Ward Wilson is the premiere source of pragmatic arguments against nuclear weapons in the world. Basically there are a lot of people that think that nuclear weapons are immoral and wrong and they're right. But there aren't very many people that argue publicly that they're clumsy, stupid, not very effective weapons.

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Ward Wilson- Fighting Lies Supporting Nuclear Weapons

This is the first part of a two part transcript of my interview with Ward Wilson

Here's a link to the audio podcast interview

RK - And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 a.m.

My guest tonight is Ward Wilson. He's the author of Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons and he's a senior fellow at the British American Security Information Council. I know Ward from way back and it's great to have him on the show again. We're going to talk about his work and we'll get into it in just a moment. Welcome to the show Ward.

WW - Thanks Rob I'm glad to be here.

RK - I love what you do and I think it's incredibly important and valuable and what's really nice is that I'm not the only one. You've really gotten some amazing support over the last couple years. Can you talk a little bit about that?

WW - One of the blurbs on the back of the book that I like the best is from a four star General from the Army. So it's pretty cool when you're against nuclear weapons and you get military guys to like what you say. There were two Pulitzer Prize winning historians who've endorsed the argument that I make about Hiroshima. And I was in Costa Rica about two months ago at a conference sponsored by the Oscar Arias Institute. Arias is the former President - two term President of Costa Rica who is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. I don't know if you remember but in the eighties there were three Central American countries that had Civil Wars going on and Arias got all the Presidents of the Central American countries together and essentially talked them into passing a bunch of land reform and other progressive reforms. And they resolved all the Civil Wars. So he's kind of a hero of mine. I'm down at this conference and he's introducing the topic, it's about Nuclear War and some other topics - and he's talking away in Spanish, which I don't understand, he's says, "blah blah blah, Ward Wilson, blah, blah" And I'm like, "Oh I think he's talking about me." (Laughs) And then afterwards he told me he uses the arguments from Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons in all his speeches about nuclear war now. And I said, "Oh, gosh that is so nice. Thank you." And he said, "Well it's because they're all so true." So (Laughs) I was overwhelmed and honored because when a Nobel Peace Prize winner says he likes the arguments you've been making then that's good stuff--for me anyway.

RK - So this is Oscar Arias himself saying that?

WW - Yes.

RK - Awesome. Yes. Yes, you should be proud of that. So what's the elevator description of what you do?

WW - I'm the premiere source of pragmatic arguments against nuclear weapons in the world. Basically there are a lot of people that think that nuclear weapons are immoral and wrong and they're right. But there aren't very many people that argue publicly that they're clumsy, stupid, not very effective weapons. And so that's one of the reasons why the work I do has drawn some attention because when you marry those two approaches together - when you say nuclear weapons are not only immoral but their also clumsy, stupid, not very effective weapons then you've really got a very strong argument. So that's been having some impact.

RK - Toward who?

WW - Well I went and spoke at the Pentagon, for instance, and they listened very closely. It was quite a cordial conversation because I didn't say they were immoral I just said I want my country to be defended and safe but I want effective weapons to do it. I've been lobbying in Parliaments in the UK - in the United Kingdom at the House of Commons. A couple of years ago I spoke before the so-called Top Level Group, which is a group of retired people in the United Kingdom including two former Foreign Ministers, two Admirals, two Generals, a cluster of Lords from the House of Lords and a Barrenness. So that was - and you know in different places around the world. I'm going to be lobbying in Parliaments in Norway, Netherlands, Germany, UK, and Canada over the next year and I hope to go to Iran. I've been talking to some of President Rouhani's foreign policy people to see if I can stamp out the last bits of support for a nuclear weapons program in Iran.

RK - What do you tell them?

WW - What? What do I tell parliamentarians and others?

RK - What do you tell them? Yes.

WW - I say, "Look nuclear weapons have an exaggerated reputation. They didn't force Japan to surrender at the end of World War II. The Japanese said that the Bomb forced them because it was great excuse for losing the war. That way the Army didn't have to lose face for having lost. And they're clumsy weapons. The whole trend in warfare is away from big blundering weapons and towards small precise intelligent weapons. So why would you want to build a weapon of the past? Why wouldn't you want to put your money into peace or at least, the very least, spend money on weapons smart and discriminative?"

RK - I would also argue that what we learned in Iraq it's not weapons at all. It's making alliances and connecting with the people.

WW - Yeah. Well so -

RK - Bottom up. Bottom up approaches to dealing with the people.

WW - So I was having - I was having a conversation with a former Ambassador from Iran to Germany. He was also on their national security council and he pointed something out to me that I didn't know. I haven't had time to check the facts but this is what he said, he said, "During the ten years while the US was in Iraq and we were spending billions of dollars and treasure and killing people and breaking things with our armed forces--"

RK - Trillions of dollars.

