Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Martin Hellman

  • More Russians Fear Nuclear War

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    martin_hellman1The risk analysis approach I have advocated for reducing the threat of nuclear war doesn’t wait for a catastrophe to occur before taking remedial action since, clearly, that would be too late. Instead, it sees catastrophes as the final step in a chain of mistakes, and tries to stop the accident chain at the earliest possible stage. The news coming out of Ukraine for over a year has given us many options for doing that, but few in this country seem aware of the nuclear dimension to the risk. Russians are more aware, with a recent poll showing 17% who fear a nuclear war, versus 8% two years ago. 

    I suspect that much of the difference in American and Russian perspectives is due to our relative distances from the carnage. The Ukrainian civil war is being fought on Russia’s doorstep, and has flooded Russia with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

    Unfortunately, those very different perspectives also create the possibility for one side to inadvertently threaten the perceived vital interests of the other. To a large extent, that’s how the Cuban Missile Crisis started.

    Numerous examples of such misperception have been highlighted in this blog (search on Ukraine to find them), and a recent article in the Nixon Center’s journal The National Interest provides additional examples. These examples focus on the West’s mistakes not because Putin is blameless, but because our mistakes are the only ones which we have the power to correct.

    Looking at the ways we could help stop the violence in Ukraine illustrates another advantage of risk analysis: It doesn’t just reduce the risk of catastrophe. It also helps build a more peaceful world.

    If you agree that these ideas need wider consideration, please add a link on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, and use other social media to help get the word out. Thank you!

  • Strategic Empathy: A Better Strategy in Ukraine and Marriage

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    A blog post by University of Ottawa Prof. Paul Robinson makes an important point about the need for better strategic thinking concerning the Ukrainian crisis. Robinson advocates “strategic empathy” for producing successful outcomes – understanding your opponent’s thinking before acting. Acting without first understanding how your opponent sees things –  no matter how wrong he might be – is likely to exacerbate the conflict. As Robinson notes in his conclusion, “Moral certitude may be emotionally satisfying, but strategic empathy is far more likely to lead to peace.” I recommend that you read the entire post – it’s not very long – but here are two key paragraphs:

    The response of both Russia and Western states to the crisis in Ukraine has been to throw insults at one another and to resort to conspiracy theories. To many in the West, Russian behaviour in Ukraine is the product of a deliberate plan of imperial expansion; to many Russians, the civil war in Ukraine is the result of a long-term American strategy to destabilize and weaken any potential rivals. Within Ukraine, the current government views the war as solely the consequence of Russian aggression, whereas the rebels view themselves as victims of government barbarity. No matter who you are, somebody else is entirely to blame. No effort is made to understand, let alone empathize with the other side’s point of view.

    Underlying all this is a sense on both sides of moral righteousness. The division of the world into good guys – us – and bad guys – them – discourages any effort to promote strategic empathy, for the latter comes to be regarded as appeasing evil. But strategic empathy does not require that one concede that the other side is right. Rather, through a better understanding of others’ actions, one increases one’s chances of pursuing successful policies.

    Although I was previously unaware of the term “strategic empathy,” this blog’s coverage of Ukraine has had that as its goal. Anyone wanting to better understand the Russian perspective can go back through my past posts here by searching on Ukraine in the search box at the upper right.

    I first learned the need for strategic empathy in resolving conflicts with my wife. After an argument, I’d go in another room, pretend I was an actor who had to play her and argue, with convincing emotion, why it was all my fault instead of hers (as it initially appeared to me). I wouldn’t end up agreeing with her perspective, but understanding it was crucial to successfully resolving the argument.

    This March, we’ll have been married for 48 years, a feat I doubt we could have accomplished without strategic empathy on both our parts. Even better, the goodwill built up by that approach made the last ten years of our marriage totally argument free. Now, instead of trying to “win” when we have differing opinions, we tend to ask questions to understand why the other sees it the way they do. “Getting curious, not furious” works wonders, and I highly recommend experimenting with strategic empathy at both a personal and international level. Using it in personal relationships has the advantage of being immediately available to each of us, so I recommend starting there.

