Enlightenment Now
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As we saw with climate change, people may be likelier to acknowledge a problem when they have reason to think it is solvable than when they are terrified into numbness and helplessness.88 A positive agenda for removing the threat of nuclear war from the human condition would embrace several ideas.
The first is to stop telling everyone they’re doomed. The fundamental fact of the nuclear age is that no atomic weapon has been used since Nagasaki. If the hands of a clock point to a few minutes to midnight for seventy-two years, something is wrong with the clock. Now, maybe the world has been blessed with a miraculous run of good luck—no one will ever know—but before resigning ourselves to that scientifically disreputable conclusion, we should at least consider the possibility that systematic features of the international system have worked against their use. Many antinuclear activists hate this way of thinking because it seems to take the heat off countries to disarm. But since the nine nuclear states won’t be scuppering their weapons tomorrow, it behooves us in the meantime to figure out what has gone right, so we can do more of whatever it is.
Foremost is a historical discovery summarized by the political scientist Robert Jervis: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike against the United States.”89 That means that the intricate weaponry and strategic doctrines for nuclear deterrence during the Cold War—what one political scientist called “nuclear metaphysics”—were deterring an attack that the Soviets had no interest in launching in the first place.90 When the Cold War ended, the fear of massive invasions and preemptive nuclear strikes faded with it, and (as we shall see) both sides felt relaxed enough to slash their weapon stockpiles without even bothering with formal negotiations.91 Contrary to a theory of technological determinism in which nuclear weapons start a war all by themselves, the risk very much depends on the state of international relations. Much of the credit for the absence of nuclear war between great powers must go to the forces behind the decline of war between great powers (chapter 11). Anything that reduces the risk of war reduces the risk of nuclear war.
The close calls, too, may not depend on a supernatural streak of good luck. Several political scientists and historians who have analyzed documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly transcripts of John F. Kennedy’s meetings with his security advisors, have argued that despite the participants’ recollections about having pulled the world back from the brink of Armageddon, “the odds that the Americans would have gone to war were next to zero.”92 The records show that Khrushchev and Kennedy remained in firm control of their governments, and that each sought a peaceful end to the crisis, ignoring provocations and leaving themselves several options for backing down.
The hair-raising false alarms and brushes with accidental launches also need not imply that the gods smiled on us again and again. They might instead show that the human and technological links in the chain were predisposed to prevent catastrophes, and were strengthened after each mishap.93 In their report on nuclear close calls, the Union of Concerned Scientists summarizes the history with refreshing judiciousness: “The fact that such a launch has not occurred so far suggests that safety measures work well enough to make the chance of such an incident small. But it is not zero.”94
Thinking about our predicament in this way allows us to avoid both panic and complacency. Suppose that the chance of a catastrophic nuclear war breaking out in a single year is one percent. (This is a generous estimate: the probability must be less than that of an accidental launch, because escalation from a single accident to a full-scale war is far from automatic, and in seventy-two years the number of accidental launches has been zero.)95 That would surely be an unacceptable risk, because a little algebra shows that the probability of our going a century without such a catastrophe is less than 37 percent. But if we can reduce the annual chance of nuclear war to a tenth of a percent, the world’s odds of a catastrophe-free century increase to 90 percent; at a hundredth of a percent, the chance rises to 99 percent, and so on.
Fears of runaway nuclear proliferation have also proven to be exaggerated. Contrary to predictions in the 1960s that there would soon be twenty-five or thirty nuclear states, fifty years later there are nine.96 During that half-century four countries have un-proliferated by relinquishing nuclear weapons (South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus), and another sixteen pursued them but thought the better of it, most recently Libya and Iran. For the first time since 1946, no non-nuclear state is known to be developing nuclear weapons.97 True, the thought of Kim Jong-un with nukes is alarming, but the world has survived half-mad despots with nuclear weapons before, namely Stalin and Mao, who were deterred from using them, or, more likely, never felt the need. Keeping a cool head about proliferation is not just good for one’s mental health. It can prevent nations from stumbling into disastrous preventive wars, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the possible war between Iran and the United States or Israel that was much discussed around the end of that decade.
Tremulous speculations about terrorists stealing a nuclear weapon or building one in their garage and smuggling it into the country in a suitcase or shipping container have also been scrutinized by cooler heads, including Michael Levi in On Nuclear Terrorism, John Mueller in Atomic Obsession and Overblown, Richard Muller in Physics for Future Presidents, and Richard Rhodes in Twilight of the Bombs. Joining them is the statesman Gareth Evans, an authority on nuclear proliferation and disarmament, who in 2015 delivered the seventieth-anniversary keynote lecture at the Annual Clock Symposium of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled “Restoring Reason to the Nuclear Debate.”
