EXCERPT: How Marvel’s ‘Civil War’ is an allegory for humanity’s nuclear weapons dilemma

In the 2016 movie “Captain America: Civil War,” the Avengers band of superheroes splits into two warring factions — one led Tony Stark, aka Iron Man; the other by his No. 2 Steve Rogers, aka Captain America — over an international treaty called the Sokovia Accords that would give the United Nations control over their use of potentially planet-busting superpowers. In the real world, nine men actually wield the power to potentially destroy the world with nuclear weapons, and the rest of humanity has no way to stop them.

Breaking Defense’s own Theresa Hitchens recently contributed the following essay, which identifies some real-world lessons to be gleaned from the fictional Sokovia Accords debate, for a sci-fi-meets-strategy collection titled “Power up,” published by Casemate.

“If we can’t accept limitations, we’re no better than the bad guys,” Tony Stark says. 

“The safest hands are still our own,” Steve Rogers replies. 

And so begins the 2016 Marvel Cinematic Universe movie “Captain America: Civil War.” The film centers on the deep ethical rift between the two leaders of the Avengers —Tony Stark, aka Iron Man and Steve “Cap” Rogers, aka Captain America — piqued by a UN effort to establish a treaty of sorts between the government of the world and “enhanced” humans, or in other words superheroes.

The UN’s rationale, endorsed strongly by the government of the United States where the Avengers are based, is that superhero actions require oversight and control because their powers, even when used against threats to humanity, can destroy cities, countries and perhaps the entire world. “For the past four years, you operated with unlimited power and no supervision. That’s an arrangement the governments of the world can no longer tolerate,” says US Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross in confronting the Avengers with the UN demands.

An incident in Lagos where a delegation from Wakanda is caught in the crossfire of an Avenger’s intervention in a humanity-threatening criminal scheme serves as the trigger for the UN move, the linchpin incident for the plot of the previous movie in the series, “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” In that 2015 film, the Avengers must defeat the eponymous Ultron, an artificial intelligence (AI) created by Stark to provide global protection. But soon after being awakened, the AI turns on the Avengers and spirals out of control threatening all humanity. The resulting battle essentially destroys the fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia, resulting in a worldwide uproar.

Thus, the legal instrument that will place the Avengers under the direct supervision of the United Nations is dubbed the “Sokovia Accords.” The heroes are asked (in reality ordered) to sign the accords or retire and hang up their metaphorical spurs. Further, those who do not sign and later decide to take action without a UN mandate will be considered lawbreakers and subject to arrest.

As the movie’s title implies, the members of the Avengers are split into two groups based on their view of the accords.

Tony convinces half of the team that there is value in accepting the restrictions, partly out of concern about the potential for abuse of power, but also to stave off efforts to impose worse constraints on superpowered humans. “We need to be put in check,” he says bluntly.

Cap and his followers take the opposing view, both out of a distrust of authority and a belief that the individual members of the Avengers will make the right choices if given the freedom to do so.

“Civil War,” at its heart, is an allegory for the constant ethical struggle in societies, particularly democracies, between security and liberty, as argued by philosopher Mark D. White in his book “A Philosopher Reads … Marvel Comics’ Civil War.” White argued, “if we peel away the superhero façade, under the capes and masks we see the same debates in the Marvel Universe as we do in the real world. These include conflict between liberty and security in the political realm as well as defending the right and advancing the good in the personal realm.”

But at the crux of “Civil War” is the precise question of whether individuals with world-destroying powers should somehow be collectively regulated by representatives of the rest of the world they might imperil. That question applies to a particularly thorny conundrum of international security today: the existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of a select few.

Interestingly, the film makes a comparison between the superheroes themselves and nuclear weapons. For example, when lecturing the Avengers on the need for the Sokovia Accords, Ross decries that the team has no idea where Thor (the god-prince of the planet Asgard, based on Norse mythology) and Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk, currently are or what they are doing.

“If I misplaced a couple of 30-megaton nukes, you can bet there’d be consequences,” he says.

While the analogy to the leaders of nuclear-armed countries is not perfect, in that “Civil War’s” ethical dilemma is primarily focused on individual human rights, there is enough of a parallel to tease out some implications for real-world global security. What responsibilities do nuclear-armed states, and their leaders, have to the rest of the eight billion humans on Earth concerning the use of potentially plant-busting nukes? What actual collective controls should, or even could, be put on those leaders decisions regarding nuclear weapons use or directly on their arsenals?

As of November 2022, there are nine (known) men in the world who have their fingers on nuclear buttons — none of whom face any real constraints, legal or otherwise, upon their ability to trigger Armageddon. Of those nine countries possessing nuclear weapons, five are sanctioned to do so under international law via the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Those countries are: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The four others possess nuclear weapons but have not been officially blessed to do so under international law: India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

India, Israel and Pakistan are not signatories to the NPT, so arguably they are not bound by its strictures (although there have been legal arguments surrounding their status citing customary international law). Both India and Pakistan openly tested nukes in the late 1990s, and the international community has essentially accepted their status as nuclear weapon states. Israel is known to have possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s but has never admitted to doing so.

North Korea, by contrast, signed the NPT in 1985 but withdrew in 2003 after the discovery of its clandestine effort to develop nuclear weapons. Thus, Pyongyang is considered by many, if not all, nations as operating outside international law and therefore subject to economic sanctions. Hence, the on-again, off-again effort by the United States to negotiate a deal with North Korea that would trade economic relief and assistance for disarmament.

