Nuclear Weapons Are Not a Fact of Life

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the growing risk of nuclear war today. Russia is making regular nuclear threats. America is undertaking a large-scale nuclear modernization program. China is increasing its nuclear arsenal. Tensions are escalating between nuclear-armed states.

But nuclear weapons are not an inevitable fact of human life. They are not impossible to get rid of, and pushing for that can be done by ordinary people like you and me.

Precedent exists for solving the problem of weapons of mass destruction. At one point, the United States and the Soviet Union, then Russia, together had over 70,000 tons of chemical weapons. But on July 7, 2023, the United States announced it had destroyed the last of its chemical weapon stockpiles, under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. Russia declared it had done so a few years earlier.

When nations violate such treaties — such as when Syria, a party to the treaty, used chemical weapons in 2018 — they see little benefit but can quickly bring on international condemnation. Syria’s strategic position didn’t suddenly improve because it employed a weapon of mass destruction. The world perceives chemical and biological weapons as very dangerous but not as a source of power.

Nuclear weapons can lose their power, too. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are remarkably inefficient tools of war. They are clumsy and expensive and lack practical military utility. Their use would result in catastrophic destruction, potentially wiping out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and spreading radioactive contamination across borders and generations. It is hard to envisage a scenario in which a state would be better off choosing to use a nuclear weapon over a conventional weapon, given the significant harm it would cause both to that nation and to its allies. Even nuclear-armed nations openly acknowledge that these weapons should never be used.

As opposed to conventional weapons, nuclear weapons’ main perceived benefit lies in their ability to scare and deter others. Their power lies not in their practical utility but in how they are viewed by nations and their adversaries. This concept, known as nuclear deterrence, works only as long as your adversaries allow it to work; it is a profoundly vulnerable security strategy.