In the near term, the greatest menace of nuclear war comes not so much from the number of weapons in existence as from the circumstances in which they might be used. The policy of launch on warning, launch under attack, or hair-trigger alert is truly the stuff of nightmares. No early warning system can perfectly distinguish signal from noise, and a president awakened by the proverbial 3:00 A.M. phone call would have minutes to decide whether to fire his missiles before they were destroyed in their silos. In theory, he could start World War III in response to a short circuit, a flock of seagulls, or a bit of malware from that Bulgarian teenager. In reality, the warning systems are better than that, and there is no “hair trigger” that automatically launches missiles without human intervention.122 But when missiles can be launched on short notice, the risks of a false alarm or an accidental, rogue, or impetuous launch are real.
The original rationale for launch on warning was to thwart a massive first strike that would destroy every missile in its silo and leave the country unable to retaliate. But as I mentioned, states can launch weapons from submarines, which hide in deep water, or from bomber aircraft, which can be sent scrambling, making the weapons invulnerable to a first strike and poised to exact devastating revenge. The decision to retaliate could be made in the cold light of day, when the uncertainty has passed: if a nuclear bomb has been detonated on your territory, you know it.
Launch on warning, then, is unnecessary for deterrence and unacceptably dangerous. Most nuclear security analysts recommend—no, insist—that nuclear states take their missiles off hair-trigger alert and put them on a long fuse.123 Obama, Nunn, Shultz, George W. Bush, Robert McNamara, and several former Commanders of Strategic Command and Directors of the National Security Agency agree.124 Some, like William Perry, recommend scrapping the land-based leg of the nuclear triad altogether and relying on submarines and bombers for deterrence, since silo-based missiles are sitting ducks which tempt a leader to use them while they can. So with the fate of the world at stake, why would anyone want to keep missiles in silos on hair-trigger alert? Some nuclear metaphysicians argue that in a crisis, the act of re-alerting de-alerted missiles would be a provocation. Others note that because silo-based missiles are more reliable and accurate, they are worth safeguarding, because they can be used not just to deter a war but to win one. And that brings us to another way to reduce the risks of nuclear war.
It’s hard for anyone with a conscience to believe that their country is prepared to use nuclear weapons for any purpose other than deterring a nuclear attack. But that is the official policy of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Pakistan, all of whom have declared they might launch a nuclear weapon if they or their allies have been massively attacked with non-nuclear weapons. Apart from violating any concept of proportionality, a first-use policy is dangerous, because a non-nuclear attacker might be tempted to escalate to nuclear pre-emptively. Even if it didn’t, once it was nuked it might retaliate with a nuclear strike of its own.
So a common-sense way to reduce the threat of nuclear war is to announce a policy of No First Use.125 In theory, this would eliminate the possibility of nuclear war altogether: if no one uses a weapon first, they’ll never be used. In practice, it would remove some of the temptation of a pre-emptive strike. Nuclear weapon states could all agree to No First Use in a treaty; they could get there by GRIT (with incremental commitments like never attacking civilian targets, never attacking a non-nuclear state, and never attacking a target that could be destroyed by conventional means); or they could simply adopt it unilaterally, which is in their own interests.126 The nuclear taboo has already reduced the deterrent value of a Maybe First Use policy, and the declarant could still protect itself with conventional forces and with a second-strike capability: nuclear tit for tat.
No First Use seems like a no-brainer, and Barack Obama came close to adopting it in 2016, but was talked out of it at the last minute by his advisors.127 The timing wasn’t right, they said; it might signal weakness to a newly obstreperous Russia, China, and North Korea, and it might scare nervous allies who now depend on the American “nuclear umbrella” into seeking nuclear weapons of their own, particularly with Donald Trump threatening to cut back on American support of its coalition partners. In the long term, these tensions may subside, and No First Use may be considered once more.
Nuclear weapons won’t be abolished anytime soon, and certainly not by the original target date of the Global Zero movement, 2030. In his 2009 Prague speech Obama said that the goal “will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime,” which dates it to well after 2055 (see figure 5-1). “It will take patience and persistence,” he advised, and recent developments in the United States and Russia confirm that we’ll need plenty of both.
