Scientists and Strategists Contemplate the Increasing Odds of Nuclear War
04.18.2017 / BY Mark Wolverton
At a ‘nuclear weapons summit’
in Santa Fe, experts counted the ways catastrophe could be unleashed —
and the many fewer ways it can be prevented.
Santa Fe, New Mexico, is less than an hour’s drive from Los Alamos,
where the atomic bomb was conceived, and only a few hours from
Alamogordo, where it burst into life on July 16, 1945. That makes the
history of nuclear weapons as much as part of the culture and identity
of Santa Fe as the Palace of the Governors, turquoise jewelry, and the
scent of piñon on the cool mountain air. This past December, an unusual
group of people came together for a few days for an event called the
Santa Fe Nuclear Weapons Summit. Their purpose was to consider what
remains the fundamental issue of our age: What should we do about
nuclear weapons?
One reason that question is so difficult to answer is that, after
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nukes became something of an abstraction, the
stuff of nightmares and apocalyptic scenarios, not something that
affected our day-to-day lives. And for those born after the Cold War,
they’re ancient history, a plot device for TV shows and Hollywood
thrillers, not a real and present threat. In his 2012 book “The
Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb,” the
journalist Philip Taubman quoted former Secretary of State George
Shultz: “I think to a certain extent after the end of the Cold War the
subject went to sleep.”
But out there in the night, the nukes sleep on as well, ever ready to
awaken at the slightest nudge, whether through direct intention or
miscalculation. And though the Cold War and the Soviet Union have faded
into history, the danger has not. In the months since the summit, that
hard fact has been made sharply and freshly clear, as
President Trump promises vast expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal while North Korea conducts new missile tests.
During the first minutes of the summit at Santa Fe’s historic Lensic
Theater, Eric Schlosser, author of the book “Command and Control:
Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,”
asked former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry: “Right now as we sit
here, given your decades of public service in this realm, how great do
you think the threat of nuclear weapons is today?”
Perry answered,
“I’m sorry to
report to you that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe today is
greater than it was at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“I don’t like that answer,” Schlosser responded wryly, to nervous laughter from the audience.
“I don’t like it at all,” Perry said.
“But I’m afraid it’s the truth.”
To dead silence from the Lensic audience, Perry went on to recount
his own Cold War experiences, from helping to interpret U-2 photography
of Russian missile sites during the Cuban crisis to a memorable night as
Secretary of Defense: “I was called [at] 3 o’clock in the morning once,
telling me that 200 missiles were on their way from the Soviet Union to
the United States. I will never forget that moment.”
That turned out to be a computer glitch, one of many that transpired
during the Cold War years, as Schlosser details in “Command and
Control.” Although in those days, the main threat was military — the
nuclear Pearl Harbor that strategists called a “BOOB” (“bolt out of the
blue”) attack — the possibility of catastrophic accident or
miscalculation also always lurked.
Yet just as that danger receded with the end of the Cold War, another
appeared: nuclear terrorism. For decades, the tight control of nuclear
weapons and their possession by only a handful of sovereign nations
essentially guaranteed that if they were ever used, it would be as an
act of national will, not a spasm of ideological violence.
That guarantee is gone.
In a stark video, Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry
contemplates the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists on
Washington, D.C.
Perry showed the Lensic audience a short video dramatizing the
consequences of a single terrorist nuke detonating in Washington, D.C.
Beyond the immediate catastrophic loss of life, the political, social,
and cultural fallout of such a disaster would vastly surpass the
physical fallout of the bomb — making the world’s response to 9/11 seem
calm and rational by comparison.
Such dangers led Perry to join with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and
Henry Kissinger in publishing a joint editorial in January 2007 in the
Wall Street Journal arguing for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
For many world leaders, including then soon-to-be-President Barack
Obama, their words transformed the concept of a nuclear-free world from a
radical peacenik fantasy to a realistic, achievable goal. Yet the goal
remains elusive. While Perry takes justifiable pride in participating in
the dismantling of about 8,000 U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons during
his career, “the bad news is there’s still 15,000 left,” he notes
candidly, adding, “whatever the numbers, it’s the end of civilization”
if they’re ever unleashed.
Trained as an engineer and mathematician, Perry still approaches
questions of Armageddon with a scientist’s precise clarity of thought,
as he did throughout his Washington years. Which raises another issue
that was among the many questions addressed by Perry in the Q&A that
followed his interview with Schlosser: Given that it was a group of
brilliant and gentle scientists who first brought the nuclear demon into
the world back in 1945, what can science do now to leash that demon?
