In July of 1945, U.S. president Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” Terrible and useful. For sixty years, people have focused on the terrible aspects of nuclear weapons. They have made films about nuclear war, detailed the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and imagined the end of life on earth. In those sixty years, on the other hand, people have rarely talked seriously about the usefulness of nuclear weapons. Do they really win wars? Are they effective threats? Fear—engendered by real and imagined cold war dangers—constrained real inquiry. Absorbed by images of destruction, most people didn’t ask practical questions. But it turns out that the area that we’ve explored the most—the terribleness of nuclear weapons—is not the key to understanding them. The key is investigating whether or not they are really useful.

I am not urging the familiar argument that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to be useful; I am suggesting that even if one could use them with impunity, nuclear weapons would still have little practical value. Sixty years of experience, recent reevaluations of the track record of nuclear weapons, and reinterpretations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on new research make it possible to argue that there are very few situations in which nuclear weapons are useful. It might, in fact, be possible to demonstrate that nuclear weapons are functionally the equivalent of biological and chemical weapons: powerful and dangerous weapons, but with very few real applications. And therefore it might also be possible to make the case that—as with chemical and biological weapons—there are practical, prudential reasons for banning nuclear weapons.

To date, two related strategies have been used to oppose the use of nuclear weapons: the horror strategy and the risk strategy. The former relies on moral feelings and tries to persuade people that using nuclear weapons is too immoral to contemplate. The latter relies on calculations of the possibility that a small war could become an all-out nuclear war and tries to persuade people that the danger is too great.

Those who use the horror strategy often make Hiroshima and Nagasaki the centerpiece of their case. They try to drive home the immorality of using nuclear weapons by forcing their listeners to experience vicariously the horror of these cities. Doctors increased the emotional impact of this approach in the 1980s by talking unflinchingly and in detail about the medical consequences of nuclear attacks.

The risk strategy has been more widely embraced than the horror strategy. Vividly given a story line by Nevil Shute in On the Beach (a novel later made into a movie in which a nuclear war extinguishes all human life), it has remained a staple of antinuclear argument, used by radicals and sober policymakers alike.

Jonathan Schell updated and expanded the risk strategy in The Fate of the Earth. Schell eschewed the normal tack of emphasizing the risks of escalation, arguing instead that an all-out nuclear war might lead to the destruction of all life on earth. So it didn’t matter how big or small the risk of escalation was, the consequences were so terrible that no amount of risk was worth running. In 1983, Carl Sagan and four others further buttressed Schell’s case with evidence suggesting that severe climatic disruption, dubbed “nuclear winter,” could be triggered by a nuclear war.

Sound as their reasoning might be, both these strategies have weaknesses. The horror argument’s weakness is that in a crisis necessity almost always trumps morality. People will say, “Yes, it’s wrong. But we have to do it. We have no other choice.” If the Bomb seems likely to be militarily effective most people will decide to use it, even if they know it is wrong to do so.

The risk strategy has been eroded by the end of the cold war, which led to lowered tensions and significantly reduced the likelihood of nuclear escalation. Another key—but often overlooked—change is the end of “extended deterrence”—the threat by the United States and the Soviet Union to respond to attacks on their client states with nuclear counterattacks. At one time, all of Europe, all of Latin America, some of Asia, and even parts of Africa were covered by extended deterrence. With the collapse of the cold war client-state system, many nations are now out from under the nuclear umbrella. It is now possible for the United States to attack, say, Syria, with nuclear weapons without the threat of a nuclear response from Russia. As the risk of escalation has decreased, the strength of the risk argument has also decreased.

It is often said that every weapon that man has invented has been used in war. This statement misses the point. The important issue is not whether this or that weapon has ever been used, it is whether such a weapon—once tried—has become a fixture in the arsenals of warlike nations. Horrible weapons have been imagined and tried. But are they still used?

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 rain shells down on Paris without warning. The Parisians were bewildered and terrified. In all, the Paris Gun fired about 360 shells, killing 250 people and wounding 620.

Only a handful of other superguns have since been built (Schwerer Gustav and V3 among them). 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. Decisions about acquiring or banning weapons are not based on their horribleness but on their ability or inability to help win wars.

There are four general ways that nuclear weapons might be used: in a war intended to exterminate an opponent, in a war of coercion, as a threat, and to create terror. For two of these categories—coercion and threats—it is relatively easy to show that nuclear weapons are not ideal weapons and, in some circumstances, are so seriously mismatched to the task at hand as to be useless.

On the other hand, nuclear weapons are admirably suited for wars of extermination. If you have decided on a war in which your goal is to annihilate your opponent, nuclear weapons are your best choice. In this case it is necessary to argue not that the weapons wouldn’t be useful, but that such wars are morally wrong. This is not a demanding task. No case can be made that the capability to wage a war of annihilation is valuable or necessary. And this moral judgment is borne out by the practical experience of history: the actual number of wars of extermination is small. (Wars of extermination are distinct from genocide or other murderous actions within a country’s own boundaries.) A careful review of human history unearthed only one clear case, the Third Punic War.

