Honor

    It is a singular honor to be selected for this prestigious new prize. I believe we are at a time when the intellectual structure that has frozen thinking about nuclear weapons into rigid systems is coming apart and new ideas, new ways of looking at the problem are emerging that will change everything, perhaps even our reliance on nuclear weapons. I am moved and awash in emotion I can't find words. That my essay should have been selected to represent the first of this new breed of ideas is more than I could have ever hoped for.

    The piece is called "The Myth of Deterrence" and essentially looks at the factual foundations of nuclear deterrence and concludes that while it is an interesting theory there's no particular evidence that you can site as proof that it is true or even exists. The essay concludes by urging that it is imprudent to depend on a theory for the safety and security of the United States (or any state for that matter.) I will write about that idea here, and some of the general themes that the essay raises, in the coming months.

    [Listen. Can you hear that? That sound of breaking and tearing? That is the sound of the old structures coming apart. It is the sound of old ideas buckling and popping, breaking at the point where the wear and tear of experience and events have worn them so thin they can't hold together. It is the sound of a paradigm crashing down. Shultz, Kissinger, Perry and Nunn made the loudest noise, but there has been a rattling undertone of disrepair for years. No longer the smooth whirring of a tight set of ideas revving together, but the whacking and clanking of a ramshackle, discordant machine that is slowly shaking apart piece by piece. The question is: who will build those new ideas? Who will venture out into the unknown and find the way for the rest of us? Who will  produce a vision of the world that will draw us irresistibly forward? The old world of nuclear weapons ideas is passing away. Who will build the new one?]
 

Comments

[Russ Wellen]

Re the sound of old structures breaking apart, this recent piece by Lawrence Korb in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "The U.S. Air Force's indifference toward nuclear weapons," (link below) is also encouraging.

Excerpts:
"From its creation as a separate service at the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force was first among equals amid the nation's three military departments and four armed services. [Its] dominance was due primarily to its leading role in developing and deploying strategic nuclear weapons. . ."

"But with the Soviet Union's collapse. . . . Budget priorities and hard-charging officers in the air force began to flow toward traditional air missions. Rather than the Bomber Barons, the air force in the post-Cold War era was led by the Fighter Mafia. . . . Moreover, as conventional weapons became smarter and more lethal, it became clear that nuclear weapons had little military utility."

"Given this lack of attention to nuclear weapons" the recent mistakes in maintenance and handling are not surprising.

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/the-us-air-forces-indifference-toward-nuclear-weapons