by Nicholas Wright
In his book, Warhead, Dr. Nicholas Wright, a leading neuroscientist and adviser to the Pentagon, analyzes the new science behind warfare to understand why we fight, lose, and win wars. Read on for a featured excerpt.
Two armies faced each other in May 1940. The German side had fewer trained men, guns, tanks, and planes. They had lost a world war two decades earlier. Their opponents’ leaders—and many independent observers—believed that material inferiority meant the Germans couldn’t win this time either.
But in the 1920s and ’30s, German military professionals had asked how they could harness the human brain’s capacities for shock, creativity, guile, will, daring, and skill, alongside the technologies of their time, to win wars. One idea was to use tanks en masse to surprise an enemy, and radio communications to think and decide faster than the enemy. And in May 1940, as we all know, their Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, catastrophically defeated the British and French forces.
German effectiveness created the initial opening. But there was more to it: German troops advanced so far in 1940 through an enemy with more trained men, guns, tanks, and planes because French will collapsed. And French capitulation handed Germany vast armaments that enabled their June 1941 Russian invasion. What’s more, collaboration meant that by 1942 fewer than three thousand German police were needed to handle all of occupied France.
Happily for us, Germany’s democratic enemy had also combined brains and machines. British commanders in the 1930s had looked ahead to build new air forces that would win the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s first major defeat.
Russians, unlike the French, had the resolve to withstand an almost unimaginable number of deaths. Hitler foolishly decided to declare war on the United States. The Allies skillfully nurtured the cooperation that enabled their fight back—seen so powerfully in the exquisite trust built between the British and Americans who planned D-Day and fought through to German soil. If the Germans and Japanese had worked together even a fraction as well, they could have won the war. After all, German soldiers were beaten back from Moscow’s outskirts by Soviet troops who no longer needed to face Japan.
The story of World War II is often told as one in which, after a rocky start weathered by British courage, victory was inevitable through overwhelming Russian manpower and American manufacturing. But Germany almost won; Britain didn’t lose; Russian will didn’t collapse; and Americans learned from ingenious and effective adversaries. None of that can be understood without the central weapon of war, the human brain.
In the previous paragraphs, while reading about history, your eye passed over terms that have much to do with the brain: courage, cooperation, learning, deciding, foolishness, creativity, trust. All are fundamentally psychological.
Harnessing human brains for war, given the technologies and societies of the time, has always provided an advantage—from the eras of Alexander the Great and Sun Tzu to Shaka Zulu, Heinz Guderian, and Dwight David Eisenhower. This is no less true in our time.
Cognitive neuroscience gives us better self-knowledge of why humans fight, lose, and win wars—to better understand our past, anticipate our future, and, in the process, know ourselves better as humans. The brain provides a new perspective, and a new source of evidence, to help us understand war.
And war gives a new perspective on the brain, because every human brain is built to win—or at least survive—a fight. Human against nature; human against human.
In Warhead, readers will journey with me through ten brain regions, each the focus of a chapter. We start at the base of the brain, at the brainstem, from which dopamine can compel us, pain can cripple us, and arousal floods our brain. From there, we climb step by step until we reach that most distinctively human region at the other end of the brain: the frontal pole that helps us think about our thinking, explore, and change our minds. This approach emphasizes specific brain regions and also weaves in the broader neural networks in which they operate— so that you can see both the forest and the trees.
The picture of the brain that emerges may be unlike the one you’re used to. It challenges our common understanding of perception and reality; turns what you thought you knew about yourself upside down; and grounds us in the basic biology of life. How does hunger work? Why do we experience life in the first person? How do you become you?
Warhead. Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Wright. All rights reserved.
DR. NICHOLAS WRIGHT, MRCP, PhD is a neuroscientist who researches the brain, technology and security at University College London, Georgetown University, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, where he also advises the Pentagon Joint Staff. He works with governments and the private sector. He worked as a neurology doctor in London and Oxford, and has published numerous academic papers, which have been covered by the BBC and New York Times. He has appeared on CNN and the BBC, and regularly contributes to outlets like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, and Slate.