At the risk of sounding complacent—and I am not—I have to say that [nuclear security], too, would benefit by being conducted a little less emotionally, and a little more calmly and rationally, than has tended to be the case.
While the engineering know-how required to build a basic fission device like the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb is readily available, highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium are not at all easily accessible, and to assemble and maintain—for a long period, out of sight of the huge intelligence and law enforcement resources that are now being devoted to this threat worldwide—the team of criminal operatives, scientists and engineers necessary to acquire the components of, build and deliver such a weapon would be a formidably difficult undertaking.98
Now that we’ve all calmed down a bit, the next step in a positive agenda for reducing the nuclear threat is to divest the weapons of their ghoulish glamour, starting with the Greek tragedy in which they have starred. Nuclear weapons technology is not the culmination of the ascent of human mastery over the forces of nature. It is a mess we blundered into because of vicissitudes of history and that we now must figure out how to extricate ourselves from. The Manhattan Project grew out of the fear that the Germans were developing a nuclear weapon, and it attracted scientists for reasons explained by the psychologist George Miller, who had worked on another wartime research project: “My generation saw the war against Hitler as a war of good against evil; any able-bodied young man could stomach the shame of civilian clothes only from an inner conviction that what he was doing instead would contribute even more to ultimate victory.”99 Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes. Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible. All kinds of weapons have been dreamed up that never saw the light of day: death rays, battlestars, fleets of planes that blanket cities with poison gas like cropdusters, and cracked schemes for “geophysical warfare” such as weaponizing the weather, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, the ozone layer, asteroids, solar flares, and the Van Allen radiation belts.100 In an alternative history of the 20th century, nuclear weapons might have struck people as equally bizarre.
Nor do nuclear weapons deserve credit for ending World War II or cementing the Long Peace that followed it?
??two arguments that repeatedly come up to suggest that nuclear weapons are good things rather than bad things. Most historians today believe that Japan surrendered not because of the atomic bombings, whose devastation was no greater than that from the firebombings of sixty other Japanese cities, but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the Soviet Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.101
And contrary to the half-facetious suggestion that The Bomb be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear weapons turn out to be lousy deterrents (except in the extreme case of deterring existential threats, such as each other).102 Nuclear weapons are indiscriminately destructive and contaminate wide areas with radioactive fallout, including the contested territory and, depending on the weather, the bomber’s own soldiers and citizens. Incinerating massive numbers of noncombatants would shred the principles of distinction and proportionality that govern the conduct of war and would constitute the worst war crimes in history. That can make even politicians squeamish, so a taboo grew up around the use of nuclear weapons, effectively turning them into bluffs.103 Nuclear states have been no more effective than non-nuclear states in getting their way in international standoffs, and in many conflicts, non-nuclear countries or factions have picked fights with nuclear ones. (In 1982, for example, Argentina seized the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom, confident that Margaret Thatcher would not turn Buenos Aires into a radioactive crater.) It’s not that deterrence itself is irrelevant: World War II showed that conventional tanks, artillery, and bombers were already massively destructive, and no nation was eager for an encore.104
Far from easing the world into a stable equilibrium (the so-called balance of terror), nuclear weapons can poise it on a knife’s edge. In a crisis, nuclear weapon states are like an armed homeowner confronting an armed burglar, each tempted to shoot first to avoid being shot.105 In theory this security dilemma or Hobbesian trap can be defused if each side has a second-strike capability, such as missiles in submarines or airborne bombers that can elude a first strike and exact devastating revenge—the condition of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). But some debates in nuclear metaphysics raise doubts about whether a second strike can be guaranteed in every conceivable scenario, and whether a nation that depended on it might still be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail. So the United States and Russia maintain the option of “launch on warning,” in which a leader who is advised that his missiles are under attack can decide in the next few minutes whether to use them or lose them. This hair trigger, as critics have called it, could set off a nuclear exchange in response to a false alarm or an accidental or unauthorized launch. The lists of close calls suggest that the probability is disconcertingly greater than zero.
