So I’m transferring my site from one host to another. As part of the process I’m taking a text back up of the old site and laboriously posting it to the new site. It’s not very interesting work, but one benefit is that I get to review and reread everything I’ve ever put on the site, which is mildly interesting (to me.) Some of the comments are being lost in the transfer process and not all of the links may still work.

Please have patience while this process goes forward. Thanks.

The Edge Foundation was founded to keep track of interesting intellectual developments in the sciences and elsewhere. Their contention is that traditional institutions don’t do a very good job of disseminating new and interesting ideas and they work hard to fill this need. Periodically they ask a group of experts to say what they are optimistic about or what they’ve changed their minds about recently.

In the most recent version of “What is something you changed your mind about recently” Freeman Dyson says the argument I make in ”The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” about Hiroshima changed his mind. This is pretty impressive, as Dyson knew Robert Butow, the man who wrote the most authoritative study of Japan’s decision to surrender.  Take a look. (It’s also impressive on Dyson’s part, because even though he’s 85 years old, … Read More »

I will be speaking on April 24th to the Los Alamos Committee on Arms Control and International Security at 7:30 pm in Los Alamos, NM. The topic will be “Rethinking Nuclear Weapons: Unlearning the Lessons of Hiroshima.” The invitation came courtesy of Cheryl Rofer, who heads the group. You can read her blog at The Nuclear Diner. Earlier this year she asked for people to outline their thoughts on what US nuclear weapons policy should be. The responses make interesting reading. Check it out.<br>

I’ve been asked by a group of policy experts in Washington–they haven’t announced their existence yet; they’re waiting for the election to be over–to analyze the challenges and possibilities of enforcing a world free of nuclear weapons. They intend to outline a series of practical steps to get to a world free of nuclear weapons in the next ten to twenty years. This paper is part of the process of making the steps to that goal seem concrete and therefore achievable.

I’m humbled and proud to be asked to be a part of this effort. I can think of no more important task. And I realize that it’s not the sort of task you can do on your own–without help or advice. At least it’s not something you can do well working alone. As I start drafting this paper, I’d be … Read More »

I was visiting the International Security website and I was surprised and pleased to see that my article “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” was listed as one of the top five most viewed articles on their website. More than a full year later. If you haven’t read the article, I urge you to take a look. I intend, in the next few months, to make it the basis for a more important article that I’m at work on called “The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence.” I will argue that we have fundamentally misunderstood deterrence and that much of what we think we know about nuclear weapons is wrong. Have a look.

Things that are very dangerous and useful are often prized as weapons of war. Things that are very dangerous but not very useful often end up getting abandoned or even banned–depending on how difficult they are to use against an adversary. The question is: which category does a nuclear weapon fit into? Dangerous and useful? Or dangerous and not so useful?

People often assume that because nuclear weapons can kill a lot of people that therefore they must be useful weapons of war. Killing people = useful in war. Right? Except that there are lots of things that kill people that aren’t useful in war. Hurricanes. Plague. Tornadoes. Extremely high voltage electricity. Sulfuric acid. Global warming. You can think of others.

The problem in war isn’t just to randomly kill people. If that were the case, then figuring out how to seed clouds … Read More »

I’m going to (sigh) do a little self-promoting. I apologize. Independent scholars have to self-promote more than folks at Harvard or Johns Hopkins.

I recently heard that an article I published in Dissent last year is going to be reprinted in a book being put out by McGraw-Hill. Which makes me very pleased. It’s called Annual Editions: Global Issues, and it’s a textbook which “provides convenient, inexpensive access to current articles selected from the best of the public press.” The article lays out new reasons for banning nuclear weapons. You can read it on Dissent’s website here.

I met and talked with Dr. Jeffrey Lewis (whose excellent blog on all things nuclear–www.armscontrolwonk.com–you should take a look at) when I was in Washington recently and we were talking, among other things, about euphemisms. Euphemisms abound in discussions of nuclear weapons. And that has always interested me. It reminded me of a short thing I wrote some time ago when I was thinking about the anthropology of nuclear weapons. [Someone, it seems to me, ought to approach the field of nuclear weapons as an anthropologist would. Imagine you are on an island of strangers and observe their behavior.]

I’ve dug up the piece and put it on a page under the Publications/Essays menu choice called “Language games.” Please comment.

So, how is the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 possible? The Israelis had what is now estimated to be 30 nuclear bombs and 10 missiles in 1973. How is it possible that Assad and Sadat persuaded themselves to launch an attack on Israel?

According to most Americans, nuclear deterrence “works.” This is largely based on the American experience of the Cold War in which US nuclear weapons seem to have restrained the Soviet Union a number of times. Certainly the Soviets launched no nuclear attacks against the US. It’s also an example of the unfortunate habit of Americans to assume that what is true for us is what is true in general. If deterrence worked in the Cold War, it must just work.

