| http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017therefore precede the attainment of
absolute security and lasting peace.” This,
the laureate contradicted. “To a great
extent, disarmament is dependent on
guarantees of peace. Security comes first
and disarmament second.”
Hawk though I may be, I don’t scoff at
the men and women of the International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
I listen to them and respect them. On
receiving the Nobel, the organization
said, “This prize is a tribute to the tireless
efforts of many millions of campaigners
and concerned citizens worldwide who,
ever since the dawn of the atomic age,
have loudly protested nuclear weapons,
insisting that they can serve no legiti-
mate purpose and must be forever ban-
ished from the face of our earth.”
You know who often talked a lot like
this? Reagan. This was chronicled in a
2005 book by Paul Lettow, Ronald
Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons. Reagan said, “We seek the
total elimination one day of nuclear
weapons from the face of the earth.”
That comes from his second inaugural
address, in 1985. A year later, he said, “It
is my fervent goal and hope that we will
some day no longer have to rely on
nuclear weapons to deter aggression and
assure world peace.”
But until that day...
There are nine nuclear nations, five of
which are democracies—and one of the
other four is North Korea. Iran is knocking
on the door. The A-bomb is 1940s tech-
nology, remember: How long can it be
confined to only nine states? “You can’t
put the genie back into the bottle,” goes an
old cliché. Another cliché speaks of tooth-
paste and tubes. You can say that these
infernal, world-destroying things should
not have been invented. But here they are.
Curiously, there was a government
that gave up nuclear weapons. Apartheid
South Africa had six and a half bombs.
(One was not quite complete.) They de -
stroyed them, rather than bequeath them to
the successor government.
That is very, very exceptional. And an
old bumper sticker most likely applies to
the world of nuclear weapons: “If guns are
outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
What Reagan wanted, fervently, was
missile defense—a shield against
nuclear weapons, a way out of Mutual
Assured Destruction, also known as
MAD. There ought to be a prize for that,
Nobel or not.long time. Indeed, a Nobel lecture in 1927
was titled “Security and Disarmament.”
More about that in due course.
In its recent press release, the commit-
tee said that its award to ICAN was in
keeping with Alfred Nobel’s will—his
instructions for the prize—and they were
absolutely right about that. In his will of
1895, Nobel sketches three criteria: “fra-
ternity between nations” (the first and
foremost); “the abolition or reduction of
standing armies” (a criterion you can read
as “disarmament”); and “the holding and
promotion of peace congresses.”
He was an interesting cat, Alfred
Nobel. He made his living in explosives
and the most famous of the prizes he
willed is for peace. He was an idealist
with a realistic streak, or a realist with an
idealistic streak. “Good wishes alone will
not ensure peace,” he once wrote. “One
must be able to give favorably disposed
governments an acceptable plan. To de -
mand disarmament is really only to make
oneself ridiculous without doing anyone
any good.”
Nobel was a very strong believer in
deterrence—maybe an over-believer in it.
In some moments, he thought that
weapons would become so terrible, war
would be unthinkable, and simply aban-
doned. “In the day that two armies are
capable of destroying each other in a sec-
ond, all civilized nations will surely
recoil before a war and dismiss their
troops.” In other moments, he thought
that men would never stop slaughtering
one another, no matter what.
He died in 1896. If he had lived to see
merely World War I, he would have
thought his pessimism brutally confirmed.
In hindsight, some of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee’s decisions look silly.
In the mid 1920s, the committee gave the
prize to three foreign ministers for the
Locarno Treaties, which were supposed
to secure a new order in Europe and pre-
vent a second world war. When the
treaties were consummated, the Timesof
London bannered, “Peace at Last.”
We may scoff. But 18 million were
killed in the first war, and people were
desperate to stop a second. And we know
more now.
In 1928, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was
made. This was the international treaty
designed to “outlaw war,” in the phrase
of the day. Frank Kellogg, the American
secretary of state, received the Nobel
prize in 1929. (Aristide Briand, theFrench foreign minister, had won earlier
for the Locarno Treaties.)
Again, we may scoff. The outlawing
of war! What could be more absurd? Yet
a lot of non-absurd people spoke well of
the pact, including President Coolidge,
including Colonel Stimson. They did
not think there would never be another
war. They thought that a treaty would
give a war-weary or war-skeptical pub-
lic a tool against governments moving
unwisely to war.
And, to say it again: We know more now.
We know a lot about deterrence—and
rogue regimes, and aggressors, and the
limits of appeasement. This is what
makes current naivety so irritating. In
2008, the Guardianran a profile of the
man who was then chairman of the
Norwegian committee, Ole Danbolt
Mjøs. The paper listed his “likes” and
“dislikes.” The “likes” were his “wife and
family,” “peace,” and “the arctic cathedral
of Tromsø.” His “dislikes” were “wars”
and “nuclear weapons.”
Well, thank you very much. There are
no lovers, or even likers, of wars and
nuclear weapons, except for psy-
chopaths, who, it is true, sometimes rise
to power (as in North Korea). There are
people who think that war is occasionally
necessary, and people who think that
nuclear weapons are needed for the
maintenance of peace, until lions lie
down with lambs, all cuddly.
In 2005, Chairman Mjøs was award-
ing the peace prize to the International
Atomic Energy Agency and its then
director general, Mohamed ElBaradei.
He said, “It is hypocritical to go on
developing one’s own nuclear weapons
while doing everything in one’s power to
prevent others from acquiring such
weapons.” He also quoted ElBaradei, to
the effect that you shouldn’t tell others
not to smoke if you have a cigarette dan-
gling from your mouth.
A good line—but does it not matter
whopossesses nuclear weapons, and
why? Democratic Israel, totalitarian
Iran—does it make no difference?
The aforementioned Nobel lecture in
1927 was delivered by Ludwig Quidde, a
German peace campaigner. He is one of
my favorite laureates. (Several years ago,
I wrote a history of the Nobel Peace Prize,
Peace, They Say.) In his lecture, Quidde
said, “The popular, and one may say
naive, idea is that peace can be secured by
disarmament and that disarmament must
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