Zia Mian
Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University
Remarks at the conference
Tectonic Geopolitical Changes: Which Way to Peace and a Nuclear Weapons-Free World?
New York City, 26 April 2026
What am I going to tell you that will help you and all of us together take our work forward? That’s the place where I want to start.
Let me begin by saying that the argument that nuclear weapons are terrible is not something that is new. It also is not something that belongs to the peace movement. Everybody who has dealt with nuclear weapons from the very beginning has always known this.
We know that even before the first bomb was ever actually assembled by the United States during World War II, before it was ever tested, before it was used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American leaders understood what they were doing.
We know to the minute about a meeting that took place in April 1945 when the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, went to see President Truman, who had just been made president, to give him the first briefing about the secret Manhattan Project to build nuclear weapons. Truman was vice president before becoming president, and the bomb was a secret from him. It was a secret from the US Congress, a secret from the American public, and a secret from the world.
You can read the diary of the Secretary of War, saying, I went to see the President, I told him about the nuclear weapon program, and this is what I told him. What he told him was that the bomb was almost finished. The first test is not going to be until July. This is April. He says to the president that this is the most terrible weapon in the history of the world. Modern civilization might be destroyed. The world will be at the mercy of this weapon.
What more did the President need to know? But he didn’t stop the program. He didn’t delay the program. He didn’t want to know more about the program. He didn’t ask, my God, what were you people doing? He just let it go forward.
Then there was the test, then there was Hiroshima. And after Hiroshima, Truman wrote in his diary, he wrote, “This is the greatest thing in history.”
So, the first thing is how leaders think about nuclear weapons. Even though they know they are terrible, they still think of them as a source of power. Terrible power, but power, nonetheless. And we as peace activists have to grapple with this fact. What we’re actually dealing with is a problem of power, and leaders and states. It’s not about the bomb. It’s about the power that it gives men, mostly men, control of large institutions, and large populations with little to no accountability. We need to think about it not in terms of technologies, but politics.
Point two is that when it comes to deterrence, there’s no such thing as a nuclear deterrent. It’s not a property of an object. There is no “thing” that is a nuclear deterrent. Nuclear deterrence is a relationship between people. A relationship between somebody making the threat and somebody receiving the threat. Deterrence lies actually in how the threatened feels. It is for them to decide whether they are deterred or not by anything you say or do or intend to do, or threatened to do.
Let me quote one of Daniel Ellsberg ‘s most famous lectures, it is from 1959 and is on the theory and practice of nuclear blackmail. He said if I threaten to use a nuclear weapon against you, I say… I am deterring you. But if you make that threat to me, this is blackmail. You are trying to force me to do something against my will. Again, when I make the threat, it is deterrence. When you do it, it is blackmail. Ellsberg observed that we have to see this for what it is. It is coercion through the threat of terrible violence.
The question is, how does the person who is threatened deal with this? It is for them to decide, not the person making the threat. Ellsberg, in 1959 said, the person who is threatened may decide I have to fight. Rather than being deterred, they may choose to be defiant. You won’t know when you make the threat.
The nuclear deterrence relationship is about power, people, politics, and psychology. People, especially people who make threats and people who are threatened, typically do not behave rationally. The idea of rationality when people are threatening to destroy a country and destroy the world is not something that you can reasonably understand.
It is the work of deterrence bureaucracies in the nuclear-armed states and the allies of nuclear-armed states, and others to turn threats into plans and policies and postures. These have to appear to be rational, because they are bureaucrats. Bureaucrats of violence. Bureaucrats have to have bureaucratic planning, bureaucratic rationality, and bureaucratic procedures, and committees to end the world. Committees to pick how many weapons, committees to pick where weapons are to go. But it’s all bureaucracy and committees. The pretense is rationality, because you go through a process – and it’s all about the process.
I want to conclude by telling you that the fact of the matter is we won the battle on nuclear weapons a long time ago. We just don’t know it.
Look at the country with the longest experience of nuclear weapons, which is the United States. Look at opinion polling from 1945 all the way to now. Until the mid-1960s, more people thought nuclear weapons were a good thing, and not a bad thing. But in the mid-1960s, soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a change in opinion: more Americans thought nuclear weapons were a bad thing, not a good thing. Since the 1960s up to now, that has not changed. Consistently, a majority of Americans think that nuclear weapons are a bad thing and not a good thing.
A recent opinion poll from the end of last year (2025) shows this: about 64% of Americans think that nuclear weapons are a bad thing, and only about 14%, think they’re a good thing. More women, as you might expect, think nuclear weapons are a bad thing than men. But even among men, 60% of them think that this is a bad thing. And it doesn’t matter much whether there are Democrats, Republicans, etc. Critically, more young people think nuclear weapons are a bad thing than older people.
We have won the battle of opinion have won the battle of the generations. What we have not done is win the political battle.
This is where I think we need to pay attention. I will stop with this simple observation. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty countries are meeting in New York. We know the role of the nuclear five nuclear weapons states in the treaty, the four who are not in the treaty, and then the almost 30 or so allies and partners of the United States, and Belarus, which is a partner of Russia, add them all together and you get about 40.
There are now 99 countries in the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. That is more than half of all the members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. So even among the countries of the world, we have won the political battle. More than half the countries of the world are on our side. We are on the same side.
What we have to do is to understand and practice a new kind of politics, which is based in a fundamental democratic recognition. We are the majority. We need to begin by asking: what do we do once we accept that we are actually the majority within countries and globally?