Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alva Myrdal

Myrdal strips the varnish off national security language with the bluntness of an indictment. “War is murder” is not a metaphor; it’s a deliberate moral reclassification. She refuses the usual semantic shelter - “defense,” “deterrence,” “sacrifice” - and replaces it with a word that makes intent unavoidable. Murder implies agency, planning, culpability. That’s the point: if states choose war, they are choosing killing, not suffering an abstraction.

The second move is even sharper. She widens the charge from battlefield violence to “military preparations,” treating budgets, stockpiles, and strategy sessions as part of the act itself. In the nuclear age, she argues, preparation is not prudence; it is the infrastructure of “collective murder.” That phrase collapses the comfortable distinction between combatants and civilians. Nuclear war doesn’t “go wrong” and cause mass death; mass death is the design feature that makes deterrence credible.

Context matters here: Myrdal was a Swedish diplomat and a leading voice in Cold War disarmament, active in debates over arms control when superpowers sold escalation as stability. Her rhetoric is calibrated to puncture the technocratic trance of that era - the idea that megadeath could be managed by smarter doctrines and cleaner acronyms.

“This naked truth must be faced” isn’t just a plea for honesty; it’s a demand for political adulthood. If the public accepts the euphemisms, it consents to the machinery. If it faces the words, it might refuse the policy.