WW - "--trillions of dollars. When the US started the war Iran - Iraq traded like 75 percent of its international trade with the West. But by the time those ten years of American occupation and breaking things and shooting people was over, Iraq had a majority, more than 50 percent of its trade, with China." So while we're going around the world shooting things and blowing things up and starting wars and using drones to hunt quote unquote terrorists or whomever. Maybe they are terrorists. While we're going around focusing on killing people, China's going around the world concentrating on doing trade deals and development deals and loans. The people in South Africa are worried about Chinese foreign policy. They don't want to contradict it too much because more than 50 percent of South Africa's trade is with China now. Used to be South Africa was a reliable ally of the United States. Well they probably are to some extent but still. As this--as China's influence grows because of their expanding trade around world in Latin America, in Africa while we're focusing on shooting people, they're focusing on making friends and buying influence. It occurs to me that we could very well - we have the most advanced military in the world and that's quite impressive, but it could be that having that capability has caused us not to see the problem properly. That worries me. But, you know, it's exactly what you talk about with bottom up. It's instead of shooting people with rockets out of the sky which is clearly as top down as you can get.

RK - Yeah, well, you know we had lunch today so we're kind of recapping the conversation we had at lunch. And what I said to you was I just submitted the book I've been working on, Bottom Up, for the first time to the editor.

WW - And talk about what you told me about the nuclear weapons part of that.

RK - Yeah, well, the chapter - one of the sample chapters is about top down, bottom up war and in a previous conversation with you it made me realize that nuclear weapons are about as top down as you can get. It's the idea that one powerful person can just push a button and wipe out an Army or a nation or a civilization. In a way my experience with it is--I've had people say, "nuke those people," and it might be Iraq, it might be Iran, and it's like a fantasy. It's a delusion. It doesn't get any more top down than that and what I learned from you is that it's total BS. People are not going to use it. The people that talk about it are blowing steam out of their butts and it's ridiculous and the fact is even when it is - this whole idea that it's a deterrent is nonsense. It's a fantasy. It's almost like word porn.

WW - Well there is a sense in which--so you could tell the Cold War history the way we tell it or you can tell it in an entirely different way. Imagine that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't win the war. This is not a moral argument about us being wrong and whatever, whatever. This is an effectiveness argument. So now you drop these bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Russians declare war on the same day that we drop the bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese see the writing on the wall. They know that adding another great power to the war essentially cooks their goose, so they say, "okay we have to surrender." So they offer to surrender. We say, "Oh, nuclear weapons are a miracle weapon." And because we are the largest country undamaged in the world at the end of World War II, what we say has a lot of influence in the world. We set nuclear weapons as the currency of power. If you want to be a great power, if you want to be a super power, you've gotta have nuclear weapons. Now nuclear weapons got this huge reputation and we basically only ever had one test of what affect they have. Remember the important thing about nuclear weapons for deterrence is not what they do to buildings and cars and factories and human bodies. The important thing is what they do in the minds of leaders. Deterrence is psychological, and in terms of the psychological impact of nuclear weapons we basically have eight or nine pieces of data, maybe twelve. We have two explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a small number of crisis during the Cold War that involved nuclear weapons. So we've got this huge reputation for nuclear weapons based really on not much evidence. And the fundamental - the first episode that gave us the idea that nuclear weapons were so amazing now appears to have not proved that they're amazing at all. It now appears to have not proved that they're amazing but proved that they can be ignored like any other city bombing. The Germans didn't surrender after we bombed Hamburg and they didn't surrender after we bombed Dresden. It's possible that we've wildly exaggerated the usefulness and power of deterrence. This kind of magic abra cadabra word that we use to solve all of our foreign policy problems--you know, "We'll be safe because we've got deterrence. We can hold them off because we have deterrence. We'll use deterrence to get them to do this." Well what if - we have never really tested deterrence because how do you measure what's going on inside the mind of an adversary? What if we've totally made deterrence up? What if it's a myth? So I wrote an essay called, "The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence" that's kind of getting a little traction. I actually had a full professor from Leeds University write a long essay about how I was totally wrong and there was definite proof that deterrence was real and stuff. If nothing else it's a compliment to be getting the attention of full professors at departments international relations.

RK - So you - let's talk more about this idea of a myth because I'm really into mythology and heroes and archetypes. Why do you call it a myth?

