the full range of outcomes. None of this verifies or confirms Nagai’s claims of sacrificial causality in a decisive way. However, the balance of historical evidence may cast some doubt on the conventional historical explanations of Japanese surrender (including Schelling’s nuclear compellence argument).

Nagai’s sacrificial logic of peace leads into his response to the problem of the evil posed by the war and nuclear weapons. Nagai proposed something like a theodicy—a defense or justification of God’s existence or justice “in the face of the apparent quantity, types, and distribution of evil that we find around us.” (Murray, 2008: 353) Japan had already tolerated the loss of at least 300,000 civilians to American conventional bombing (Dower, 1986). For Nagai, the difference in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the diffuse sin of the human family that caused war was ingeniously compressed and condensed by the American scientists into a single new machine, the atomic bomb. The implicit question was now whether this new weapon, or the Americans who had wielded it so brutally, had become the new god, deposing and superseding both the Christian god and the Emperor god.

The concept of theodicy is stretched in some respects as a template for understanding Nagai’s message. First, Emperor Hirohito remained in a ceremonial political role after the war, and he issued a statement on January 1, 1946 that allowed the American occupiers to believe that he was “deposed” as the Emperor god, by his own decision. (The Supreme Commander Allied Powers had requested the statement with exactly that purpose.) However, the Japanese text of the statement allowed people to continue to affirm that the Emperor was descended from the sun goddess (Dower, 2000: 308–318). To the extent that this belief was held in Japan, the divinely descended Emperor would be shielded from cosmological blame for the war (as his exclusion from charges under the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal ensured legally).

Second, the vast majority of Japanese people were not monotheists, so they would not be concerned about the goodness of a single all-powerful God. They were troubled about their own value and significance as a Japanese people and nation—now defeated, mostly impoverished and powerless, and branded as aggressors in the war. Nagai responded to this brokenness of the Japanese people in his arcane Catholic language.

Third, Nagai asserted that the sins of all people (Joyfully we have hated and killed one another) had caused the bloody war. However, by this logic human sin could have justified the war’s endless continuation. In other words, the war was the natural and just punishment for the sins of all the nations. The unlikely and sudden coming of peace, in contrast, was a gift from God in spite of the sins of the world, and, it would follow, an act of his mercy rather than his justice. The theodicy is complexified but sustained. Finally, in Nagai’s telling, it was the willing sacrifice of the Nagasaki Catholics that had elicited God’s acceptance and brought about the peace, which confirmed that the Japanese had retained agency in their agony. The message was soteriological as well as theodicean.

Nagai kept up an active correspondence and many people visited him at his hut in Nagasaki, including the Nobel Prize winning Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, Helen Keller, a legate of Pope Pius XII, and most notably, Emperor Hirohito himself (Glynn, 1988: 221–236). Considering that Nagai spoke directly out of his Catholic experience in Nagasaki, and the fact that Christians in Japan comprised under 1% of the population, his wide appeal in the country was all the more surprising. John Dower avows,

Nagai was extraordinarily charismatic in his prolonged death agony and captured popular imagination to a degree unsurpassed by any other writer about the bombs until the mid-1960s, when the distinguished elderly novelist Ibuse Masuji, a native son of Hiroshima prefecture, published Kuro Ame (Black Rain). (Dower, 2012: 149).¹⁶

Nagai’s Leaving my Children became the 1949 best-selling book of the year in Japan, and his other book, The Bells of Nagasaki, ranked fourth. Miyamoto reports that in 1949, “the Diet commended him, and [The Bells of Nagasaki] was made into a hit movie by Shindô Kaneto in 1950, and its theme song swept Japan.” (Miyamoto, 2005: 141).

Nagai’s influence was part of a much larger churning in Japanese culture and politics to make sense of their catastrophic war and defeat and to find a way forward under American occupation (Dower, 2000). In the context of Japan’s historical path, Nagai contributed, however modestly, to the Japanese transition away from an extreme, violent, and oppressive religious nationalism during the war toward a more democratic, tolerant, and peaceful national story.

