C. Wright Mills, the nuclear weapons crisis cycle, and the continuing relevance of The Causes of World War Three

The Causes of World War Three by C. Wright Mills advances an organizational theory of nuclear crises that is no less relevant today than when it was published in 1958. Drawing on Mills’s concepts of military metaphysics and crackpot realism, I develop the notion of a nuclear weapons crisis cycle or recurring inflection points characterized by ascending militarization, distrust, reckless technological innovation, near-catastrophe, institutionalized restraint in the form of arms control, and then renewed expansion. The risks of overt but particularly inadvertent nuclear war rise with each precipice. In turn, nuclear crises are not exceptional breakdowns, but the predictable outcome of bureaucratic systems committed to the continual preparedness for war. This framework is buttressed through the middle-range theoretical insights of Charles Perrow and William Freudenburg. Mills sketched out the broader expansionary logic of the nuclear weapons crisis cycle, Perrow illustrates why expansion is so dangerous, and Freudenburg accounts for its recurrence. The Cuban missile crisis was the first precipice of the nuclear age. The Able Archer war scare of 1983 comprised the second precipice. Today, we are approaching a third inflection point as the United States and Russia abandon arms control agreements amid the development of new technologies for the more efficient and unorthodox delivery of nuclear payloads. Mills’s framework challenges core assumptions of deterrence theory while advancing concern with the bureaucratic centralization of power untethered to democratic or moral reasoning but devoted to continual development of the most dangerous technology ever invented.