Banning the Bomb: A New Approach

...WARD WILSON is an independent scholar living in Trenton, N.J...

...Using force, he argued, could intimidate and coerce, but raw power alone would not create obedience in the colonies...

...It was a terrifying weapon...

...There are no angry diatribes in liberal papers about the horror of these weapons and the necessity of banning them...

...Joseph Stalin said in a 1946 interview in Pravda, "Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves...

...But wouldn't a far more practical deterrent be for the United States, Russia, and China to form an alliance, invade North Korea, and set up a new government...

...The key is investigating whether or not they are really useful...

...Bigger Is Not Better It is often said that every weapon that man has invented has been used in war...

...A jackhammer is a very powerful tool...

...The question is, are nuclear weapons reliable tools of coercion...

...If you have decided on a war in which your goal is to annihilate your opponent, nuclear weapons are your best choice...

...It is true that a large-scale nuclear attack could effectively shatter a nation's economic infrastructure, but at what point does this become a war of extermination...

...Of course, any threat will work some percentage of the time—some people scare easily...

...What is the point of destroying a quarter of a city in order to knock out an oil refinery...

...Their impact on the wars in which they participated was minimal...

...a shotgun blast doesn't help where stealth is required...

...Rogue states that use nuclear weapons are unlikely to be democratic states, and because what nuclear weapons do best is kill people, nuclear weapons will never be well suited to punishing such a regime...

...ucLEAR WEAPONS do not appear to be suited to the battlefield...

...They have made films about nuclear war, detailed the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and imagined the end of life on earth...

...If there are hardly any circumstances in which nuclear weapons are militarily useful, and if it seems likely that the more nations that have nuclear arsenals the more likely the weapons are to fall into the hands of terrorists or madmen, then it makes practical sense to ban them...

...Nuking Pyongyang kills North Korean civilians, who, because they live under a dictatorship, have no responsibility for the decision to attack...

...Vividly given a story line by Nevil Shute in On the Beach (a novel later made into a movie in which a nuclear war extinguishes all human life), it has remained a staple of antinuclear argument, used by radicals and sober policymakers alike...

...Clearly not...

...Absorbed by images of destruction, most people didn't ask practical questions...

...Some people argue that nuclear weapons have kept the United States and other nations safe by deterring nuclear war...

...For sixty years, people have focused on the terrible aspects of nuclear weapons...

...How can nuclear bombs be shrinking if the greater the NUCLEAR WEAPONS destructive power the greater the military usefulness...

...The British abstained from using nuclear weapons not because they have admirable restraint, but because there was no practical application for the weapons...

...Decisions about acquiring or banning weapons are not based on their horribleness but on their ability or inability to help win wars...

...Terrorists, whose aim is to coerce political change by irregular attacks on innocents, are the people most likely to imagine that nuclear weapons are useful...

...Even with the sophisticated technology currently available to the U.S...

...Nuking Pyongyang only punishes the innocent...

...They try to drive home the immorality of using nuclear weapons by forcing their listeners to experience vicariously the horror of these cities...

...If the Bomb seems likely to be militarily effective most people will decide to use it, even if they know it is wrong to do so...

...And therefore it might also be possible to make the case that—as with chemical and biological weapons— there are practical, prudential reasons for banning nuclear weapons...

...DISSENT / Winter 2007 • 6 5 NUCLEAR WEAPONS Sound as their reasoning might be, both these strategies have weaknesses...

...What effective nuclear retaliation options are there...

...Sixty years of experience with nuclear weapons does not support the notion that they are singularly useful to their possessors...

...This is an objective, however, that only terrorists pursue enthusiastically...

...His secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, told him with a touch of euphoria that nuclear weapons would probably allow the United States to "dictate our own terms after the war...

...I am not urging the familiar argument that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to be useful...

...At one time one megaton (or larger) warheads were common, but today the yield of an average warhead in the U.S...

...it's not much help in repairing a watch...

...The important issue is not whether this or that weapon has ever been used, it is whether such a weapon—once tried—has become a fixture in the arsenals of warlike nations...

...The strongest arguments against the use of nuclear weapons are not those that demonstrate that they are horrible or dangerous (although they are certainly both), but those that show that they aren't very useful...

...And along with work on each of its parts, a systematic treatment of the entire subject is needed...