  • Has Torture Killed More Americans Than It Saved?

    martin_hellman1The release yesterday of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of what the CIA has called “enhanced interrogation techniques” drew predictable partisan responses, with many Democrats condemning the use of torture and Republicans saying that extraordinary times necessitated extraordinary means to protect American lives. But lost in the noise is an important question: Did these enhanced interrogation techniques play a role in killing thousands of Americans? Here’s why I believe that happened:

    Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the UN was a key element in the Bush administration’s building public support for its invasion of Iraq. There was just one problem. Powell’s contention that “Iraq provided training in these weapons [of mass destruction] to al Qaeda,” was based on false information obtained by torture. Two years later, in a Barbara Walters interview, when Powell was asked if that speech will tarnish his record, he replied:

    Of course it will. It’s a blot. I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.

    Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff at the time, sees his own participation in crafting that speech in even harsher terms:

    My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That’s not a very comforting thing.

    Initially, Wilkerson and Powell didn’t believe Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein was involved with al Qaeda. It just didn’t make sense. al Qaeda is a fundamentalist religious group, so a secular leader like Saddam was anathema to them. In the 2007 video documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, Wilkerson explains the role that torture played in bringing him and Powell around to the administration’s point of view:

    The moment al Libi [an al Qaeda fighter captured in Afghanistan in November 2001] was water-boarded, he started blurting things out. Well, rather than questioning what he was saying and going into it in detail to see if what he was saying could be corroborated, they immediately stopped and ran off to report what al Libi had said – and ended the torture. And, bang, it gets up to the highest decision-makers. 

    And all of a sudden Colin Powell is told, “Hey, you don’t have to worry about your doubts anymore, because we’ve just gotten confirmation that there were contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad.” [1:25:30-1:26:03 on the DVD; also available in text form in an online transcript.]

    If Powell and Wilkerson had known that water-boarding had been used to extract this new information – they only learned that later – they would have seen it in a very different light. So torture is partly responsible for a war which has killed thousands of Americans, leading to the title of this post: “Has torture killed more Americans than it saved?”

    Even if claims that enhanced interrogation saved some American lives turn out to be true, we also need to ask how many it has cost. If we pursue that question, I believe we will find that such methods are unjustified on extremely pragmatic as well as moral grounds.

  • Should NATO Welcome Ukraine?

    With Ukraine’s effort to subdue the pro-Russian rebels in the eastern part of the country faltering, it is understandable that its Prime Minister submitted a proposal to Parliament seeking NATO membership. What is surprising — and dangerous — is the response of NATO’s Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen: “We fully respect Ukraine’s decisions as regards Ukraine’s security policy and alliance affiliations.”

    2014-08-30-badger.jpg
    While NATO membership for Ukraine would almost surely make Russia more cautious in its treatment of that nation, the immediate risk of NATO membership is likely to make Russia much more aggressive in an attempt to prevent that from ever happening.

    Furthermore, even if Ukraine were to join NATO in the future and that were to make Russia more cautious, the risk of a war between the U.S. and Russia still would increase. That’s because any suspicion of an attack by Russia on Ukraine — as is now the case — then would risk the U.S. being treaty-bound to respond just as if New York had been attacked by Russia.

    NATO Treaty, Article V: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”

    And it can be very murky determining who is behind an attack, whether or not it was provoked, and even whether or not it even occurred.

    Unless we want to risk the survival of our homeland (and possibly the world) on allegations and perceptions of what is happening in a civil war in Ukraine, we should be much more circumspect in welcoming Ukraine into NATO.

  • What Are Acceptable Nuclear Risks?

    martin_hellman1This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    When I read Eric Schlosser’s acclaimed 2013 book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, I found a tantalizing revelation on pages 170-171, when it asked, “What was the ‘acceptable’ probability of an accidental nuclear explosion?” and then proceeded to describe a 1957 Sandia Report, “Acceptable Premature Probabilities for Nuclear Weapons,” which dealt with that question.

