Hiroshima I

    "If nuclear weapons aren't useful, then how can you explain the fact that they won World War II?"

    It's a good question. The problem is that they didn't win World War II. The Soviet intervention did. The Soviet intervention radically changed the strategic situation. The atomic bombing was merely an extension of an already ferocious bombing campaign.

    In 1945 the Japanese had lost the war. The Allies knew it. The Japanese knew it. The only question was how the Allies were going to persuade the Japanse to surrender. The US was offering "unconditional surrender" which meant the Japanese gave in and the US made no promises.

    Historians have looked pretty closely at the situation inside the Japanese government in the summer of 1945.  A certain amount of new evidence has come to light. Journals, diaries. Based on all the evidence historians have conlcuded that the Japanese were considering only two options: fight one last bloody battle that would inflict so many casualties that the US would offer better terms, or convince the Soviets (still neutral at the time) to mediate an end to the conflict. Both plans could have still worked after the bombing of Hiroshima. Neither one was a live option after the Soviets intervened. The Soviet invasion changed everything. When viewed from the Japanese perspective, it's clear that the Soviet invasion was decisive.
    It seems unimaginable to us that any attack as horrible as the nuclear attack against Hiroshima could not have been decisive. But when you compare the Hiroshima bombing with the conventional attacks against Japanese cities that summer a startling and unexpected fact jumps out at you: the Hiroshima bombing wasn't all that much worse.  More on comparing city attacks next time.

Honey, I shrunk the nuclear weapons

    Sometimes counterfactual questions are the most revealing. What intrigued Holmes was not what the dog did in the night, but what it didn't do: it didn't bark. Nuclear weapons are so dramatic - they draw our attention so forcefully - that sometimes we don't stop to wonder why other, alternative states of affairs haven't come to pass.

    Why is it that nuclear weapons are not bigger?

    There is no theoretical limit to the size of hydrogen bombs. In the early days of nuclear weapons, when physicists were issuing dire warnings almost daily, one of the things they kept repeating was that you could build bigger and bigger bombs without any upper limit. The Soviets tested a bomb that was 52 megatons in 1962. Larger bombs could have been built. Yet they weren't. How can this be?

    If nuclear weapons are powerful because of the size of the explosion they create, why aren't people building bigger and bigger bombs? Bigger bombs would mean more powerful explosions, more influence and power for the country that possessed them, right? So why aren't we all racing to build 1,000 megaton bombs?

    In fact, the size of nuclear warheads in the US arsenal has actually been shrinking. At one time the US had several missiles whose warheads had yields of 1 megaton or greater. There was a gravity bomb with a yield of 9 megatons. But those weapons have all been retired. The yield of an average warhead in the US arsenal is now only about 300 kilotons.

    How can nuclear bombs be shrinking if the greater the destructive power the greater the military usefulness? This is the question we need to be asking ourselves.

    [Or is it possible that really big explosions aren't really that militarily useful?]

Lost in the unmapped city

    The problem with nuclear weapons issues is not that the questions have been framed badly, the problem is that they have not been framed at all. Most book-length treatments of the subject have really only one thing in common: they have no agreed-upon methodology. There are no common pathways that we can follow to explore the topic, no common jumping-off points for debate. The subject, methodologically speaking, is a sprawling unmapped city.

    Read a book on economics and almost certainly the author will talk about supply and demand, money, markets, capital investment, and other topics before moving on to areas where the author believes he or she has something new to offer. The subject is well mapped and there are agreed on points of controversy and agreed assumptions. You could think of people familiar with a subject as being like tour guides: they know the landmark problems, they know the best route for showing people around the topic for the first time.

    Pick up a book on nuclear weapons issues and you may find a structure, but if you compare it with another book, the structures will be entirely different. Very few books on nuclear weapons have the same bones. Of the books that do share a structure, the structure they share is the least useful: chronology. They start with the Manhattan project, cover Hiroshima, move on to the decision to build the hydrogen bomb and so on, down to the present. Along the way the author stops and expands on the points he or she thinks important.

    Chronology is the organizing principle of last resort. Only the desperate use it. Think about writing a book about love, or steam engines, or horse racing and organizing the material chronologically. You wouldn't do it, you would organize the material by different types of steam engines, different kinds of horse racing, different meanings of love. Imagine a book about economics that started with the invention of money and worked its way forward through kings and guilds to mercantilism, robber barons and on down to the present day. Would you tour a city by starting at the oldest building and then stopping at every building in order of age?

    We are strangers in the city of nuclear weapons. Certain neighborhoods have been mapped – nuclear war strategy, just war theory, arms race theory, deterrence theory, and so on -- but there is no guide to the city as a whole.

    This lack of a intellectual framework is a daunting problem for an investigation of nuclear weapons. How do our national leaders decide questions about nuclear weapons if they have no framework within which to evaluate the issues? How can citizens participate in the debate about these weapons -- which could effect many of us directly and catastrophically -- if there are no agreed assumptions, ideas, or paths for discussion?

