Dangerous but not useful

    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 in order to create tornadoes might be a sought-after war fighting technology. But people don't imagine that tornadoes would make useful weapons of war. Because random destruction - and the destruction that a tornado creates is almost entirely random - doesn't win wars. To win a war you need to convince your adversary's leadership that they no longer have the means to resist you. And that usually means destroying or killing their military.

    Although we care a lot about whether civilians get killed in war (because we're civilians - most of us) the fact is that throughout history killing civilians just hasn't mattered that much. Name all the wars you can think of where a leader surrendered because civilians were being killed in large numbers. Anyone? Two thousands years of history -  thousands and thousands of wars - and you can't come up with even one instance? [There is actually one instance that I know about. You don't know it because you haven't spent time studying the killing of civilians in war. But I take some comfort from this one exception. This isn't math where if there's one false case then the rule can't be true. This is human history where if the rule is true all the time you ought to begin suspecting that it's a rule that doesn't tell you anything very interesting.  I'm going to let you work on finding it for a while and then tell you later. The bottom line is that one exception doesn't make a strong counter-argument to the point I'm making: killing civilians doesn't win wars. ]

    So where were we? Dangerous weapons - weapons that can kill a lot of people - don't necessarily make useful weapons. They don't necessarily help you win. The history of chemical and biological weapons make excellent illustrations of this. Chemical weapons were used quite extensively in World War I. They were pretty effective at killing people in large numbers. But for a number of reasons they didn't deliver any strategic advantage to one side or the other. They made the battlefield difficult to use, they were relatively unpredictable (the wind was always changing direction at inconvenient times), and they couldn't be aimed and timed in such a way that they decisively affected the course of battle. The same is true of biological weapons. Biological weapons could kill even more people more rapidly than chemical weapons. But even a moment's thought demonstrates that they would be very hard to use effectively in war. The battlefield would be contaminated. The disease you're spreading might very easily infect your own troops. Biological weapons have only been used a couple of times because it's so obvious that they're not really that useful.

    So which kind of weapon are nuclear weapons? Are they dangerous (able to kill a lot of people) and useful (able to win a war)? Or are they dangerous (able to kill a lot of people) but not very useful (difficult to win a war with)? This is the central question.

    Hiroshima matters a lot to this discussion because the best support for the idea that nuclear weapons are useful for fighting wars is the claim that they "won" World War II. Turman made this claim, as well as Stimson. Bernard Baruch even dubbed them "the winning weapon" in 1946. (Borrowing the phrase from Air Force General Thomas Gates.) But did the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki win World War II?  There is increasing historical evidence that they did not. [For those of you who don't know where I stand on this read "The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima" published in International Security. It demonstrates convincingly that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki influenced the Japanese either very little or not at all.]

   If nuclear weapons didn't win World War II, is it possible that they're not very useful for winning wars? Is that why no one has found a way to use them effectively since? Both the US and Soviet Union lost wars - Vietnam and Afghanistan - despite possessing "the ultimate weapon." Peculiar, eh? Israel and Great Britain fought wars against non-nuclear opponents - the Yom Kippur War and the Falkland Islands War - in which they couldn't figure out a useful role for their nuclear weapons. Is it possible that nuclear weapons can kill lots of civilians but aren't very useful militarily? Is that why the US and Soviets agreed to cut way back on strategic nuclear weapons? Is that why so many tactical nuclear weapons were retired (both by the US and Soviets) by mutual consent in the 1980s? You didn't hear many generals complaining at the time that nuclear weapons were "decisive weapons of war" that were "essential for winning battles" did you?

    We always imagine that nuclear weapons haven't been used because they are so horrible, because their use would be morally condemned. But what if there is a more practical reason why nuclear weapons haven't been used? What if they're just hard to use effectively? It's easy to use them to kill civilians - but that doesn't win wars. It's hard to think of a way to use them to destroy another country's military cleanly.

    What if nuclear weapons are just not very useful for winning wars? That would make them like chemical and biological weapons: weapons that can kill people  en masse but that are difficult to use to win a war. Hmmm. And what ever happened to chemical and biological weapons? Oh, that's right. They've been banned.