A scenario: You’re nearing the end of a blind date, waiting for the waiter to bring out the ice cream. Both of you are still trying to come up with fodder for conversation. You’ve covered the weather, countries you have visited, documentaries you liked, your favorite breeds of dogs, where to buy the best ground coffee.
Just then, your date declares with a smile, “So how about nuclear weapons? Wouldn’t using them be…well, sort of fun? The collapse of modern society, or at least the end of the comforts we know? Imagine the thousands of immediate deaths, the damage to the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystem. The famines. Oh, and I forgot the years of skyrocketing cancer cases!”
After you’ve finished staring, and blinking, after you’ve caught the waiter’s eye for the check, you might still be waiting for the punchline. No one could actually be so flip, so grotesquely cavalier about a grave danger to civilization — indeed, the gravest possible danger. Could they? Particularly with a new acquaintance they’re purportedly trying to woo? But I recently discovered this very discussion happening in reality, in the singularly strange world of “cyberdating.”
A screenshot of the OkCupid question about nuclear war.
For those who are still somehow unaware, Internet dating offers anyone the ability to post a profile on the Web about their likes and interests, typically with a photo. Users can then interact: send instant messages, talk, flirt. According to research, about 75% of single people are searching online for partners nowadays.
A friend told me to try OkCupid, the most popular dating site around. It was established 12 years ago and now has millions of regular users of every age group. One of the best-known features of OkCupid is its wealth of “match questions.” Once you join, the website — like a robot that’s been programmed to be endlessly, insatiably curious about what you love and hate — begins trying to discern the real you. A nearly endless stream of yes/no and multiple-choice questions continues for as long as you play along; the site suggests dating candidates based on your answers. Theoretically, it’s a matter of giving the algorithm of romance the food it needs to thrive and get smarter.
I spent some time grappling with the initial onslaught of questions, and at first most seemed somewhat reasonable. Would you consider dating someone who dislikes children? How shy would you say you are? Do you solely date people with athletic and toned bodies?
But then, the first day of my membership, this one appeared:
In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?
I read the question several times, with emotions that included confusion, exasperation and anger. The hippest dating site on the Web was challenging me to answer a question that was not only inane but insane. I looked around to see if Rod Serling’s ghost was watching from a dim corner of the room.
I’m not alone in my puzzlement.
OkCupid for years has hosted online forums: message boards at which members can debrief about any question — how they answered it, and what the “best” answer might have been. The one on nuclear war clearly has been in active use by the dating site for many years, because as far back as 2008 it was sparking extended debate. That year, a site member (one of several) summarily condemned it:
“This is not even OK to even consider…” the site user wrote, “…unless you are an absolute idiot and have begun to believe the government/military attempts to make you think that such a thing would be survivable and wouldn’t be the end of life as we know it, which it would be.”
In 2011, people were still flocking to message boards to talk about the question, to defend how they answered it or (as before) to denounce it. One user called it “the most moronic question on this site.” A member in his late 50s identified himself as a former worker in the nuclear missile industry and declared that any use of such weapons would obviously be “a nightmare.”
“Actually many would survive,” he wrote. “But what would life on this planet be after that? Radiation clouds, radioactive rain, on and on…at least 10 years of death or more.”
On the message boards, lots of OkCupid users appear to agree with him, and this buoys my spirits. But there are also an unsettling number of comments by people standing by the notion that nuclear war might be the ultimate source of thrills. Many of these do not reach beyond a superficial concept of “excitement” to examine the widespread, unparalleled tragedy that a nuclear exchange would bring.
“It’s the end of civilization,” one site user writes. “How is that not exciting? I’m not saying it will be enjoyable in the slightest, but it will be fascinating. Literally a once in a lifetime event.”
Another, a 26-year-old man, posts that it stands to reason many people would find any big change in their prosaic existence to hold a certain allure. “People are craving anything to break the monotony of their droning, boring lives, and something that touches every individual would do that,” he writes. “Everyone wants to see an explosion, a house of cards fall over…”
But perhaps the most revealing (and disconcerting) remarks are by those romance-seekers who declare the prospect of nuclear war generates, for them, a responsive chord: memories of entertainment that they’ve enjoyed in the form of action-packed movies and video games. Specifically, they point to apocalyptic films about zombie invasions, or video games that ostensibly simulate the aftermath of nuclear cataclysm.
Fallout 4, released in 2015, had $750 million in sales on its first day of availability alone.
Take, for example, a wildly popular video game named Fallout. Quite a few OkCupid members mentioned it. In Fallout, which has appeared in several editions since 1997, the Earth after World War III is an exciting place to be, indeed. The latest version of the game is set in the bombed, charred remains of Boston in the year 2287, more than two centuries after nuclear bombs have devastated parts of the United States. Gamers take on the identity of “the Sole Survivor,” a heroic figure who emerges from a bomb shelter to search for a baby who was stolen and spirited away into the radioactive ruins of Beantown. Intricately detailed adventures await, with cutting-edge special effects, as players encounter bands of evil humans, “ghouls,” wild animals and even aliens. There are also “super mutants,” who previously were human but because of germ warfare have transformed into “massive, muscle-bound creatures with a natural immunity to radiation damage and disease,” according to information from gamers on the Wikia.com Fallout page. These characters are programmed to have no facial expressions other than “a permanent sneer,” and some of them have access to football-size nuclear weapons that can be launched by catapult. And they’re not happy to see you.
Fallout 4 came out in November 2015, and an incredible 12 million copies of the game were sold in the first 24 hours. That amounted to about $750 million in income for the game manufacturer — breaking the first-day-of-release record for any game sold in 2015.
The 2008 video game Fallout 3 was set in Washington, D.C., 200 years after the region’s nuclear obliteration in 2077.
I honestly can’t get my head around that amount of money being spent in a day, especially on a game — let alone one that takes the worst existential peril humankind faces and seeks to turn it into a circus world that’s so amusing that it’s addictive. To compare, $750 million represents 6.2 times the top opening-day box office receipts of any movie in history (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” also in 2015). I also find it interesting, stepping away from fantasy, that the United States Institute of Peace, a bipartisan federal agency that works to mediate other nations’ conflicts without force and to find nonviolent ways for the U.S. to protect its interests, is now subsisting on a budget of roughly $35 million per year. Apples and oranges, perhaps, but show healthy skepticism if Joe Consumer says he has nothing left to spend on international amity.
Getting back to my experience on OkCupid: I never did get past the bizarre “match” question, and I have yet to become an active user of the dating site. As a supporter of nuclear abolition, for me the question became a vexing distraction that made me doubt the logic behind the site’s much vaunted software for playing matchmaker. True, the “nuclear war excitement” question apparently was first posed, a long time ago, as a suggestion by an ordinary site member, and I’m under no delusion that the average person is well-versed in the dreadful humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons use. We all know that lack of education and lack of empathy can be common.
But I would have hoped the cyber-romance mavens who created the site — Harvard grads all — would have realized the question’s folly, too, instead of officially embracing it and then allowing it to foul the interrogatory stream all these years. (OkCupid didn’t reply to requests for comment about this essay.)
Actually, I have a strong feeling that those who run the dating site know that more than a few of its questions are absurd. But hey, it’s essentially free to use, and maybe that deters complaints (the site is mainly financed by advertising). To quote Christian Rudder, a co-founder of OkCupid who used to maintain his own blog before leaving the company, “The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position.”
That was honest, at least.
Do a strange dating-website question and an astonishingly successful game about a nuclear wasteland offer much to inform us about the future of the nuclear abolition movement? Perhaps.
These fantastical opinions and fantastical games prove, I believe, that people — decades after the Cold War — still have tremendous interest in the sheer power of these weapons and at least some awareness of their capacity to create calamity on an epic scale.
Educating these people, especially the younger generation, about the immeasurable extent of suffering inherent in any nuclear war, is the great challenge for antinuclear activists everywhere.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
Although peace activists know it well, the average American is “blissfully unaware” that the likelihood of a nuclear attack inside U.S. borders has markedly increased for two reasons: serious deterioration in relations between American officials and their Russian counterparts and potential development by terrorists of improvised nuclear technology.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Perry.
