Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

And contrary to the half-facetious suggestion that The Bomb be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear weapons turn out to be lousy deterrents (except in the extreme case of deterring existential threats, such as each other).¹⁰² Nuclear weapons are indiscriminately destructive and contaminate wide areas with radioactive fallout, including the contested territory and, depending on the weather, the bomber’s own soldiers and citizens. Incinerating massive numbers of noncombatants would shred the principles of distinction and proportionality that govern the conduct of war and would constitute the worst war crimes in history. That can make even politicians squeamish, so a taboo grew up around the use of nuclear weapons, effectively turning them into bluffs.¹⁰³ Nuclear states have been no more effective than non-nuclear states in getting their way in international standoffs, and in many conflicts, non-nuclear countries or factions have picked fights with nuclear ones. (In 1982, for example, Argentina seized the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom, confident that Margaret Thatcher would not turn Buenos Aires into a radioactive crater.) It’s not that deterrence itself is irrelevant: World War II showed that conventional tanks, artillery, and bombers were already massively destructive, and no nation was eager for an encore.¹⁰⁴

Far from easing the world into a stable equilibrium (the so-called balance of terror), nuclear weapons can poise it on a knife’s edge. In a crisis, nuclear weapon states are like an armed homeowner confronting an armed burglar, each tempted to shoot first to avoid being shot.¹⁰⁵ In theory this security dilemma or Hobbesian trap can be defused if each side has a second-strike capability, such as missiles in submarines or airborne bombers that can elude a first strike and exact devastating revenge—the condition of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). But some debates in nuclear metaphysics raise doubts about whether a second strike can be guaranteed in every conceivable scenario, and whether a nation that depended on it might still be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail. So the United States and Russia maintain the option of “launch on warning,” in which a leader who is advised that his missiles are under attack can decide in the next few minutes whether to use them or lose them. This hair trigger, as critics have called it, could set off a nuclear exchange in response to a false alarm or an accidental or unauthorized launch. The lists of close calls suggest that the probability is disconcertingly greater than zero.

Since nuclear weapons needn’t have been invented, and they are useless in winning wars or keeping the peace, that means they can be uninvented—not in the sense that the knowledge of how to make them will vanish, but in the sense that they can be dismantled and no new ones built. It would not be the first time that a class of weapons has been marginalized or scrapped. The world’s nations have banned antipersonnel landmines, cluster munitions, and chemical and biological weapons, and they have seen other high-tech weapons of the day collapse under the weight of their own absurdity. During World War I the Germans invented a gargantuan, multistory “supergun” which fired a 200-pound projectile more than 80 miles, terrifying Parisians with shells that fell from the sky without warning. The behemoths, the biggest of which was called the Gustav Gun, were inaccurate and unwieldy, so few of them were built and they were eventually scuttled. The nuclear skeptics Ken Berry, Patricia Lewis, Benoît Pelopidas, Nikolai Sokov, and Ward Wilson point out:

Today countries do not race to build their own superguns. . . . There are no angry diatribes in liberal papers about the horror of these weapons and the necessity of banning them. There are no realist op-eds in conservative papers asserting that there is no way to shove the supergun genie back into the bottle. They were wasteful and ineffective. History is replete with weapons that were touted as war-winners that were eventually abandoned because they had little effect.¹⁰⁶