While you were sleeping
The date is 1 July 1999. The place is Florence, Italy. It is early. My wife (in two more years she'll be my ex-wife, but this morning she is still my wife) is sleeping on the other side of the large hotel bed. I am sitting cross-legged on thick hotel carpeting next to the bed with a journal in my hands. (I've switched off the little light I was reading with). The dim light of morning makes it just possible to see. If you get up, cross the room, and look out the window to your left, you can see the Duomo. It is, perhaps, 5:15 am.
I've been reading Wittgenstein, the passages where he talks about the handles and knobs in a train engine's cab. They look similar (because they're all intended to be handled) but they are each used in a different way and each have a different function. Now - while you're sleeping, while you're on your way to work, while you're explaining the world to your children, or dining out, or slumped before the television, in the arms of your love, having the conversation that will get you ahead in life, calling your Mom, thinking about food - now, I'm writing.
Weapons as tools: quote P.I. 11 & 12. In the same way most soldiers look alike - they wear the same uniform, salute the same way, wear the same helmets. But in the U.S. army soldiers can be quite specialized: this one operates radios, this one calls in artillery fire, this one drives a tank, this one calculates supply tonnages needed, this one scuba dives, this one translates codes, etc. etc. In any given situation to get the job done you need the right soldier.
Perhaps in ancient armies this was less true. But even in Alexander's army there were men who fought on foot with sarissas, men on foot with bows, cavalry, specialists in siege warfare, etc. etc. Even two thousand years ago success involved employing the right type of soldiers on the right kind of terrain against the right type of opponent. (Hannibal's use of cavalry at Canae, or, for an example of the wrong troops at the wrong place, Ney's use of cavalry against the British left at Waterloo.)
Just as soldiers are specialized, so too are weapons specialized. Sometimes a single soldier will carry several different weapons: a short spear for thrusting or throwing, a short broad sword, a round shield. Armies often bring whole collections of special weapons in their baggage train.
War is not fought with a single weapon but with a panoply of weapons. Each is designed for a particular situation, for a particular use. A modern army has thousands of weapons, [long list of weapons] each for use in a particular situation. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, to ask: what sort of weapons are nuclear weapons? What situation are they best suited for? And which situations are they not suited for at all?
Another way to think about it is to imagine (as many people seem to do) that there is one medium behind all our weapons: call it "unipower." Unipower, in this conception, is like electrical current: a uniform medium that flows through all our weapons. We imagine, as it were, a spectrum of power. It should be possible to measure the power that each weapon has and assign it a rating - a uniform power rating or UPR.
In any given situation, it is not a question of which weapon to use, it is simply a question of how much power to apply. A pistol, according to this notion, has a relatively low power rating, perhaps 120 UPR. A howitzer has more, say, 1,000 UPR. And a nuclear weapon has the most power possible, say a billion UPR. In this way of thinking a howitzer is always better than a pistol and a nuclear weapon is always better than a howitzer. But there is no uniform measure of a weapon's power. Different weapons are effective in different situations. A pistol will not work in a situation where avoiding detection is essential. The "less powerful" knife might be the right tool here. A howitzer will not work under water. And so on.
Weapons are like tools. They have capabilities that are situational. There is no uniform power rating for weapons because the effectiveness of a weapon changes with the circumstances of its use. It is a profound mistake, therefore, to look at nuclear weapons and say, "Wow! They're the most powerful weapons ever!" and then stop thinking. In order to use nuclear weapons appropriately, in order to understand them, we have to understand their capabilities. We have to know in which situations they are effective and in which situations they are not.
[How I spent my summer vacation.]