    Unable to find the report online, I contacted Schlosser, who was kind enough to share it with me. (We owe him a debt of gratitude for obtaining it through a laborious Freedom of Information Act request.) The full report, Schlosser’s FOIA request, and my analysis of the report are now freely accessible on my Stanford web site. (The 1955 Army report, “Acceptable Military Risks from Accidental Detonation of Atomic Weapons,” on which this 1957 Sandia report builds, appears not to be available. If anyone knows of an existing copy, please post a comment.)

    Using the same criterion as this report*, which, of course, is open to question, my analysis shows that nuclear terrorism would have to have a risk of at most 0.5% per year to be considered “acceptable.” In contrast, existing estimates are roughly 20 times higher.**

    My analysis also shows, that using the report’s criterion*, the risk of a full-scale nuclear war would have to be on the order of 0.0005% per year, corresponding to a “time horizon” of 200,000 years. In contrast, my preliminary risk analysis of nuclear deterrence indicates that risk to be at least a factor 100 and possibly a factor of 1,000 times higher. Similarly, when I ask people how long they think we can go before nuclear deterrence fails and we destroy ourselves (assuming nothing changes, which hopefully it will), almost all people see 10 years as too short and 1,000 years as too long, leaving 100 years as the only “order of magnitude” estimate left, an estimate which is 2,000 times riskier than the report’s criterion would allow.

    In short, the risks of catastrophes involving nuclear weapons currently appear to be far above any acceptable level. Isn’t it time we started paying more attention to those risks, and taking steps to reduce them?

    *The report required that the expected number of deaths due to an accidental nuclear detonation should be no greater than the number of American deaths each year due to natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.

    ** In the Nuclear Tipping Point video documentary Henry Kissinger says, “if nothing fundamental changes, then I would expect the use of nuclear weapons in some 10 year period is very possible” – equivalent to a risk of approximately 10% per year. Similarly, noted national security expert Dr. Richard Garwin testified to Congress that he estimate the risk to be in the range of 10-20 percent per year. A survey of national security experts by Senator Richard Lugar was also in the 10% per year range.

  • More on the Ukraine

    martin_hellman1This article, along with Hellman’s full series on the Ukraine crisis, can be found at his blog Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    With the Crimea voting today on whether to secede from the Ukraine, and early returns indicating strong support for secession, the following perspectives on the crisis are particularly relevant. As before, I am emphasizing unusual perspectives not because the mainstream view (“It’s  Russia’s fault!”) doesn’t have some validity, but because it over-simplifies a complex issue. And, when dealing with a nation capable of destroying us in under an hour, it would be criminally negligent not to look at all the evidence before imposing sanctions or taking other dangerous steps.

    In his blog, Russia: Other Points of View, Patrick Armstrong asks, “If, as seems to be generally expected, tomorrow’s [now today’s] referendum in Crimea produces a substantial majority in favour of union with the Russian Federation, what will Moscow’s reaction be?” It will be interesting to assess his answer a week from now, when time will tell if he was right:

    I strongly expect that it will be……

    Nothing.

    There are several reasons why I think this. One is that Moscow is reluctant to break up states. I know that that assertion will bring howls of laughter from the Russophobes who imagine that Putin has geography dreams every night but reflect that Russia only recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after Georgia had actually attacked South Ossetia. The reason for recognition was to prevent other Georgian attacks. Behind that was the memory of the chaos caused in the Russian North Caucasus as an aftermath of Tbilisi’s attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the 1990s. Russia is a profoundly status quo country – largely because it fears change would lead to something worse – and will not move on such matters until it feels it has no other choice. We are not, I believe, quite at that point yet on Crimea let alone eastern Ukraine.

    Moscow can afford to do nothing now because time is on its side. The more time passes, the more people in the West will learn who the new rulers of Kiev are.

    To show “who the new rulers of Kiev are,” Armstrong then quotes from a Los Angeles Times article, which starts off:

    It’s become popular to dismiss Russian President Vladimir Putin as paranoid and out of touch with reality. But his denunciation of “neofascist extremists” within the movement that toppled the old Ukrainian government, and in the ranks of the new one, is worth heeding. The empowerment of extreme Ukrainian nationalists is no less a menace to the country’s future than Putin’s maneuvers in Crimea. These are odious people with a repugnant ideology.

