The Bowls of Wrath Courtesy of Corporate America (Revelation 16)

Ward Wilson- Fighting Lies and Misconceptions Supporting Nuclear Weapons

The Trinity Bomb in Los Alamos

This is the second part of a two part transcript of my interview with Ward Wilson

Here’s a link to the audio podcast interview

RK – My guest tonight is Ward Wilson. He’s the author of Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons and he’s a senior fellow at the British American Security Information Council. I know Ward from way back and it’s great to have him on the show again. We’re going to talk about his work and we’ll get into it in just a moment.

the transcript of the interview picks up with the last question I asked:

RK – I’m assuming that part of that is military expenses but a lot of it is private contractors probably General Electric and – who? What are the big companies that benefit that are going to be spending money on lobbying members of Congress?

WW – Well, you can find out by going to a website called dontbankonthebomb.com. It’s an international effort to get people to divest from large corporations that make their money off nuclear weapons. Most nuclear weapons are made by organizations that are government funded. But some corporations like – I can’t think of one right off the top of my head. Large corporations make their money by making things specifically for use with nuclear weapons. You can find out what those things are and what those corporations are and if you feel strongly about it you can insist that your University not invest its endowment in those corporations. Or your town retirement fund – employee retirement fund not invest in those corporations. Or you personally don’t invest in those corporations. If you’re lucky enough to have investments. I think it’s a very clear way to send a message that says, “I don’t think nuclear weapons are a good kind of weapon.”

RK – Alright so I got to the website and I can read a quick list of some of them. Alliance Techsystems, Babcock and Wilcox, Bechtel, Boeing, GenCorp, General Dynamics, Honeywell International, Jacobson Engineering, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman.

WW – That’s pretty much the usual suspects.

RK – That’s the military industrial complex.

WW – Yep, and they make big bucks off of nuclear weapons and they lobby Congress hard about those nuclear weapons. Sending them a message is probably worth doing.

RK – What’s also interesting is that it lists the companies that offer mutual funds and investments that are invested in nuclear weapons. That includes AIG, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, Oppenheimer Fund, PNC Bancorp, and State Farm, and State Street. You know -

WW – The question you want to ask yourself is: if you’re investing money with people who are investing in nuclear weapons corporations, don’t you effectively own a nuclear weapon? You own a part of a nuclear weapon. The question you have to ask yourself is, “Do I want to own a nuclear weapon? Do I want to be financially responsible for part of this complex of weapons? Is this a way that I want to be involved the United States?”

RK – Humanity – The world. Yeah that’s a good point. So I want to go back the military issue. You said that a lot of military people after they leave the military, they’re actually able to say what they really think. Which is really screwed up too that they really can’t say what they think. But when they get out of the military they don’t like nuclear weapons. Why do you think that is?

WW – So the best example is Lee Butler. Lee Butler was the commander of Strategic Air Command–the Air Force’s nuclear weapons arm and he became the first commander of the STRATCOM which is all the nuclear forces of the Navy, Air Force combined. He told me – I was sitting in his kitchen – and he’s very intense and quite likeable. He said, “Every month in the middle of the night or during a meeting or whatever, someone would show up and say, ‘Sir, you have to come down to the big room now.’ They would go down to the command center and they whisk you down there really fast and you look at the big board and there is an attack scenario up on the big board. There’s four thousand missiles headed towards the United States or whatever the scenario is for the exercise that day. They give you a book because everything you do is scripted because they’re sure it’s going to be so emotional that you’ve got to be reading from a script or else you won’t get it right. They put you on the phone with the president of the United States or whoever is playing the president for this exercise and the president says, “General, what is the situation?” And you say, “My President, this is happening and this is happening.” And then you say, “Mr. President, what are your orders?” And he says, “General, what do you recommend?” And Butler said that in the 32 months that he was Commander, it was always the same. The attack was designed in such a way that you always had to respond with MAO4. This is the early 1990s. There were four major attack options (MAO). MAO1 was leadership, MAO2 was leadership plus military, MAO3 – Major Attack Option 3 was leadership, military, and economy. And MAO4 – which was the one they always fixed it so you had to recommend that – was leadership, military, economy, and civilian population. So for 32 months, once a month, Lee Butler had to live through the imaginary experience of recommending to the president that 120 million Russians and various other nationalities be killed in 30 minutes. And he said invariably the president, or whoever was playing the president for that exercise, after you recommended whatever you recommended, would say, “Alright. That’s what we’ll do.” So that in affect Butler was making the decision. He was choosing to kill all those millions of people. And for some people maybe that’s not a problem but for Lee Butler when he came out of the military, he worked as hard as he could to do something about nuclear weapons. And I think there are a group of military people who have that experience. They get close to nuclear weapons, they think about the reality of it, and it’s so obviously wrong that they feel they have to do something. I’ve completely forgotten what your question was because that Butler story gets me every time. He’s so–

RK – My question was, “Why do the military feel that nuclear weapons are bad?” You told me it’s not only Lee Butler it’s a lot of generals and a lot of military people don’t like nuclear weapons at all.

