War & Peace Quote by George Wald

Wald’s sentence is built like a scientist’s proof, not a politician’s plea: list the variables, eliminate every possible justification, and show the contradiction at the core. “Nothing worth having” is a moral premise disguised as a measurement. He isn’t arguing that nuclear war is too costly; he’s arguing that it breaks the logic of ends and means. Even if you “win,” the victory is definitionally hollow.

The phrasing is carefully exhaustive. He names the two usual alibis for war - the material (territory, resources, security) and the ideological (values, systems, national destiny) - then denies both. That double negation matters: it refuses the Cold War habit of treating nuclear weapons as a tragic but rational extension of strategy. Wald’s point is that nuclear war doesn’t merely risk failure; it makes success incoherent. You can’t defend a “tradition” by vaporizing the people and places that carry it. You can’t protect a society by destroying the conditions that let society exist.

Subtextually, Wald is taking aim at the language of deterrence, which relies on abstraction: megatons, second-strike capability, acceptable losses. His word “utterly” punctures that antiseptic vocabulary. Coming from a scientist - someone whose authority is typically recruited to build and justify these systems - the line reads as an ethical defection. It insists that technological sophistication doesn’t confer moral clarity, and that the most “realistic” assessment of nuclear war is also the most damning: it’s a method that cancels its own purpose.