In this juxtapositional analysis, Nagai is also interesting for the illumination that his persona and message may bring to understanding a very different figure, an influential civilian defense intellectual in the United States, Albert Wohlstetter.

Albert Wohlstetter

Takashi Nagai died in his hut in Nagasaki on May 1, 1951. Three months earlier, Albert Wohlstetter had begun working as a part-time consultant at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Wohlstetter was born in New York in 1913, the grandson of cosmopolitan Jewish immigrants from Vienna. Trained in mathematics and philosophy of science at Columbia University, he worked in operational research during World War II for the U.S. War Production Board. After the war he partnered and failed in a Santa Monica, California business designing prefabricated homes in the Bauhaus style. Wishing to remain in Santa Monica, Albert followed his wife Roberta to the RAND Corporation, a non-profit civilian research institute and the first modern think tank, recently established there by the U.S. Air Force. This move set the stage for Albert Wohlstetter to become a central figure among civilian defense intellectuals (then a uniquely American role), with profound consequences for American nuclear policy and national story.

By May, Albert had found a research project into which he could pour all of his multifaceted genius for analysis, rhetoric and design. The Air Force had posed a problem to RAND: Where and how should the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) locate its bomber bases? The 1953 R-244 “Base Study,” led by Wohlstetter, analyzed and critiqued the “programmed system” of basing bombers abroad already planned by the Air Force for implementation from 1956 to 1961 (Wohlstetter et al., 1953a). The plan called for relocating about 2000 long range—but not yet intercontinental—B-47 and B-36 bombers from about 30 bases in the continental U.S. to about 70 bases abroad, all hosted by American allies much closer to the Soviet Union. This plan reflected a particular historical moment, including the recent struggle of the U.S. military during World War II to achieve proximity for large scale bombing sorties on targets in both Japan and Germany, and assumptions from the early Cold War when the U.S. still possessed either a nuclear monopoly or vast nuclear superiority. It was conceived shortly after the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen fusion bomb on August 12, 1953, but before the U.S. deployed the truly intercontinental B-52 jet bomber and medium and short-range missiles in the early 1960s.

The analysis compared three alternative basing systems: (1) the Air Force programmed system to base all U.S. bombers overseas, (2) a configuration of bombers based in the U.S. but using air-refueling to strike intercontinentally, and (3) bombers based in the U.S. but refueling at overseas ground staging areas to operate intercontinentally. If the three basing systems were the “independent variables,” the “dependent variable” was which system would deliver (1) maximum striking power against the enemy (2) at the least cost. However, between the independent and dependent variables lay a jungle of mutually interactive intervening variables (Wohlstetter et al., 1953b, 1954).

What was the significance of this massive, technical edifice of calculation? First, it was imposing and authoritative, but its processes were esoteric and its conclusions inscrutable to anyone but the authors themselves. Ironically, the Wohlstetter team had derided the “essay tradition” followed in earlier RAND nuclear studies in favor of what they claimed was a superior computational approach. However, to explain their dense quantitative findings and persuade policymakers to adopt their recommendations they returned to the traditional forms, the policy essay and the live policy briefing, both larded with tables and graphs. Contrary to Wohlstetter’s conceit of transcending the essay tradition, the technical findings did not explain themselves, and his rhetorical brilliance was even more necessary in proportion to the opacity of his methodology. Indeed, Wohlstetter placed great stock in knowing his audience. He made frequent visits to air force bases and to Washington, DC. The 1953 “Base Study” was taken on the road for a long series of live, secret briefings where the arguments were honed to convert each key audience.

In the essays that emerged from these rounds of briefings, one effective rhetorical devise was to introduce a batch of additional intervening variables piecemeal, in a manner targeted to persuade crucial policy audiences. For example: “The preferred system [U.S. bomber bases with overseas base refueling] has the greatest destruction potential of the systems compared. In addition, it is the most flexible as to the size and rate of strike, proportion of targets attacked, and route of approach and flight profile” (Wohlstetter et al., 1953a: 1). Here five more variables are thrown out almost casually, but cleverly, to appeal to Air Force commanders, members of Congress, and White House officials.

