By John Warnock, Warrior Maven Senior Fellow. These views are his own.
Are nuclear weapons useless? General Colin Powell said they were.
Powell’s actual words were “these [nuclear] weapons are useless, they cannot be used.” That’s clear enough, isn’t it? He said this in the Prologue to an important video documentary released in 2010 called Nuclear Tipping Point.(The Prologue is 4 1/2 minutes long, the documentary is 55 minutes long.)
Nuclear Weapons
General Powell was someone you’d think would know, if anyone did. In the 1980’s, he had been President Reagan’s National Security Advisor. During the administration of President George H. W. Bush, who followed Reagan, General Powell had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. This was when the nuclear stockpiles of both the United States and the Soviet Union were the biggest they would ever be–70,000 nuclear weapons, when you added them together. Even if you didn’t add them together, enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on earth many times over.
Nuclear weapons certainly could have been used for that—to destroy life on earth. Some of us who grew up during the Cold War believed they might well be used for that. During Powell’s years in George H.W. Bush’s administration, the Soviet Union came apart and we who had lived through the Cold War finally could begin to believe nuclear weapons would not be used for that.
Okay. But come on. How could nuclear weapons be useless? We’d used them, hadn’t we, against Japan? And they’d been useful, hadn’t they? They’d ended the war with Japan and with it World War II.
Actually, there was some serious doubt about that. We did, for sure, use two atomic bombs on Japan, and a week after we dropped the second one, the Japanese emperor had for sure surrendered. But was it our use of the atomic bombs that caused the surrender? The fact that the surrender happened after the atomic bombs were used doesn’t mean it happened because they were used. The sun didn’t come up today because you woke up and had your coffee before it did.
Among those who have questioned whether the two atomic bombs should be taken to have caused the surrender are two important World War II generals. Curtis LeMay was the army air force general who, starting in March 1945, had firebombed and destroyed all or part of over 60 cities in Japan. These firebombings destroyed many more structures and killed many times more people than the two atomic bombs did. If you take a look at the photographs now available to us of cities that were firebombed, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at the aftermath in Hiroshima.
