"I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction"
About this Quote
Keegan’s line lands with the unnerving calm of someone who has spent a career studying how humans rationalize slaughter. “I can’t visualize” isn’t comfort; it’s a historian’s diagnostic tool. He’s describing a failure of imagination, and in doing so he exposes the one modern danger that doesn’t look like past dangers. Wars, in his archive, have motives, friction, escalation ladders, recognizable political endgames. Nuclear extinction doesn’t fit the narrative grammar of history, so the mind resists it.
That refusal is the subtext: we use “can’t picture it” as a substitute for “it won’t happen.” Keegan’s phrasing also quietly indicts the strategic culture of deterrence. The Cold War taught publics to live with apocalyptic hardware by turning it into an abstract diagram: second-strike capability, mutually assured destruction, “stable” balance. The more the bomb is managed as policy, the less imaginable its outcome becomes. Keegan is pointing at that cognitive dissonance: a civilization capable of engineering doomsday, yet emotionally insulated from its consequences by distance, bureaucracy, and euphemism.
Context matters. Coming from a military historian, not an activist, the sentence reads like a skeptical aside aimed at both hawks and pacifists. He’s not denying risk; he’s emphasizing how rare total self-immolation is in the historical record, even amid brutality. The chill is that nuclear war doesn’t need the usual historical ingredients - hatred, conquest, even victory. It only needs misread signals, tight timelines, and leaders persuaded that catastrophe is “unvisualizable” right up until it isn’t.
That refusal is the subtext: we use “can’t picture it” as a substitute for “it won’t happen.” Keegan’s phrasing also quietly indicts the strategic culture of deterrence. The Cold War taught publics to live with apocalyptic hardware by turning it into an abstract diagram: second-strike capability, mutually assured destruction, “stable” balance. The more the bomb is managed as policy, the less imaginable its outcome becomes. Keegan is pointing at that cognitive dissonance: a civilization capable of engineering doomsday, yet emotionally insulated from its consequences by distance, bureaucracy, and euphemism.
Context matters. Coming from a military historian, not an activist, the sentence reads like a skeptical aside aimed at both hawks and pacifists. He’s not denying risk; he’s emphasizing how rare total self-immolation is in the historical record, even amid brutality. The chill is that nuclear war doesn’t need the usual historical ingredients - hatred, conquest, even victory. It only needs misread signals, tight timelines, and leaders persuaded that catastrophe is “unvisualizable” right up until it isn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