In all of those countries, the decision to use a nuclear weapon is solely up to the head of state. Read that again: solely up to the head of state, however, intelligent, rational or completely crazy that person may or may not be. In most nuclear weapon states, a decision by a president or prime minister would be conveyed to senior military leaders, who in turn would authorize weapons operators to perform the actual launch. So, in theory, those national military officials could serve as an obstacle to actions they deemed irrational or illegal under either national law or the international law of armed conflict.

But in practice, military offers who refuse to take orders from those at the top of their chain of command face dismissal or worse, depending on the country in question. (One only needs to look to North Korea to see examples of worst-case consequences.) Indeed, in the United States during the Trump administration, several top military leaders were ousted, resigned in protest, or considered doing so because of presidential decisions they deemed grossly misguided, dangerous or outright illegal.

Additionally, there is little de facto international control over how those nine nuclear states deploy or use their arsenals. Outside of the general prescriptions against the threat or use of force absent an armed attack in the UN Charter and those included in the law of armed conflict, there are no legally binding constraints on the use of nuclear weapons on those countries or their leaders.

The International Court of Justice in a landmark 1996 case essentially found that while international law nowhere justifies the use of nuclear weapons, it also nowhere prohibits it.

In 2017, 122 nations signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that pledges signatories not to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. That treaty went into force in January 2021. However, the negotiations were boycotted by all nine nuclear weapon states and many of their allies, including most NATO countries — making its relevance to nuclear decision-making moot.

The NPT commits the five signatory nuclear weapon states to take collective steps toward complete nuclear disarmament, as well as efforts to prevent their arsenals and know-how from leading to proliferation by other states. Yet, while the United States and Russia have concluded a series of bilateral nuclear arms treaties designed to limit or reduce their arsenals, neither China, France nor the United Kingdom have signed similar treaties.

In addition, despite those treaty obligations, the five NPT nuclear weapon states — as well as the other four de facto nuclear weapon states outside the treaty — all continue to pronounce nuclear weapons as central to their national security and are undertaking expensive weapons modernization programs, according to a comprehensive report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This means that the total number of nuclear weapons at the start of 2022, an estimated 12,705, is expected to rise in the coming years. SIPRI reported in a June 13, 2022, press release:

“All of the nuclear-armed states are increasing or upgrading their arsenals, and most are sharpening nuclear rhetoric and the role of nuclear weapons play in their military strategies,” said Wilfred Wan, director of SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program. “This is a very worrying trend.”

Indeed, Russia has used nuclear saber-rattling, at least indirectly, to deter other nations from intervening in its ongoing war with Ukraine.

In fact, none of the nuclear weapons states have proven to be willing to negotiate sovereign control over their nuclear arsenals over the years. However, some (including the United States) have agreed to limited inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And the three countries with the largest nuclear arsenals — Russia, the United States and China — all have formidable conventional might, and all three still can harness considerable economic power to achieve their geopolitical goals, including their hold on their nuclear arsenals. Further, they each have unilateral veto power on the UN Security Council, although the United Nations has been working since its establishment in 1946 to eliminate nuclear weapons, with obviously little success.

Proponents of nuclear weapons in the US and Western countries often argue that while total nuclear disarmament would be ideal, it will never occur. In our imperfect world of geopolitical conflict, they assert, nuclear weapons instead have the contributed to upholding international peace and security, and will continue to do so, by preventing war among the major world powers. Under this logic, the existence of nuclear weapons inherently deters their use due to fears among their possessors of mutual annihilation.

This argument is a riff on Cap’s conviction that each of the Avengers can be counted on to make the right decisions — rational leaders will refrain from nuclear use because that would be self-destructive, if nothing else. But just as Tony argued in “Civil War” with regard to superpowered humans, no one can guarantee that all national leaders with nuclear buttons will always act rationally — and there is a good deal of evidence to show there have been, and still are, some who are dangerously far from rational.

Nonetheless, in Marvel’s “Civil War” it proves infeasible for the United Nations and the world’s governments to constrain the actions of the superpowered Avengers. Cap goes into hiding with his allies after after freeing them from a UN high-security prison, leaving Tony in the near-empty Avengers’ compound with only two members of the team who continue to support the Sokovia Accords. The film ends in a poignant scene, as Tony reads a letter from Cap that is both an explanation of his actions and an olive branch — but not an apology for his opposition to the accords.

In the real world, it likewise is questionable whether something akin to a nuclear version of the Sokovia Accords could be made to work, simply because it remains highly unclear what persuasion or power the rest of the world could bring to bear upon the leaders of nuclear weapon states to even bring them to the table. So, for the moment anyway, it is simply a fact that all human beings live in the shadow of extinction at the hands of nine men, over whom they have little or no meaningful political, legal or even moral sway.

Perhaps, however, there is value in putting time and effort into considering how to do so — just as “Civil War” makes clear that Tony’s thwarted desire to find a way to legitimize and constrain superhuman violence, as well as prevent superhero abuse of power, is a worthwhile and logical aim. For example, it isn’t inconceivable that some of today’s nuclear powers might be convinced that it is in their security interest to create higher national barriers to nuclear weapons use — and to urge their counterparts to do the same. This, in turn, could serve as a step toward consideration among the nuclear powers about how to improve collective speed bumps to nuclear escalation. Meanwhile, those majority of countries (and people) without nuclear weapons at their command could begin to develop ideas for how to reduce the benefits and increase the economic costs to those who do. In this vein, the 2017 Nuclear Ban treaty could serve as a forum.

As the crippled James Rhodes, aka War Machine, tells Tony at the end of “Civil War,” sometimes the hard fight needs to be fought because it is “the right thing to do.”