WW – Well the reason is – this is easy – their clumsy. You want to destroy a building in a city (and I would estimate that 95 percent of all targets in war are building size or smaller.) You want to destroy a building in a city you’ve got to destroy three quarters of the city to do it, if you use a nuclear weapon. Say you’re the Russians and you want to do a limited strike on the US–just missile silos, sub bases, and air bases. Two US physicist constructed this imaginary attack scenario in 1976 by Soviet forces on just nuclear targets. Surgical. Carefully circumscribed. The result? 20 million people die because of all the radiation poisoning downwind. Even when you try to use nuclear weapons in a carefully controlled, limited way they blunder across the landscape and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Military guys are brought up being told that they are more ethical than the regular civil population. They don’t kill civilians, they fight by the rules, they are honorable, they wear the uniform with pride. And then to be told that they’re going to use weapons that are going to kill 90 thousand innocent civilians. I think just rubs most of them the wrong way. Some of them not. But–you know the whole trend in warfare is towards smaller, more precise, more accurate weapons, little tiny drones. I use this slide in my presentation of a little 4 inch drone called the Black Hornet Nano. It’s got a little camera in the nose and it flies around the battlefield and you can see what’s going on. It seems to me that is what the future looks like. Tiny little smart vehicles that can shoot somebody with a tiny little shot of poison or I don’t know. Maybe it’s something that knocks them out and disables them while you capture them. These seventy year old clumsy, blundering weapons: they just seem like dinosaurs. They seem like an evolutionary dead end in terms of weapons development.

RK – This is the Rob Kall Bottom Radio Show WJNC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philly sponsored by opednews.com. If you came in late to this conversation I’ve been talking with Ward Wilson, the author of Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons and a Senior Fellow at the British American Security Information Council. With the website rethinkingnuclearweapons.org. We’ve been talking about how even members of the military don’t like nuclear weapons and the idea that they’re a seventy year-old technology that have never proven to actually do what they’re claiming to do. Which is win wars or deter wars. Which is what Ward is spending his life working on, really. Talking to people in different nations’ militaries and foreign services. You recently had a very interesting experience in France. What happened there?

WW – France, we used to laugh about France (Laughs), in the anti-nuclear world people are kind of scornful about France because we used to say that when the world gets rid of all their nuclear weapons the last country to abandon nuclear weapons won’t be Israel and it won’t be Pakistan, it will be France. The problem is that in France nuclear weapons are so tightly identified with what it is to be French–with the French nation. They’re part of France’s identity. With the force de frappe France is a world power and, you know, France with a capital F. But without them they’re just a middle-sized country with great cuisine and a history of having once been great. We used to talk about France that way but recently three guys organized a conference in France that was just amazing. It was in the National Assembly, their Congress. It opened with a speech by the President of the National Assembly. There was a former Prime Minister in attendance who spoke. There were three former Defense Ministers. Retired Foreign Ministers from Austria and Israel, think-tank people, people from the Red Cross.

It was really an impressive group of people and more than 200 attendees, registered attendees. For the first time, in the heart of French officialdom there was conversation about the things that we’ve been talking about. The economic cost of nuclear weapons, their military disutility, debates about deterrence. Some of the people who spoke, some of the former defense ministers still think that nuclear deterrence is essential. And they said so. But this is a debate that has never been had in France before. It was an enormous step for them to even begin discussing it. I gave a talk and I was startled at how carefully and closely they listened. in particular one fellow that listened was a former French defense minister who is the leader of one of the center right parties in France. He ran for President last time and he might run again. He really liked what I said and he stood up and gave a very strong speech afterwards and said, “We have to support nuclear disarmament. Nuclear weapons are not useful weapons and Europe has to lead the way in nuclear disarmament. Russia and United States have been in charge but now it’s time for Europe to lead.” To watch the leader of a center right party in France go on the record of strongly favoring disarmament was amazing experience and I really think that those three guys–Paul Quiles, a fixture in French government who’s held several cabinet posts including defense minister, Bernard Norlain, who’s the former Commander of their Air force, and Jean-Marie Collin–those three guys are doing amazing things in France. I would’ve said that France was impossible before I went there. But now I think there is – you know France could surprise us.

RK – You sent an email out with a little anecdote that something you said in your speech was later used. What was that?

