Recent and upcoming nonproliferation activities, events, and announcements involving the CNS center, staff, and programs.

Updated: Apr 22, 2010

Ward Wilson Joins CNS as Senior Fellow

Press Release

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has awarded a $390,000 grant to Princeton-based nuclear weapons policy analyst and award-winning writer Ward Wilson.

The purpose of the grant is to support Wilson's ground-breaking research and writing about the changing international discussion around nuclear weapons policy.

Wilson's research centers around the emerging notion that nuclear weapons are costly, dangerous but not very useful. These new, pragmatic arguments undermine the rationale for keeping nuclear weapons, while at the same time making a break with past moral arguments.

Wilson is increasingly the source of fundamental challenges to the nuclear status quo. He believes that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the way we think about nuclear weapons. The most basic ideas and established notions are being rethought. Stephen Schwartz, editor of The Nonproliferation Review said: "Wilson . . . is well on his way to deconstructing the most fundamental beliefs about nuclear weapons."

Wilson is Director of the Rethinking Nuclear Weapons Project a collaborating partner of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which will administer the grant over three years.

The grant will be in support of research and writing for a ground-breaking book titled Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: New, Pragmatic Arguments. In addition, Wilson plans scholarly articles questioning whether nuclear weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians are useful, and whether they have "kept us safe" for the last 60 years.

About Ward Wilson

Wilson is a graduate of the American University in Washington, DC with a special emphasis on history and philosophy and works from Princeton as a department guest of the Program on Science and Global Security of Princeton University.

In 2007, Ward Wilson published "The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima" in International Security, which posed a radical challenge to established thinking. According to the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, the article "effectively demolishes the generally-accepted myth that the atomic bombings brought World War II to an end."

In 2008, Wilson won the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Challenge and its $10,000 cash prize, for the "most outstanding essay on nonproliferation." Wilson bested scholars from 11 countries and across the United States with an essay entitled "The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence." The article is a fundamental challenge to the theory of nuclear deterrence and has been called "brilliant" and "important."

Recent invitations to speak include: Stanford, University of Chicago, Georgetown, Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, Stimson Center, the UN, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the Naval War College, the New School, the New America Foundation as well as others.

Ward Wilson has been published in International Security, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nonproliferation Review, the Chicago Tribune, Dissent and elsewhere. He recently contributed a chapter entitled "Stable at Zero: Enforcing the Peace in a World Without Nuclear Weapons" to Elements of a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty, a collection of essays edited by Barry Blechman and published by the Stimson Center.

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) strives to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by training the next generation of nonproliferation specialists and disseminating timely information and analysis. CNS at the Monterey Institute of International Studies is the largest nongovernmental organization in the United States devoted exclusively to research and training on nonproliferation issues.