WW - Well I don't know. It just - it's not - what is nuclear deterrence? It's not a box. It's not something physical. It's kind of an idea like - you know - think about the islanders living on a volcanic island and the volcano erupts and they're all terrified and appalled. Half the village is wiped out and the religious Shaman says, "We have to throw a virgin into the volcano to mollify the mountain god." So they look around and they decide to do it. They throw a virgin in and a year goes by and there's no eruption of the volcano and they say, "Huh. It must be working." And then every year they throw a virgin into the volcano until the next time the mountain explodes. You know we have--as human beings we have this capacity to infuse objects with meaning. You think about a Totem Pole, it's just a stump of wood but somehow we carve it and then we look at it a particular way and it becomes heroes and demons and gods and you know, evil spirits. I think that the symbolic power of nuclear weapons is very strong. Weapons often become symbols. If you look at Dreadnoughts (which was the word for battleships at the turn of the century--the turn of the 1900's), there was a whole arms race over Dreadnoughts and everyone needed Dreadnoughts. Kaiser Wilhelm told his friend the King of Italy that once he had enough Dreadnoughts built then the other leaders in Europe would listen to him with respect. Dreadnoughts were a symbol of military might and they were going to give you political power and influence. And it turned out that they were really just symbols. When World War I came what they discovered is that battleships were very vulnerable to torpedoes from submarines or from surface ships. And in World War II they found conclusively that battleships are not very powerful. Anytime you get a fighter bomber you can sink a battleship--it's much easier to sink them, in fact, because they're such big targets. They're these huge expensive piece of military equipment, impressive in peacetime but highly vulnerable in wartime. So their value was really symbolic more than real. I'm concerned that we made this big todo about nuclear weapons and it will turn out that they don't have real value. That they're just myths. Let me tell you the argument that persuaded the guys at the Pentagon. I went and talked to the A10 Directorate which is the Air Force's Policy, Planning, and Strategy staff for nuclear weapons. So it's the heart of the nuclear endeavor in Washington. And we had a great conversation. They liked the presentation. They weren't necessarily persuaded, but they listened respectfully and attentively. But the thing that really got their attention was a guy said, "Come on, Ward. It may true that Hiroshima didn't win the war but the fact is nuclear weapons now have this reputation. The reputation is now the reality and so you have to live in the world as it is. You can't ignore the reputation and pretend it ought to be less or wish that it was less. It is what it is." And I said, "What I always think about when I think about reputation is Patroclus." Patroclus, you remember, was Achilles' best friend. They stole Achilles' girl, so Achilles decided to sulk in his tent. He wasn't going to fight. He was the best warrior for the Acheans--this was in the Trojan War. So the Trojans kept winning and winning and killing the Acheans, and the Acheans kept falling back and taking losses. And they kept sending delegations to Achilles' tent saying, "Dude, come on! You've got to fight" - or whatever the ancient Greek equivalent of dude was - "You've got to fight for us." But he said, "I won't fight, I won't fight. They took my girl." Finally Patroclus goes to him and says, "Okay, you won't fight. I get it. But lend me your armor." And Achilles says, "Okay." So Patroclus puts on the shining breast plate and he picks up the famous shield and puts on the helmet and goes out onto the battlefield. And for a while the reputation of Achilles carries the day. The Trojan fall back, the Acheans push forward, and they retake some of the conquered ground. Eventually Hector says, "Well I don't care. Achilles or no, I've got to go out and fight him." He goes out on the battlefield and Apollo (who favors Hector swoops) down and knocks Patroclus over. He doesn't hurt him. But he knocks him down and his helmet come off. The Trojans see that it is not the great Achilles inside the armor but some other mere mortal and they run him through with spears. And what I said to those guys at the Pentagon is, "I don't want my country to be defended by a reputation. --Not by a hollow suit armor. I want the real Achilles. I want actual defense. Reputation is smoke and mirrors and can disappear at any time."

RK - And you know told this whole story of Patroclus to them?

WW - Yeah, and they really liked it because of course they're trained to be warriors--they want to be Achilles, too. But I think that the point is that you don't want to defend yourself with a myth. Because a myth can evaporate at any moment.

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)

RK - Who benefits from nuclear weapons?

WW - Well defense contractors, there's a large nuclear weapons industry, weapon labs, facilities that work on the plutonium and the uranium and put the warheads together and so on. But the problem really is people - there is a cadre of people who are believers. They are fervent believers. They think nuclear weapons keep up safe and make us a super power and give us status. You know, for them, nuclear weapons are the magic talisman that makes us who we are. And of course we would still be Americans without nuclear weapons. We would still have -

RK - Who are these crazy people who are the nuclear weapons believers? Is there demographics for them? What do you know about them?

WW - Their academics, there guys like Nobel Economics Prize winner Thomas Schelling, who believes that nuclear deterrence is an essential component of US security. They're former defense department officials, civilians mostly. They tend not to be military guys, although there are some military men who believe fervently in nuclear weapons. Talking to military guys I find most tend not to like nuclear weapons. They can't--during their active military careers--say they don't like nuclear weapons because then they lose--at least if you're in the Air Force you lose your job because you've got to be ready to go and bomb whenever the President says, "Go and bomb wherever." But a lot of guys come out of the service and say, "These are terrible weapons." And I think there's some people in think tanks. It's surprising how many civilians really support nuclear weapons. And there are a large cross section of conservative politicians who appeal to the fear and pride in voters and say, "We're great because we have nukes and we have to be afraid if other people get them."

RK - A couple things, one you told me it cost over 50 billion dollars a year to maintain the nuclear weapons in the United States. Is that number still about right?

WW - Yeah, we're spending about 52 billion a year.

RK - I'm assuming that part of that is military expenses but a lot of it is private contractors probably General Electric and - who? What are the big companies that benefit that are going to be spending money on lobbying members of Congress?

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

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