The vast majority of wars are wars of coercion. The conventional wisdom has been that nuclear weapons are decisive in this kind of war. After all, they won the war in the Pacific. But when examined closely, the presumption of decisiveness evaporates. Recent reinterpretations of the Japanese surrender call into question the notion that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in any way connected with that decision. The Soviet intervention radically altered the strategic situation and was the decisive event.

The power to destroy cities is not the power to win wars. Freeman Dyson makes this point vividly in an example drawn from the Falklands War. Someone had said loosely about the war that if the British had wanted to they could have “blown Buenos Aires off the map.” This was true, but Dyson points out that the British would still have had to send soldiers to re-conquer the Falklands. And destroying Buenos Aires would probably have made the Argentine soldiers defending the islands fight more fiercely. Or the British could have nuked the Falklands themselves, but that would have destroyed the islands. The British abstained from using nuclear weapons not because they have admirable restraint, but because there was no practical application for the weapons.

Sixty years of experience with nuclear weapons does not support the notion that they are singularly useful to their possessors. Despite its nuclear arsenal, the United States was fought to a draw in Korea, lost a war in Vietnam, did not stop genocides in Cambodia or Rwanda, and is currently mired in conflict in Iraq. Despite its sizable nuclear arsenal, the Soviet Union suffered humiliation in its own guerrilla war in Afghanistan. Nuclear nations have fought many wars, but these supposedly powerful weapons have not played a decisive role in any of them.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS do not appear to be suited to the battlefield. This inutility has already been ratified by two of the most authoritative bodies in a position to make a judgment: the military establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union. If tactical nuclear weapons were really militarily useful, would these two military establishments have allowed almost all tactical weapons to be retired in the 1980s?

Nuclear weapons are also of questionable effectiveness in attacks on economic targets. Most economic targets are roughly building-sized, and with today’s precision-guided munitions, conventional weapons are more than adequate. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, require destruction of an area many times larger than the target. What is the point of destroying a quarter of a city in order to knock out an oil refinery? It is true that a large-scale nuclear attack could effectively shatter a nation’s economic infrastructure, but at what point does this become a war of extermination?

When the United States first got nuclear weapons, there were high hopes that they would provide not just military might, but international influence as well. Truman, when he talked about nuclear weapons being “useful” in the diary entry quoted above, was probably thinking of the upcoming negotiations he faced with the Soviet Union over the shape of the post–World War II world. His secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, told him with a touch of euphoria that nuclear weapons would probably allow the United States to “dictate our own terms after the war.” Byrnes returned from the bargaining table a chastened man. The Soviets, he reported ruefully afterward, “are stubborn, obstinate, and they don’t scare.” Perhaps this is not surprising. Joseph Stalin said in a 1946 interview in Pravda, “Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves.”

The U.S. nuclear monopoly did not prevent communist domination of Eastern Europe in the years after the Second World War. It did not prevent the Berlin Crisis of 1948. It did not prevent the communist takeover of China in 1949. Of course, any threat will work some percentage of the time—some people scare easily. The question is, are nuclear weapons reliable tools of coercion? Clearly not.

Some people argue that nuclear weapons have kept the United States and other nations safe by deterring nuclear war. This is difficult to prove. Imagine a man who says that the lucky penny he keeps on his dresser has prevented nuclear war. When you ask for proof, he says, “Well, I’ve kept that penny on the dresser for sixty-two years and there’s been no war, so it must be working!” Nuclear weapons may provide crucial safety and security, although it is hard to imagine how dangerous weapons that cannot be defended against are the best means of providing safety. Another—perhaps more certain—way to prevent nuclear war is to ban nuclear weapons.

Another way to assess the usefulness of nuclear weapons is to think about the role they might play in a crisis today. Imagine, for example, that the North Koreans used a nuclear weapon to attack Seoul or Tokyo. The United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, or China would all be in a position to retaliate against Pyongyang. Some might argue that this would be the right way to deter future nuclear attacks against cities. But wouldn’t a far more practical deterrent be for the United States, Russia, and China to form an alliance, invade North Korea, and set up a new government? Nuking Pyongyang only punishes the innocent. North Korea’s leaders would surely have left the city shortly before the North Korean nuclear strike was launched. Nuking Pyongyang kills North Korean civilians, who, because they live under a dictatorship, have no responsibility for the decision to attack. Rogue states that use nuclear weapons are unlikely to be democratic states, and because what nuclear weapons do best is kill people, nuclear weapons will never be well suited to punishing such a regime.

Many people believe that the most likely use of nuclear weapons in the next few years (barring a war in the Middle East or the Asian subcontinent) is a terrorist attack against a city. Terrorists, whose aim is to coerce political change by irregular attacks on innocents, are the people most likely to imagine that nuclear weapons are useful. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine nuclear deterrence against terrorists. Imagine that a nuclear bomb hidden in a cargo container is detonated in Baltimore Harbor. What effective nuclear retaliation options are there? It would be very difficult to identify the attackers. But even assuming that a terrorist group takes responsibility—say, al-Qaeda—how can nuclear weapons be used to redress this evil? Would you use a nuclear weapon against a city in Pakistan in which you think Osama bin Laden is hiding? Again, the vast majority of those who die will be innocent, and if faulty intelligence leads you to attack the wrong city you risk punishing only the innocent.