Paris Gun

    It is often said that every weapon that man has invented has been used in war. This may be true; it's a difficult claim to document and prove. But except for the fact that it makes a good gloom-caster, it is a relatively unimportant point. The important issue is not whether this or that weapon has ever been used. The important question is whether such a weapon - once tried - has remained in the arsenals of warlike nations. Horrible weapons may have been imagined and tried. But are the horrible weapons still used?

    The statement, for example, that every horrible weapon that has ever been imagined has gained a permanent place in the arsenals of most nations is certainly, demonstrably false. Consider the Paris Gun. Built by the Germans in World War I it was more than 90 feet long, weighed 256 tons and moved on rails. It fired a 210 pound projectile more than 80 miles. Often confused with its smaller cousin the large mortar called "Big Bertha", in its day it was the largest cannon ever built. 

    It was a terrifying weapon. From March until August of 1918, the Germans used it to shell Paris. The shells fell out of the sky without warning and initially people believed they were being dropped by aeroplanes. Because the weapon was relatively inaccurate it couldn't be used against any target smaller than a city. In all, the Paris Gun fired about 360 shells, killing 250 people and wounding 620.

    Only one or two superguns have since been built (Schwerer Gustav, V3, etc.) Their impact on the wars in which they participated was minimal. Today nations do not race to build their own superguns. African nations, torn by strife, do not try to trade their oil or diamond resources for superguns bought from arms dealers. There are no angry diatribes in liberal papers about the horror of these weapons and the necessity of banning them.

    "But of course this is so," someone might say, "because these weapons were not very effective." And that is the point. There are any number of weapons that have been banned (chemical, biological) and a great many more that have simply fallen out of use. To say that every weapon that has ever been imagined has been tried in war may well be true. But it stubbornly misses the point. The key question is whether weapons are adopted into the arsenals of most nations.

    The issue for nuclear weapons is whether they will be seen as useful enough to be adopted into the arsenals of most nations. It is not a question of horror, it is a question of usefulness. 

History

I am convinced that to avoid nuclear war it is not sufficient to be afraid of it. It is necessary to be afraid, but it is equally necessary to understand. And the first step in understanding is to recognize that the problem of nuclear war is basically not technical but human and historical. If we are to avoid destruction we must first of all understand the human and historical context out of which destruction arises.

-- Freeman Dyson 

    History has a bad name when it comes to nuclear weapons. People who talk about arms races and people who talk about deterrence sometimes draw examples from the past - arms races in the 1920s or cases of deterrence from ancient history. But in the main, people who think about nuclear war believe history has little to teach them. Herman Kahn put the argument with especial vividness:

Despite the fact that nuclear weapons have already been used twice, and the nuclear sword has been rattled many times, one can argue that for all practical purposes nuclear war is still (and hopefully will remain) so far from our experience that it is difficult to reason from, or illustrate arguments by, analogies from history.

    Kahn, as so often, is both vivid and wrong. Louis Menand says that one of Kahn's striking abilities was to clearly articulate the conventional wisdom inside the community of scholars then working on nuclear war planning. This notion - that we lack experience and that therefore we have to rely on abstractions - strikes me as a very fair statement of one of the key assumptions of the time. In fact, I think many people still hold this assumption without thinking about it. (Rational choice.)

    But this notion is wrong. What led Kahn and his contemporaries astray, and what continues to lead us astray, I believe, is the tendency to focus on the means and forget about the ends. Our eyes get drawn to the means – nuclear weapons – and our thinking is overwhelmed by awe and a sense of danger. We look down the row of weapons invented by man – stone axe, bronze spear, musket, canon, tank, bomber – we see the nuclear missile near the end and say, “Wow! There's never been anything like nuclear weapons.” Which is true. But beside the point. As Thomas Schelling has argued, it is not the means that matter, it is the end.

It is not true that for the first time in history man has the capability to destroy a large fraction, even the major part, of the human race. Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese Islands without nuclear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, expensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capability to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many populous parts of the world. Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick.

    Against non-combatants almost any means may be used. The capability to destroy cities has existed for thousands of years. Ask the Carthaginians. The difference is that today's means allow us to do so faster, more easily and while the defender's military is still intact.

    So if cities have been destroyed for thousands of years and if the principal use of nuclear weapons is to destroy cities (not the only use, but the characteristic one), then what is required is a thorough study of city annihilations in history. If one seeks to seriously understand the practical and moral implications of using nuclear weapons (and perhaps find practical and moral arguments against their use) one must turn to history. How often have cities been annihilated in war? Does city annihilation win wars? Does it substantially further the aims of a war? Does city annihilation translate into usable diplomatic power? Does city annihilation have a moral component that, in the long run, makes the victor pay? Answer these questions and you are in a position to discuss, based on experience and knowledge, whether it makes sense to use nuclear weapons.