Bio
Ward Wilson is a nuclear weapons policy analyst who is increasingly the source of fundamental reevaluations of nuclear weapons and challenges to Cold War notions. Stephen Schwartz, editor of Nonproliferation Review, has said, “Wilson . . . is well on his way to deconstructing the most fundamental beliefs about nuclear weapons.”
In February 2010, Wilson was awarded a $392,000 grant by the Foreign Ministry of Norway in support of basic research, writing, and speaking. The grant will be administered by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Wilson is a Senior Fellow at CNS. He also directs the Rethinking Nuclear Weapons project.
This spring he co-authored a study commissioned by the Swiss Foreign Ministry titled “Delegitimizing Nuclear Weapons: Examining the Validity of Nuclear Deterrence.” The study was presented at the United Nations in May during the 2010 Review Conference for the Nonproliferation Treaty with Dr. Patricia Lewis, Deputy Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies.
He has presented or participated in invited colloquia at: Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Georgetown the Monterey Institute, Los Alamos, the UN, the Naval War College, the Stimson Center, the New School, the New America Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as others.
He has been published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dissent, the Chicago Tribune, Nonproliferation Review and International Security (among others). His work has been described as “some of the most original and exacting thinking being done about nuclear weapons today.”
In 2007 Wilson published “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” a ground-breaking article in International Security that argued that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not coerce the Japanese to surrender in 1945. Wilson argues that the bombings were justified under the circumstances, most people would have made the choice Truman made, but they didn’t work. That is, they destroyed the cities but didn’t coerce surrender. The article, according to the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, “effectively demolishes the generally-accepted myth that the atomic bombings brought World War II to an end.”
In 2008 Wilson wrote “The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence” which won the second largest cash award in the field (after the Nobel prize). The Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Challenge awards $10,000 to the “most outstanding essay on nonproliferation” each year. Wilson bested scholars from 11 countries and across the United States. The article is a fundamental challenge to the theory of nuclear deterrence and has been called “brilliant” and “important.”
In 2009 he wrote the final chapter for a study by the Stimson Center called Elements of a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. The chapter, titled “Stable at Zero: Enforcing the Peace in a World Without Nuclear,” sums up why it would be difficult to cheat and argues that a world without nuclear weapons would be far more stable than most observers believe.
He has been asked to embark on a speaking tour of nations that are considering building nuclear weapons in order to present views about the usefulness of nuclear weapons based on recent scholarship about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tentative stops include Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea. He will also be speaking in the United States, trying to encourage new thinking about nuclear weapons.
Current work includes a book titled New Realism: a Pragmatic Re-evaluation of Nuclear Weapons, an action/adventure novel about the Germans inventing nuclear weapons in 1943 called Hitler Gets the Bomb, a scholarly work exploring the military efficacy of attacks against cities called “Killing Civilians,” exploration of a previously unknown nuclear threat by the Nixon administration against North Vietnam, study of notions of apocalypse in the American mind following the development of nuclear weapons, and a scholarly analysis of the claim that nuclear weapons have “kept us safe” for 60 years.