“White Heat” and the Present Threat of Nuclear War

White Heat is the title of a 1949 film noir, what stars James Cagney as a psychotic criminal, Arthur “Cody” Jarrett. Wikipedia supplies some highlights:

Cody and his gang rob a mail train in the Sierra Nevada mountains, killing four members of the train’s crew. While on the lam, Cody has a severe migraine, through which Ma [his mother] nurses him. Afterward, Ma and Cody have a quick drink and toast, “Top of the world!”, before rejoining the others….

Informants enable the authorities to close in on a motor court in Los Angeles, where Cody, Verna [his wife], and Ma are holed up. Cody shoots and wounds US Treasury investigator Philip Evans and makes his escape. He then puts his emergency scheme in motion – confess to a lesser crime committed by an associate in Springfield, Illinois, at the same time as the train job—a federal crime—thus providing him with a false alibi and assuring him a lesser sentence. He turns himself in and is sentenced to one to three years in state prison….

In the [prison’s] infirmary, [Cody] is diagnosed as having a “homicidal psychosis” and is recommended for transfer to an asylum. Another inmate sneaks him a gun, which Cody uses to take hostages, and along with Hank and their cellmates, Cody escapes….

Cody plans to steal a chemical plant’s payroll by using an empty tanker truck as a Trojan horse. Hank [Fallon, an undercover agent] rigs a signal transmitter and attaches it to the tanker…. The police track the tanker and prepare an ambush…

[T]he police surround the building and call on Cody to surrender; he decides to fight it out…. In the ensuing gun battle, the police kill most of Cody’s gang…. Cody shoots one of his own men for trying to surrender. Finally, only Cody is still loose. He flees to the top of a gigantic, globe-shaped gas storage tank. After Hank shoots Cody several times with a rifle, Cody fires at the tank, which bursts into flames. He shouts, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”, before the tank explodes.

The ending of the film parallels the death of Adolph Hitler four years earlier. Hitler, with his “Thousand Year Reich” in ruins and facing certain defeat by the Allies, shot himself in his underground bunker.

According to my AI assistant, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. (not by suicide) and Hitler’s suicide, there were only four suicides by leaders of nations that were then great powers:

The common themes of the suicides (including Hitler’s) are defeat and loss of power. Yet, defeat (political if not military) and loss of power have long been commonplace among leaders of great powers. In retrospect, the surprising thing about Hitler’s suicide is that it happened.

What does all of this have to do with nuclear war? If a leader were to initiate the use of nuclear weapons, he might hope that the enemy’s response would be in kind (at most) and not escalatory. But unless he were psychotic (a description that seems to fit Hitler), he would have to anticipate escalation, culminating in mutual devastation. His own death would be a near certainty, either as a direct result of the nuclear exchange or in the aftermath (by suicide, starvation, or at the hands of others).

But rare is the leader who prefers suicide to loss of power. Rarer yet, since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is the leader who has cast the first nuclear stone.

What about threats to cast the first nuclear stone (since 1945), specifically, Putin’s threats during the course of his war on Ukraine? Those threats put the onus on the West if Putin were to go nuclear. And so, the West initially stopped short of doing things that might cause Putin to go nuclear.

However, as time has passed and Putin’s “red lines” have been breached without a nuclear response from Russia, it has become increasingly clear that Putin isn’t willing to risk the devastation of Russia, let alone a form of suicide.

At least, that’s the way I see it.