RK - So your argument is basically that not only do nuclear weapons not work but they're bad for the military. They're bad for defense.
WW - They're bad for our country because they're bad on a number of levels. Think about what deterrence says. For deterrence to work you have to convince people that you are willing to wipe out an entire country if it comes to that. You've got to prove to people that you're bloodthirsty, if you want deterrence to work. Well, you can't always be wiping out countries with nuclear weapons in order to prove that you'll do it. So sometimes you'll have to do lesser crimes in order to prove to people that you're bloodthirsty enough to carry out your threat to use nuclear weapons. You look at how militaristic the United States has been since World War II. How willing we've been to go to war. How often we describe it as necessary compared to how often we went to war from the Revolutionary War until 1945. I did a statistical study and I think we went to war like seventeen percent of the time from the Revolutionary War to World War II. If you look at all the years seventeen percent were war years and the rest were all peace years. But from 1945 to the present it's something like forty percent are peace years and sixty percent are war years. Don't quote me on the statistics because I don't actually remember the number but it's a significant and remarkable shift in the war-likeness of the United States. Some of it may be due to the fact that we're the lone super power when we were in the Cold War and so on. But it also seems to me that nuclear weapons have this corrosive effect. They force you to constantly be biting the heads off chickens in order to prove you're a tough guy who would do anything--including nuke you--if he had to. And that's a cost we don't think about.
RK - That's horrible.
WW - Yeah.
RK - Can you site examples?
WW - I don't know. Did we really have to go into Vietnam? The argument at the time was if we didn't stop them here then they'll be in California next. But in some ways it's kind of "We've got to show them." We've got to show that we're tough. It's kind of at the edges of behavior. I would argue that maybe the Iraq war is an instance of a kind of macho breast beating, we're gonna go find somebody we can beat up on to prove that we're not intimidated by terrorists. I don't know. I'll think about it. I'll work on it for you. I'll think of specific examples.
RK - You know I always ask you the same question and I'll ask it of you again.
WW - (Laughs)
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