Nuclear Weapons and Individual Rights

Nuclear Weapons and Individual Rights

In a poem called “Fall 1961,” Robert Lowell wrote:

All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.

These words, provoked by a Berlin crisis, suggest that it is possible to kill a subject by anguished attention; indeed to kill even a subject that is not a subject in the conventional sense at all.

Even this subject, is infinitely more than a subject—the subject of human extinction—can...