The second significance of the 1953 “Base Study” was that Wohlstetter and company were right on the policy questions. Their central conclusion was that locating the bulk of U.S. bombers clustered together on tens of bases close to the Soviet Union would also place them within easy range of Soviet bombers carrying new Russian thermonuclear (hydrogen) weapons so destructive that only a few bombs could destroy an entire American base. Wohlstetter’s policy recommendations won the day, and in a few years American bombers were redeployed to a larger number of more dispersed bases on the U.S. mainland, with strike plans emphasizing refueling bombers at overseas bases on the return flight.¹⁷

The Air Force programmed basing strategy that was overturned had emphasized maximizing the scale and certainty of an American first strike against the Soviet Union. The Wohlstetter team understood and convinced almost everyone that the first priority in nuclear policy was to secure a survivable second-strike retaliatory force to deter the adversary’s first strike.¹⁸ In this way, Wohlstetter and the secret 1953 Base Study played a critical role in the discovery/invention of nuclear deterrence itself.

Third, Wohlstetter played a leading role in promulgating these ideas in the United States and the world so that “deterrence” has become not just a theory, but an institutionalized body of shared knowledge and practice on an international level (Lupovici, 2010). Deterrence became a social fact—not merely an idea or identity in our heads, but a story within which we have lived, part of our social structure. The strength of the social and intersubjective dimensions of nuclear deterrence are better understood in the “fourth wave” deterrence literature.

Recognizing Wohlstetter’s rhetorical skills in the secret technical studies opens a window to perceiving his mythopeic powers. In the bomber base vulnerability study, the central mythopeic element is in full view: vulnerability. The vulnerability of our bomber bases encircling the Soviet Union could actively invite a first strike, robbing us of our second-strike retaliatory capacity and stripping us of protection of our homeland—making our cities, our land and our bodies vulnerable. We know what nuclear vulnerability looks like, because American journalists and the U.S. military undertook exhaustive studies of the consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hersey, 1946; U.S. Strategic bombing Survey, 1946). We can imaginatively transpose American faces onto the black and white photos of the burned, skinned alive, charred Japanese bodies that many of us have seen. Human bodies are soft to blast, transparent to radiation, saturated with water subject to vaporization—highly vulnerable to the technologies of splitting and fusing atomic nuclei.

The theme of nuclear vulnerability became pervasive in American society after World War II, and was available to justify the centralization of national government power, massive investments in advanced defense technologies and military budgets, and the mobilization of elite expertise. (The same terror of nuclear annihilation also fed the nuclear nonproliferation and abolition movements.) The victory in World War II, success of the Manhattan Project and the American lead in nuclear weapons technology, and U.S. economic dynamism all contributed to enormous national self-confidence and sometimes hubris.

Not only did the United States have most of the world’s best nuclear physicists, driven out of totalitarian Germany and Russia in the 1930s; we also seemed to have the smartest strategic thinkers. This claim of elite expertise was a subtext of Albert Wohlstetter’s first open publication, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs in January 1959. Military historian Marc Trachtenberg (1991: 20) describes this piece as, “probably the single most important article in the history of American strategic thought.”

Wohlstetter’s timing was brilliant. In January 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower was beginning his sixth year in office looking older than his 68 years, and the Second Berlin Crisis with the Soviet Union was underway. In the same year Fidel Castro won the Cuban Revolution, and Senator John F. Kennedy loudly criticized the Eisenhower administration for failing to close the post-Sputnik “missile gap” (Thomas, 2012). Americans were feeling vulnerable.

The title of the article evoked several points on the spectrum from terror to hope. In the face of our nuclear “terror,” there was the broad promise of “balance,” which, however “delicate,” might still be tuned and adjusted by the right people with the right ideas.