    Read the rest of the article to learn more.

    And a Reuters dispatch shows how the interim Ukrainian government is making it more likely that Crimea’s desire to secede and re-join Russia will be honored by Russia:

    Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk vowed on Sunday to track down and bring to justice all those promoting separatism in its Russian-controlled region of Crimea “under the cover of Russian troops”.

    “I want to say above all … to the Ukrainian people: Let there be no doubt, the Ukrainian state will find all those ringleaders of separatism and division who now, under the cover of Russian troops, are trying to destroy Ukrainian independence,” he told a cabinet meeting as the region voted in a referendum on becoming a part of Russia.

    We will find all of them – if it takes one year, two years – and bring them to justice and try them in Ukrainian and international courts. The ground will burn beneath their feet.”

    Given that the Ukrainian opposition demanded amnesty for even the violent protesters in Kiev, how can the new government possibly expect the more peaceful Crimean opposition not to secede under such threats? It is also worth noting that this new government was installed by force in violation of an agreement worked out between Yanukovych and the political leaders of the Ukrainian opposition.

  • Avoiding Needless Wars, Part 10: Iran

    Martin HellmanThe interim agreement to freeze Iran’s nuclear program has been praised by some as a diplomatic breakthrough and condemned by others as a prelude to nuclear disaster. A full appraisal must wait until we see what the follow-on agreements, if any, look like. In the meantime, here’s my take:

    1. The only alternative to negotiations is a military strike powerful and sustained enough to not only destroy Iran’s current nuclear program but also to prevent its resurrection. Such actions are impossible in the current political climate — and probably in any environment.

    Domestically, Americans are tired of wars, and our budget is already highly stressed. Internationally, we’ve developed a reputation as a bull in a china shop, so an American attack would be met with howls of indignation. It also would reinvigorate terrorism against Israel as Iran totally unleashed Hezbollah and Hamas.

    A strike which prevented Iran from ever developing a nuclear weapons would not be surgical or short lived and might be impossible. At a minimum, it would require hundreds of thousands of American “boots on the ground” for years on end, and cost trillions of dollars. It probably would cost tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives.

    Even with that level of effort, an American invasion probably would fail to achieve its objective since Iran would be a more powerful adversary than either Iraq or Afghanistan, both of which have failed to produce anything that might be called an American victory.

    In 2010, TIME magazine explained why then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates advised against attacking Iran: “Military action, Gates warned, would solve nothing; in fact it would be more likely to drive Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.”

    Gates’ warning was echoed last year by former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. James Cartwright: “If they [the Iranians] have the intent, all the weapons in the world are not going to change that. … They can slow it down. They can delay it, some estimate two to five years. But that does not take away the intellectual capital.”

    Also last year, Yuval Diskin, a former head of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, warned that, contrary to its intention, attacking Iran might accelerate its nuclear program.

    While a military strike is the only alternative to negotiations, the above arguments show that it is not a viable option. Diplomacy is our only real option, so the question becomes how to practice it most effectively.

    2. Given that diplomacy is our only viable option, we need to recognize that our past negotiating position – and the one Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu is demanding be reinstated – is a non-starter.

    There’s no way Iran will dismantle its centrifuges and the rest of its nuclear program based on American promises of sanctions relief, especially when those promises might be rescinded by a new administration in 2015, over-ridden by Congress, or nullified by an Israeli attack.

    Our broken promises to Gaddafi add to Iran’s mistrust. In 2003, when he gave up his nuclear weapons program, President Bush promised that this good behavior would be rewarded. Yet, in 2011, our airstrikes played a key role in toppling and murdering Gaddafi.

    Iran also mistrusts us because we aided Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, even though we knew he was using chemical weapons – an action we later used as part of our tortured logic for deposing him.

