'Rethinking Nuclear Weapons'
Trying to sidestep fraud quietly, without being noticed: Ward Wilson's 'Four myths about nuclear weapons - Hiroshima - H-Bomb - Deterrence - Usefulness'
Ward Wilson's twist-the-truth video - Nov. 2008 at the 'Monterey Institute', Princeton
This is a 48-minute Youtube of the 'expert' Ward Wilson, filmed from the front of what looks like a lecture room of the Monterey Institute. Powerpoint-style graphics are displayed behind him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bB9_hsETP4 Click here to watch Ward Wilson do his routine.
Interesting because it's an attempt to phase out 'nuclear weapons' without admitting the huge fraud. Obviously, the traditional view - that an H Bomb will wipe out a huge area and irradiate it too - has to be removed, if possible, but without stating that the whole idea was a fraud. Also of course US genocidal policy, and support for Jewish policy, must not be mentioned. Tricky, and indeed we see classic symptoms of nervousness - the speaker has the body language of a salesman pushing a weak product; along with evasions, weak analogies, timing problems, feeble jokes.
The 'Monterey Institute' Youtube site has many videos; the blurb to this one says fairly accurately:-
He argues that the Japanese did not surrender because of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since nuclear deterrence relies on the threat of city destruction and city destruction is an ineffective way to wage war, he calls the efficacy of nuclear deterrence into question.
His four myths are supposed to be Hiroshima, H-Bomb, Deterrence, and Usefulness, but in practice Wilson doesn't follow this sequence. From our viewpoint, this isn't surprising; however we can use it as a rough outline to put some order into his shambling nonsense.
Paradigm shift. He's talking of public perception - he knows this is a P.R. exercise in lies. ".. It's something you're gonna have to help build.. the outsize tool problem.." There's introductory stuff like a well-known optical illusion, supposedly representing a paradigm shift; and the 'Apocalypse paradigm', backed by Oppenheimer, Baruch, and other usual suspects. What can he do with this? Well...
H-Bomb
His problem: to pretend that an H-Bomb, if it existed, wouldn't be effective.
His solution: to claim that destroying cities has not usually won wars in the past. And also to scale down the dangers that H-Bombs (if they existed) would pose.
Watch for: in the past, destroying cities was difficult; but with an H-bomb, the whole thing could be simply wiped out - so historical examples are irrelevant. And watch for homely, tame, irrelevant comparisons.
"It turns out cities have been destroyed in wars for thousands of years" - he doesn't go into the issue of what a 'city' is (one he mentions had 30,000 inhabitants) or what 'destroyed' meant - not surprisingly, since an H-Bomb as promoted would destroy far more effectively than any pre-technology war. He gives fake analogies - Atilla, Genghis Khan, Richmond Va, and Coventry and London. (Wilson doesn't seem aware that by comparison with German and Japanese towns, the damage to these was pretty negligible). There's a long, long section on this - following the inverse law of length and implausibility - and it's all complete rubbish, since H-Bombs, if they existed, could delete whole territories.
Deterrence
Wilson points out correctly that there have been a lot of wars since 1945 - though he says nothing on their aims, methods, results, or morality. Obviously this is to be expected from a funded hack! What he says is deconstructed on our site. For example, why weren't the 'Soviets' (read: Jews running Russia and eastern Europe) intimidated by the supposed US monopoly in nuclear weapons? Wilson doesn't follow this argument through; clearly, if the weapons had existed, they could have been used, and his paymasters will be assured that the real reasons will not be given. Wilson pretends that this proves deterrence in effect does work - but not against ordinary wars.
Wilson introduces a phrase: 'nuclear exceptionalism' apparently taken from Herman Kahn. Nuclear weapons are so awesome and dangerous, so powerful and different, that people can't reason about them (apart from Herman Kahn).
Hiroshima
Wilson's 'myth of Hiroshima' is the entirely correct view that the Japanese didn't surrender because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. The fact they were desperate to surrender is not known to Wilson, who however gives a very, very long dull account of Japanese attitudes near the end of the war, including their attitude to Stalin and alleged slowness in coming to a decision, and what must be nonsense about the International Date Line. I doubt whether any of it is accurate, notably the surrender manoeuvres, but it fills Wilson's time. However, what he doesn't dispute is the traditional lie that atomic bombs were used. But he takes advantage of the relatively limited damage to the two cities by pretending it would apply also to H-Bombs.
Usefulness
Having done his best to establish that destroying cities doesn't work (assuming the destruction is conventional!), and that the atom bombs supposedly used didn't cause surrender (but suppose they'd been used at the start?), Wilson now has to claim such bombs are useless. His object is to ban them but keep conventional arms - he praises the US forces without even the slightest idea of whether they are sustainable, or what they've been used for.
Wilson's technique here is amusingly stupid. He uses his homely comparison method, comparing H-Bombs to sledgehammers, a stick of dynamite, the 'Spruce Goose' flying boat, and the problem of parking big cars. He also says MIRVs needed small bombs, and in any case claims the nuclear arsenal's bombs 'have been getting smaller', presumably contravening the laws of physics.
Conclusion
There's routine stuff about terror and the Vietnam War - Wilson seems to love genocide - and the well-known fake mushroom cloud photo. He does insert one significant, barely-noticeable remark - there are "doubts about reliability", something he failed to mention before. And he says nuclear weapons have cost about $5.5 trillion - I don't know if he tried to adjust for inflation.
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This must I imagine be typical of a funded 'think-tank' required to output official garbage. And I've just found this incredible story:
The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has awarded a $392,000 grant to Princeton-based nuclear weapons policy analyst and award-winning writer Ward Wilson.
. . .The grant supports Wilson's ground-breaking research and writing on the changing nature of the international debate about nuclear weapons and on the "new realism" about nuclear weapons: emerging notions that they are costly, dangerous, but not very useful. These new, pragmatic arguments undermine the rationale for keeping these dangerous weapons while at the same time breaking with the deadlocked debates of the past.
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I note the British 'Pugwash' Group (in business more than 50 years) is in on this.