Substantively, Wohlstetter took aim at several erroneous ideas in the nuclear conventional wisdom. The first error was the belief that nuclear deterrence was easy, or even automatic, if we simply possessed a sufficient number of weapons. Wohlstetter (1959: 213) argued instead that deterrence was difficult, but possible, and was embodied in a survivable second-strike capacity: “To deter an attack means being able to strike back in spite of it. It means, in other words, a capability to strike second.” Furthermore, such a capacity was not built by matching the enemy’s weapons—bomber for bomber, missile for missile, megaton for megaton. Wohlstetter was not the first to make the argument, but he made it more persuasively, and to a larger audience (Robin, 2016: 80).

How was such a secure, second-strike retaliatory posture to be built? In the Cold War nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 1960s it was a moving target, requiring flexible, precise, and expensive adjustments of the “delicate balance,” whose “matters are wildly uncertain” (Wohlstetter, 1959: 215). Wohlstetter went on to narrate the bomber basing controversy of the early 1950s, but without attributing his own central role in it. The point was less the policy victory, and more the style of reasoning and use of evidence that led to it.

Wohlstetter highlighted the overall “stability” or “instability” of the nuclear relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The stability argument was already inchoate in the 1953 bomber basing study, with the inference that the U.S. made its own bomber force vulnerable to a Soviet first strike by basing them too close to the borders of the Soviet Union. American policymakers, by not thinking things through, had come close to increasing the chances of a Soviet attack that would have crippled our capacity to strike back, and thereby increased the chances of the general war we were trying to deter.

In “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” the stability theme is amplified for a public audience (Wohlstetter, 1959: 211).

Because of its crucial role in the Western strategy of defense, I should like to examine the stability of the thermonuclear balance which, it is generally supposed, would make aggression irrational or even insane. The balance, I believe, is in fact precarious, and this fact has critical implications for policy.

Here “aggression” does not refer to the Soviet Union only. The term is pitched at a general level, because it is aggression itself—whether the Russian’s or ours—that we must deter.¹⁹ So too for the “stability” of the delicate and precarious “balance,” concepts that are conceptualized as general features of the mutual deterrence system.

Crucially, Wohlstetter cast the United States as the chief steward of the deterrence system and the stability of its balance. He suggested that the American military, government and people were called by history to play this role.²⁰ Why us? Implicitly, it was our past leadership in developing nuclear weapons and using them against Japanese cities, our ongoing technological leadership in designing and producing nuclear weaponry, and our unmatched global military reach. We created this “terror” in 1945, and continued in 1959 to manufacture and deploy it on the largest scale, so it fell to us to stabilize its delicate balance. Wohlstetter offered us a way to transform our role from chief nuclear terrorist of the world to chief steward of global stability. By managing the stability of the balance, we Americans would protect both Cold War powers, as well as dozens of bystander nations, from annihilation.²¹

Wohlstetter articulated in discourse, and embodied and enacted in both his professional life and personal life, not only what to do with nuclear weapons, but also how to live with them. The closing sentence of “The Delicate Balance of Terror” addresses a moral challenge to America as a whole to face the tough decisions about nuclear policy (Wohlstetter, 1959: 234, emphasis in original):

They are hard, do involve sacrifice, are affected by great uncertainties and concern matters in which much is altogether unknown and much else must be hedged by secrecy; and, above all, they entail a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger.

The national “sacrifice” entailed in these hard decisions would demand accepting moral, intellectual, political, and economic responsibility for managing the stability of the deterrence system as a whole, not only for deterring the Soviet Union, but also for deterring nuclear war itself.

It would be up to the United States to see farther ahead, to fine tune, to calibrate the delicate balance of terror. How could it be calibrated to be high enough to engender rational self-preservation in service of world peace, but not too high or too low so as to tempt leaders into foolish risk-taking leading to world war?

Fear, temptation, foolishness—these are moral categories. An alternative myth to Americans as the guardians of world peace after 1945 might have been, and was and is for some, the story of Americans as the nuclear tyrants of the world. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb during World War II, thought of Vishnu, the Hindu god of death, as his first reaction the first successful atomic bomb test in New Mexico (Else, 1980).

