By Dan Worthen
The essential argument of Ward Hayes Wilson’s It Is Possible: A Future Without Nuclear Weapons (Avenues The World School Press – 2023) is that atomic weapons are impractical tools of war, and that because they pose a unique danger to the world and to humanity, they must be eliminated. This is not a new argument. Perhaps the most oft-quoted line of the atomic age, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” uttered in a joint statement by presidents Reagan and Gorbachev at their 1985 summit in Geneva, Switzerland, says essentially the same thing. (More completely, the statement reads: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then, would it not be better to do away with them entirely?”)
Nearly forty years on, however, atomic weapons remain with us. Indeed, despite worldwide sentiment against them and the advent of the U.N.’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the governments of the nine nuclear-armed states show no inclination whatsoever to give them up. So, at this late date, does It is Possible achieve its goal of helping humanity move closer to eliminating nuclear weapons?
In 231 pages of historical analysis and simple logic, Wilson spells out how the whole mess got started, what brought us to where we are today, and what we need to do to bring these long decades of madness to a close. His efforts reach their peak in his elegant dismantlement of deterrence theory. For nuclear deterrence to work, he says, because of the stakes involved, it must be guaranteed to work one hundred percent of the time. The fly in the ointment, however, is us, and the logic could not be simpler:
1. Human beings are fallible.
2. Nuclear deterrence involves human beings.
3. Therefore, nuclear deterrence is fallible.
Deterrence advocates – and there are many – argue that the absence of nuclear war since 1945 “proves” that deterrence works. In response, Wilson quotes no less an authority on the subject than Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those thirteen days in October 1962 put nuclear deterrence to its sternest test so far, and MacNamara gives the theory short shrift: “In the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”
Wilson’s blend of logic and historical scrutiny, undergirded by science, forms the backbone of It is Possible. It’s a strong backbone that works impeccably in almost all cases.
One place where it doesn’t work is in a discussion of the geopolitical landscape that would arise following a nuclear war between the United States and Russia:
... The world after the war would be dominated by China ... And if the United States fought a nuclear war with China, Russia would probably move aggressively to conquer first Europe and then significant portions of the rest of the world. And if Russia, China, and the United States all fought a three-way nuclear war, then Europe or Brazil or Nigeria would end up as the dominant power in the world.
Really? Simple as that? The complexities of international relations rarely, if ever, wash out so cleanly. The aftermath of a full-scale thermonuclear war, no matter who the combatants are, would utterly redefine global havoc. This is especially true if we include nuclear winter in the equation – a potentiality that Wilson chooses curiously to ignore throughout the book.
To support one of his main points – that we have overvalued nuclear weapons from the beginning – Wilson argues that the Japanese surrender to end World War II came about, not as a result of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in response to the declaration of war made against Japan by the Soviet Union at midnight on August 8 th , 1945. At least in the United States, this interpretation remains highly controversial, in part because of Americans’ patriotic need to see the bombs as having forced the Japanese hand where nothing else could.
Both Wilson’s view and the standard American view rely on a false dichotomy in which Japan’s final decision to surrender could come only in response to the Soviet declaration of war or at the hands of the Americans with their nuclear bombs. Perhaps a more organic rendering is in order – one that takes into account the many critical blows the Japanese suffered in the last months of the war to lay the groundwork for surrender: the firebombing of Tokyo and scores of other cities; the naval blockade that cut off the country’s fuel supply; the loss of Okinawa and other sites the Japanese had earlier conquered; and the two atomic bombings; and the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria.
Although the above critiques are a bit too important to cast aside, they don’t detract fatally from the rest of the book. Taken as a whole, It is Possible stands as a significant, even crucial, contribution. Its power lies in its clear, conclusive message that nuclear weapons, immoral to their core, are hyper-dangerous, overvalued, obsolete, useless creations. It backs up its message with masterful turns of logic and persuasive infusions of evidence. Does it achieve its goal of helping humanity move closer to eliminating nuclear weapons? Not yet, but if enough people read it, that could change.