That was the warning delivered in November by William Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense, who told attendees in Chicago at the annual Clock Symposium sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that intensified public information campaigns will be essential to enlighten a citizenry that’s become complacent and ignorant about the rising threat of catastrophe.
“Our first steps today must be education and activism,” said Perry, who led the Defense Department under President Bill Clinton between February 1994 and January 1997. Perry, 88, is now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, where he also is a senior fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute.
The political relationship between the U.S. and Russia, nearly 24 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has become just as hostile as it was during the Cold War, Perry told an audience of mostly scientists and students at the University of Chicago.
“How in the world could this have happened?” Perry asked, recalling that in the period following the fall of the USSR, American and Russian officials were amicable enough to jointly dismantle about 8,000 nuclear weapons, hold many diplomatic meetings and even engage in joint peacekeeping exercises.
To some extent, Perry blamed today’s Russian government leaders for producing soured relations. Russia has violated Ukrainian boundaries and embarked on a new, major build-up of its ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) forces, nuclear submarines, and nuclear-capable bombers, he said, even as the U.S. is engaged in major, long-term modernization of its own nuclear technology.
Russian leaders, in addition, have made reckless statements regarding their government’s ability to use nuclear weapons as a tool of power, Perry said. Government-backed Russian news agency chief Dmitry Kiselyov, he recalled, said in 2014 that his nation “could turn the U.S. into radioactive ash.”
The statement was broadcast on TV, with Kiselyov situated in front of a photo of a mushroom cloud; it was a response to cautions from the Obama Administration that the Russians mustn’t try to annex Crimea.
Later in 2014, Perry said, President Vladimir Putin boasted that his country was “one of the most powerful nuclear nations” and should not be interfered with militarily. He indicated that Russia could rely on tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance threats to its interests in Eastern Europe.
Perry also criticized Russia’s apparent rejection of a no-first-use policy governing strategic use of nuclear weapons. The Russian military more than 20 years ago said it might use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack that posed an existential threat to the country, negating a longstanding no-first-use doctrine espoused by Soviet leaders. More recent remarks by Russian leaders, though, have seemingly reconfirmed that officials no longer believe no-first-use has value for Russia today amid strained relations between Washington and the Kremlin. [It should also be noted that the U.S. government has never espoused a no-first-use doctrine.]
But it’s not only Russian officials who are liable for the current deep freeze in relations with the U.S., Perry said. American policy since the end of the Cold War has not always produced trust, he suggested, starting with what he called “premature expansion” by NATO in the period after the demise of the Soviet Union. East Germany joined NATO in 1990 after Germany was reunified, and three former Warsaw Pact nations, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO in 1997. They did so in 1999. Since 2004, nine other Eastern European countries have joined NATO.
“Part of the problem we’ve brought on ourselves,” Perry said.
Furthermore, Perry was critical of the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, which forced that treaty to be terminated. Because it wished to pursue a National Missile Defense program, the George W. Bush Administration declared it would no longer participate in the treaty, which had banned signatories from building systems to intercept and destroy nuclear weapons delivered to targets via ballistic missiles. Russian leaders say they fear and oppose U.S. ABM programs and plans.
Many in the Russian government now believe that American leaders are seeking to foment counter-revolution against Russian interests around the world, as well as supporting factions in Russia that oppose Putin, Perry said. These fears, together with a dismal Russian economy that seems to have little chance for recovery in the near future, have engendered “ultra-nationalism” in Putin’s actions and speech that conceivably could lead to war between the U.S. and Russia — and even a nuclear exchange in a worst-case scenario, he said.
“The danger is that he [Putin] may overplay his hand and blunder into a war, and a war nobody wants,” he said.
The United States and Russia must try to reopen “serious dialogue” to find peaceful diplomatic solutions and address nuclear issues, Perry said. At the very least, American and Russian scientists need to have unofficial discussions about how to reduce existential threats to the world’s future — a practice that was much more common in past decades, he said.
The alternative will be a new nuclear arms race, which Perry said the U.S. and Russia stand at the brink of already, and also a risk that the two powers may once again turn to nuclear tests.
“We have to stop drifting to a nuclear arms race and testing,” he said.
Even more probable and alarming than a major war between nuclear-armed nations, Perry said, is the prospect of a terrorist organization such as ISIS obtaining nuclear materials. He said that these materials conceivably are “within reach” of these organizations, considering the amount of unprotected fissile material in the world. A so-called “crude” bomb constructed by terrorists, though unsophisticated by modern standards, would probably still have the destructive power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, he said.
Perry showed a brief video that depicted what might occur if such a weapon were to be detonated by terrorists on the ground in Washington, D.C. The new video will eventually be used to show high school and college students, in a very dramatic way, the stark reality of the effects of a nuclear explosion on government functioning and everyday life. It was commissioned by the William J. Perry Project, an educational initiative he founded in 2012 in connection with the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
In the movie, which Perry narrated live from the lectern, a “rogue group” of citizens from an unnamed nuclear nation manages to improvise a single, compact uranium bomb and transport it in a crate by airplane — under the guise of agricultural equipment — to a Dallas airport. The box is then shipped to a warehouse in Washington, D.C. and driven in a van by a terrorist down Pennsylvania Avenue. Midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, the bomb is exploded.
About 80,000 people die instantly.
The dead include the president, vice president, speaker of the house, secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and 320 members of Congress. The president pro tempore of the Senate is later sworn in as the new commander in chief in a hospital.
In the scenario, terrorists declare in a radio message that they will set off five more nuclear bombs — one every week — in unspecified cities, until various political demands are met. Panic seizes the nation and people try to evacuate cities.
Meanwhile, Wall Street trading is halted. The U.S. economy plunges. Widespread rioting occurs in urban areas. Martial law is declared there, and National Guardsmen move in and start shooting looters. The video depicts civil liberties effectively being ended, as the military sets up “concentration camps” to hold those who are feared to be dangerous.
“This is my nuclear nightmare, essentially,” Perry said after presenting the video, which had evoked tears from some audience members while it was being played.
The Clock Symposium is held annually by the Bulletin to discuss grave threats to the survival of the planet, and in recent years speakers have focused both on nuclear weapons and global warming. The metaphorical clock is used by the organization as a symbol to be adjusted every year to depict the relative danger to humanity, with midnight representing doomsday.
The Doomsday Clock now stands at 3 minutes to midnight. The minute hand was set two minutes closer to midnight at the beginning of 2015; it had stood at 5 minutes to midnight in 2014. The Bulletin said the change reflected unabated global climate change together with efforts by several nations to both modernize and enlarge their nuclear arsenals. The farthest the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, when the U.S. and USSR signed the START Treaty; the minute hand was set to 17 minutes to midnight.
The next position of the clock hands is expected to be announced in January.
Perry told symposium attendees that he felt a U.S.-Russian nuclear war that would cause the end of civilization is now “very unlikely still, though possible.” But he said that if the Doomsday Clock were adjusted based solely on the basis of the danger of nuclear terrorism, he would set it to 1 to 2 minutes to midnight.
Also at the Bulletin’s symposium, Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and co-chair of the 2010 International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, warned that the world’s biggest peril is that any nation with nuclear weapons might see one or more of them launched due to error or accident, causing a regional nuclear war. “It really is only a matter of time before weapons are used,” he said.
That such a calamity has not happened already, he said, is “a matter of sheer, dumb luck.”
Evans, who is now chancellor of the Australian National University, said abolition of nuclear weapons wherever they exist must remain the long-term goal of world leaders, even if the goal appears very elusive now.
“The main game in all of this…is not peaceful uses, or nuclear security, or nonproliferation, but outright nuclear disarmament–the complete elimination from the face of the Earth of the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented,” he said. “The basic argument first articulated by the Canberra Commission in 1996 remains compelling: So long as any country has nuclear weapons, others will want them; so long as any country has nuclear weapons, they are bound one day to be used, by accident if not by design; and any such use will be catastrophic for life on this planet as we know it.”
