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| FIVE MYTHS ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS Ward Wilson New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2013 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-547-85787-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-547-85787-X | 187pp. | HC/BWI | $22.00 | |
Common thinking about nuclear weapons — not only on the part of military leaders but among the general public — has been ambivalent, combining a fear of their immense destructive power with the belief that "our side" must maintain a nuclear arsenal to deter "the other side" from using them.
At the same time there have always been those who advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons. While the large arsenals of strategic weapons have undergone a mutual "build-down" in recent decades, total abolition has never been in the cards because of the difficulty of getting all members of the "nuclear club" to agree to a verifiable treaty. The unanswerable question has always been, "How can we trust the other guys?"
Comes now Ward Wilson, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He has decided that we are asking the wrong questions.
"But what if our thinking about nuclear weapons is flat-out wrong? What if the assumptions that undergirded the Cold War arms race are wrong? What if our military planning and budgeting are based on faulty logic? What if, during the seven decades that have elapsed since atomic weapons were used in anger for the first and only time, we have made our choices based on beliefs that have little foundation in reality and that have been repeatedly contradicted? What if our deep-seated fears are justified, but our decades-old belief that nuclear weapons are necessary is not?" – Page 2 |
The treatment of nuclear weapons in novels like Nevil Shute's On the Beach, and in many films including Colossus: the Forbin Project and Panic in the Year Zero as well as the popular and satirical Dr. Strangelove, has hewed closely to this apocalyptic vision. I have long felt such works vastly overstate the hopelessness of the situations they portray. In Colossus, for example, the detonation of one or two missile warheads by the newly emerged intelligent computer is enough to bring humanity to its knees.1 Contrast this with the real world, where — as Mr. Wilson demonstrates — two atomic bombs made at most a minor contribution to ending Japan's fight in the second world war. It's really too bad that he can't manage to build a better case.
Mr. Wilson goes on to provide answers to all these questions. He has done a lot of research, and he does raise some good points. However, he also glosses over contrary evidence in some places, and fails to cite sources for some of his assertions. For example, on page 32 he states that "Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked, and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed." This supports his contention that the two atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had only a minor influence on Japan's decision to surrender. It's a plausible conclusion if the evidence is as he presents it; but he fails to provide a source.
Later he turns to the central issue: Are we humans in control of nuclear weapons, or is it the inanimate weapons that are, because of our fear, effectively in control of us?
"There is no question that human existence demands humility. And there is a case to be made that humans are better off when animated by religious faith. There are larger forces in the universe that we are not in control of, and acknowledging that is simple realism. But there are strong reasons for believing that nuclear weapons should not be included in that list of forces beyond our control. To begin with, nuclear weapons are implements that we manage and use as we wish. If someone said, pointing to a hammer on the workbench, "That hammer is beyond our control," we would think that person was pretty peculiar. Why are we inclined to view nuclear weapons differently?" – Page 116 |
The merit of religious faith aside, this paragraph crystallizes the essence of Mr. Wilson's argument beautifully. Nuclear weapons are tools. We can destroy them if we choose.2 That they are fearfully powerful tools is undeniable, and hence they should be handled with great respect and caution. But Mr. Wilson is right when he argues that abject fear of nuclear weapons is not going to help us handle them properly. That said, he weakens his argument by comparing them to a common hammer. It is a poor analogy because anyone can buy a hammer at the local hardware store and thereafter use it according to his or her own wishes, without any authorization or control codes whatsoever. (Also, of course, the misuse of a common hammer would affect a few people at most.) Earlier in this chapter, he himself admits that "You can't stuff the nuclear genie back into the bottle." Then, with another false analogy, he declares this fact irrelevant because, like the unwieldy bicycles with one huge front wheel, nuclear weapons will simply be abandoned as more trouble than they're worth.
I judge Mr. Wilson's overall contention that nuclear weapons have no conceivable utility, and therefore could be abolished without any loss of capability, to be without merit. First, the claims that they were not decisive either in forcing Japan to surrender in World War II or in deterring a subsequent major conflict during the Cold War (which do have merit) do not prove that they made no contribution to either desirable outcome. This might be true; but, sadly, his level of scholarship is insufficient to establish that.3 Second, his assertion that nuclear weapons have no real power is unfortunate because it is transparently untrue. I think he makes it in order to strike down what he calls the apocalypse myth. This shows his heart is in the right place. Alas, his head is another matter. Consider the problem of diverting an asteroid found to be on a collision course with Earth. Depending on how much warning we had, it is possible that a nuclear bomb would be the only means of diverting it in time. That is one reason — to my mind a decisive one — why I think nuclear weapons should not soon be abolished.
To sum up: This book is worth reading because the author has done considerable research into the circumstances of the Japanese surrender during World War II (and has an extensive bibliography of 591 entries to prove it). Unfortunately, he fails to sufficiently support his principal argument that the world can and should move beyond nuclear weapons. Five Myths is definitely worth reading, but that 591-entry bibliography is the only thing that might make it a keeper, and in the modern age some searching online is likely to bring up more than enough sources. Because of its poor writing and inadequate scholarship, I mark it down two notches.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.