...Many people believe that the most likely use of nuclear weapons in the next few years (barring a war in the Middle East or the Asian subcontinent) is a terrorist attack against a city...

...strategic arsenal is only about a third of a megaton...

...Freeman Dyson makes this point vividly in an example drawn from the Falklands War...

...It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful...

...The case against city attacks needs to be strengthened with historical examples...

...This statement misses the point...

...As the risk of escalation has decreased, the strength of the risk argument has also decreased...

...In this connection, the size of nuclear weapons raises a question...

...This is difficult to prove...

...Imagine, for example, that the North Koreans used a nuclear weapon to attack Seoul or Tokyo...

...Current Strategies To date, two related strategies have been used to oppose the use of nuclear weapons: the horror strategy and the risk strategy...

...Horrible weapons have been imagined and tried...

...No case can be made that the capability to wage a war of annihilation is valuable or necessary...

...Burke believed strongly that the application of force was not the best way to bind the colonies to the British Empire...

...But it should be clear from the limited treatment here that there is enough substance in the approach to merit further work...

...But even assuming that a terrorist group takes responsibility—say, al-Qaeda—how can nuclear weapons be used to redress this evil...

...A good deal of energy has been devoted to imagining circumstances in which nuclear 68 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 weapons would be exactly the right weapons to use...

...Or the British could have nuked the Falklands themselves, but that would have destroyed the islands...

...Often confused with its smaller cousin, the large mortar called "Big Bertha," in its day it was the largest cannon ever built...

...The former relies on moral feelings and tries to persuade people that using nuclear weapons is too immoral to contemplate...

...People will say, "Yes, it's wrong...

...With the collapse of the cold war client-state system, many nations are now out from under the nuclear umbrella...

...In fact, the size of nuclear warheads in the U.S...

...nuclear monopoly did not prevent communist domination of Eastern Europe in the years after the Second World War...

...This inutility has already been ratified by two of the most authoritative bodies in a position to make a judgment: the military establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union...

...From March until August of 1918, the Germans used it to rain shells down on Paris without warning...

...We have no other choice...

...Another way to assess the usefulness of nuclear weapons is to think about the role they might play in a crisis today...

...The U.S...

...Jonathan Schell updated and expanded the risk strategy in The Fate of the Earth...

...The Soviet intervention radically altered the strategic situation and was the decisive event...

...Byrnes returned from the bargaining table a chastened man...

...Early on in the nuclear age, physicists warned that there was no theoretical limit to the size of hydrogen bombs...

...Imagine that a nuclear bomb hidden in a cargo container is detonated in Baltimore Harbor...

...But it turns out that the area that we've explored the most—the terribleness of nuclear weapons—is not the key to understanding them...

...His assertion must have been especially surprising because the British army and navy at that time were the most powerful in the world...

...In this case it is necessary to argue not that the weapons wouldn't be useful, but that such wars are morally wrong...

...Why build a nuclear weapon with an end result you can already achieve using conventional weapons...

...It did not prevent the Berlin Crisis of 1948...

...The only reason that the director of the Pakistani nuclear project was able to sell nuclear technology to the North Koreans is that proliferation had gained such widespread acceptance...

...and Russian arsenals has been shrinking...

...It is now possible for the United States to attack, say, Syria, with nuclear weapons without the threat of a nuclear response from Russia...

...Benefits of Banning the Bomb The benefits of a total ban are clear...

...government, for example, we were unable to identify chemical and biological facilities in Iraq, a country with barren, cloud-free, best-case topography...

...The United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, or China would all be in a position to retaliate against Pyongyang...

...None of the arguments sketched here is the final word on the usefulness of nuclear weapons...

...But when examined closely, the presumption of decisiveness evaporates...

...It's not the size of the bang, it's the match between the situation at hand and the weapon's capabilities...

...North Korea's leaders would surely have left the city shortly before the North Korean nuclear strike was launched...

...On the other hand, nuclear weapons are admirably suited for wars of extermination...

...Nuclear weapons are also of questionable effectiveness in attacks on economic targets...

...I am suggesting that even if one could use them with impunity, nuclear weapons would still have little practical value...

...Another— perhaps more certain—way to prevent nuclear DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 67 NUCLEAR WEAPONS war is to ban nuclear weapons...

...Despite its nuclear arsenal, the United States was fought to a draw in Korea, lost a war in Vietnam, did not stop genocides in Cambodia or Rwanda, and is currently mired in conflict in Iraq...