If we are the guardians of world peace as the stewards, not only of our own national defense but also of the stability of the whole deterrence system, then we and our weapons are not Vishnu or Thanatos, the mechanical embodiments of the collective death wish of the human race. No, we are the ones who contain and control Thanatos; we protect the world from him and sublimate his power into the service of peace and life (and the California lifestyle).

Having explored Nagai’s theodicy in which the sacrificial deaths of Nagasaki Catholics brought peace to Japan and the world, we come full circle to Wohlstetter’s secular cosmodicy of design. The problem of evil does not disappear with the death of God, but instead becomes the problem of “cosmodicy,” justifying the fundamental goodness of the cosmos or universe in the face of the reality of suffering and evil (McPherson, 2016). Mass killings by American air power, executed in the past and promised in future deterrent threats, demand both a moral justification and a social science causal explanation. The two are inextricably intertwined in sophisticated claims of sacrificial causality.

Laid bare, the American claim of sacrificial causality that Albert Wohlstetter did so much to create looks something like this. The American reputation for killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese by conventional and nuclear air power can be put to good use. With this record, reinforced in Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, we can credibly promise to destroy the cities and military bases of our adversaries in a future nuclear war. However, our experts will calibrate a stable balance of terror so precisely that we will save not only ourselves and our allies, but also the rest of the world. The cosmodicy is that we threaten to sacrifice you in an imaginary future in order to save both us and you now. This deterrence effect is transient, but indefinite; and we are confident that we can keep it up as long as necessary.

Which is more implausible—this claim, under which several billion people have lived pretty well for generations—or Takashi Nagai’s outlandish, mystical intuitions?

Conclusion: Weaving a mythopeic nuclear umbrella

Today, more than 20 years after his death and 60 years after his signature work, Albert Wohlstetter is still lionized by his admirers as almost a secular saint (Zarate and Sokolski, 2009), and demonized by his opponents (Dunn, 1997; Kuklick, 2007; Robin, 2016). Takashi Nagai also continues to both fascinate (Glynn, 1988) and aggravate (Josemaria, 2010; McClelland, 2019; Michiaki, 2013; Miyamoto, 2012), and there is a cause at the Vatican for his canonization as a Catholic saint. It may be that new stories on a mythopeic scale are conceived and spread by seminal heroes and saints (Boulding, 1990: 47–48).

At the level of their writing alone, they might be pigeon-holed—Nagai as theological and Wohlstetter as technical. In terms of their personas and life work, they might be set against each other, as apostle of peace versus false prophet of war. That could be an interesting account, but I will leave it for others. I am most struck, perhaps perversely, by their unexpected and often ironic similarities.

Their genius was not limited to discourse, ideas or identity. Each in his own context embodied, enacted and exemplified stories of living well together with nuclear weapons. Each built a mythopeic nuclear umbrella from materials at hand to protect his own nation and the world—at least temporarily—from these ultimately ruinous weapons.

A mythopeic nuclear umbrella is a kind of shelter, and we can view the family homes of both Nagai and Wohlstetter as microcosms of their broader proposals.

Takashi Nagai did not rebuild after the bombing of Nagasaki, but instead lived in a makeshift hut thrown together by his friends on the site of his obliterated home. He is photographed lying in bed in this hut, happy with his two children and packages of books prepared to mail (see Image 1). He would appear to have no material at hand with which to construct a mythopeic nuclear umbrella. But he did have his wounds. His protection from the terror of nuclear vulnerability, which he knew intimately in his own body and his wife’s, was the protection of humility and surrender, of accepting the wounds and losses, and turning them into renewing sacrifice to extend peace in time and space. It was a path of happiness and hope without self-hatred that he could offer to his fellow Japanese, so that all of their humanity and energy could be poured into rebuilding a peaceful world with the help of science. That was his mythopeic nuclear umbrella.

Image 1.

Dr. Takashi Nagai in his hut with his children Kayano and Makoto, before he died of radiation sickness in 1951 in Nagasaki, Japan (https://alchetron.com/Takashi-Nagai).

