(Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons) [PDF KINDLE] ✓ Ward Wilson

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Free read µ Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons ´ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook Download ¶ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ¿ Ward Wilson Free download Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons “ Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons is accessible short and breathless It has the tone of a TED talk an avid speaker bursting with one big idea and eighteen minutes to hold your attention” New York TimesNuclear war would be an apocalypse Nuclear deterrence is effective in a crisis Nuclear weapons shock and awe opponent. This is a very short book about myths of nuclear weapons The author contends 1 Nuclear weapons weren t the cause of Japans surrender but likely Russia s declaration of war against Japan in the summer of 45 2 Nuclear deterence is reliable in a crisis The author argues that in the Cuban Missile Crisis The Yom Kippur War and The Gulf war in 1990 luck was important than any deterrent of nukes 3 Nukes brought about the long peace from 1945 to the present The author argues that other factors have kept the major powers from going to war against each other for the past 68 years He also reminds us that the Victorians had their own long Peace after the Napoleonic wars but it ended in the disaster of World War I and its seueal 4 We can t put the genie back in the bottle the author argues not only that we can it might be the only sensible thing to do I sm not convinced by his arguments but it is nice to get a different perspective on this issue

Free read µ Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons ´ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook Download ¶ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ¿ Ward Wilson Free download Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons Surrounding nuclear weapons stripping away emotion and exaggeration By drawing on new facts and historical research Wilson methodically shatters each of these myths in turn His conclusions will surprise you enlighten you and spur debates about whether nuclear weapons have any power and importance in the twenty first century. Wilson s thesis is that our societal maxims about nuclear weapons are not proven facts but instead myths constructed in retrospective through a combination of wishful thinking self aggrandizement and rationalizing away of faults He pokes through these myths with very well chosen historical evidence and argues for a rational approach to determining what value and use nuclear weapons actually have Since the book is short and valuable enough I ll summarize each myth first although we think that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked Japan into surrendering Ward argues that the meeting to discuss surrender was already underway when Nagasaki was bombed and that no major meetings had been held immediately after Hiroshima s bombing like one might have expected Rather it seems Japanese leaders who were already aware of the potential of a uranium bomb saw the bombing as just that another bombing of a Japanese city into oblivion The crisis that prompted this talk of surrender was the Russian invasion of Manchuria and perhaps importantly of Japan s portion of Sakhalin Island with the accompanying easy access to Hokkaido s vulnerable shores Ward points out that this event destroys both of Japan s hopes for a good resolution the diplomatic and the military forcing the surrender that the atomic bomb could notThe next myth Ward takes on arises from the shift to hydrogen bombs from fission bombs the vastly greater TNT euivalent of these weapons does not actually correspond to a greater utility in war especially when used against civilian targets He points out that destructive power against cities would be a better metric and fission bombs fit this just as well as have conventional bombs and standing armies The key to winning a war according to him comes from the defeat of the enemy s armies not the destruction of his cities In the actual chapter his point is rather subtle he isn t handwaving away the terrible devastation such weapons might cause but argues that such devastation may not achieve the war aims of a nuclear weapons user as shown by historical examples of similar devastation s insufficiency He proceeds to tear down the idea of nuclear deterrence as a shutdown of war using the Cuban missile crisis as his foremost example but delving into times war has actually broken out even with a nuclear state on the defensive end This leads into his next point that the long peace some regions of the world have experienced since 1945 is perhaps due to luck than anything else similar stretches of only minor conflict have in the past of course preceded global conflict Ward closes his arguments with the assertion that if our current ideas of safety through nuclear arsenals are built on mere myths then we are protecting ourselves with an illusion and an exceedingly dangerous illusion at that If we are wrong about how these weapons achieve their purpose then the conseuences could be disastrous A reexamination of our nuclear history is reuired for our safety and we must decide whether nuclear weapons are actually useful or if they merely serve as a danger This book is uick very well researched and noted and a great read Highly recommended

Download ¶ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ¿ Ward Wilson

Free read µ Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons ´ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook Download ¶ PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ¿ Ward Wilson Free download Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons S Killing civilians causes leaders to back down The bomb has kept the peace for sixty five years These are the things we think we know about nuclear weapons but it turns out they are myths myths that nonetheless still shape our nuclear policyIn Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons Ward Wilson blows the lid off the stale debate. I was hoping for technical detail and persuasive factual arguments but I found it mostly based on the authors general opinions It is worth reading but it wasn t uite what I thought it would be