The key role of experts such as nuclear scientists in today’s world is to refute arguments about nuclear deterrence that are once again being used to justify proliferation and modernization, even though such deterrence theories make little practical sense anymore, Evans said.
“It is not just a moral argument–as important as the reborn humanitarian movement now is–that has to be mounted against nuclear weapons,” he said. “Nor a financial argument, though the extraordinary opportunity cost of nuclear programs–in terms of other desirable expenditure foregone–might appeal to some hardheads. What policy makers need to be persuaded about are the rational, strategic arguments against nuclear weapons: that in fact they are at best of minimal, and at worst of zero, utility in maintaining stable peace.”
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Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
This article is the second in a series by Robert Kazel. To read Kazel’s first article, a longer interview with Gen. Lee Butler, click here. To read the final article by Kazel in this series about Gen. Butler, click here.
When Lee Butler looks back at his anti-nuclear efforts of the mid- to late-’90s, he views himself as a “reluctant activist.” The former commander in chief of U.S. strategic nuclear forces never felt comfortable fully allying himself with longstanding organizations that had waged the fight for nuclear abolition for many years already. To do so, he feared, would tarnish his reputation with elite decision-makers—government officials and military leaders. He felt his particular value to the cause of disarmament was as an expert who’d have access to the corridors of power in many countries, not as a radical peacenik. So Butler’s relationship with abolition groups was never uncomplicated, though he consistently lauded them for their patience and dedication.
Butler discussed his views on how anti-nuclear organizations today can survive and exert influence in a world that often appears apathetic.
KAZEL:Do you think anti-nuclear groups can still achieve abolition?
BUTLER: If you are an optimist, with respect to the future of mankind, you have to believe that more opportunities will come, like Sisyphus moving that ball up the hill. Sometime, you’re going to get to the top and it’s going to roll down the other side, and the era of nuclear weapons will be over.
If you wanted me to pick a date for that, I would say a possible prospect, and a happy one, would be July of 2045—the 100th anniversary of the first test of an atom bomb in the deserts of New Mexico.
KAZEL:Because that date could become a goal for people?
BUTLER: It’s possible. It has significance. It’ll be a hundred years in the Atomic Age. It’s far enough out, that enough things could happen serendipitously to make that possible.
KAZEL:Total nuclear disarmament by all nations by then?
BUTLER: Yes. What that requires, however, is for people to continue to stay focused, work very hard at it, keep advising sensible and acceptable alternatives that can be embraced by increasing numbers of people as opportunities present themselves—and they will.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Global Zero, Bruce Blair’s organization, are vital, because they have to continue public education and awareness.
The former general’s metamorphosis into an anti-nuclear activist was featured on the cover of Washington Post Magazine in December 1997.
KAZEL:Can nuclear-abolition activists influence the views of military and political leaders today?
BUTLER: Your principal purpose is to understand who is your target audience. Political and military leaders are not your target audience. Their minds are made up, and they are not going to be changed. Your target audience is publics. I mean worldwide.
[Among the public] there is one group that is simply not interested in the subject, and will not be. There’s a second group that is already interested and committed, and you would be wasting your time preaching to the choir. It’s a third group, the unaware, who have simply never thought about these matters. It’s just never gotten on their radar screen. That’s the vast majority of the people in the world. The challenge for [anti-nuclear groups] is to frame a message that captures their attention and gets them to think.
I’ve talked to audiences ranging from sixth graders to corporate titans. I know what captures their attention immediately: the dimensions, the anecdotes, the histories drawn from the whole Cold War that get the response, “That’s utterly dismaying.” The $6 trillion that was spent on nuclear weapons alone in the Cold War. The number of warheads that were fabricated. You can count on very few fingers and toes the number of people in the world who actually understand how extraordinarily dangerous these weapons are, and how we lived on the brink of nuclear warfare in the Cold War years.
KAZEL:What would you tell nuclear abolition proponents of today, who might be discouraged?
BUTLER: You have to cling to the belief of what I call the “small weights in the pan” theory of opinion change. The scales of the blindfolded [Lady] Justice, right? It is still possible to imagine that those scales are now profoundly tipped on the side of nuclear deterrence. But I don’t see that as one enormous block, I see it a mountain of many small blocks of individual opinions. You just want to move those weights, one at a time, from one pan to the other. At some juncture, you reach a tipping point and opinion begins to shift more in favor of elimination.
That’s a long, hard process, but it has happened time and again throughout history. I’ve seen enormous changes in public morality, in societal values, happen in my lifetime. People just need to understand it’s hard.
These groups need to work in concert to develop a global strategic plan, if they’re going to maximize their resources. They need to be in league with one another.
KAZEL:You depict any use of nuclear weapons as a grave violation of morality. How can religious leaders help the cause of abolition?
BUTLER: What can be done, should be done, must be done is for a collective of organizations, like the World Council of Churches, to take their message to their flocks on a worldwide basis: a very bold statement with regard to the moral imperative [of abolition]. And these churchmen are long overdue, in my estimation.
This message needs to be sent from every pulpit, and it needs to be done in a coordinated and concerted way—a very strategic way. It’s not something you talk about every Sunday: “Today, let’s talk about tactical nuclear weapons.” No. It needs to be done once, and it needs to be done according to a very scripted message.
KAZEL:Where would religious leaders get the script?
BUTLER: I’d be happy to write it for them. Read my book. [Laughs]. Read my speeches. I’ve said it hundreds of times.
KAZEL:Lawrence S. Wittner, a retired professor who has written on antiwar movements, says nuclear abolition groups can be stronger if they reach out to partner with other kinds of organizations—medical, scientific, environmental, religious, anti-poverty, labor, professional. Do you agree?
BUTLER: It’s right on point. The IPPNW, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, is a very respected group with global reach who’ve done some groundbreaking work with regard to consequences of regional nuclear warfare and a case study on India and Pakistan. Get professional groups involved.
The climate change movement. You talk about climate change: It’s hard to imagine anything other than volcanoes that would pose a greater risk right now [than a nuclear exchange]. I would consider it a great misstep if [global warming activists] did not make some public statement about the climatological risks of nuclear weapons and be on record about their elimination. I mean, it’s right in their ballpark.
KAZEL:Can activists get the attention of the public these days? You write in your upcoming book that average people seem uninterested in, even largely unaware of, nuclear weapons—that they’re totally distracted by trivial news and the demands of consumerism.
BUTLER: People are self-absorbed. Social media has fueled the fires of worrying about what other people think, what they wear, what they eat, or what they’re doing at the moment. It is a ceaseless round of chatter—often inane things that have virtually no consequence. The lead singer leaves the boy band One Direction, and it becomes a worldwide tragedy. How do you generate that level of concern for nuclear weapons?
I’ve got six grandchildren that I can measure this against, and I watch how they spend their time: what they worry about, the subjects they discuss. [Laughs]. Wow. People can’t focus even on inane subjects for long. To me, the challenge has never been greater. How do you penetrate the cacophony of noise that surrounds everyday life?
KAZEL:Surveys say a pretty sizable portion of adults, especially younger adults, don’t even know the U.S. still has nuclear weapons.
BUTLER: They assume they all went away because the Cold War ended.
KAZEL:Do you see any positive side to technologies such as online social media?
BUTLER: We can see more and more on these global social networks people will respond with great compassion. The outpouring of monies to alleviate the suffering from hurricanes or tsunamis—that speaks volumes that there is a global well of empathy. For all of the social media that consumes us, some of the stories are very heart-touching with respect to how people respond so generously, often in the case of people they don’t know. That’s what ultimately is going to save us, not just from nuclear war but from wars of all kinds.
The world is, in fact, becoming much flatter. We’re connected in ways that were unimaginable just 10 years ago. Events are known worldwide in an instant, where people have developed a common set of emotional responses to tragic events.
Empathy to an important degree requires personal knowledge. It’s easier for us to empathize with people we know, who are suffering greatly, than complete strangers. When people reach the degree of personal interconnectedness where they say, “I know who they are; I’m not going to do [violence] to them”—I see great evidence of the possibilities.