    For diplomacy to work, we will have to prove that we have experienced a fundamental change of heart with respect to Iran and are prepared to follow through on the promises we make.

    3. Iran appears to be only months away from being able to make at least a crude nuclear weapon. While there’s plenty of blame to go around, Israel and the US need to stop putting all of the onus on Iran and recognize that we, too, played a part in creating the current mess.

    Repeatedly threatening to attack Iran, including with nuclear weapons (a possibility threatened in President Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review) would have made even the most rational Iranian leaders seek a deterrent. And their leadership over the last 30 years has often been far from rational. Fortunately, the current leadership appears more reasonable, and that’s an opening we need to test. If, instead, we maintain a bellicose posture, we will pull the rug out from under the moderates and empower the hardliners in Iran. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar recently warned that American and Israeli hawks who mistrust diplomacy may be intentionally trying to strengthen hard-liners in Iran since they, too, oppose diplomacy.

    While our intention was to halt nuclear proliferation, we have actually encouraged it – particularly in Iran and North Korea – with our militarized approach to foreign affairs.

    I don’t like leaving Iran so close to having a nuclear capability, but the alternatives appear  far worse. It’s time to admit that our Iranian policy thus far has been a disaster and try something new – real diplomacy.

    Suggestions for Further Reading

    Harvard’s Belfer Center has a summary of the best arguments both pro and con on the interim agreement.

    Dr. Abbas Milani, Co-Director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford’s Hoover Institution has an excellent article assessing Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani.

    Handout #5 from my Stanford seminar on “Nuclear Weapons, Risk, and Hope” applies critical thinking to North Korea and Iran. All handouts are accessible from my Courses Page.

    This article was originally published by Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

  • The Man in the TNT Vest

    This article was originally published at the Nuclear Risk website

    Imagine a man wearing a TNT vest were to come into the room and, before you could escape, managed to tell you that he wasn’t a suicide bomber. He didn’t have the button to set off the explosives. Rather, there were two buttons in very safe hands. One was with President Obama and the other was with President Medvedev, so there was nothing to worry about. You’d still get out of that room as fast as you can!

    Just because we can’t see the nuclear weapons controlled by those two buttons, why do we stay in this room? As we would if confronted by the man in the TNT vest, we need to be plotting a rapid escape. Instead, we have sat here complacently for roughly 50 years, trusting that because Earth’s explosive vest hasn’t yet gone off, it never will.

    Before society will look for an escape route, we have to overcome its mistaken belief that threatening to destroy the world is somehow risk free. Changing societal thinking is a huge task, but as with achieving the seemingly impossible goals of ending slavery and getting women the vote, the first step in correcting this misperception is for courageous individuals to speak the truth: The nuclear emperor has no clothes — except for that stupid vest!

    You have an advantage that the abolitionists and the suffragettes did not. You can propagate the needed message to all your friends merely by emailing them a link to this page http://nuclearrisk.org/email21.php, or whatever you think would be most effective. While communicating with friends may seem trivial compared to the immense task we face, as explained in the resource section below, at this early stage of the process it is the essential action. I hope you will consider doing that, so that Earth’s explosive vest can become but a distant nightmare to future generations.

     

    Illustration is ©2009 NewsArt.com

    Martin E. Hellman is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. His current project applies risk analysis to nuclear deterrence, and is described in detail at NuclearRisk.org.

  • Does Nuclear Deterrence Deter?

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    A few years ago, my wife pointed out that whoever coined the term nuclear deterrence was a marketing genius: it implies that threatening to destroy the world will deter behavior we don’t like. But what happens if nuclear deterrence morphs into nuclear chicken, with neither side willing to back down and be humiliated? Two articles I came across today help illuminate how that could happen.

    Today’s New York Times has an article about the ongoing Sino-Japanese dispute over a few uninhabited island known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. The article noted:

    The diplomatic maneuvering underscores the emotions in both nations. In China, the islands are seen as the last unreturned piece of Chinese territory seized during the building of Japan’s empire more than a century ago, and thus a sign that Japan remains unrepentant. To many Japanese, the islands have become emblematic of the broader challenge that their nation, long Asia’s strongest power, faces from the emergence of an increasingly powerful China seemingly bent on settling old scores.

