To Abolish Nukes, We Must Abolish War
Manikins exposed to a nuclear explosion in the mid-1950s at the Nevada Test Site. Freaky, huh?
JERSEY CITY, JULY 27, 2025. The cover of the August Atlantic Magazine shows a nuclear fireball over the headline “EIGHTY YEARS ON THE EDGE.” Yes, it’s been 80 years since the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9, 1945). We’ve managed not to blow ourselves up. Yet. How long can our luck last?
The Bomb has haunted me since I first heard about it as a kid and thought something along the lines of, What the fuck??!! In 1983 I wrote my master’s thesis on the Nuclear Freeze campaign. Over the next decade I covered nuclear-arms issues (innovation, effects, treaties, surveillance, defenses and so on) for IEEE Spectrum and then Scientific American.
I interviewed experts at all the major weapons labs, plus the Pentagon. During a 1986 visit to the Nevada Test Site, I toured a tunnel in which, the next day, the U.S. and United Kingdom detonated a device.
So there’s a lot I could say about nukes. I’m writing this column to make just three simple points: 1, We must get rid of nuclear weapons. 2, Nations will want nukes as long as they fear being attacked by other nations. 3, Therefore, we must eliminate the threat of war between nations.
Let me elaborate on these points.
1, We must get rid of nuclear weapons.
In one of of six articles on nukes in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg notes that “the Nuclear Age is filled with near misses, accidents and wild misinterpretations of reality” that brought us to the brink of disaster. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis comes to mind.
Although the U.S. and Russia have slashed their arsenals since the height of the Cold War, they still possess “enough nuclear firepower to destroy the world many times over,” Goldberg asserts. Seven other countries possess nuclear arms: U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
Nuclear enthusiasts claim nukes make the world safer by deterring major powers from attacking each other. First, nuclear deterrence didn’t prevent wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, etc.
Second, deterrence assumes leaders of nuclear-armed nations are rational and morally decent. Do Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un and Netanyahu fit that bill? Does anyone? Remember that for deterrence to work, rational, decent nuclear leaders must be capable of murdering millions.
The Atlantic, in all its coverage, doesn’t even contemplate banning The Bomb. Perhaps the editors doubt the feasibility of eradication; all we can do is try to reduce the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
This position is bizarre, given what Ross Andersen of The Atlantic says about the scale of the risk. “Every moment that humanity spends with these weapons spread across the earth, pointed at one another, is a foolish gamble with the highest possible stakes.”
I agree. Given the fallibility of humans and machines, the risks posed by nuclear weapons are unacceptable. We must eradicate these weapons. But how? That question brings me to my second point:
2, Nations will want nukes as long as they fear being attacked by other nations.
The problem with most nuclear-eradication schemes--such as one proposed by that old warmonger Henry Kissinger in 2007 and another approved by the United Nations in 2023--is that they leave non-nuclear forces intact. Hence they don’t address the main reason why nations want nukes.
Nations acquire nuclear weapons to deter attacks by other nations. These attacks can be conventional (a grotesque descriptor for missiles, bombs, tanks and bullets), biological, chemical and cyber as well as nuclear. If deterrence fails, a nuclear-armed nation can ravage its enemy.
The war in Ukraine and other conflicts have amplified international tensions, with predictable results. According to the Federation of American Scientists, “China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as possibly Russia, are all thought to be increasing their [nuclear] stockpiles.”
South Korea, Japan, Germany and Poland have recently become “interested in going nuclear,” Ross Andersen asserts in The Atlantic. Meanwhile, The New Yorker reports that NATO members, with Trump’s encouragement, are boosting military spending.
We’re headed in the wrong direction fast. And so to my final point: 3, Therefore, we must eliminate the threat of war between nations.
Yeah, it’s my old end-of-war meme. To get rid of nukes, we must create a world in which war between any two nations is inconceivable, as much so as it is now between France and Italy, or New York and New Jersey.
I’ve been peddling this idea for almost two decades now, and it’s always been a hard sell. According to my informal surveys, almost all people--young and old, male and female, liberal and conservative--dismiss world peace as “unrealistic.”
“Realists” see war as an inevitable feature of the human condition. “Realists” say that, instead of scaling back our armed forces, we should make them fearsome enough to deter attacks by other nations and to prevail when war breaks out.
“Realists” insist we can’t abolish nuclear or non-nuclear weapons; we’re stuck with both. We must keep living in a world just a mechanical or cognitive glitch away from mass slaughter—”no more than 10 or 20 million killed, tops,” as General Buck Turgidson puts it in Dr. Strangelove—if not total annihilation.
This “realism” isn’t realistic. It’s idiotic, not to mention unscientific and immoral. For incisive critiques of “realism,” check out World Beyond War, a nonprofit dedicated to abolishing “the institution of war itself, not just the ‘war of the day.’”
World Beyond War debunks the “myth” that war is inevitable and a “necessary evil.” The organization details how war impoverishes us, erodes civil rights, promotes bigotry and harms the environment. It spells out what we could do with the $2 trillion-plus a year spent on “war and preparations for war”; and it proposes how we can make the transition to a world without war, in which disputes are resolved nonviolently.
Abolishing nukes and war won’t be easy. There are lots of political and technical details to work out. But I’m hoping we can move quickly toward world peace if enough of us insist on it.
In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker reports on “Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.” Becker reveals that tech zillionaires fantasize about becoming immortal, merging with superintelligent machines, colonizing the cosmos and so on. The book made me wonder: What would happen if folks like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel set aside their sci-fi pipe dreams and devoted themselves to the cause of world peace?
Our first step toward a world without war, and without nuclear weapons, is believing it’s possible.
Further Reading:
I make the case for a world without war in my book The End of War (recently reissued) as well as in these columns: Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War, Judith Butler on Nonviolence: A Critique, You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s, Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!, Is Killing Children Ever Justified?. See also Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Doomsday Hypothesis.
Also check out Doomsday Machines, the blog of my pal Alex Wellerstein, an historian who specializes in nuclear weapons. And keep an eye out for Alex’s forthcoming book The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age.
One other thing. Eradicating nuclear weapons doesn’t require abandoning nuclear energy. We need nuclear energy now more than ever to combat climate change, my Stevens colleague Edward Friedman, a physicist, argues in his new book Nuclear Energy: Boom, Bust, and Emerging Renaissance.