There’s every chance that the bar of civilized behavior will be ratcheted upward. As it moves, I think there will be a greater focus on anomalies such as nuclear weapons, which threaten wholesale destruction.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
This is the third in a series of articles from Robert Kazel’s interview with Gen. Lee Butler. To read the first article in this series, a longer interview with Gen. Lee Butler, click here. To read the second article in the series, click here.
On why nations amass nuclear arsenals:
It’s almost a testosterone-driven calculation: “At what point am I still the biggest guy on the block?” One of the terrible things that happened in the Nuclear Age was the possession of nuclear weapons became a validation of national manhood. That sent a terrible message. It makes you “count” more amongst your national brethren.
You can marshal all the arguments in the world with respect to effects on the climate, number of people killed [due to ecological damage], etc. But none of that is going to make a dent in the fact that nations like India and Pakistan view their nuclear arsenals as measures of their manhood, pure and simple. That’s what, in their eyes, gave them international stature. That’s what, in their eyes, commanded respect. Quite frankly, they don’t [care] about the consequences of these weapons. The most insidious part is, given the fact that they live side-by-side and they have no warning time, they are almost driven to a posture of pre-emptive strike. And the targets for their relatively imprecise weapons are cities. The worst possible situation.
Maybe someday there will be leaders of those two nations who say, “What in the world have we done?” I said to India’s nuclear-weapons community in Bangalore, “The first thing that happened when you became a nuclear-capable state is that you became a nuclear target. How did that increase your security?” I didn’t get an answer for that.
On Barack Obama:
President Obama himself is quite extraordinary [as a proponent of nuclear abolition]. He was studying these questions as a college student. He came to the conclusion, a very long time ago, as to precisely what we’ve been talking about—that nuclear weapons, as a practical matter, are an unacceptable form of warfare. So he was predisposed to make further reductions, which he’s done. New START was quite an achievement. I think that’s as much as could have been done at that point, given that he’s not a unilateral actor.
On U.S.-China relations:
Does the fact that China is a nuclear-weapons-capable nation pose a threat to the vital interests of the United States? Only if we regard them as an enemy. Britain has nuclear weapons. France has nuclear weapons. Do we view them as threats? No. We have a long history of amicable relations. So, no, I don’t view China as a threat to our survival. Is there any element of our relationship that could conceivably lead to some sort of nuclear exchange?
A lot of people would disagree. They’d say, look what they’re doing—they’re modernizing their military forces. Look what they’re doing in the fishing grounds of the South China Sea and elsewhere. As a very long stretch, there’s the question of Taiwan. It’s always been the thorn in the side [of our relationship]. But I think any nation in this world today is far more constrained in their actions than they were a half century ago, when might always could make right and if you wanted to go seize something, you just went and did it. Today I think that for whatever quarrels we might have with China, there’s a far greater likelihood that they can be settled in other courts of arbitration than to imagine we might somehow end up in nuclear war.
I would [want to] know exactly what their nuclear capabilities were, what kind of forces they have, where they were based. But that’s a different matter from considering them an enemy.
On U.S. “missile defense” technologies:
In 1993, the Cold War had thawed and Butler (far right) hosted a delegation of top Russian military officers at his U.S. Strategic Command headquarters near Omaha.
I watched the convoluted history of “Star Wars” evolve from the very beginning, when President Reagan became enamored with Edward Teller’s brainchild. Here we were, embarked on an enterprise that was entirely open-ended in terms of cost and aspiration, and for which I had the unfortunate task of developing some sort of military objective that made sense. It became very apparent that this was nothing more than the quintessential, cosmic, technological hot biscuit popping out of the oven that captured the fancy of the leader of the free world. And all of a sudden, we’re off and running with really no clear path, and hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. I came to the conclusion that it was a pipedream from the very beginning. There was no way we could ever erect a leak-proof antiballistic missile system for the United States.
It also was counterproductive from the standpoint of what it said to our allies: “Well, we’re OK, so good luck.” If we were really serious about protecting the coalition nations that subscribed to us as their protector, we would have imagined this on a global scale. [Yet] it was hard enough to do it on a national scale, and it ultimately proved undoable. But in the process, we alienated Russia once more, at a time when more than anything else we needed to be cultivating relations at the end of the Cold War.
We just sort of continually jabbed our finger in their eye, and at the end of the day it cost us the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty and the expenditure of a lot more money. I guess what we have to show for that is a very limited capability against a very small-scale, prospective missile attack from a North Korea, for example. It gives a measure of comfort to think, I guess: Kim Jong-un might just wake up one day and decide to kick one off to Hawaii or wherever he’ll be able to reach—maybe the shores of some outer Alaskan island? And that we might have some prospect of shooting it down? I view that as highly unlikely.
[Russian leaders] see it as a threat. Their principle force is their land-based missile force. It always has been. For us to proceed with a system that…appeared to threaten them, from their viewpoint was one more thing that said we’re not serious about having a good relationship.
On missteps by the U.S. after the Cold War:
The first thing I would have done would have been to begin standing down NATO—wean European nations off of U.S. largesse and have them begin to take responsibility for their own national security. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. The failure to dismantle the alliances of the Cold War was a huge mistake. I smile when I hear people today say, “Well, thank God we’ve got NATO, because we’ve got Putin.” I think we got Putin because we didn’t dismantle NATO, along with the whole attitude that we adopted with regard to Russia: kind of “kick ’em while they’re down.”
There may be a so-called “fog of war,” but there’s a fog of peace, as well, where you still can’t see with any clarity exactly who you’re dealing with, and the belief systems that have built up on both sides, and how impenetrable the mythology has become. [Our post-Cold War posture toward Russia] was an enormous strategic blunder. We’re still paying the price for it.
I expect more of our senior leaders. I expect them to see the larger picture, and play for the longer game. The longer game was establishing sound, cordial relationships with Russia to shepherd them into the realm of democratic government. Instead, the whole thing just went off the rails. In the process, arms control got lost. I was just horrified by all that, and really dismayed. The loss of momentum in nuclear arms control was the greatest price. You only have a short period of time to capitalize on those kinds of opportunities. The door closes.
After the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the danger of nuclear weapons faded as a source of anxiety for some Americans. To them, worrying that the world’s stockpiles of missiles and bombs could eventually create catastrophe seemed as anachronistic as the duck-and-cover classroom drills of a previous generation. But for George Lee Butler, a four-star U.S. Air Force general and the commander of U.S. nuclear forces between 1991 and 1994, thinking about the possibility of just such a calamity didn’t end. The reality was always a phone call away.
The calls would come at least once a month, and there was never advance warning. Butler might be anywhere: his office at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., or traveling, or home sleeping. A hotline to other military officers and the White House sat on a bedside table, closer to his wife’s head because she was the lighter sleeper.
It always turned out to be an exercise—World War III obviously never broke out during Butler’s tenure. But, at least at the outset, he never knew for sure. The games were thought to be more useful if the participants—even a key player such as Butler—were kept in the dark about that.
Every drill ran an identical course; the dialog was scripted. An officer from NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, informed Butler that satellites and ground radar had seemingly detected nuclear missiles flying toward the United States. After a brief talk about the extent of the apparent attack, Butler was required to phone the President.
“You can imagine, it’s 2:37 in the morning, and the President has been at a gala that night—not feeling very well, kind of groggy,” Butler says today. “He gets a call from me that says, ‘Sir, the United States is under nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. It appears to be a wholesale nuclear attack: land-, sea- and air-based.’ At that point, while I’m talking, the Major with the briefcase [with Presidential nuclear launch codes] is unlocking it and pulling out the black three-ring binder.”
Actual presidents—in Butler’s day, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton—never took part in these “missile threat conferences.” Like a stand-in for a movie star who wished to avoid an unpleasant stunt, someone else always acted out the role of commander-in-chief at the other end of the line. Butler felt disgust that such a crucial task was left to a substitute.
