10. Wrong Guesses

There is so little actual evidence about the psychological impact of nuclear weapons on adversaries that experts and government officials are reduced to relying on hunches. Obviously, if you are reduced to guessing, you want the people doing the guessing to have the best track record possible. You want people put in charge of developing policy who have demonstrated a superior ability to estimate the value of nuclear weapons. But the experts—the nuclear advocates—who have made the guesses, developed the theories, and built the models that nuclear policy is based on have a record of being wrong again and again.

In the United States experts and government officials made a number of expansive predictions about how nuclear weapons might affect war, diplomacy, and international relations. U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes said that nuclear weapons “assure ultimate success in negotiations.” J. Robert Oppenheimer is supposed to have told friends that nuclear weapons were so earth-shattering that they would make war impossible. Many others were sure that nuclear weapons made success in war a foregone conclusion. Air Force general Thomas Farrell called them the “winning weapon”—a name that caught on and became popular. Nuclear weapons were also judged to be the ultimate guarantee of security. No state would even contemplate an attack against a nuclear-armed state. Nuclear weapons would also be decisive on the battlefield and in war. And they would be markers of enormous prestige and importance. In order to have a seat among the ranks of the most important nations, it would be necessary to have nuclear weapons. Finally, in light of the apparent success of that first use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, experts told each other that nuclear weapons were so revolutionary, so epochal that henceforward history would be divided into the atomic and the pre-atomic eras.

This is a remarkable collection of claims. Any weapon that could bring about all these changes would be a revolutionary weapon indeed. But over time every one of these claims has proved false.

Byrnes’ claim was one of the first to be disproved. In the negotiations that followed World War II over the shape of Europe, the United States failed to get its way. This failure showed that Byrnes was wrong: nuclear weapons don’t assure success in diplomatic negotiations.

Oppenheimer’s claim that war would be impossible took longer to be disproved, but it has been disproved equally decisively. There have been more than 100 wars of varying intensities since 1945 in all parts of the world (depending on how you count). Even wars that involve states that possess nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have not prevented war.

As for the claim that nuclear weapons would be decisive in war, this claim seems so self-evident that it is difficult to imagine it not being true. How could the “ultimate” weapon not be decisive? But both the United States and the former Soviet Union engaged in wars with small, poor nations—and lost. They could not figure out a way to bring their nuclear weapons to bear to prevent these failures. The defeat of the United States by Vietnam in 1975 and of the Soviet Union by the Afghans in 1989 demonstrated that nuclear weapons do not assure success in war.

It is hard to imagine any state attacking a country that possesses nuclear weapons. The risks, it would seem, are too high. Yet just this scenario has played out twice. The attacks against Israeli forces in the occupied territories that became the Middle East War of 1973 and the attacks on the British Falkland Islands in 1982 by Argentina both pitted non-nuclear-armed states against nuclear-armed states. These two examples prove that nuclear-armed states can find themselves attacked like any other country.

Since all the members of the Security Council in the United Nations have nuclear weapons, it is often taken for granted that to be an influential and important state on the world stage, it’s necessary to have nuclear weapons. But a number of states—Germany, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and many others—have shown that prestige and influence can be had without nuclear weapons.

It seems obvious that large, destructive weapons would be decisive if used on the battlefield. But the withdrawal by the United States of almost all its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and the rest of the world in 1991 is a clear indication that U.S. military officers were not convinced that nuclear weapons would be useful on the battlefield. Certainly no military leaders went to Congress and demanded that those tactical weapons be returned. None insisted that the safety and the security of the United States could not be guaranteed unless these battlefield weapons were on hand.

And, of course, despite continued claims that nuclear weapons are “revolutionary” weapons, no one now divides history into “pre-atomic” and “atomic” ages.

It’s worth noting that these mistakes were not small mistakes. The claims made were expansive and bold. The ability to prevent war is no small thing, and the mistake of thinking that nuclear weapons might prevent it is no trifling detail. Each of these mistakes of judgment about the abilities of nuclear weapons display a real failure to grasp something elemental about the nature of nuclear weapons.

Across the last seventy years nuclear advocates have had to walk back one claim after another, until today most experts who advocate for nuclear weapons agree that these weapons are only really good for one thing: preventing a nuclear attack by a state actor. The process has been long and one-sided. It is not a process of two steps back and then a surge forward as some new capability is discovered for nuclear weapons. It has been a slow, steady retreat. Yet curiously nuclear advocates have not gained in humility as this process has progressed. They do not shrug their shoulders and say contritely, “I’d like to say I’m certain, but we’ve been wrong about so many of our assumptions in the past, it’s only fair for you to question what I say.” If anything, their claims that there present judgements are correct have grown even more strident.

The record of error and misjudgment by nuclear advocates is clear and unequivocal. Over time, one after another, predictions about the influence of nuclear weapons have proved false.