Why you should think of a shovel
By – Ward Hayes Wilson on – Jun 10, 2026, Published at – https://substack.com/
Morality is not and cannot be what sets the terms of a treaty that bans nuclear weapons. Treaties based on morality, history has taught us, do not work.
For example, see the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which European nations pledged not to use war to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be.” Signed on August 27, 1928, it was overtaken just 11 years later by the largest and most brutal war ever fought in human history — World War II.
If that is not enough, there is the fatal objection that a treaty based on morality will not restrain the ruthless dictator. When I speak about eliminating nuclear weapons one of the questions raised is always “What about Kim Jong Un?” The implication is that any man who would execute an official for falling asleep in a meeting and use an anti-aircraft gun to do it, probably won’t be restrained by moral niceties. Which is a fair point.
So you shouldn’t try to ban nuclear weapons using morality. Which is fine, because it ought to be possible to construct a perfectly sensible and pragmatic treaty to ban them. A treaty that uses the chemical and biological treaties as models. Those treaties were pragmatically organized and they depended on the fact that those two weapons weren’t very useful for fighting wars. The CWC and BWC (Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention) were treaties designed to ban weapons that were virtually useless militarily and also very dangerous. Both types of weapons can inflict horrible injuries and death, but they are so uncontrollable you could never be sure you’d kill more enemies than friendly troops. (Actually, “not-very-useful and very dangerous’“ might work as a description of nuclear weapons.)
Don’t get me wrong. Morality is essential for building an anti-nuclear movement. It is essential because nuclear weapons are fundamentally wrong and their use would not only be catastrophic, it would be the worst sin human beings have ever committed.
It is entirely possible to have a movement that is driven by deep moral conviction, but that also calls for a means to achieve its ends that is entirely pragmatic. If you lived in Massachusettes in 1857, for example, you might believe that slavery is fundamentally wrong — morally wrong. Perfectly reasonable view. But instead of insisting that a bloody and destructive war be fought to eradicate slavery from the United States, you might suggest that rather than fighting, it would be better if all the slaves be bought from their masters, set free, given assistance in finding land to farm and then made into citizens. This would be quite a practical, business-like way of getting rid of slavery. It would be a pragmatic means to achieve a moral end. The motivation would still be deeply moral. The motivation would hold fast to a core belief that slavery was utterly, unarguably wrong.
The lesson of lousy weapons
I have argued that nuclear weapons should be gotten rid of because they are lousy weapons — they are virtually useless militarily and also very dangerous. This is a very pragmatic argument against nuclear weapons. And we know this sort of pragmatic argument can work because “not-very-useful and dangerous” is the formula that has gotten rid of thousands of pieces of technology invented by human beings over at least two millennia.
The Germans built a handful of the biggest cannons the world had ever known, in secret, during World War I. The guns could fire shells more than 80 miles. These cannons were so gigantic special railroads had to built just to get them into place because the weight of such a gigantic gun would buckle ordinary roads. They seemed incredibly impressive. But it turned out that firing random shells into Paris — even rather big random shells — didn’t do much to win the war. And the guns were tricky. You had to replace the barrel relatively frequently because wear on the barrel might deform it. There is an unconfirmed report that the first barrel blew up.
So it turned out these giant cannon were completely inconsequential militarily. And they were a danger because the barrels might explode. So when the German high command saw that these guns were militarily useless and also kind of dangerous, they eventually disassembled the giant guns that they’d thought were so impressive and hauled the parts back to Germany.
Perhaps a better example of a piece of technology that was hardly useful and also dangerous might be biological weapons. Biological weapons are virtually useless militarily and very, very dangerous. First, you can’t really aim biological weapons very well. If the spores get caught up by the wind, you can’t control where they will end up, obviously, because you can’t control the wind. And some biological agents take some time to act, which doesn’t really help you in the heat of battle. Because they’re hard to control, because they spread in ways you can’t predict, biological weapons are not really useful weapons.
And they are clearly very dangerous. And not just to the other side.
What COVID taught us, if nothing else, is that even a single virus, jumping to a single individual in China can spread in ways that end up with something like 18 million people dead all around the world in just three years. Given that knowledge, it’s hard to make a case for using weapons that blast millions of pathogens into the soil, sea, and air. You know that at some point those pathogens will come back to harm your soldiers, your economy, your homeland.
So biological weapons are hardly useful militarily and very dangerous. As a result, like a stove that won’t boil water and has a tendency to self-ignite and blow up, biological weapons got abandoned — just like any other kind of technology that isn’t very useful and is dangerous.
(Just for fun, try to name a piece of technology that was virtually useless and very dangerous and that stayed in use for a long time. No fair naming nuclear weapons. I already named them. Name another kind. Go as far back into history as you want. Any part of the globe. Once people discover that they’re likely to be hoisted by their own petard, they tend to retire dangerous and useless technologies.)
People take a very utilitarian approach to tools and technology of all kinds, including weapons. Which is why it makes sense to work toward a treaty that has utilitarian arguments at its core, rather than moral rhetoric. If you want to ban a particular type of religion, then moral arguments might reasonably go into a treaty. But trying to ban weapons by using moral justifications rather than utility ones — based on history — won’t work.
A pragmatic treaty could work
There’s no reason, if we could overcome the mythology surrounding nuclear weapons and build a worldwide consensus that nuclear weapons are not-very-useful weapons military and very dangerous, that you couldn’t get a practical treaty banning them.
Even dictators
And keep in mind, the biological weapons treaty was signed by virtually every country on earth, it’s had no violations, and it’s been in force for 51 years. It is a treaty that works. And the reason it works is that people realized, at some point, that biological weapons are lousy weapons. Who wants to break a treaty if the prize you get after breaking the treaty is . . . lousy weapons?
The great fear with moral treaties, and their great weakness, is that everyone worries that they’ll eventually get violated by brutal, immoral leaders. And that’s a very sound worry. If you have a treaty based on morality banning nuclear weapons, its a fair bet that an unscrupulous, stop-at-nothing leader will eventually break it.
But if you ban weapons with a treaty that’s based on utility — if you argue that the weapons should be banned because they’re barely useful at all and they’re very dangerous — then there’s a fair chance that bloodthirsty tyrants won’t break the treaty. After all, tyrants (bloodthirsty or not) want weapons they can use. They want to invade their neighbors and defend their borders. They don’t want to take perfectly good money (that they could be using to bribe people in the regime to be “loyal”) and use it to buy lousy weapons.
The power of morality
Morality is one of the fundamental drivers of human action. Although we can be immoral, almost all of us punish ourselves afterward. So by all means, use morality as the engine that drives the effort to eliminate nuclear weapons. Use morality to inspire people to overcome their unwillingness to think about such an overwhelming problem. After all, there are few things on earth more immoral than a nuclear war. And few motivators more powerful for motivating human action.
But don’t try to make morality the solution to the problem. Eighty years of failure should have taught us all something about how that would go.
Don’t confuse what motivates you with the means you use to do the work.
Shovels
If there is a prison camp near where you live and you feel deeply that it is wrong for the prisoners not to have a latrine — that it is disgusting, immoral, and unacceptable for them not to have one — I’m with you all the way.
But don’t try to use morality to dig the latrine. Use a shovel. https://wardhayeswilson.substack.com/p/morality-and-anti-nuke-work