Butler, pictured here in 1983, was commander of the 320th Bombardment Wing, Mather Air Force Base, east of Sacramento, Cal. The base was home to long-range, B-52 strategic bombers on alert for the Strategic Air Command.
Few knew it, but for Butler that sense of abhorrence gradually began to encompass nuclear weapons in general, as he became privy to more secrets about them. After he retired from the Air Force in 1994 as head of the U.S. Strategic Command (where he had authority over land-based missiles, bombers, and nuclear submarines), he worked for a time as president of a Nebraska-based energy company. Then, his life transformed in a way that he could never have anticipated. The former Air Force career officer and decorated Vietnam War pilot, considered one of the most knowledgeable experts on nuclear weapons and strategy in the world, began talking like the most passionate of anti-nuclear activists. A fascinated media listened, all over the world.
Former colleagues were surprised when Butler continued to make earnest, eloquent remarks to large audiences, condemning the same military systems he’d once managed. Now Butler was speaking freely about the “scourge” of nuclear weapons as being sinister and irreligious, and recommending they be dismantled everywhere they existed in the world through international agreements. These weapons were relics of a previous age when it was regrettably customary for rival nations to demonize one another, he argued. But they had no strategic value for any government in the post-Cold War world.
By 1999, he’d founded his own non-profit organization named the Second Chance Foundation and had begun to travel the world to promote his ideas. He spoke to journalists, military officers, defense officials, and scholars from the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Russia, Pakistan, India and China. He received NAPF’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award in 1999.
His foundation lasted about two years. A desire to spend more time with family, in part, helped persuade Butler to give up a public life that had become stressful and tumultuous. But changes in the world political landscape also figured into the decision. Butler observed that progress in arms control under new leaders, such as George W. Bush and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, would probably be slow and difficult. Relations had worsened. Plans to develop anti-missile defense systems by the U.S., for instance, had contributed to estrangement and mistrust between the governments. Not long after, the terrorist attacks of 2001 indicated to Butler that formidable obstacles to nuclear abolition would exist, as the focus of American officials shifted sharply to beefing up security at home and to fighting a new war in Afghanistan.
Today, Butler is 75, and he has never stopped believing nuclear arms to be an enormous danger and outrageously immoral. They permit imperfect leaders to play God, he says, and make it all too easy for the planet to be ruined for all future generations in a span of hours. He’s incredulous that scores of U.S. missiles are still kept on hair-trigger alert, poised to be launched in minutes. And he is more disillusioned than ever that defense strategists and politicians keep defending nuclear deterrence: a theory born in the 1950s that asserts nations can prevent nuclear war by keeping nuclear weapons ready for use in retaliation. Butler believed that once, fervently. But he now says deterrence probably never made much sense, and certainly is unbelievable in a world of unstable, unpredictable regional nuclear actors and terrorists who seek to actually use weapons of vast, destructive power.
Now Butler has penned his life story, a project he painstakingly worked on for many years after he and his wife, Dorene, left Omaha and moved to a gated community in Laguna Beach, Calif., in 2001. The self-published memoir, which he expects to be out this summer, recounts his boyhood in Georgia as part of an Army family and his 33-year military career starting with his graduation from the Air Force Academy in 1961. It explains in depth why he ultimately called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and discusses his disillusionment with government officials who, he says, have allowed shortsightedness, petty politics and bellicosity to obstruct the road to world nuclear disarmament.
Butler wants the autobiography, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, to stand as his legacy. He’s hoping it will educate and inspire some of those who shape the world’s nuclear policies today.
In a wide-ranging interview at his house recently, Butler spoke with NAPF about the perils of nuclear weapons that arose during and just after the Cold War, and why the dangers continue. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
Decisions under pressure
KAZEL:In the ’90s, you often said nuclear abolition was a good long-term goal, but we could greatly reduce risks and maybe avert catastrophe by de-alerting our land-based weapons—our ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]. What do you think about 450 of our Minuteman missiles being on high alert nearly 20 years later?
Gen. Lee Butler at his California home in 2015.
BUTLER: I just scratch my head in astonishment, quite frankly. That is such a feature of the Cold War era, when we were vulnerable to attack at any moment, so we had to be prepared to launch our forces on a moment’s notice. Somehow, we’ve managed to persuade ourselves that we need to continue in that posture.
I find that unseemly. I don’t know how many hundreds of billions of dollars of investments we have in Russia, and how many hundreds of thousands of our citizens are there at a given time. But somehow, just the thought of having an instantaneous circumstance in which we would even consider annihilating our own people, not to mention their assets, in Russia, boggles the mind.
From the standpoint of what I consider rationality, it doesn’t pass muster with me. Even when you have someone who can be irresponsible in his rhetoric, like a [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, I find it extremely difficult to imagine a scenario, in this day and age, when you’d have a nuclear weapons component [to a U.S.-Russian conflict]. A posture of immediate alert, I just think, is a complete anachronism at this point.
KAZEL:As commander of U.S. nuclear forces, you helped persuade the George H.W. Bush Administration to take our nuclear bombers off high alert. Did you or other military leaders also consider taking ICBMs off alert?
BUTLER: The farthest we proceeded was to retire the Minuteman IIs early, and then move in the direction of single-warhead Minuteman IIIs. The community was just not ready for the prospect of taking two of the vaunted Triad weapon systems off alert at the same time. It was a pretty big bite to swallow just to get those bombers off alert. Part of the price of that was everything else was considered sacrosanct.
KAZEL:Is there even a role for land-based missiles now? It seems they just increase danger by turning large portions of our territory into enemy targets.
BUTLER: I would have removed land-based missiles from our arsenal a long time ago. I’d be happy to put that mission on the submarines. I came to develop an extremely high regard for submarines—their flexibility, their invulnerability, etc. And contrary to myth, we can communicate with them very quickly. So, with a significant fraction of bombers having a nuclear weapons capability that can be restored to alert very quickly, and with even a small complement of Trident submarines—with all those missiles and all those warheads on patrol—it’s hard to imagine we couldn’t get by. Now, the Air Force would take exception to that.
KAZEL:How do present alert levels add to the pressure to respond quickly? What did those simulations tell you?
BUTLER: The biggest constraint is how tight the timelines are: about 10 minutes for the conversation between [the commander of nuclear forces] and the President to characterize the attack and then get a decision.
It’s a function of physics. If you take a nominal ICBM launch from the former Soviet Union to a nominal target, say, in the center of the United States, you’re talking about 30 minutes. But that missile launch has to be detected and then its trajectory has to be assessed through two independent warning means, satellite and ground radar. Well, that takes time. It takes about 15 minutes or so, and then the commander of NORAD has to be brought on line. All the while, more and more missiles are being launched and are coming onto the radar screen. At some point, the commander of NORAD has to say, “OK, I understand now what’s happening, we’re under nuclear attack.”
I would call the President. I had to lay out his options. The Nuclear War Plan has four major attack options with increasing numbers of weapons. Essentially all of our [recommendations were] MAO-4, Major Attack Option 4, which means we send everything we’ve got and it would cover all 10,000 weapons [in the U.S. arsenal at that time].
The war plan was my responsibility and had about 12,000 targets. Some weapons could destroy more than one target at the same time. That war plan was premised on all those weapons being available. If we allowed the Russian attack to take out any number of them, then the war plan may not have been viable. So, there reached a point where I would say, “Mr. President, I need your decision now.”
It became unequivocally obvious to me the immense responsibility of my role. The [person playing the role of the] President said at that point, “General Butler, what is your recommendation?” And effectively, on my answer—which he would always endorse—hung the fate of civilization.
If I said MAO-4 [full-scale counterattack], he would always agree. If it’s you sitting in that chair, knowing that once you said the fatal words, “I agree with your recommendation: MAO-4,” you’ve sealed the fate of hundreds of millions of people outright. Thanks to what science has now taught us, as Carl Sagan said many years ago, the combined effects of a wholesale attack involving 20,000 [American and Russian] thermonuclear warheads essentially would have been the end of civilization as we know it.