But the pathway has been laid out. If nuclear warheads continue to be dismantled faster than they are built, if they are taken off a hair trigger and guaranteed not to be used first, and if the trend away from interstate war continues, then by the second half of the century we could end up with small, secure arsenals kept only for mutual deterrence. After a few decades they might deter themselves out of a job. At that point they would seem ludicrous to our grandchildren, who will beat them into plowshares once and for all. During this climbdown we may never reach a point at which the chance of a catastrophe is zero. But each step down can lower the risk, until it is in the range of the other threats to our species’ immortality, like asteroids, supervolcanoes, or an Artificial Intelligence that turns us into paper clips.
CHAPTER 20
THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS
Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.1 When the Enlightenment began, a third of the children born in the richest parts of the world died before their fifth birthday; today, that fate befalls 6 percent of the children in the poorest parts. Their mothers, too, were freed from tragedy: one percent in the richest countries did not live to see their newborns, a rate triple that of the poorest countries today, which continues to fall. In those poor countries, lethal infectious diseases are in steady decline, some of them afflicting just a few dozen people a year, soon to follow smallpox into extinction.
The poor may not always be with us. The world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across the world’s countries and people. The proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost 90 percent to less than 10 percent, and within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this book it could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in most of human history, has vanished from most of the world, and undernourishment and stunting are in steady decline. A century ago, richer countries devoted one percent of their wealth to supporting children, the poor, and the aged; today they spend almost a quarter of it. Most of their poor today are fed, clothed, and sheltered, and have luxuries like smartphones and air-conditioning that used to be unavailable to anyone, rich or poor. Poverty among racial minorities has fallen, and poverty among the elderly has plunged.
The world is giving peace a chance. War between countries is obsolescent, and war within countries is absent from five-sixths of the world’s surface. The proportion of people killed annually in wars is less than a quarter of what it was in the 1980s, a seventh of what it was in the early 1970s, an eighteenth of what it was in the early 1950s, and a half a percent of what it was during World War II. Genocides, once common, have become rare. In most times and places, homicides kill far more people than wars, and homicide rates have been falling as well. Americans are half as likely to be murdered as they were two dozen years ago. In the world as a whole, people are seven-tenths as likely to be murdered as they were eighteen years ago.
Life has been getting safer in every way. Over the course of the 20th century, Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accid
ent, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths, 92 percent less likely to die by fire, 90 percent less likely to drown, 92 percent less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job.2 Life in other rich countries is even safer, and life in poorer countries will get safer as they get richer.
People are getting not just healthier, richer, and safer but freer. Two centuries ago a handful of countries, embracing one percent of the world’s people, were democratic; today, two-thirds of the world’s countries, embracing two-thirds of its people, are. Not long ago half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against racial minorities; today more countries have policies that favor their minorities than policies that discriminate against them. At the turn of the 20th century, women could vote in just one country; today they can vote in every country where men can vote save one. Laws that criminalize homosexuality continue to be stricken down, and attitudes toward minorities, women, and gay people are becoming steadily more tolerant, particularly among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women, and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor.
As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.
People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely, depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal.
As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil, set aside more preserves, extinguished fewer species, saved the ozone layer, and peaked in their consumption of oil, farmland, timber, paper, cars, coal, and perhaps even carbon. For all their differences, the world’s nations came to a historic agreement on climate change, as they did in previous years on nuclear testing, proliferation, security, and disarmament. Nuclear weapons, since the extraordinary circumstances of the closing days of World War II, have not been used in the seventy-two years they have existed. Nuclear terrorism, in defiance of forty years of expert predictions, has never happened. The world’s nuclear stockpiles have been reduced by 85 percent, with more reductions to come, and testing has ceased (except by the tiny rogue regime in Pyongyang) and proliferation has frozen. The world’s two most pressing problems, then, though not yet solved, are solvable: practicable long-term agendas have been laid out for eliminating nuclear weapons and for mitigating climate change.
For all the bleeding headlines, for all the crises, collapses, scandals, plagues, epidemics, and existential threats, these are accomplishments to savor. The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Scientists have exposed the workings of matter, life, and mind. Inventors have harnessed the laws of nature to defy entropy, and entrepreneurs have made their innovations affordable. Lawmakers have made people better off by discouraging acts that are individually beneficial but collectively harmful. Diplomats have done the same with nations. Scholars have perpetuated the treasury of knowledge and augmented the power of reason. Artists have expanded the circle of sympathy. Activists have pressured the powerful to overturn repressive measures, and their fellow citizens to change repressive norms. All these efforts have been channeled into institutions that have allowed us to circumvent the flaws of human nature and empower our better angels.