WW – Oh yeah. The guy who spoke, Herve Morin, the center right leader, picked up on something I said. Part in my presentation was about the fact that we could have a revolution in thinking about nuclear weapons. After all, the Ptolemaic view of the universe (which had the earth at the center and everything revolving around it) was the standard belief for 1,500 years and then Copernicus comes along in 1543 and says, “No, no. The sun is at the center.” In a few years that sweeps the old view into the dustbin of history. So Morin was interviewed in Le Monde, the national French newspaper the next day, and he said, “We need a Copernican revolution when it comes to thinking about nuclear weapons.” It’s an amazing experience to be supplying talking points to a guy – however indirectly – to supplying to talking points to a guy who might be running for President of France. And since he’s center right, he has the potential to win.

RK – Congratulations.

WW – (Laughs) its very strange. Thank you. I just hope that it’s possible to do something on this issue before we have some kind of calamity. It’s wonderful to go to conferences and imagine that you have influence but the important issue is whether we get something sensible done about nuclear weapons.

RK – How long has it been that you’ve really been speaking about nuclear weapons?

WW – Speaking, probably seven years but I’ve been thinking about them for thirty years. I got started in 1981 and i’ve been devoting a fair amount of intellectual energy since then.

RK – What kind of progress can you measure in that time?

WW – Personally, in my intellectual understanding, most of the progress came since the year 2000. It’s weird how progress happens. You get one realization and you kind of mull over that for a while. Then you realize something else and as a result of that you connect something else with it. It’s a little like mapping unexplored territory. You spend lots and lots of time wandering over the surface with no map whatsoever and then you start to recognize some landmarks. Eventually you can begin to map–a relatively coherent map of what the terrain actually looks like. But the initial process is mostly just wandering. Looking amazed at whatever is around you. I would love to tell you that I was tremendously smart and I had a plan and I just went step by step through it but the fact is it what mostly just reading and writing and trying to figure stuff out for a long time, and then slowly realizing a few things.

RK -Since you started and where you are now has anything changed in a way that is significant?

WW – Yes, but not really as a result of what I’m doing. The biggest thing that’s happening is that in 2013, in March, the Norwegian government held an International Conference on the humanitarian impact on nuclear weapons. They emphasized that these are weapons that have very bad consequences and that they’re consequences that are difficult to ameliorate because hospitals and doctors are all dead. 127 countries came and many of the ambassadors and officials representatives had not been exposed to the information before. There was a follow up conference in Mexico in Nayarit in February of this year. I have to say as a side light that being in Oslo in March is a lot less fun than being in Mexico in February. 140 countries came to the meeting in Mexico and it was a remarkable meeting because they again presented information about nuclear weapons and the dangers and they also talked about the risk of accidental use. We were supposed to close the second day at 4:00 or something but at 7:30 we were still in the room because there were so many countries that wanted to talk to say how they felt. All these countries that for years and years – the United States has been saying, and Russia had been saying, “This is for us to worry about and you sit quietly and don’t talk about it. This is our problem, our responsibility.” Somebody finally said to all the other countries in the world, “What do you think about nuclear weapons?” It turns out that Nicaragua and the Fiji Islands and countries all over – New Zealand – all these countries around the world have something to say. Because everyone in the world would be affected by nuclear war. There is a growing sense among some countries that – in fact the problem with nuclear weapons is the responsibility of all countries not of just a select few who have the weapons. There’s going to be a follow up conference in Vienna in December and I’m hoping to be able to do a side event presentation of some information about deterrence. It feels as if there’s a growing momentum internationally to do something about nuclear weapons.

RK – How has your approach to it changed and evolved over the years?

WW – You know you get smarter. People tell you things. People will have smart suggestions and you incorporate those. I had a pretty bad argument against nuclear deterrence when I started out. Patricia Lewis in the UK pointed out that nuclear deterrence may work pretty well, and it may even work 90 percent of the time, but that’s not even close to good enough. If the result of nuclear deterrence failing is the possibility of catastrophic nuclear war, then a one in ten chance that you’re going to have a catastrophic nuclear war is unacceptable. Nuclear deterrence has to be 99.99999 percent reliable. It has to work every time to prevent that war or it’s not good enough. You can’t just sit back smugly and say, “Well we lasted seventy years. It must work.” You’ve got to show–if you’re going to put the lives of 300 million people at risk–you’ve got to show that this is a technique that definitely works. It’s absolutely reliable and that just is not something that you can show. Not provable. You learn things, you figure things out. I’m doing a paper on climate change and the possibility of nuclear war resulting from conflict over drought or water drying up. I didn’t know that 60 percent of the agriculture in Pakistan, one of the nuclear powers, depends on water that comes from glaciers in Kashmir. If you have global warming, the water that’s in the glaciers of Kashmir will decline, there will be less food in Pakistan, and here will be a nuclear armed state looking around to find a way to feed its people. That’s a serious problem. You keep learning things. You find things out.