KAZEL:When you commanded Strategic Air Command, you ordered a major revision of the list of nuclear targets. You saw that U.S. missiles would hit political or military targets, but they’d be so numerous and so powerful that countless civilians in nearby cities and industrial areas would also be wiped out.
BUTLER: Well, the notion of the “1, 2, 3, 4” major attack options is that we would begin with leadership targets, MAO-1, then military targets, then military-industrial targets, and then finally, urban areas. That was always parsing matters pretty finely, because if you think about where the leadership targets were, they were in Moscow, for the most part. We had 400 warheads targeted on Moscow, in my day. Think about that: Fourhundred thermonuclear weapons, each on the order of 350 kilotons? The urban population certainly was not going to be spared simply because it was an attack on military leadership.
KAZEL:Your book looks critically at U.S. military leaders who kept using deterrence theory to justify large nuclear arsenals long after the Cold War ended. Do you think the new generation of leaders really still has faith in deterrence?
BUTLER: In the latest issue of the Air Force’s Air and Space Power Journal, there was an article on the five “myths” of arguments against deterrence, one of which was that submarines can do the job. I don’t want to use the word “desperate,” but I think it is a very concerted effort on the part of the Air Force to shore up deterrence. It all rings so hollow. It’s like the priest in the temple, and his voice is echoing amongst the columns. But you peel it all back and say, “Give me a situation when you would actually use one.”
KAZEL:Why isn’t deterrence reliable?
BUTLER: The first victim in a nuclear crisis is deterrence, because at that point all bets are off. One of the fatal flaws of deterrence, then and now, is deterrence applies in a circumstance in which you have a mortal enemy. If they’re a mortal enemy, you probably don’t have a very close relationship with them, which means you probably don’t understand how they think to a very high degree of precision—how they will respond under very threatening circumstances. That doesn’t sit very well with me. Even people who live with each other every day are sometimes hugely surprised.
Well, I can’t think of a situation where you’re more likely to be wrong. And in the case of the Soviet Union, we were wrong. They didn’t buy into “flexible” response. When I was a young, so-called “action officer” in the Pentagon and Air Force Headquarters, an Air Force brigadier [general] named Jasper Welch—who would shortly become my boss—had spent a very long period of his life developing a whole notion of “flexible” options to be incorporated into the Nuclear War Plan so that the President wasn’t left with an all-or-nothing [decision].
Now on the face of it, that seems like a very reasonable idea, instead of the President having to say, “That’s all I can do, just launch everything?” What if it’s not an all-out attack [on the U.S.]? That was perfectly rational and legitimate: limited and selected attack options.
KAZEL:As I understand this, our government started to think it might selectively strike Soviet political and military targets in a war, but that launching a massive attack at the beginning might be avoided?
BUTLER: This is one of the frailties of deterrence: the Soviets never bought into that sort of philosophy. For them, one warhead on the motherland, and that was it. If they should lose their leadership in an initial attack, they made provisions for the forces to be launched [by various lesser officials or military officers].
So, that gave the lie to the whole notion of flexible options.
If I could strike one word from the lexicon of the nuclear weapons enterprise, it would be “deterrence.” Because it’s easy. It’s lazy. It’s using rhetoric for a replacement of really rigorous thinking about what is exactly implied by your actions. I would force people to actually describe what it is they think they’re doing [by holding onto nuclear weapons] in very detailed terms, and then defend it on that basis.
KAZEL:You’ve also said that deterrence fails in practice because it ignites arms races—spiraling costs, new and revamped technologies, and instability as various nations seek not just security but superiority. Can deterrence theory give birth to conditions that are likelier to lead to war?
BUTLER: We had 40 years of history of that. Of the several things that deterrence did not do, it did not serve as any sort of guide for force levels. To the contrary, in service to deterrence, force levels constantly increased almost exponentially. At its height we had 36,000 weapons in our active inventory. Imagine that. Thirty-six thousand. We had warheads on artillery shells that could be launched from jeeps. We had dozens of warhead types and delivery systems. We had landmines and sea mines.
We deluded ourselves with regard to our capacity to manage crises. Deterrence was an open-ended invitation to just build more, and more complicated, systems. We always found a reason to go to the next level of arms, or the next hot technological biscuit to come popping out of the oven.
That just scared the bejesus out of the Soviets. They weren’t equipped to stay in that race, and ultimately Ronald Reagan saw that and he spent them into oblivion. The weapons became ever more numerous and more destructive. There’s no end to it, and the rationale was always that deterrence required it.
That we would pursue these weapons with such unfettered enthusiasm—competing amongst the [military] services for resources, going to roll out these shiny new things, cutting ribbons—spoke to me a great deal about the human condition. For some people, technology has absolutely mesmerizing qualities. If we can do it, we must. That’s the kind of thinking that got us where we are today. To add to that, the military-industrial complex was being fed a virtually endless trough of money. There is no end to the number of people who will find any way to justify building something new, brighter and better. I’ve seen that happen time and time and time again…
Fifteen hundred nuclear warheads [deployed by both the U.S. and Russia today] is still a mind-boggling amount of destructive potential. Mind boggling. I can’t think of anything that underscores that better than how concerned we are about one falling into the wrong hands. We still readily accept 1,500 as a reasonable number. That’s the kind of “logic” that we get locked into, in the nuclear era.
KAZEL:Aside from questions of strategy, you argue in your memoirs the same position you pounded home 20 years ago: that nuclear weapons violate basic ethics and are an affront to sacred human values. How did you start to believe that?
BUTLER: I guess I’m what some would call a spiritual person, from my study of the origin and evolution of the universe and life as we know it. I find it so awe-inspiring. That’s where I draw my sense of morality and humanity, and the overwhelming importance of sustaining the privilege of life. I think our No. 1 responsibility as human beings is to continue to elevate the bar of civilized behavior, to make conditions [hospitable to] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s what captures my spiritual fancy these days.
Rather than being concerned about the moral implications of these devices, we continue to pursue them as if they were our salvation—as opposed to the prospective engine of our utter destruction. Human beings are by far the most destructive species on the planet, that the planet has ever seen. We kill each other for a variety of reasons, ranging from pleasure to vengefulness to fear for survival. As long as these weapons exist, and people hold them in such high regard for reasons of national esteem, they act as a brake on our capacity for advancing our humanity.
KAZEL:Were you already thinking that when you were commander of Strategic Air Command?
BUTLER: As they say, the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. When I finally began to understand the full import of the rather terse phrase “weapons of mass destruction”—their acquisition, their operation, their targeting, the execution of that war plan—I began to think and reflect more deeply on the question, how did we ever get ourselves into this circumstance? And, by extension, how are we ever going to get ourselves out?
We had become so enamored of nuclear weapons. Somehow they had become an end in themselves. Sort of a totem of power.
People embark on these sort of messianic quests. Some people climb Mt. Everest, some want to swim the Amazon. But for me, it was more about telling the story of how we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention—probably the latter in greatest proportion, for those who do believe in religious intervention. Because skill and luck certainly don’t account for it.
KAZEL:Do you believe it’s ever ethical to bomb civilians in wartime?
BUTLER:(Pauses.) One of the very first victims of all-out war is ethical considerations. In World War II, as an example, we burned 200 of the largest Japanese cities to the ground. In the history of warfare, circumstances have produced a sort of scorched-earth policy and ethical considerations are simply abandoned.
That was certainly the case in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were ostensibly military installations nearby, which were used to rationalize the bombings, but there were other targets that we could have struck that would have put far fewer civilians at risk.
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that a nuclear weapon is, at its very core, anti-ethical. It is simply a device for causing wholesale destruction. Nuclear conflict is essentially an irrational activity, because essentially what you’re doing is signing your own death notice.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
Before 2015, many scientists knew that a “nuclear winter” theoretically could bring major climate change to the world and create famines in many countries. But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the use of a hundred atomic bombs by Pakistan and India – in what was later named the South Asian Nuclear War – that people everywhere began to comprehend the longer-term, global effects of nuclear exchanges. They then understood, to their horror, that there was no such thing as a strictly “regional” nuclear conflict.
