By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 26, 2026
We do not need nuclear weapons anymore.
That is the argument. Not that they are evil. Not that they never had a purpose. Not that history can be unwritten. They were built for a world that expected total war between major industrial powers and accepted the possibility of ending cities in order to avoid losing nations. That world is gone. The weapons are still here, but the reality that created them is not.
For decades, nuclear weapons were defended as the final backstop of deterrence. The logic was brutal but simple. If both sides knew that using these weapons would bring catastrophic destruction, neither side would dare start a war that could end in mutual annihilation. There is some truth in that. Deterrence helped shape the Cold War, and the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union never directly exchanged nuclear blows is not nothing. But deterrence was never peace. It was terror held in balance, a suspension bridge made of fear, luck, machinery, and human judgment.
That system has always depended on too many things going right at once. Early warning systems have to work. Radar has to read correctly. Satellites have to report correctly. Political leaders have to stay calm. Military officers have to interpret data correctly under severe time pressure. Nobody can panic. Nobody can misread a screen. Nobody can let pride outrun judgment. The system has to succeed every time, forever. Human systems do not work that way. They never have.
That is why the near misses matter. The public usually remembers the bombs that were dropped, but not the ones that nearly were. The world has already seen false alarms, technical errors, and moments when individual officers had to decide whether to trust the machine in front of them. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov refused to treat a warning of incoming U.S. missiles as a confirmed attack. He hesitated, questioned the system, and the world got another day. That is not proof that deterrence works perfectly. It is proof that it came close to failing and happened not to.
The people who were trained to handle these systems understood this better than anyone else. Contrary to public fantasy, the officers and crews responsible for nuclear weapons were not sitting around dreaming about the day they got to use them. Their job was to maintain readiness, but their professional culture was built around the understanding that actual use would represent the failure of everything else. They trained to execute orders because that was the job. They also understood, often more clearly than politicians did, what those orders would mean. Nuclear war was not a victory condition. It was the point at which control had broken down.
That distinction matters because it exposes the contradiction at the center of nuclear doctrine. We maintain weapons that are supposedly essential, but we also structure the entire system around making sure they are never used. We say they preserve stability, while quietly admitting that any real use of them would be catastrophic beyond ordinary military language. We call them deterrents because calling them practical weapons would force us to confront the truth. In any serious exchange, especially between major powers, there is no clean battlefield outcome. There is only ruin, escalation, and aftermath on a scale no modern society is prepared to absorb.
The old argument for keeping nuclear weapons was that there was no other way to guarantee security against large, heavily armed states. That argument has weakened over time. Conventional weapons are now vastly more precise than they were in the Second World War or even during much of the Cold War. Intelligence, surveillance, targeting, and communications systems have transformed how military power is used. The United States and other advanced militaries have shown repeatedly that they can destroy infrastructure, armor, command centers, supply networks, and hardened targets without using nuclear weapons. Desert Storm made that clear decades ago. Later wars, for all their political failures and strategic waste, reinforced the same point. If the question is whether modern states can deliver overwhelming force without crossing the nuclear threshold, the answer has already been yes for a long time.
That does not mean conventional war is clean. It is not. It does not mean modern militaries are wise. They often are not. It means only that the specific claim once made for nuclear weapons, that they are necessary because no other form of power can do the job, has been overtaken by reality. We have other means. We have had them for years. Nuclear weapons remain because they are embedded in institutions, budgets, doctrines, and prestige. They remain because governments are reluctant to surrender symbols of ultimate power even after the strategic logic behind them has started to rot.
There is another reason this argument is wearing out. Younger generations do not seem nearly as enchanted by apocalyptic thinking as earlier ones were. That does not mean they are perfect, peaceful, or free of delusion. It means they grew up in a world more interconnected, more immediate, and more aware of consequences that do not stop at borders. They understand, in a way older generations often did not, that the destruction of whole populations is not some abstract chess move in a war room. It is collapse. It is poison in the air, chaos in supply chains, panic in financial systems, and suffering that does not stay where it starts. Nuclear weapons belong to a mentality that assumed entire societies could be threatened in order to preserve order. More and more people no longer accept that premise.
That is why the debate should move past the old moral theater. The case against nuclear weapons does not need to begin with calling them wicked objects, and it does not need to pretend history can be erased. They were developed for reasons that made sense to the people who built them, in the world those people inhabited. Fine. History is what it is. But the fact that something once had a strategic rationale does not mean it keeps one forever. Cavalry had a rationale. Battleships had a rationale. Chemical weapons had a rationale to the people who wanted them. Time changes systems. Technology changes systems. Human expectations change systems. Nuclear weapons have not adapted to the world we actually live in. They have simply continued to exist inside it.
A limited nuclear exchange would still be catastrophic. A larger one would be civilizational in effect. Even one use would break the taboo that has held since 1945 and open a door no sane government should want opened. These are not normal weapons. They are not better bombs. They are instruments whose use would instantly create consequences beyond the ability of leaders to predict or manage. A system that depends on such weapons forever not being used is not a mature security system. It is a gamble stretched across generations.
At some point, a serious country has to admit when a category of weapon no longer serves a useful purpose. Nuclear weapons reached that point years ago. They remain dangerous. They remain expensive. They remain politically symbolic. What they no longer are is necessary. We are not fighting the Second World War. We are not living in the opening decades of the Cold War. We have already spent generations and trillions of dollars learning how destructive modern conflict can be without crossing the nuclear line. The lesson is sitting right in front of us.
We no longer need nuclear weapons. What remains is risk without necessity, danger without utility, and inertia dressed up as strategy.
For more information about the WPS News project and its long-term archive mission, visit: https://cliffpotts.org
For more commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com
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References
National Security Archive. “The 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident.”
U.S. Strategic Command historical materials on nuclear doctrine.
Congressional Research Service. “U.S. Nuclear Weapons: Policy and Structure.”
U.S. Department of Defense. “Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report.”
International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament reports.
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