October 28, 2012
John Mueller,
Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, published in
2009, copyright dated 2010, by Oxford
University Press (The paperback edition has an improved index)
The book argues that, whatever
their impact on activist rhetoric, strategic theorizing, defense budgets, and
political posturing, nuclear weapons have had at best a quite limited effect on
history, have been a substantial waste of money and effort, do not seem to have
been terribly appealing to most states that do not have them, are out of reach
for terrorists, and are unlikely to materially shape much of our future.
CONTENTS
I. THE IMPACT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
1. Effects
2. Overstating the Effects
3. Deterring World War III:
Essential Irrelevance
4. Modest Influence on History
5. Apocalyptic Visions, Worst‑Case
Preoccupations, Massive Expenditures
II. THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
6. Arms Races: Positive and
Negative
7. Proliferation: Slow and
Substantially Inconsequential
8. The Limited Appeal and Value
of Nuclear Weapons
9. Controlling Proliferation:
Modest Success
10. Costs of the Proliferation
Fixation
11. Reconsidering Proliferation
Policy
III. THE ATOMIC TERRORIST?
12. Task
13. Likelihood
14. Progress and Interest
15. Capacity
Epilogue and an Inventory of
Propositions
THE PROPOSITIONS
Obsession with nuclear weapons,
sometimes based on exaggerations of the weapons' destructive capacity, has
often led to policies that have been unwise, wasteful, and damaging
Nuclear weapons have been of
little historic consequence and have not been necessary to prevent World War
III or a major conflict in
Militarily, the weapons have
proved to be useless and a very substantial waste of money and of scientific
and technical talent: there never seem to have been militarily compelling
reasons to use them, particularly because of an inability to identify suitable
targets or ones that could not be attacked about as effectively by conventional
munitions
Although nuclear weapons seem to
have at best a quite limited substantive impact on actual historical events,
they have had a tremendous influence on our agonies and obsessions, inspiring
desperate rhetoric, extravagant theorizing, wasteful expenditure, and frenetic
diplomatic posturing
Wars are not caused by weapons or
arms races, and the quest to control nuclear weapons has mostly been an
exercise in irrelevance
The atomic bombs were probably
not necessary to induce the surrender of the Japanese in World War II
Those who stole American atomic
secrets and gave them to the Soviet Union did not significantly speed up the
Soviet program; however, obsession about that espionage did detrimentally
affect American foreign and domestic policy, something that led to a very
substantial inflation in the estimation of the dangers that external and
internal enemies presented
Changes in anxieties about
nuclear destruction have not correlated at all well with changes in the sizes
or the destructive capacities of nuclear arsenals
Arms reduction will proceed most
expeditiously if each side feels free to reverse any reduction it later comes
to regret; formal disarmament agreements are likely simply to slow and confuse
the process
The economic and organizational
costs of fabricating a nuclear arsenal can be monumental, and a failure to
appreciate this has led to considerable overestimations of a country's ability
to do so
The proliferation of nuclear
weapons has been far slower than routinely predicted because, insofar as most
leaders of most countries (even rogue ones) have considered acquiring the weapons,
they have come to appreciate several defects: the weapons are dangerous,
distasteful, costly, and likely to rile the neighbors
The nuclear diffusion that has
transpired has proved to have had remarkably limited, perhaps even
imperceptible, consequences
Nuclear proliferation is not
particularly desirable, but it is also unlikely to accelerate or prove to be a
major danger
Strenuous efforts to keep
"rogue states" from obtaining nuclear weapons have been substantially
counterproductive and have been a cause of far more deaths than have been infl icted by all nuclear
detonations in history
The weapons have not proved to be
crucial status symbols
Not only have nuclear weapons
failed to be of much value in military confl icts, they also do not seem to have helped a nuclear
country to swing its weight or "dominate" an area
Given the low value of the
weapons and their high costs, any successes in the antiprolifertion
effort have been modest and might well have happened anyway
Strenuous efforts to prevent
nuclear proliferation can act as a spur to the process, enhancing the appeal
of-or desperate desire for- nuclear weapons for a least a few regimes, an
effect that is often ignored
The pathetic North Korean regime
mostly seems to be engaged in a process of extracting aid and recognition from
outside, and a viable policy toward it might be to reduce the threat level and
to wait while continuing to be extorted rather than to enhance the already
intense misery of the North Korean people
If
Although there is nothing wrong
with making nonproliferation a high priority, it should be topped with a
somewhat higher one: avoiding policies that can lead to the deaths of tens or
hundreds of thousands of people under the obsessive sway of worst‑case
scenario fantasies
It is likely that no "loose
nukes"-nuclear weapons missing from their proper storage locations and
available for purchase in some way-exist
It is likely there is no such
thing as a true black market in nuclear materials
The evidence of any desire on al‑Qaeda's
part to go atomic and of any progress in accomplishing this exceedingly
difficult task is remarkably skimpy, if not completely negligible, while the
scariest stuff-a decade's worth of loose‑nuke rumor and chatter and
hype-seems to have no substance whatever
Because of a host of
organizational and technical hurdles, the likelihood that terrorists will be
able to build or acquire an atomic bomb or device is vanishingly small
Despite the substantial array of
threats regularly issued by al‑Qaeda (the only terrorist group that may see
attacks on the United States as desirable), and despite the even more
substantial anguish these threats have inspired in their enemies, the terrorist
group's capacity seems to be quite limited
One reason for al‑Qaeda's
remarkably low activity in the last years is that 9/11 proved to be
substantially counterproductive from al‑ Qaeda's standpoint; indeed, with
9/11 and subsequent activity, the terrorist group seems mainly to have
succeeded in uniting the world, including its huge Muslim portion, against its
violent global jihad
Any threat presented by al‑Qaeda
is likely to fade away in time, unless, of course, the United States overreacts
and does something to enhance their numbers, prestige, and
determination-something that is, needless to say, entirely possible
The existential bombast suggesting that the
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