International panels and historians would try with scant success to construct a narrative to explain the unprecedented mass destruction of that summer weekend. The early events of the conflict appear plain enough: Pakistan’s government spent July complaining that India was increasingly engaging in cyber attacks aimed at testing the vulnerability of its neighbor’s nuclear command-and-control computer systems. As tensions mounted, Pakistani troops were dispatched into the Kargil district of the Ladakh region in Jammu and Kashmir — an area officially on India’s side of the “line of control” that divided the restive, mountainous Himalayan state. As with a similar incursion in 1999, India responded with intense air and artillery assaults using conventional weapons.
While other governments urged calm, several major Pakistani government buildings in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad were destroyed by explosive devices. Indian leaders vehemently denied all culpability. They asserted Pakistani militants or religious extremists likely were trying to take advantage of the latest tumultuous period to provoke a nuclear Armageddon between the rival nations.
Indian Army and paramilitary forces confronted large crowds in the streets of Srinager, the overwhelmingly Islamic summer capital of Kashmir, as well as other large cities in the region. Two Pakistani military officers then sparked an uproar in India’s media: One said publicly his nation was ready and willing to give field commanders the authority to use arsenals of small, tactical nuclear weapons to repel any invasion of his country by Indian soldiers. Another leaked word to reporters that Pakistan was mulling the option of detonating a “demonstration” nuclear warhead, far above a large Indian city, to prove it had no squeamishness about using the bombs it possessed.
July turned to August, and Indian and Pakistani military forces went on full nuclear alert. In preparation for total war, both sides increased the pace of marrying nuclear warheads with missiles and aircraft so they could be used quickly, if needed. Startling the world, India aired TV and radio messages telling citizens to move to their basements – makeshift shelters where many families had already stored emergency food and water after New Delhi recommended it in 2013.
A high-level team of peace envoys from the U.S., whose jet was heading to the region, was urgently mediating with the two sides by telephone over the Atlantic. Diplomats told a relieved world that tensions between India and her neighbor actually were easing and that more a serious conflict probably could be headed off.
But subsequent events are much less clear. Dozens of missiles in both nations remained on hair-trigger alert, with a strategic “window” of about three minutes for politicians and officers to decide if an early warning sign was a real attack. Then, a monumental wild card: A meteor the size of a refrigerator, it was later determined, shattered Earth’s atmosphere 80,000 feet over Jaipur, a city of 3 million in northwest India. Breaking thousands of windows, it exploded in the sky with a sonic boom and an approximate blast power of 250 kilotons (compared to the 12.5-kiloton bomb that destroyed Hiroshima).
The nuclear phase of the war began just eight minutes after the meteor struck. The connection between the meteor and use of missiles by both countries, if any, remains a topic of endless debate. The exchange of missiles persisted for two full days. Approximately 100 nuclear explosions, centering mainly on urban centers, took millions of lives in each country on account of the blasts themselves but also the radiation, hunger and disease that followed. No clear winner emerged.
The significance of the war for the rest of the world soon dawned. After massive pillars of black smoke and dust rose above the remains of dozens of burned cities, unprecedented pollution traveled around the world and ascended 25 miles to the stratosphere. There the soot was trapped, immune to disruption by rain below. Skies turn from blue to gray.
Major declines in temperature in all parts of the world followed. Average rainfall declined. Growing seasons in both hemispheres immediately got shorter, as farmers from New England to China saw some crops yield much less than expected and other crops fail altogether.
Meanwhile, ozone in the atmosphere became massively depleted, and harmful ultraviolet rays at the planet’s surface increased, further injuring plants, causing greater incidence of human illness such as skin cancer, and playing havoc with the biosphere in countless ways.
The effects would last years. The World Famine of 2015-2025 ultimately was considered the worst catastrophe in mankind’s history – a tragedy affecting billions who had no connection whatsoever to the war that had been its cause. The grime high in the atmosphere lingered for years, absorbing sunlight necessary for plants, animals and people to survive and thrive — and serving to remind an appalled world, every day, of the dark potential of its nuclear technology.
*
The above scenario is hypothetical. What’s real, already, is the work of scientists over the past few years who have reinvestigated and revised the theories of nuclear winter that captured world attention in the 1980s. Most Americans probably haven’t thought about nuclear winter since that era, when an all-out war between the U.S. and Soviet Union looked plausible. Back then, everyone from ordinary citizens to journalists to world leaders joined the discussion about how the use of nuclear arms could imperil world ecology and, in the worst case, cause the extinction of all species.
Alan Robock, now a senior professor in environmental science at Rutgers University, was a young scientist studying nuclear winter at that time. Today, the 63-year-old researcher is warning anyone who will listen that although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, and the risk of a Third World War now appears to be reduced, the danger of nuclear winter persists.
Robock and a few colleagues have been using cutting-edge computer models to try to foretell the climatic consequences of nuclear explosions in an era when a “local” exchange of nuclear weapons – say, between India and Pakistan – appears more probable than a general world war.
Scientists such as Robock are asking if we can safely stop viewing nuclear weapons as an ominous threat to the world environment, merely because the arsenals of emerging nuclear powers are relatively small. Robock says absolutely not. To him, the latest ecological predictions are just as chilling as they were three decades ago. They point to prolonged, major climate damage affecting many regions on Earth, with widespread deaths from hunger in many countries. This appears true even if the usage of a “small” number of nuclear weapons was the triggering event.
NAPF spoke with Robock about his new research, and why he thinks his findings are just as urgent as the well-known nuclear winter studies of the 1980s. He also discusses his frustration that his efforts to stir the interest of government officials, and even fellow scientists, often have been met with what appears to be apathy. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
KAZEL: Dr. Robock, if you were speaking to a group of Americans who remember scientists’ warnings about nuclear winter back in the 1980s, what would you tell them about your more recent theories and how they’re relevant to today’s world?
ROBOCK: Thirty years ago, we discovered that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union could produce a nuclear winter with temperatures plummeting below freezing during the summertime, destroying agriculture around the world and producing a global famine. The indirect effects of nuclear war would be much greater than the direct effects, as horrible as they would be.
This helped to end the nuclear arms race. Mikhail Gorbachev has been quoted in multiple interviews saying he knew about the work on nuclear winter, which was being done jointly by American and Russian scientists. That was a strong message to him to end the arms race.
But that was 30 years ago. Now we’re asking two questions. One, even though the arms race is over and the number of weapons is coming down, could we still produce a nuclear winter with the current arsenals? And the answer to that is yes. Even after the New START agreement is implemented in 2017, there will still be enough nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals to produce a full nuclear winter with temperatures below freezing in the summer and global famine. Most people think that the problem has been solved, but it has not.
The second question is, what would be the consequences of nuclear war between some new nuclear powers, such as India and Pakistan? Imagine…a nuclear war ensues between India and Pakistan, each of them using only 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons. Their weapons might be bigger than that, but we know that’s the simplest to build. So we did a scenario by which each side used 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons. This will be much less than 1 percent of the global nuclear arsenal, and less than half of each of their arsenals.
It would be horrible. Twenty million people would die. As horrible as that would be, it would produce about 5 million tons of smoke, which would go up in the atmosphere, last for more than a decade, and cause cooling at the Earth’s surface… It would be the coldest temperatures ever experienced in recorded history – temperatures colder than the “Little Ice Age” a couple of hundred years ago, in which there was famine around the world.
This would cause devastation in the world food market. People would stop trading. There would be a famine and we estimate up to a billion people might die.
So, we’re in a terrible situation. People don’t realize that the use of nuclear weapons is still the greatest danger that the planet faces. And we have to solve this problem so that we can have the luxury of worrying about global warming – which is also a problem.
KAZEL: Why have you tended the emphasize the example of India and Pakistan as a possible place where a nuclear war might break out, rather than other areas of the world?
ROBOCK: There are nine nuclear nations now – the current members of the [U.N.] Security Council – the first five to get nuclear weapons, the U.S., Russian, China, France and England. Then there’s four more. There’s Israel, who doesn’t admit [possessing nuclear weapons], India, Pakistan and North Korea. People think, “Oh, that’s on the other side of the world. We don’t have to worry about it. They only have a few weapons. We can forget about it.” But it’s not true.