    Where territorial disputes are concerned, even a few small, uninhabited islands can cause rationality to evaporate, and an irrational adversary is unlikely to be deterred. If Japan is irrational enough to get into a war with China, we would be dragged in by our mutual security treaty which Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell clearly stated extends to these disputed islands.

    Paradoxically, nuclear deterrence depends on our adversary being rational enough to be deterred, while we must appear irrational enough to risk our existence as a nation. The second part of that paradox was clearly enunciated in a 1995 USSTRATCOMM white paper, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence”:

    Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially “out of control” can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries. [emphasis added]

    The second article today which relates to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence is Ward Wilson’sguest post on the Arms Control Wonk blog, which explains how President Kennedy failed to be deterred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ward’s column is related to his new book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, which I highly recommend. When I got my copy of the book, I wasn’t sure how much time I’d be able to give it. After all, this is my primary area of academic interest and I’ve read extensively on the issues treated here. But I found myself drawn in to the point that I finished the book the same day it arrived! That hasn’t happened in a long time, and is a tribute to both Ward’s masterful writing style and his concise arguments. Buy it, you’ll like it!

    And, most importantly, let’s start recognizing that nuclear chicken (i.e., nuclear deterrence) is not a rational basis for our national security.

    Martin Hellman is a NAPF Associate and is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

  • Nuclear Weapons and World Peace – Could Malta lead the way?

    This article was originally published by the Malta Independent.


    Martin HellmanHuman beings are so adaptable that we have often accomplished what we previously thought ourselves incapable of achieving. The idea that men could fly was seen as absurd until the Wright brothers, Santos Dumont and others defied conventional wisdom. Because they had the courage to consider what everyone around them “knew” was impossible, today we fly higher and faster than any bird, and have even walked on the moon. Human slavery and the subjugation of women, once seen as immutable aspects of human nature, are now banned in every civilized nation.


    But one dream has eluded us: beating our swords into ploughshares, and learning to make war no more. In this instalment of this series of articles, I argue that we may be close to realising that age-old dream of Isaiah, and that nuclear weapons can be the catalyst for doing so, if only we will view them from the proper perspective.


    The current environment might not seem conducive to that hope, with constant reports of wars, and threats of war. Yet a deeper look also shows signs of promise. Two books that appeared last year, Prof. Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War, and Prof. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, both argued that the numbers paint a very different picture, with deaths due to war dropping from roughly 150,000 per year in the 1980s to 100,000 per year in the 1990s, and to 55,000 per year in the first decade of this century. While 55,000 deaths per year is a tragedy, that is far less than the number of deaths from road accidents!


    In earlier writings, Prof. John Mueller argued that war was going out of style, much as duelling did in the 19th century: compare the millions of civilian deaths that were planned and actually celebrated during World War II, with the revulsion that even a few accidental ones produce today. Think of London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Nanking, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki – or the siege of Malta – and compare them with the understandable outcry today when an attack on al Qaeda inadvertently kills a few women and children. There are also signs of hope on the nuclear front: the world’s arsenals have fallen several-fold, from a peak of over 70,000 weapons to roughly 20,000 today.


    This data provides hope, but we should not become complacent about the threat posed by nuclear weapons – as Mueller, Goldstein, and to a lesser extent Pinker, tend to do. Part 3 in this series presented evidence that a child born today has at least a 10 per cent chance of being killed by nuclear weapons during his or her 80-year expected life – equivalent to playing Russian roulette with a 10-chambered revolver pointed at that child’s head. This level of risk may be lower than during the Cold War, but it is still unacceptably high. Now is not the time for complacency. Each generation is responsible for passing on a better world to their children. Now is the time to focus and help build the momentum towards eliminating this risk that could otherwise destroy the future.