RK – You have another book coming? Anything in your head?

WW – I want to write a book about the dangers of deterrence because I think that people imagine that deterrence is the thing that has kept us safe and made us prosperous for 70 years. Mostly we didn’t have a nuclear war because of luck and that’s really clear. Do we have enough time to tell the luck story? Or are we almost done?

RK – Yeah, we have seven minutes.

WW – In order to show that nuclear deterrence relies on luck, not that it works like magic, all you have to do is think about the Cuban Missile Crisis. People talk all the time about how the Cuban Missile Crisis proves that deterrence works. After all, the Russians put missiles into Cuba, there was a risk of nuclear war, and then they took them out. So that’s pretty obvious. They don’t think about the fact that when Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba, he knew that if he blockaded Cuba the resulting crisis could end up as a nuclear war. And his estimate of the risk was so right. Saturday, the height of the crisis, there is a U2 spy plane pilot on a routine air sampling mission over the North Pole and his equipment malfunctions, his directional equipment. And he’s flying along over tundra, ice, and snow there’s stars overhead and there’s snow down below. How do you know where you are? You follow the instruments. He’s flying along and flying along and eventually he looks up at the starts and he figures out he really probably isn’t where he should be. There must be something wrong with the instruments. He’s right, he has flown 300 miles into the Soviet Union at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets scramble MiG fighters to find him and shoot him down. He’s calling, “Mayday, mayday,” back to the base in Alaska. They scramble F102’s to go find him and protect him and bring him back. Except, some midlevel official in the Air Force has decided that because it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis all of the conventional air-to-air missiles on the F102’s have been taken off and replaced with Falcon nuclear air-to-air missiles. So the only weapons that the US fighters have, the only armaments they are carrying are nuclear weapons. If they had to run into the Soviet fighters, there would have been nuclear explosion over Russia, and probably a nuclear war. The only reason there wasn’t was because we were lucky. Not because nuclear deterrence works like magic. But because we got lucky. They couldn’t find each other in that era before GPS. Its stories like that, that make you think about and realize that deterrence is a dangerous strategy and if you we continue to rely on it – there’s a video online, on You Tube somewhere, of the Karl Wallenda who was a tightrope walker, and he walked on tightropes every day of his life from when he was young until he was 72. At 72–you can watch the video–he’s walking across, he’s 800 feet off the ground on this wire with a pole. He loses his balance, he totters back and forth, he grabs the wire and falls to his death. It’s horrifying to watch. The point is: just because you’ve walked a tightrope every day for 50 years doesn’t make it safe. The exact same thing applies to nuclear deterrence. Just because we have walked the deterrence tightrope and survived for 50 years doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is safe and reliable.

RK – It’s so crazy. Just the idea that jets would be armed with nuclear missiles to fire.

WW – Well, I guess the rationale was if you’ve got a squadron of Soviet bombers coming at you, you might as well use nuclear missiles because it will take out more bombers. It makes a kind of convoluted sense but, if all the conventional air-to-air missiles have been replaced and there are no fighters that don’t have nuclear air-to-air missiles then what do you use if need fighters to protect someone or to fight other fighters? A lot of the nuclear armaments were crazy anyway. There was a nuclear bazooka that the explosion was so large that it would kill the guy that fired it because he couldn’t run away fast enough before the explosion blew him to smithereens. They’re crazy weapons.

RK – It sure is. We’ve got two minutes you want to wrap up?

WW – Well, it’s really great to talk to you and it was a terrific lunch.

RK – Same here.

WW – I think that a lot of people are held back from thinking about nuclear weapons because they think it’s too horrible and there’s nothing we can do. That nuclear weapons are necessary. But I don’t think they are necessary. I think it’s perfectly sensible to think of getting rid of them. We have, after all, banned other clumsy, not-very-useful weapons like chemical weapons and biological weapons. So there’s no reason why we can’t say when we fight our wars we’re going to use these weapons but not those weapons. Nuclear weapons don’t give you some magic advantage. When the United States had its first war plan with nuclear weapons they imagined bombing Russia with all 113 nuclear bombs but then they imagined they would have to fight the Russian army in Europe anyway because once you’ve destroyed all the cities in Russia, the army is just going to mount up and roll into Europe and take the resources there. Winning wars involved beating the other guy’s Army not incinerating his civilians. Civilians are kind of beside the point. I think that we can make real progress on nuclear weapons. I’m optimistic that it’s possible.

RK – You’re doing great work and it’s so important.

WW – Thank you Rob.