At the same time . . .
Seven hundred million people in the world today live in extreme poverty. In the regions where they are concentrated, life expectancy is less than 60, and almost a quarter of the people are undernourished. Almost a million children die of pneumonia every year, half a million from diarrhea or malaria, and hundreds of thousands from measles and AIDS. A dozen wars are raging in the world, including one in which more than 250,000 people have died, and in 2015 at least ten thousand people were slaughtered in genocides. More than two billion people, almost a third of humanity, are oppressed in autocratic states. Almost a fifth of the world’s people lack a basic education; almost a sixth are illiterate. Every year five million people are killed in accidents, and more than 400,000 are murdered. Almost 300 million people in the world are clinically depressed, of whom almost 800,000 will die by suicide this year.
The rich countries of the developed world are by no means immune. The lower middle classes have seen their incomes rise by less than 10 percent in two decades. A fifth of the American population still believes that women should return to traditional roles, and a tenth is opposed to interracial dating. The country suffers from more than three thousand hate crimes a year, and more than fifteen thousand homicides. Americans lose two hours a day to housework, and about a quarter of them feel they are always rushed. More than two-thirds of Americans deny that they are very happy, around the same proportion as seventy years ago, and both women and the largest demographic age group have become unhappier over time. Every year around 40,000 Americans become so desperately unhappy that they take their own lives.
And of course the problems that span the entire planet are formidable. Before the century is out, it will have to accommodate another two billion people. A hundred million hectares of tropical forest were cut down in the previous decade. Marine fishes have declined by almost 40 percent, and thousands of species are threatened with extinction. Carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulate matter continue to be spewed into the atmosphere, together with 38 billion tons of CO2 every year, which, if left unchecked, threaten to raise global temperatures by two to four degrees Celsius. And the world has more than 10,000 nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries.
The facts in the last three paragraphs, of course, are the same as the ones in the first eight; I’ve simply read the numbers from the bad rather than the good end of the scales or subtracted the hopeful percentages from 100. My point in presenting the state of the world in these two ways is not to show that I can focus on the space in the glass as well as on the beverage. It’s to reiterate that progress is not utopia, and that there is room—indeed, an imperative—for us to strive to continue that progress. If we can sustain the trends in the first eight paragraphs by deploying knowledge to enhance flourishing, the numbers in the last three paragraphs should shrink. Whether they will ever get to zero is a problem we can worry about when we get closer. Even if some do, we will surely discover more harms to rectify and new ways to enrich human experience. The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.
How reasonable is the hope for continuing progress? That’s the question I’ll consider in this last chapter in the Progress section, before switching in the remainder of the book to the ideals that are necessary to realize the hope.
* * *
I’ll start with the case for continuing progress. We began the book with a non-mystical, non-Whiggish, non-Panglossian explanation for why progress is possible, namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlig
htenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. At the time skeptics could reasonably say, “It will never work.” But more than two centuries later we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting ways in which the world has been getting better.
Lines that plot good things over time cannot automatically be extrapolated rightward and upward, but with many of the graphs that’s a good bet. It’s unlikely we’ll wake up one morning and find that our buildings are more flammable, or that people have changed their minds about interracial dating or gay teachers keeping their jobs. Developing countries are unlikely to shut down their schools and health clinics or stop building new ones just as they are starting to enjoy their fruits.
To be sure, changes that take place on the time scale of journalism will always show ups and downs. Solutions create new problems, which take time to solve in their term. But when we stand back from these blips and setbacks, we see that the indicators of human progress are cumulative: none is cyclical, with gains reliably canceled by losses.3
Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.
The technological advances that have propelled this progress should only gather speed. Stein’s Law continues to obey Davies’s Corollary (Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think), and genomics, synthetic biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, materials science, data science, and evidence-based policy analysis are flourishing. We know that infectious diseases can be extinguished, and many are slated for the past tense. Chronic and degenerative diseases are more recalcitrant, but incremental progress in many (such as cancer) has been accelerating, and breakthroughs in others (such as Alzheimer’s) are likely.