But consider Assad and Sadat. What were they thinking? They must have known that Israel had nuclear weapons. Both of … Read More »

What sort of thing would be militarily ineffective, but still useful for coercing nations? Try to imagine something that you couldn’t win a war with, but that would still give you usable power. What would it be like? The ability to destroy a country’s economy without invading? –Like the threat to unleash millions of undetectable counterfeit bills? Imagine you had figured out a way to trigger massive earthquakes in your enemy’s territory. Would the threat of this devastation give you usable leverage in political or diplomatic negotiations?

What role does the ability to create damage play in conflicts between nations? Certainly once a war has started, the ability to inflict damage on non-military targets appears to have almost no value at all. The US and Great Britain inflicted enormous damage on Germany during World War II without making the slightest perceptible … Read More »

This is a fable about the difference between reputation and reality.

There was a warrior of the Anakal tribe who wore a particularly fearsome mask into battle. This warrior was strong and skillful and he very rarely lost. Over time his reputation spread far and wide. Wherever this warrior went on the battlefield, wearing his fearsome mask, people would shrink back or run in fear. As time passed the Anakal conquered most of the other tribes in their world.

The warrior, however, was mortal and one day was bitten by a snake while fishing and died. The tribal elders of the Anakal met to discuss what to do. The tribe had grown used to to being safe–protected by their strong and skillful warrior. Without him other tribes would be much more likely to attack them or rebel. The elders spoke at length … Read More »

“Old Ferguson is really at it today,” Tom whispered to me. We were seated in Bowl 4 late on a Wednesday afternoon. The class was “International Relations and the US Military” with Professor Emeritus Albert Tarquinius Ferguson. I’d chosen the course because Ferguson has a reputation for being pretty entertaining in class but even though I’m an econ major, I’d found myself getting drawn in to the substance. Mostly because of the readings. My uncle served in Kosovo and I’ve read a lot about the Civil War and World War II. Today Ferguson was talking about nuclear weapons. Railing for the last half hour or so about their uselessness. Rich Bain, he’s some senator’s son or something, raises his hand. Rich is fearless because he figures, I’d guess, that his father has already paved the way for his success.

“What about … Read More »

Most people who take a position on nuclear weapons can be roughly sorted into three groups: those who say that nuclear weapons are necessary for deterrence, those who say that nuclear weapons have some utility militarily or diplomatically beyond deterrence and those who say we should get rid of nuclear weapons. The second and third groups are tiny compared to the deterrence group. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, since it’s generally socially and politically acceptable to say that you only favor keeping nuclear weapons because of deterrence.

But scratch a deterrence position a little bit and you may be surprised by what’s underneath. It turns out that for many people, saying they only favor keeping nuclear weapons for deterrence is what nuclear strategists would call “declaratory policy.” That is, it’s what you say out loud, but it doesn’t really reflect your … Read More »

Can anyone help me out? I keep hearing this word in conversation with people interested in nuclear weapons but I can’t seem to figure out what it means. It’s very confusing.

My mother had a similar experience once. My parents were at a party of very fancy intellectuals – mostly physicists, some of whom were in JASON – and she overheard a couple of conversations she couldn’t make any sense of. People – physicists mostly – seemed to be talking about “corks” a lot. One man was going to go to Turkey to explain corks to the Turks. She couldn’t figure out why the Turks wouldn’t understand corks. The whole thing seemed bizarre. Fortunately, before she opened her mouth to ask, it suddenly dawned on her that they were talking about quarks. Mystery solved.

I’m in a somewhat similar situation, although I’m … Read More »

I attended two conferences recently: the Carnegie Endowment Non-Proliferation conference and the Peace and Security Initiative conference. The Carnegie conference is large — over 800 attendees this year — and tends to be dominated by government officials and big-gun establishment academics. People from Harvard and Stanford whose names appear on the cover of important works in the field. The sort of people who could end up as Assistant Secretaries of State or National Security Advisors. The Peace and Security Initiative conference, on the other hand, is sponsored by the Ploughshares Fund and draws a more eclectic and — to me — interesting group.

There was something funny about the Carnegie conference. In the first meeting on the first day George Perkovich had a slide with five talking points – goals for the conference – and one of them was about devaluing … Read More »

[I recently attended a conference of the Peace and Security Initiative in Washington, DC, which had a fascinating presentation on values by an outfit called American Environics. They look at the deep values that underlie familiar positions. Some of what I heard sparked this imaginary conversation.]

[Conservative]: “We have Ward Wilson with us today who recently wrote an article in the liberal journal Dissent examining the issues around abolishing nuclear weapons. Aren’t you worried that that would leave us defenseless?”

[Me]: “When guns are outlawed then only outlaws will have guns?”

[Conservative]: “Exactly.”

[Me]: “A lot of people are afraid of nuclear weapons and they’re right to be. Nuclear weapons are very, very dangerous. The question is: would you rather have a world in which a lot of people (some of whom we don’t trust) have nuclear weapons and the US has overwhelming conventional … Read More »