While you were sleeping - A meditation on Wittgenstein, tools and nuclear weapons. “The date is 1 July 1999. The place is Florence, Italy. It is early. My wife (in two more years she’ll be my ex-wife, but this morning she is still my wife) is sleeping on the other side of the large hotel bed. I am sitting cross-legged on thick hotel carpeting next to the bed with a journal in my hands.”
Reality - Thoughts on why we misperceive the power and importance of nuclear weapons. “Much of the hold that nuclear weapons have on us is psychological. Their size in our mind’s eye is not related to their size in the real world of practical consequences. They are wrapped in a shroud of sixty years of rhetoric and hyperbole. We have attached such deep feelings to them that they have been transfigured.”
Flash and boom - A discussion of the anthropology of our fear of nuclear weapons. “It is the flash and roar that impressed them. And thinking about nuclear weapons in terms of flash and boom is the key to understanding our reactions to them. Consider how we might react to a weapon that destroyed large areas and killed lots of people without the flash and boom of nuclear weapons. -By vibration, perhaps.”
War is not Hell - Thinking about whether morality applies to nuclear war. “Some try to argue that moral considerations have no place in discussions of nuclear weapons. “War is Hell,” they say, quoting General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous remark, and presume that in Hell no rules of morality apply.”
Language games - There’s something funny about the way we talk about nuclear war. “It is hard to imagine a grizzled Greek warrior, a veteran — someone comfortable with the physical contest of fighting and killing face to face, someone who had seen death over and over, who honored his enemies, who knew war intimately and knew its costs — being able to understand our euphemistic way of talking about nuclear weapons.”
Talisman - More thoughts on the relationship between nuclear weapons and reality. “By far the majority of people who believe in some power outside themselves believe in God or gods. But in some people belief in God is replaced by or coexists with a tendency to project their belief onto something physical: a talisman, totem or idol. It is this second tendency that concerns us here.”
A-bomb v. H bomb - A critical look at using yield to compare A-bombs and H-bombs. “Since the 1950s people have said, “The bomb used against Hiroshima was horrible, but nuclear weapons today are thousands of times more powerful than that bomb was.” This notion, that H-bombs are much more destructive than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, is a commonplace. It is another example of loose and inaccurate thinking about nuclear weapons.”
Nuclear Rorschach - Thinking about the lack of evidence in the field of nuclear weapons. “One of the striking things about the field of study that has grown up around nuclear weapons is that it is a field dominated by theory. No other area of military endeavor is so theoretical – not grand strategy, not tactical air combat, not guerrilla warfare – nothing. You would be far more likely to mistake nuclear weapons discussions for macro-economics or higher physics than, say, anthropology or engineering.”
Nuclear weapons are not evil - Meditation on the morality of nuclear weapons. “Weapons are tools. They are things that we use, and as such should be judged based on the actions of the people who use them, not in and of themselves. If a carpenter drives a nail crookedly we blame the carpenter. Only in very special circumstances do we blame the hammer.”
The ultimate weapon - What is an ultimate weapon? What characteristics would one have? “Nuclear weapons are not the ‘ultimate weapon.’ Their uses are limited in ways we don’t always see clearly, but that are real. As an exercise and in order to set a mental benchmark against which to measure nuclear weapons, let us imagine a truly ultimate weapon.”