Anitnuclear activist Freeman Dyson spoke about the U.S.’s relationship with Nuclear Weapons on April 7
By Michele Alperin
Freeman Dyson has a long history with weapons of mass destruction. During WWII, the young physicist served with the RAF’s civilian Operations Research arm. There, he devised ways to drop firebombs on German cities more efficiently in hopes of creating city-killing firestorms. When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, Dyson at first welcomed it — anything to end the war. But he soon had a very public change of heart. Since after the war, Dyson has consistently campaigned against nuclear weapons.
Dyson’s activism is not just talk: he is one of the few people who can plausibly claim to have helped prevent a nuclear war. In 1966, the military was considering using small “tactical” nuclear weapons against Vietnam. Dyson was one of four scientists to write a secret report warning that this was a catastrophic course of action.
On April 7, the famous scientist and Princeton resident spoke out once more against the bomb. Dyson appeared at a talk entitled “Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons,” which was sponsored by the Coalition for Peace Action at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton. About 60 people attended, their interest piqued by the nuclear threats issued in March and April by a bellicose North Korean regime.
Ward Wilson, senior policy analyst at the British American Security Information Council, was the main speaker, and Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study and antinuclear activist, offered a response.
Dyson said he would like to see the United States make changes unilaterally rather than engage in international negotiations, which “are inherently slow, cumbersome and subject to all kinds of political sabotage.”
He suggests following the paradigm set by Matt Meselson, who 45 years ago was working at the arms control and disarmament agency in Washington, but managed to convince Nixon to drop the biological weapons program by talking to Henry Kissinger, his neighbor on Cape Cod. By executive order, Nixon destroyed the stockpile of biological weapons and stopped their development.
Furthermore, says Dyson, when Meselson confronted the generals who were arguing in favor of these weapons, they were unable to say how they planned to use them, and Dyson suggests that generals today would not be able to answer the same question regarding nuclear weapons.
For 20 years, nuclear weapons have been mostly ignored, but events of late in North Korea and elsewhere have turned the public’s interest again to these costly and, according to many, immoral weapons of mass destruction.
Proponents of nuclear weapons, who believe that the existence of nuclear arms has the effect of deterrence, have a certain smugness, Wilson said. They see themselves as realists, who “shake their heads sadly when people talk about nuclear abolition; they know people who believe in long-term are dreams, naïve Pollyannas, or worse, idealists.”
Wilson claims that the beliefs of these “realists,” which grew out of the Cold War, should be reexamined. “No one does his best thinking when he is afraid, so ideas that grew out of the Cold War should be suspect,” he says.
Arguing that nuclear weapons are too big, clumsy, outmoded, and messy for any conceivable purpose, Wilson proceeds to take apart the five myths that proponents use to support their arguments.
The first myth is that nuclear weapons shocked Japan into surrendering in WWII. Wilson sees it differently, claiming that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war prompted Japan’s surrender, but Japanese leaders attributed it at the time to the bomb because that was less embarrassing.
The second myth is that nuclear weapons are the most destructive weapons in history. But destruction does not win wars. “Wars are won by killing soldiers; as long as armies are armed and willing to fight, wars go on,” he says.
The third myth is that nuclear deterrence is safe and reliable. But Wilson maintains that it is only safe if absolutely nothing goes wrong. During the Cuban missile crisis, for example, only luck prevented a mistaken launch of nuclear missiles when an American U-2 spy plane wandered 300 miles off course into Soviet air space. Luckily Soviet fighters didn’t find the plane, which was armed with nuclear rather than conventional missiles because of the crisis. “The only reason there were not nuclear explosions is that the two sets of fighters didn’t happen to find each other; that is not deterrence working by magic; it is sheer luck,” says Wilson.
The fourth myth is that nuclear weapons are necessary because they keep the peace. But peace comes and goes, and the fact that Europe has seen no major war in for many years proves nothing and certainly not proponents’ claims that nuclear weapons have changed human nature, argues Wilson. This argument uses “proof by absence,” he says, comparing it to the ancients’ belief that throwing virgins into a volcano yearly prevented another eruption.“Just because we haven’t had a real bad event in a long time doesn’t prove anything,” says Wilson.
The final myth is that nuclear weapons can’t be disinvented, that the genie is out of the bottle. “This is absolutely true,” says Wilson, “but it also happens to be absolutely irrelevant.” The real question, he says, is whether nuclear weapons are smart military technology, and he claims they are not. Rather, they are clumsy, blundering, overly large, expensive, imprecise, outmoded dinosaurs that can rain radiation indiscriminately. “The whole trend in warfare is away from big weapons to smaller, more intelligent, more precise weapons,” he says.
Finally, the cost of nuclear weapons is huge, amounting to $5.5 trillion between 1945 and 1996, and sucks away money that could be used to improve society.
Audience members shared their experiences of living under the shadow of the threat of nuclear war.
Carol Kaslander of Lawrenceville recalls wondering, during the Cuban missile crisis, “Why was my teacher giving us homework if we are not going to be around to do it?”
Carol Bemmels of Hopewell was once part of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament in Cambridge, Mass. Ron Schmitter of Wrightstown, who grew up in the late 1960s, recalls the last year of draft numbers, and says, “We’re doing this again.” Irene Goldman, board chair of the Coalition for Peace Action, thought this program was just the right tone for people who don’t know much about nuclear weapons and their dangers.
“Ward demystifies nuclear weapons and calls it what it is — they are useless, like the Edsel!”
