War & Peace Quote by Charles Horner

Calling the nuclear weapon "obsolete" is a deliberately destabilizing move, especially from a soldier. Obsolescence usually belongs to gadgets and doctrines, not devices that can end cities in minutes. Horner is trying to reframe nukes from the ultimate security blanket into dead weight: expensive, morally radioactive, strategically blunt. The intent is not naive pacifism; it is a challenge to the prestige logic that keeps nuclear arsenals alive long after their original missions have drifted.

The subtext is institutional. In military culture, some capabilities become sacred not because they are usable, but because they symbolize dominance and guarantee budgets, influence, and political leverage. By labeling nukes obsolete, Horner attacks that symbolism. He implies that real power has migrated to other arenas - precision conventional strikes, intelligence, cyber operations, supply chains, regional deterrence - where escalation can be managed rather than annihilating everyone’s options. Nuclear weapons deter, but they also freeze thinking: they offer an all-or-nothing endpoint that makes every crisis feel like a cliff.

"I want to get rid of them all" is the line that forces the moral accounting. It strips away the comfortable euphemisms ("strategic stability", "extended deterrence") and asks whether a weapon we pray never to use can still be considered a rational tool. Coming from a soldier, it carries the credibility of someone trained to assess utility, not sentiment - and the provocation of someone willing to say the quiet part aloud: some arsenals persist because admitting they are unusable would expose how much of national security is theater.