In stark contrast to Nagai’s austere, cluttered hut, Wohlstetter is pictured enjoying his bright, spacious, carefree, California modernist utopia (see Image 2). “The House in the Sky” was designed by Wohlstetter’s friend, the renowned modernist architect Josef Van der Kar, utilizing new building materials of steel, aluminum, glass, and concrete (Museum of Arts and Design, 2014). In the photo, Wohlstetter is completely at ease in this home, as if to say, “If I were afraid of a nuclear attack, would I build a glass house?”

Image 2.

The Wohlstetter family, Albert, Joan and Roberta in “The House in the Sky.”

Indeed, both men are shown living happily within their homes and within their stories, embedded in thriving families, living intensely and well. Each one is transcending the terror and suffering of nuclear weapons in his own way. The cultural appeal is still evident today, as both homes attract pilgrimages of international visitors.

Wohlstetter constructed his nuclear shelter from materials and circumstances at hand, drawing from the power of the American economy: nuclear devices, long-range bombers, concrete air bases, and electronic tracking and guidance. But this technological cornucopia was not sufficient in itself; it had to be assembled in the best possible architectural composition to form a material and mythopeic nuclear umbrella over the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia (especially Japan).

If for Nagai the crucial connection between his family home and his nuclear shelter was humility, for Wohlstetter the decisive link was design (Lee, 2011). Design is the art of rational and esthetic control. Wohlstetter’s survivable base configurations were built on the ground to facilitate bomber flight routes for a deterrence “house in the sky.”

Wohlstetter understood the defense intellectual as a master designer, and he performed this role at the highest level of excellence. Implicitly, he proposed design itself, and elite designers, as the fountainhead of hope for the survivability of our second-strike force, the stability of the delicate balance of terror, the future of the American way of life, our prestige as protectors rather than terrorists, and the survival of the world. Perhaps cool insouciance and a Laurel Canyon lifestyle could save the world. That was his mythopeic nuclear umbrella.

Discursively, the mythopeic responses of Nagai and Wohlstetter to living in a world with nuclear weapons are opposed. However, historically these stories have not only coexisted but have interwoven with each other. Both have co-constituted the same mythopeic nuclear umbrella.

For 70 years now, roughly since the 1951 Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan, the two countries have maintained a contradictory but enduring security relationship characterized by U.S. nuclear extended deterrence over Japan, a Japanese pacifist foreign policy and abolitionist nuclear policy, and both countries playing leadership roles in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and renegotiations. Today, both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of every global institutional component of that relationship are seriously questioned. There is growing uncertainty about major power deterrence, U.S. extended deterrence, international arms control and nonproliferation, nuclear abolition, and U.S. international leadership on matters nuclear (Doyle, 2020; Ford, 2018; Roberts, 2016; Sauer et al., 2020; Schmid, 2019; Taylor and Jacobs, 2018; Walker, 2012).

I have argued that stories, if not causally prior to ideas, norms and law, are at least mutually imbricated with the ideological, moral, and legal. When the fusion is firm it is invisible to the members of the society. Ironically and perhaps tragically, we can discern our own mythopeic stories more easily when they are strained or breaking; that is, when they are dying within our hearts and we are abdicating their epic encompassment.

At this writing, both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming into more severe questioning than perhaps ever before. Do we have better stories to substitute for the nuclear tales of deterrence we have told each other for 80 years?

Footnotes

ORCID iD

William E DeMars

Notes

Author biography

William E DeMars is Professor in the Department of Government & International Affairs at Wofford College in South Carolina. He previously taught International Relations at undergraduate and graduate levels at Earlham College, the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and the University of Notre Dame. He has published articles on humanitarian politics, the changing face of war in Africa, intelligence issues, NGOs, and International Relations Theory. He is the author of NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics (Pluto Press, 2005); and editor, with Dennis Dijkzeul, of The NGO Challenge for International Relations Theory (Routledge, 2015).

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