What to read

Getting a grasp on the reality of nuclear weapons

A friend who has been making his way in the world of law has a rekindled interest in nuclear weapons issues and asked me recently what he should read. Here are the things I think are important and mind-opening.

Thirteen Days

Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days (New York: Bantam Books, 1967).

I have never come across any other account that brings the fear of nuclear war so closely and suffocatingly to life. The Cuban Missile Crisis has rightly been called “the week the world held its breath” and that description, if anything, underplays the sense of crisis and danger spinning out of control. Kennedy writes clearly, the pace is fast, the tension is palpable, and I am constantly reminded when I read it, that this is someone who stood in the eye of the hurricane and lived to tell the tale.

Kennedy obscured some of the facts in order to cast his dead brother in a better light. (Robert Kennedy, at his brother’s behest, cut a deal with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin promising that the US would remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey if the Soviets agreed to remove theirs from Cuba.)

If, after reading this harrowing account, you decide you want a more modern take and greater detail about the crisis, I recommend the NY Times bestseller by Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. (The description of Castro writing to Khrushchev at the height of the crisis encouraging him to launch a nuclear war is worth the price of the book all by itself.)

The Bomb as God

Jacques Hymans, “The Bomb as God: A Metaphor that Impedes Nuclear Disarmament.” Security Studies (2024): 1-29.

This is, I think, a foundational article. Read, mark and inwardly digest. I’m not sure if I agree that nuclear weapons should be labeled God — “God” is a name mostly associated with Christianity (and to a lesser extent with Judaism) and might not resonate with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani readers. But this is a quibble over labels, not a disagreement with the central thesis.

I am absolutely sure there is a kind of established mythology wrapped around nuclear weapons that fills us with awe and reverence, fogs our brains, and obscures reality. We are primitives when we think about nuclear weapons, bowing down before idols and totems. If we could open a door and let in a breeze that would swirl away this shroud of myth and religion, we might see our way to dealing with this problem in a reasonable way.

If you find the article valuable, you might also try this colloquy from the H-Diplo Roundtable (a sort of scholars’ discussion in essay form). https://issforum.org/roundtables/26597

Benoit Pelopidas

Benoit is an extraordinary thinker who has produced more interesting and consensus-challenging scholarship on more aspects of nuclear weapons than anyone I know. And more important, SciencesPo, his research program, doesn’t take a penny from military funders. (And he had the courage to document the funding from military contractors that distorts the nuclear weapons “debate” and creates conflicts of interest for other think tanks and foundations that often say they support nuclear disarmament.)

You can find the full list of SciencePo’s publications here. The six that I have read and recommend most (although all of them are worth reading) are these:

• “Too close for comfort: Cases of near nuclear use and options for policy”

• “The oracles of proliferation: How experts maintain a biased historical reading that limits policy innovation”

• “Nuclear weapons scholarship as a case of self-censorship in security studies”

• “The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises”

• “The birth of nuclear eternity”

• “A bet portrayed as a certainty: reassessing the added deterrent value of nuclear weapons”

There is also a video of Benoit giving the opening address at the Nobel Peace Conference a few months ago.

I recommend Benoit unreservedly. Read him closely and you will never think about nuclear weapons in the same way again.

Kjolv Egeland

Kjolv Egeland is a ferocious researcher and has a wonderful capacity to find authorities that exactly confirm his points. Instead of summing up the argument he has been making, he lets some heavyweight do it for him. It’s a marvelous skill. His knowledge of the field is so deep, and each argument is so carefully researched, that it is as if he is simply explaining the way things are, rather than arguing a position or idea. This is masterful scholarship.

• “Who stole disarmament? History and nostalgia in nuclear abolition discourse”

• “The ideology of nuclear order”

• “European nuclear weapons? Zombie debates and nuclear realities”

• “A theory of nuclear disarmament: Cases, analogies, and the role of the nonproliferation regime”

Cold War History

John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg, eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999).

I’m a historian and I firmly believe that to understand the present and at least have a shot at guessing the future, you have to study the past. History is human nature on display and because human nature changes only slowly, it is sometimes a useful tool for realistically estimating the future.

Nuclear weapons theory and doctrine is unusual in that important strands of it remain unchanged from the earliest days of the Cold War. The essays in this book, about many of the leading figures in those formative years, are well written, accurately sourced, and enormously instructive (but you have to listen closely). If you are going to read only one source on the origins of nuclear weapons thinking, I would recommend this book of essays.

Tactical nuclear weapons

Because people in Europe have been thinking about building tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons lately, I would also recommend these two excellent papers that explain the realities (cold water alert) of trying to actually use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The first is a careful examination of how difficult it would be to destroy large tank formations with nuclear weapons.

A.H. Nayyar and Zia Mian, “The Limited Military Utility of Pakistan’s Battlefield Use of Nuclear Weapons in Response to Large Scale Indian Conventional Attack,” Pakistan Security Research Unit, Brief Number 61.

The second is by U.S. Army Colonel (ret.) Jeffrey D. McCausland, “Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Operational Myths and Realities.” McCausland spent much of his career in Europe working on the feasibility of using nuclear weapons in battlefield situations. This long paper outlines the problems and potential hazards of trying to use weapons that create such large explosions and spew so much poison on the battlefield.

Air Power

One of the enduring beliefs that resulted from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seeming to force Japan’s surrender is the notion that air power directed at “strategic” targets (often in order to “break the will” of civilian populations) can win wars. This belief guided much of the bombing in Korea and Vietnam, and has continued to crop up in other wars—like the Iran/Iraq War, for example. Tami Davis Biddle takes a coldly factual look at this belief and carefully documents the truth of the matter.

Tami Davis Biddle “Air Power and Warfare: A Century of Theory and History,” United States Army War College Press.

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So, a question, for you, dear reader. What else should I recommend to my friend? What are the articles and books that reveal current flaws in our thinking, open up new ways of examining this issue, and might encourage people to see this problem more realistically?