    A race is on between “the better angels of our nature” and the risk that a mistake, an accident, or simply a miscalculation, will bring on a final, nuclear war. By properly integrating the nuclear threat into the quest for world peace, we can motivate our better angels to run a bit faster, thereby increasing their chance of winning the race. To do that, we need to recognise that every small war – and even the mere threat of war – has some chance of escalating out of control, much as a terrorist act in Sarajevo was the spark that set off the First World War. The only real difference is that World War III would not have a successor.


    The best-known example of a spark that nearly set off the nuclear powder keg is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Both superpowers were taken by surprise when a minor conflict suddenly erupted into a crisis that had them teetering on the brink of the nuclear abyss. Afterwards, President Kennedy estimated the chance of war as having been “somewhere between one out of three and even.” In Kennedy’s estimation, that crisis was equivalent to playing nuclear roulette – a version of Russian roulette in which the whole world is at stake – with a 2- or 3-chambered revolver.


    Lesser crises have more chambers in the gun, but it doesn’t matter whether there are two chambers or two hundred. If we continually pull the trigger, it is only a matter of time before the gun goes off and civilization is destroyed. We have played this macabre game more often than is imagined. So long as we pretend that the potential gains from war outweigh the risks, each of our actions has some chance of triggering the final global war. Every “small” war – even those in Syria, or Libya, or Kashmir, or Georgia – pulls the trigger; each threat of the use of violence pulls the trigger; each day that goes by in which a missile or computer can fail pulls the trigger.


    The only way to survive Russian roulette is to put down the gun and stop playing that insane game. The only way to survive nuclear roulette is to move beyond war in the same sense that the civilized world has moved beyond human sacrifice and slavery.


    In the past, when it was merely moral and desirable, it might have been impossible to beat swords into ploughshares. Today, in our interdependent and interconnected global village, it is necessary for survival.


    Gen. Douglas MacArthur recognised that reality in his 1961 address to the Philippines Congress: “You will say at once that, although the abolition of war has been the dream of man for centuries, every proposition to that end has been promptly discarded as impossible and fantastic. But that was before the science of the past decade made mass destruction a reality. The argument then was along spiritual and moral lines, and lost. But now the tremendous evolution of nuclear and other potentials of destruction has suddenly taken the problem away from its primary consideration as a moral and spiritual question and brought it abreast of scientific realism.”


    There is potential for this to be the best of times, or the end of time, depending on which direction we take at this critical juncture. Technology has given a new, global meaning to the biblical injunction: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”


    Choosing life is not a passive decision, and requires an appropriate outward expression.


    To remove this risk of extinction, we must shift from an old mode of thinking, which justifies war as being necessary for survival, to a new mode of thinking, which recognises war as the ultimate threat to our survival. When it was merely moral and desirable, it might have been impossible to beat swords into ploughshares, but today the lives of our children and grandchildren – and quite possibly our own – depend on our once again doing what we previously thought ourselves incapable of achieving. And, as outlined in earlier essays in this series, Malta is an ideal candidate for leading the way in an outward expression of this changed thinking, by becoming the first nation to treat the nuclear threat with the respect and attention it deserves. That would be a game changer, which would give our better angels a second wind in the race against oblivion.


    Through supporting this series of articles, the ICT Gozo Malta project is seeking to create awareness that this is a global issue that can affect every one of us, including our children and their children. This is an issue that can be addressed in a meaningful way in a small country such as Malta. We in Malta have no desire to own or build weapons of mass destruction. We can leave a legacy for a safer world. Because of our small population and certain other advantages, it is easier for us to build a tipping point of public interest and for Malta to take a leadership stance, just as we already have in the area of nuclear power when Malta participated in the anti-nuclear Vienna Declaration, 25 May 2011. To begin this next process of change, and to ask our leaders to be more proactive in this cause, we require numbers! To make an outward expression, you can register your personal support on the online petition page, asking our government to make this issue a higher priority: www.change.org/petitions/global-nuclear-disarmament-malta.


    If you would like us to keep you posted on new developments and ways you might participate in this effort to make Malta a beacon unto the nations of the world, please contact David Pace of the ICT Gozo Malta Project (dave.pace@ictgozomalta.eu).