...Burke said that he opposed force not because it was an "odious" instrument of policy but because it was a "feeble" one...

...These are weapons with roughly a third the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—about the same destructive power that was deployed in the conventional raids against Japanese cities in the summer of 1945...

...He writes regularly at www.rethinkingnuclearweapons.org . DISSENT / Winter 2007 • 69...

...Any international ban would have to include careful monitoring of all formerly nuclear nations and inspection of nuclear power reactors...

...Those who use the horror strategy often make Hiroshima and Nagasaki the centerpiece of their case...

...On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine nuclear deterrence against terrorists...

...At one time, all of Europe, all of Latin America, some of Asia, and even parts of Africa were covered by extended deterrence...

...First, as with most applications of nuclear weapons, conventional weapons already provide a fairly extensive bunker buster capability...

...66 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 Only a handful of other superguns have since been built (Schwerer Gustav and V3 among them...

...The power to destroy cities is not the power to win wars...

...But we have to do it...

...In most military situations, conventional weapons are better suited to the task at hand than nuclear ones...

...Perhaps this is not surprising...

...For two of these categories—coercion and threats—it is relatively easy to show that nuclear weapons are not ideal weapons and, in some circumstances, are so seriously mismatched to the task at hand as to be useless...

...With no military weapons floating around, and access to nuclear power monitored and controlled by international organizations, building a rogue bomb or stealing one becomes almost impossible...

...Weapons, like tools, are situational: their "power" is measured not by their raw force but by the extent to which their capabilities match the circumstances...

...Today, nations do not race to build their own superguns...

...So it didn't matter how big or small the risk of escalation was, the consequences were so terrible that no amount of risk was worth running...

...But why is it necessary to imagine unlikely or outlandish scenarios in order to justify these weapons...

...Some might argue that this would be the right way to deter future nuclear attacks against cities...

...Of What Use Today...

...The chief benefit is that it protects us against the danger that people are currently most concerned with in connection with these weapons: use by a terrorist group against a city...

...It might, in fact, be possible to demonstrate that nuclear weapons are functionally the equivalent of biological and chemical weapons: powerful and dangerous weapons, but with very few real applications...

...The horror argument's weakness is that in a crisis necessity almost always trumps morality...

...Consider the Paris Gun...

...In 1775, Edmund Burke rose in Parliament to oppose the use of force against the American colonies...

...A careful review of human history unearthed only one clear case, the Third Punic War...

...And destroying Buenos Aires would probably have made the Argentine soldiers defending the islands fight more fiercely...

...Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, require destruction of an area many times larger than the target...

...Most economic targets are roughly buildingsized, and with today's precision-guided munitions, conventional weapons are more than adequate...

...After all, they won the war in the Pacific...

...Another key—but often overlooked—change is the end of "extended deterrence"—the threat by the United States and the Soviet Union to respond to attacks on their client states with nuclear counterattacks...

...a knife has little effect at a thousand yards...

...Doctors increased the emotional impact of this approach in the 1980s by talking unflinchingly and in detail about the medical consequences of nuclear attacks...

...Are they effective threats...

...The weapons could be retrieved by their owner, but only by publicly breaking the treaty...

...Diplomatic Influence When the United States first got nuclear weapons, there were high hopes that they would provide not just military might, but international influence as well...

...It would be very difficult to identify the attackers...

...In those sixty years, on the other hand, people have rarely talked seriously about the usefulness of nuclear weapons...

...He is currently at work on a book about the military usefulness of destroying cities throughout history...

...In 1983, Carl Sagan and four others further buttressed Schell's case with evidence suggesting that severe climatic disruption, dubbed "nuclear winter," could be triggered by a nuclear war...

...But of course this is so," someone might say, "because these weapons were not very effective...

...And we were looking for facilities on the surface...

...Truman, when he talked about nuclear weapons being "useful" in the diary entry quoted above, was probably thinking of the upcoming negotiations he faced with the Soviet Union over the shape of the post– World War II world...

...The Soviets tested a bomb with a yield of roughly fifty-two megatons in 1962...

...Yet they have not been...

...In all, the Paris Gun fired about 360 shells, killing 250 people and wounding 620...

...HE CURRENT administration also imagines that mini-nukes would be useful...

...Imagine a man who says that the lucky penny he keeps on his dresser has prevented nuclear war...

