Dennis Wrong
AVOIDING NUCLEAR WAR
From the beginning it was widely understood that nuclear
weapons were not like other weapons because they were potentially
capable of destroying civilization and even the human species. I
don ' t suppose that I would recall exactly where I first learned of the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima had it not occurred in a dramatic
formal setting. I was sitting in the visitors ' gallery of the House of
Commons in Ottawa when the prime minister entered the chamber
and interrupted the debate to declare that he had momentous news
to announce to the House and to the Canadian people. I remember
whispering jokingly to my companion, "He ' s going to tell us he has
been re-elected," for Mr. King was contesting a by-election that day,
having lost his own parliamentary seat at the general election two
months earlier.
At home a few hours afterward , I wondered whether the prime
minister had not made too much of the atom bomb, which surely
was just another touted new weapon like the German V-2 rocket
introduced the year before . My father, who as a high government
official had known of the test explosion in the New Mexico desert,
replied, "You have totally missed the point. This bomb is unlike
anything we've ever seen and the world will never be the same
again." Within weeks this was generally recognized and has not
been forgotten since despite all the denunciations of our escapist
illusions and somnambulistic progress toward disaster that periodi–
cally become fashionable.
The arms race did not start until a few years later, after the
Russians exploded their first nuclear bomb . The concept of MAD
("mutual assured destruction" ) was not officially formulated until
the Kennedy administration , but the idea of a "balance of terror,"
,
with each side deterred from using the weapon out of fear that the
other side would retain the capacity to respond in kind , was already
a commonplace by the middle 1950s. The purely abstract mental
world of strategic policy in which ideas can never be put to the test of
actual experience came into being. The term
scenario
was first used
metaphorically to refer to diverse conceptions of possible nuclear
wars that lacked even the concrete if illusive reality of the theater.
When assessing intentions as opposed to capabilities, which at
