Ward Wilson is a nuclear weapons scholar who is increasingly the source of fundamental challenges to the nuclear status quo. Stephen Schwartz, editor of Nonproliferation Review, has said, “Wilson . . . is well on his way to deconstructing the most fundamental beliefs about nuclear weapons.”

The first scholarly article Wilson wrote (in 2007) was published in one of the leading journals in the field: International Security. Many scholars wait all their lives to be published in IS. The achievement is made more remarkable by the fact that it was a ground-breaking study that poses a radical challenge to established thinking. “The Winning Weapon: Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima,” according to the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, “effectively demolishes the generally-accepted myth that the atomic bombings brought World War II to an end.”

The second scholarly article Wilson wrote won the second largest cash award in the field (after the Nobel prize). The Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Challenge awards $10,000 to the “most outstanding essay on nonproliferation” each year. Wilson bested scholars from 11 countries and across the United States with an essay titled “The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence.” The article is a fundamental challenge to the theory of nuclear deterrence and has been called “brilliant” and “important.”

After training as a historian at the American University in Washington, DC with a special emphasis on philosophy, he was a Fellow at the Robert Kennedy Memorial Foundation in 1981 where he wrote about nuclear weapons issues. He went on to a successful career as an international computer consultant and only returned seriously to nuclear scholarship in 2000. He has been published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dissent, the Chicago Tribune, Nonproliferation Review and International Security (among others). His work has been described as “some of the most original and exacting thinking being done about nuclear weapons today.”

He is currently at work on a book titled Eliminating Nuclear Weapons, a paper about aspects of getting to a world free of nuclear weapons titled “Stable at Zero” and a scholarly work exploring the military efficacy of attacks against cities called “Killing Civilians.”