...It is within the capabilities of almost any enemy simply to dig deeper...

...Nuclear bunker busters would only extend existing capabilities a few hundred meters (to three hundred meters below the surface at most...

...If nuclear weapons are useful, why is it that the trend is toward making them more like conventional weapons...

...Terrible and useful...

...Someone had said loosely about the war that if the British had wanted to they could have "blown Buenos Aires off the map...

...The Soviets, he reported ruefully afterward, "are stubborn, obstinate, and they don't scare...

...There are two telling objections to such a weapon...

...This is an indication of how hard it is to locate secret facilities...

...If tactical nuclear weapons were really militarily useful, would these two military establishments have allowed almost all tactical weapons to be retired in the 1980s...

...Do they really win wars...

...Larger bombs could have been built...

...administration supports research into developing "bunker buster" nuclear weapons that could destroy targets deeply buried or secreted in caves...

...Only in blowing up cities are nuclear weapons singularly well suited to a task...

...Fear— engendered by real and imagined cold war dangers— constrained real inquiry...

...Nuclear nations have fought many wars, but these supposedly powerful weapons have not played a decisive role in any of them...

...The Parisians were bewildered and terrified...

...Despite its sizable nuclear arsenal, the Soviet Union suffered humiliation in its own guerrilla war in Afghanistan...

...And that is the point...

...The Hiroshima argument needs to be more thoroughly researched...

...Schell eschewed the normal tack of emphasizing the risks of escalation, arguing instead that an allout nuclear war might lead to the destruction of all life on earth...

...This is not a demanding task...

...The conventional wisdom has been that nuclear weapons are decisive in this kind of war...

...Would you use a nuclear weapon against a city in Pakistan in which you think Osama bin Laden is hiding...

...African nations, torn by strife, do not try to trade their oil or diamond resources for superguns bought from arms dealers...

...But are they still used...

...As I write this in October 2006, North Korea has just tested a nuclear weapon...

...The risk strategy has been more widely embraced than the horror strategy...

...Nuclear weapons may provide crucial safety and security, although it is hard to imagine how dangerous weapons that cannot be defended against are the best means of providing safety...

...Built by the Germans in World War I, it was more than 90 feet long, weighed 256 tons, and moved on rails...

...Sixty years of experience, recent reevaluations of the track record of nuclear weapons, and reinterpretations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on new research make it possible to argue that there are very few situations in which nuclear weapons are useful...

...And this moral judgment is borne out by the practical experience of history: the actual number of wars of extermination is small...

...Recent reinterpretations of the Japanese surrender call into question the notion that the bombings of Hiroshima NUCLEAR WEAPONS and Nagasaki were in any way connected with that decision...

...If nuclear nations are unwilling to give up their weapons entirely, perhaps each could warehouse a small stockpile under UN administration in their own countries...

...By banning nuclear weapons you substantially decrease the chances that they will fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorist organizations...

...The vast majority of wars are wars of coercion...

...The current U.S...

...There is considerable work still to be done...

...This was true, but Dyson points out that the British would still have had to send soldiers to reconquer the Falklands...

...When you ask for proof, he says, "Well, I've kept that penny on the dresser for sixty-two years and there's been no war, so it must be working...

...The international reaction serves as a strong reminder that it is important to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of unstable leaders...

...The second is that the intelligence necessary for such a strike is unimaginable...

...The latter relies on calculations of the possibility that a small war could become an all-out nuclear war and tries to persuade people that the danger is too great...

...It may seem paradoxical to think of them as "feeble," but I want to make something of the same argument about nuclear weapons...

...Wars of extermination are distinct from genocide or other murderous actions within a country's own boundaries...

...The more nations that have nuclear weapons, the more likely someone is to put them into the hands of irresponsible people...

...It fired a 210-pound projectile more than 80 miles...

...A howitzer is of no use underwater...

...There are four general ways that nuclear weapons might be used: in a war intended to exterminate an opponent, in a war of coercion, as a threat, and to create terror...

...It did not prevent the communist takeover of China in 1949...

...In some situations brute force is less effective (or more "feeble") than other means...

...The risk strategy has been eroded by the end of the cold war, which led to lowered tensions and significantly reduced the likelihood of nuclear escalation...

...Again, the vast majority of those who die will be innocent, and if faulty intelligence leads you to attack the wrong city you risk punishing only the innocent...