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REDUCTION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS BETTER THAN ABOLITION SINCE
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| REDUCTION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS BETTER THAN ABOLITION SINCE IT RETAINS THEIR DETERRENT VALUE Michael Quinlin. Nuclear Weapons and the Abolition of War International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 67, No. 2 (Apr, 1991), pp. 293-301 What I have said during this part of my argument is, in summary, that by former criteria of warfare, nuclear warfare is absurd and that nuclear weapons have moreover made all substantial warfare between nuclear powers, and not just nuclear warfare between them, absurd. This is in one sense a terrible situation but in another and very real sense it is a hopeful one. For it means that there should be no rational incentive, in any circumstances at all, for anyone to start a war between nuclear powers. The practical task of strategy, in my view, is not to try to change these facts – it seems tome that they almost certainly cannot be securely and permanently changed – but to recognize them clearly and to exploit them positively, to construct the most effective possible system for what has so evidently become now not just a very desirable objective, as it would have been in the past, but an utterly essential one the absolute prevention of war between great powers or alliances. The fact is, surely, that we cannot abolish nuclear weapons while maintaining the option, the possibility, of major war what we have to do is to exploit nuclear weapons so as to abolish such war. That is, after all, to go to the heart of what we must want to do what we are ultimately against is war itself, not the mere existence of particular instruments. So I do not pretend to see, nor to think that it would be realistically useful to work towards, a future in which the process of negotiated disarmament, within a system still of opposed nation- states with a historical propensity towards war, have removed nuclear weapons from the scene. We seek, instead, a structure in which the irreversible fact of nuclear weapons is the keystone of an arch of freedom from war, built-and this is after all what keystones essentially do-more dependably, more efficiently and more economically than would otherwise be possible. To say the same thing another way, nuclear weapons constitute the reduction to absurdity of war capability, and their arrival is therefore a historical watershed of overwhelming significance. Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
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