Editor’s Note: Carol van Strum is one of the most important teachers and best friends I’ve ever had. I met her when I was a young reporter trying to sort out the PCB and dioxin scandal — something she had already been doing for 20 years the day I met her, and I owe my success to her generosity and faith in me. She is working constantly in the background of Planet Waves, helping us with fact checking, research, ideas, editing and plenty else. She’s also a voracious reader and loves to write book reviews — here you have two. –efc
Book Review By Carol Van Strum
But man, proud man
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven
As would make the angels weep.— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
The typical advocate of nuclear weapons, like Shakespeare’s angry ape “most ignorant of what he’s most assured,” declares with absolute certainty that nuclear weapons are necessary, citing oft-repeated “truths” commonly believed to be self-evident:
— that nuclear weapons shock and awe our enemies into submission as they did Japan in 1945;
— that nuclear deterrence is effective in a crisis;
— that nuclear bombs’ awesome destructive power wins wars;
— that the existence of nuclear weapons has kept the peace for 65 years;
— and that anyway, it’s way too late to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle.
But what if our thinking about nuclear weapons is flat-out wrong? asks Ward Wilson.
What if the assumptions that undergirded the Cold War arms race are wrong? What if our military planning and budgeting are based on faulty logic? What if, during the seven decades that have elapsed since atomic weapons were used in anger for the first and only time, we have made our choices based on beliefs that have little foundation in reality and that have been repeatedly contradicted? What if our deep-seated fears are justified, but our decades-old belief that nuclear weapons are necessary is not?
With the precision of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s fussy little Belgian detective, Wilson examines each of these justifications for nuclear weapons in his book Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; $22.00), laying out what seems an irrefutable argument for each, and then with method and order proceeds to expose the fallacies, errors, misinformation, gross exaggerations, and even outright lies upon which our nuclear policies rely.