Nukes Unlikely to be Abolished, Nobel Winner Says
The world’s nuclear powers are unlikely to eliminate their arsenals, Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling said last week.
“I don’t trust any country, even my own country,” Schelling, a 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize for economics, said Thursday during a speech in Colorado Springs, Colo. “You’re never more than a few days or a few weeks away from rebuilding them and it’s impossible to forget how to make the damn things. I don’t like the idea of pretending we can be a world without nuclear weapons.”
Schelling has applied game theory to issues such as nuclear deterrence and arms control. He expressed hope that nuclear weapons would remain a deterrent force as they were during the Cold War, the Pueblo Chieftain reported.
Iranian officials might look to nuclear weapons so “they don’t have to worry that the United States, Israel or Russia will invade them,” he said (see related GSN story, today).
Responding to a question, Schelling said the Bush administration’s policy of preventive war is “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. If I was an Iranian, I would want nuclear weapons. I think we’d be wise to shut up about preventive war as a strategy” (see GSN, March 17, 2006).
While there have been no fewer than six conflicts that involved at least one nuclear power — including the Korean, Vietnam and Falklands wars — the taboo against actually using one of the weapons has persisted for decades, he said.
“Nobody [in the 1950s] could have imagined that we could have finished the 20th century without exploding a nuclear bomb in anger,” Schelling said (John Norton, Pueblo Chieftain, Feb. 23).
