Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alva Myrdal

In Myrdal's hands, the most dangerous fantasy of statecraft gets demoted from misguided to impossible. "Victory" is the old word that once let leaders launder devastation into triumph, the term that made casualty lists feel like a down payment on national glory. Her target is the cost-benefit logic baked into war planning: the idea that if the prize is big enough, the suffering can be justified. In the nuclear age, she argues, that calculus doesn't just fail morally; it fails structurally. The price is no longer a tragic but finite expenditure. It's potentially civilizational.

The line works because of its clinical phrasing. "Misconception" suggests an error that can be corrected, almost polite. Then she tightens the screw: "total illusion". Not propaganda, not exaggeration, but a hallucination that persists only because institutions are invested in it. The subtext is aimed at strategists and publics alike: nuclear doctrine depends on the theater of winnability, on scenarios where "limited" exchanges stay limited, where escalation can be managed, where someone emerges with a banner instead of ashes. Myrdal punctures that performance.

Context matters: as a Swedish diplomat and disarmament advocate in the Cold War, she was speaking into a world of deterrence theory, arms races, and bureaucracies that treated apocalypse as a variable. Her sentence is less a plea than an indictment: if leaders keep talking about "winning" under nuclear conditions, they're not being tough-minded. They're being mystical.