A good deal of energy has been devoted to imagining circumstances in which nuclear weapons would be exactly the right weapons to use. But why is it necessary to imagine unlikely or outlandish scenarios in order to justify these weapons?

The current U.S. administration supports research into developing “bunker buster” nuclear weapons that could destroy targets deeply buried or secreted in caves. There are two telling objections to such a weapon. First, as with most applications of nuclear weapons, conventional weapons already provide a fairly extensive bunker buster capability. Nuclear bunker busters would only extend existing capabilities a few hundred meters (to three hundred meters below the surface at most). It is within the capabilities of almost any enemy simply to dig deeper. The second is that the intelligence necessary for such a strike is unimaginable. Even with the sophisticated technology currently available to the U.S. government, for example, we were unable to identify chemical and biological facilities in Iraq, a country with barren, cloud-free, best-case topography. This is an indication of how hard it is to locate secret facilities. And we were looking for facilities on the surface.

THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION also imagines that mini-nukes would be useful. These are weapons with roughly a third the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—about the same destructive power that was deployed in the conventional raids against Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. Why build a nuclear weapon with an end result you can already achieve using conventional weapons?

In this connection, the size of nuclear weapons raises a question. Early on in the nuclear age, physicists warned that there was no theoretical limit to the size of hydrogen bombs. The Soviets tested a bomb with a yield of roughly fifty-two megatons in 1962. Larger bombs could have been built. Yet they have not been. In fact, the size of nuclear warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals has been shrinking. At one time one megaton (or larger) warheads were common, but today the yield of an average warhead in the U.S. strategic arsenal is only about a third of a megaton. How can nuclear bombs be shrinking if the greater the destructive power the greater the military usefulness? If nuclear weapons are useful, why is it that the trend is toward making them more like conventional weapons?

The benefits of a total ban are clear. The chief benefit is that it protects us against the danger that people are currently most concerned with in connection with these weapons: use by a terrorist group against a city. By banning nuclear weapons you substantially decrease the chances that they will fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorist organizations. The only reason that the director of the Pakistani nuclear project was able to sell nuclear technology to the North Koreans is that proliferation had gained such widespread acceptance. The more nations that have nuclear weapons, the more likely someone is to put them into the hands of irresponsible people. (As I write this in October 2006, North Korea has just tested a nuclear weapon. The international reaction serves as a strong reminder that it is important to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of unstable leaders.)

Any international ban would have to include careful monitoring of all formerly nuclear nations and inspection of nuclear power reactors. (If nuclear nations are unwilling to give up their weapons entirely, perhaps each could warehouse a small stockpile under UN administration in their own countries. The weapons could be retrieved by their owner, but only by publicly breaking the treaty.) With no military weapons floating around, and access to nuclear power monitored and controlled by international organizations, building a rogue bomb or stealing one becomes almost impossible.

None of the arguments sketched here is the final word on the usefulness of nuclear weapons. There is considerable work still to be done. The Hiroshima argument needs to be more thoroughly researched. The case against city attacks needs to be strengthened with historical examples. And along with work on each of its parts, a systematic treatment of the entire subject is needed. But it should be clear from the limited treatment here that there is enough substance in the approach to merit further work.

In 1775, Edmund Burke rose in Parliament to oppose the use of force against the American colonies. Burke believed strongly that the application of force was not the best way to bind the colonies to the British Empire. Burke said that he opposed force not because it was an “odious” instrument of policy but because it was a “feeble” one. His assertion must have been especially surprising because the British army and navy at that time were the most powerful in the world. Using force, he argued, could intimidate and coerce, but raw power alone would not create obedience in the colonies. In some situations brute force is less effective (or more “feeble”) than other means.

It may seem paradoxical to think of them as “feeble,” but I want to make something of the same argument about nuclear weapons. The strongest arguments against the use of nuclear weapons are not those that demonstrate that they are horrible or dangerous (although they are certainly both), but those that show that they aren’t very useful. Weapons, like tools, are situational: their “power” is measured not by their raw force but by the extent to which their capabilities match the circumstances. A jackhammer is a very powerful tool; it’s not much help in repairing a watch. A howitzer is of no use underwater; a shotgun blast doesn’t help where stealth is required; a knife has little effect at a thousand yards. It’s not the size of the bang, it’s the match between the situation at hand and the weapon’s capabilities. In most military situations, conventional weapons are better suited to the task at hand than nuclear ones. Only in blowing up cities are nuclear weapons singularly well suited to a task. This is an objective, however, that only terrorists pursue enthusiastically.

If there are hardly any circumstances in which nuclear weapons are militarily useful, and if it seems likely that the more nations that have nuclear arsenals the more likely the weapons are to fall into the hands of terrorists or madmen, then it makes practical sense to ban them.

Ward Wilson is an independent scholar living in Trenton, N.J. He is currently at work on a book about the military usefulness of destroying cities throughout history. He writes regularly at www.rethinkingnuclearweapons.org.

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