Uploaded November 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Ward Hayes Wilson is a Senior Fellow and director of Realist Revolt, which you can find at realistrevolt.org
Was funded with close to a million dollars, over six years by the Norwegian and Swiss foreign ministries.
He’s the author of the book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons
Time for thinking is over—time to action
Realists are really romantics
Working on book with working title, From Gods to Tools. Why that title?
We treat nuclear weapons as though they were gods.
Nuclear weapons are symbols of power. They give advocates of nuclear power the feeling that they are gods.
But nukes are only tools and they are not very good at being tools.
They are supposed to be good at deterrence, but in reality, they are not, and deterrence is a very unreliable concept. It is subjective and will fail.
Risk of war is high now because of the crazy factor in the US, N. Korea, India…
There’s a belief that every one wants nuclear power. That’s just not real. When the UN had a treaty for eliminating nuclear weapons, 122 nations voted for it.
Nuclear war as apocalypse is disempowering.
The main obstacles to getting rid of Nuclear weapons is belief systems.
Protesters are facing 20 year prison sentence. They argue against nukes from a moral viewpoint.
The talk the president gives
The challenge is to change peoples’ minds enough so that when you say “nuclear weapons” they think “clumsy, dangerous technology with virtually no real utility.” We need a movement that changes perceptions
Why can we look realistically, when before that wasn’t possible?
How would getting rid of nuclear weapons affect our values?
Ward Hayes Wilson is a Senior Fellow and director of Realist Revolt, which you can find at realistrevolt.org
Was funded with close to a million dollars, over six years by the Norwegian and Swiss foreign ministries.
He’s the author of the book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons
Time for thinking is over—time to action
Realists are really romantics
Working on book with working title, From Gods to Tools. Why that title?
We treat nuclear weapons as though they were gods.
Nuclear weapons are symbols of power. They give advocates of nuclear power the feeling that they are gods.
But nukes are only tools and they are not very good at being tools.
They are supposed to be good at deterrence, but in reality, they are not, and deterrence is a very unreliable concept. It is subjective and will fail.
Risk of war is high now because of the crazy factor in the US, N. Korea, India…
There’s a belief that every one wants nuclear power. That’s just not real. When the UN had a treaty for eliminating nuclear weapons, 122 nations voted for it.
Nuclear war as apocalypse is disempowering.
The main obstacles to getting rid of Nuclear weapons is belief systems.
Protesters are facing 20 year prison sentence. They argue against nukes from a moral viewpoint.
The talk the president gives
The challenge is to change peoples’ minds enough so that when you say “nuclear weapons” they think “clumsy, dangerous technology with virtually no real utility.” We need a movement that changes perceptions
Why can we look realistically, when before that wasn’t possible?
How would getting rid of nuclear weapons affect our values?