In an ideal world, the answer would be obvious: Uninvent the Bomb.
Since that’s impossible, politicians and diplomats must find ways to
control the nukes, and that’s where science is indispensable. “The
treaties are always subject to the issue of, can they be verified, and
verification is a very difficult issue,” Perry said. “Scientists in the
past have come up with techniques which have given enough confidence in
verification that we’ve been able to go ahead with the treaties. So I
think at least one thing that scientists can do in this area is work on
ways of improving verification.” As an example, Perry cited the global
monitoring network of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization,
which proved sensitive enough to detect the partial fizzle of North
Korea’s first failed nuclear test in 2006. “The final estimate was only
about a half a kiloton yield, which was a very low-yield nuclear bomb,
and yet our seismic network detected it with very high reliability,”
Perry said. With North Korea threatening to conduct new underground
nuclear tests, such capability is even more vital.
Not only scientists, but students, artists, writers, businesspeople,
futurists, and other innovators participated in the summit over the next
three days. They traveled to tour Los Alamos National Laboratory,
participated in discussions with experts including the former CIA
officer Valerie Plame and the former U.S. diplomat Robert Gallucci, and
immersed themselves in intensive workshops to develop brief multimedia
presentations envisioning the world in 2045 — a century after the Bomb’s
debut — and possible futures in a world with and without nuclear
weapons.
The summit finale, in which several teams presented imaginative if
brief scenarios, raised some intriguing perspectives and led to a
spirited discussion with the audience, but offered no final answers —
which was not surprising. No one was expecting the most complex
existential dilemma of our age to be resolved in a four-day meeting in a
picturesque corner of New Mexico.
“My generation was responsible for building up this fearsome nuclear arsenal,” says former Defense Secretary William J. Perry.
Visual by Department of Defense
For William Perry, now 89 years old, such activities are more than
just a way to kill time in retirement. “I have basically devoted the
rest of my life to educating the public on nuclear dangers and what
might be done to lessen those dangers,” he told the Lensic audience. As
he explained in Philip Taubman’s book, “My generation was responsible
for building up this fearsome nuclear arsenal. And my generation has now
started the task of dismantling it. But we will not be able to finish
this task. So we will have to pass the baton on to your generation.”
It might be easy to dismiss such efforts merely as the forlorn quest
of old Cold Warriors for some sense of atonement in the twilight of
their lives. And it’s all too easy to feel completely hopeless about the
entire issue, and that trying to change it is merely an exercise in
futility. As David Kaiser, science historian and physicist at MIT,
notes, “I do think that present uncertainties raise the threat level in a
way that hasn’t been true for a long time.” He adds that he wasn’t
surprised when
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to move their clock closer to midnight.
Kaiser is referring to the Bulletin’s famous “Doomsday Clock,” which
since its inception in 1947 has served as an unofficial cultural
indicator of impending Armageddon. “Midnight” on the Clock represents
global nuclear war. As the new presidential administration took office
in January 2017, the Bulletin moved the hands of the Clock to two and a
half minutes to midnight — the closest ever to Doomsday except when it
stood at two minutes during the 1950s, after both the U.S. and the USSR
acquired the hydrogen bomb.
Other experts are equally uneasy. Peter Galison, professor of history
of science and physics at Harvard, notes that the current State
Department is in “dire shape,” and that foreign policy has “shifted away
from professionals with the linguistic and statecraft skills needed to
help guard the peace and toward the White House.” Galison also observes
“an increasing and worrisome volatility to Executive Office discussion
of increasing nuclear armaments and disparaging accords to build down
the current arsenals.” Together, he says, these “present us precisely with a real and worrisome danger.”
Yet it would be a tragic mistake to surrender wholly to fear. The
summit demonstrated convincingly that even though the old Cold Warriors
such as William Perry must eventually relinquish their crusades,
passionate and vigorous people from the generations that follow are more
than ready to take up their baton. In the public discussion that closed
the summit, several of them summed up the main take-home lesson of the
past few days: “Don’t assume [nuclear catastrophe] is inevitable,
inescapable, or that you don’t have agency.”
Considering that the new president of the United States is a man who
seems to believe that nuclear weapons are nothing more than particularly
noisy firecrackers, the cause has never been more timely.
Mark Wolverton, a 2016-17 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, is
a science writer, author, and playwright whose articles have appeared
in Wired, Scientific American, Popular Science, Air & Space
Smithsonian, and American Heritage, among other publications. His most
recent book is “A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert
Oppenheimer.”
With the nuclear genie out of the bottle, the next disaster is only a matter of time