Since nuclear weapons needn’t have been invented, and they are useless in winning wars or keeping the peace, that means they can be uninvented—not in the sense that the knowledge of how to make them will vanish, but in the sense that they can be dismantled and no new ones built. It would not be the first time that a class of weapons has been marginalized or scrapped. The world’s nations have banned antipersonnel landmines, cluster munitions, and chemical and biological weapons, and they have seen other high-tech weapons of the day collapse under the weight of their own absurdity. During World War I the Germans invented a gargantuan, multistory “supergun” which fired a 200-pound projectile more than 80 miles, terrifying Parisians with shells that fell from the sky without warning. The behemoths, the biggest of which was called the Gustav Gun, were inaccurate and unwieldy, so few of them were built and they were eventually scuttled. The nuclear skeptics Ken Berry, Patricia Lewis, Benoît Pelopidas, Nikolai Sokov, and Ward Wilson point out:
Today countries do not race to build their own superguns. . . . There are no angry diatribes in liberal papers about the horror of these weapons and the necessity of banning them. There are no realist op-eds in conservative papers asserting that there is no way to shove the supergun genie back into the bottle. They were wasteful and ineffective. History is replete with weapons that were touted as war-winners that were eventually abandoned because they had little effect.106
Could nuclear weapons go the way of the Gustav Gun? In the late 1950s a movement arose to Ban the Bomb, and over the decades it escaped its founding circle of beatniks and eccentric professors and has gone mainstream. Global Zero, as the goal is now called, was broached in 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who famously mused, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” In 2007 a bipartisan quartet of defense realists (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry) wrote an op-ed called “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” with the backing of fourteen other former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State and Defense.107 In 2009 Barack Obama gave a historic speech in Prague in which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” an aspiration that helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize.108 It was echoed by his Russian counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev (though not so much by either one’s successor). Yet in a sense the declaration was redundant, because the United States and Russia, as signatories of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, were already committed by its Article VI to eliminating their nuclear arsenals.109 Also committed are the United Kingdom, France, and China, the other nuclear states grandfathered in by the treaty. (In a backhanded acknowledgment that treaties matter, India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed it, and North Korea withdrew.) The world’s citizens are squarely behind the movement: large majorities in almost every surveyed country favor abolition.110
Zero is an attractive number because it expands the nuclear taboo from using the weapons to possessing them. It also removes any incentive for a nation to obtain nuclear weapons to protect itself against an enemy’s nuclear weapons. But getting to zero will not be easy, even with a carefully phased sequence of negotiation, reduction, and verification.111 Some strategists warn that we shouldn’t even try to get to zero, because in a crisis the former nuclear powers might rush to rearm, and the first past the post might launch a pre-emptive strike out of fear that its enemy would do so first.112 According to this argument, the world would be better off if the nuclear grandfathers kept a few around as a deterrent. In either case, the world is very far from zero, or even “a few.” Until that blessed day comes, there are incremental steps that could bring the day closer while making the world safer.
The most obvious is to whittle down the size of the arsenal. The process is well under way. Few people are aware of how dramatically the world has been dismantling nuclear weapons. Figure 19-1 shows that the United States has reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1967 peak, and now has fewer nuclear warheads than at any time since 1956.113 Russia, for its part, has reduced its arsenal by 89 percent from its Soviet-era peak. (Probably even fewer people realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.)114 In 2010 both countries signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which commits them to shrinking their inventories of deployed strategic warheads by two-thirds.115 In exchange for Congressional approval of the treaty, Obama agreed to a long-term modernization of the American arsenal, and Russia is modernizing its arsenal as well, but both countries will continue to reduce the size of their stockpiles at rates that may even exceed the ones set out in the treaty.116 The barely discernible layers laminating the top of the stack in the graph represent the other nuclear powers. The British and French arsenals were smaller to begin with and have shrunk in half, to 215 and 300, respectively. (China’s has grown slightly from 235 to 260, India’s and Pakistan’s have grown to around 135 apiece, Israel’s is estimated at around 80, and North Korea’s is unknown but small.)117 As I mentioned, no additional countries are known to be pursuing nuclear weapons, and the num
ber possessing fissile material that could be made into bombs has been reduced over the past twenty-five years from fifty to twenty-four.118
Figure 19-1: Nuclear weapons, 1945–2015
Sources: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/2927, based on data from the Federation of Atomic Scientists, Kristensen & Norris 2016a, updated in Kristensen 2016; see Kristensen & Norris 2016b for additional explanation. The counts include weapons that are deployed and those that are stockpiled, but exclude weapons that are retired and awaiting dismantlement.
Cynics might be unimpressed by a form of progress that still leaves the world with 10,200 atomic warheads, since, as the 1980s bumper sticker pointed out, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. But with 54,000 fewer nuclear bombs on the planet than there were in 1986, there are far fewer opportunities for accidents that might ruin people’s whole day, and a precedent has been set for continuing disarmament. More warheads will be eliminated under the terms of the New START, and as I mentioned, still more reductions may take place outside the framework of treaties, which are freighted with legalistic negotiations and divisive political symbolism. When tensions among great powers recede (a long-term trend, even if it’s in abeyance today), they quietly shrink their expensive arsenals.119 Even when rivals are barely speaking, they can cooperate in a reverse arms race using the tactic that the psycholinguist Charles Osgood called Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction (GRIT), in which one side makes a small unilateral concession with a public invitation that it be reciprocated.120 If, someday, a combination of these developments pared the arsenals down to 200 warheads apiece, it would not only dramatically reduce the chance of an accident but essentially eliminate the possibility of nuclear winter, the truly existential threat.121