We wanted to emphasize the danger of even a small number of weapons because nuclear proliferation is still a big problem. There are other countries that want to have them.
There are 40 countries it the world that have highly enriched uranium or plutonium and could make nuclear weapons, if they wanted to. Everybody knows how to make them. Why have they chosen notto? How can we keep them [from choosing otherwise]? Why doesn’t Japan or Germany or Belgium or Brazil or Argentina have nuclear weapons? They could if they wanted to.
We wanted to emphasize that it’s much more dangerous to have them than it is to not have them.
People still thinks it’s “mutually assured destruction” – if Country A attacks Country B, Country B will retaliate, and that’s why we don’t attack them. But it turns out it would be suicide to use nuclear weapons. If you attacked a country, and produced all these fires and smoke, it would come back to haunt you. It would affect your agricultural production.
KAZEL: Do you see much interest today among researchers around the world in nuclear winter – for example, in Russia and China, or, in particular, India and Pakistan, since this is data that’s especially relevant to them?
ROBOCK: Unfortunately no, we don’t. We write journal articles, we give talks at conferences. I just gave two talks at a conference in Europe a couple of weeks ago. Colleagues in Switzerland have recently completed a similar climate-model study…The Swiss government has given us a small amount of funding to do this work. But we would like to identify colleagues in Russia to this, and we don’t see any interest.
I talked to a Pakistani colleague at Princeton and he said, “You know, they’re really proud of this accomplishment, of being able to make nuclear weapons. If you started doing research into this [in Pakistan] to show that they can’t be used [because of environmental dangers], you would be a pariah. People would criticize you as being unpatriotic.”
Everyone who hears [my findings] gets kind of shocked by the results. Again, it’s kind of an emotional reaction and they don’t really want to hear it. But I’ve not gotten any pushback in terms of the science. Nobody’s been able to find a flaw in our science.
KAZEL: I noticed in one of your papers you expressed impatience with Global Zero because they haven’t put a spotlight on environmental dangers when they’ve campaigned against nuclear weapons. Do you think antinuclear groups have a responsibility to spread the word about nuclear winter now?
ROBOCK: Absolutely. That was [an impetus] to the end of the arms race. The first results were quite controversial. Carl Sagan was going around talking about it a lot and there was a lot of debate about it. That made people look again at the direct effects of nuclear weapons and how horrible the direct effects would be.
People had been ignoring it, and Russia and the U.S. had just been building more and more weapons. This discussion really shocked people into realizing how crazy the arms race was.
You know, this is an easier problem to solve than global warming. The solution to global warming is to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that threatens a tremendous economic base of the fossil fuel companies and the energy infrastructure of the planet. It’s a tough struggle, and it’s slow. But nuclear weapons, there’s only a few thousand of them around the world. It’s a small part of the world economy. So this can change much more easily than solving the global warming problem.
Obama has said he wants to get rid of all nuclear weapons. He is trying to reduce our arsenal, but he could reduce our arsenal unilaterally without waiting for the Russians – and make us safer. Of course, you’ve got to educate people about what nuclear weapons really are in order for them to understand this.
My senator, Robert Menendez [D-New Jersey], is now the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I’m going down to Washington next month to try to do some lobbying and try to talk him into having a hearing about this.
KAZEL: How active should the scientists of today be in prescribing policy changes? In 2007, you [and a co-author] called for de-alerting of nuclear missiles, elimination of tactical nuclear weapons, ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium. You’ve also said that U.S. and Russian arms reductions have been insufficient and that we could go down to a basic deterrence force of a few hundred nuclear weapons. Are you more willing now to recommend specific policies rather than just supply data to the government and the military?
ROBOCK: As far as specific policy recommendations, I’m not an expert. I’m an expert in climate. I remember in the 1980s, I was talking to another scientist about this, and he said, our job is just to provide the information and data and let the policymakers decide on the policy. I thought about that and I said, you know, the policymakers spend their careers deciding how to target nuclear weapons, how to use them, how to threaten with them. If they actually accepted our science, they would be out of a job.
The clear policy implication [of our research] is that you can’t use nuclear weapons, you have to get rid of them. If they accepted that, they’d have to find another line of work. So how can we expect them to change the policy when they have a self-interest in continuing the policy? That’s why I think it’s important for scientists to speak out.
It’s frustrating because we’re trying to get some more money to support the research. There are a lot of details that still need to be understood. We thought maybe the Department of Defense, which has the nuclear weapons and might use them, or the Department of Energy, which makes the nuclear weapons, or the Department of Homeland Security…might want to fund such studies. In every case, the program managers say, “It’s not my job. It’s somebody else’s job to look at that problem.”
Obama understands these issues and wants to do the right thing, but he needs somebody to push him. He needs a movement. He needs a lot of people to be concerned about it. People think that [the nuclear weapons] problem has faded away and there are more important concerns in their lives. They don’t feel threatened like they did in the past.
KAZEL: Apparently there is a common misconception that nuclear winter theories have been, at some point in the past, discredited or overstated. You’ve written about this.
ROBOCK: As Bob Dylan says, “How does it feel?” It feels better to believe it’s not going to be winter, even though it’s wrong. Because the arms race is over, because nobody talks about it anymore, people think the problem has disappeared.
We had this new modern-climate model, with which we did the India-Pakistan case with. We said, let’s go back and see, is it really nuclear winter? People said maybe it wouldn’t be nuclear winter, maybe it would be nuclear “fall.” We found the smoke would stay [in the upper atmosphere] for many years. Nobody knew that before. We found that indeed it would get below freezing in the summertime.
We [also] repeated the simulations we did 30 years ago. Those used a third of the nuclear arsenals on the U.S. and Russian side and produced 150 million tons of smoke. So we said, how much smoke would only 4,000 weapons produce – 2,000 on each side? And we could still get 150 million tons of smoke, the same as you’d get with the much larger arsenals of the past. You’d still produce nuclear winter. So it’s still way too many weapons.
KAZEL: In trying to demonstrate the gravity of nuclear winter, how do you convey to the public that this is potentially catastrophic? For instance, after a regional nuclear exchange, you predict average cooling would decrease two to three degrees Fahrenheit for several years. Some crops would have their growing season shortened by a couple of weeks. Those numbers may not seem dramatic to a non-scientist.
ROBOCK: We found a 10 to 20 percent reduction in the corn and soybean crop in the United States for years [following an India-Pakistan nuclear war]. We found the same thing for rice production in China for years. That brings rice production in China down to what it was when there were 300 million fewer Chinese people.
Everyone wouldn’t instantly die of starvation, but the food supplies in grain-growing regions would shrink around the world by 20 percent for a decade. That would put a huge strain on the global food trade.
Ira Helfand [co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War] wrote an article saying there might be a billion people at risk of starvation because they’re now living marginal existences. They depend on imported food. There would be nobody to come in to help them. There would be no stores of food.
KAZEL: In looking back at the media attention paid to nuclear winter in the 1980s, a huge spotlight was placed on Carl Sagan. He first warned about it in an article in Parademagazine. He was on “The Tonight Show” dozens of times and testified before committees of Congress. He was called “the people’s scientist.” Do you think the strong interest in nuclear winter at that time was an anomaly because he was so charismatic and well known, whereas today there’s no scientist like that who can stir up interest?
ROBOCK: Yes. We’ve thought about and we agree with that. We thought to get [astrophysicist] Neil deGrasse Tyson interested. He’s going to be doing a new version of the “Cosmos” show with Carl’s widow, [writer-producer] Ann Druyan. He’s the only scientist I know who even comes close to Carl.
We also tried to get Al Gore interested, because he’s got a global audience when he talks about climate. But he wasn’t interested.
So yes, we need somebody like that to give the message. We’re trying to get a Hollywood screenplay written, and do a movie about this. I think using popular culture would get a lot of people’s attention. We haven’t gotten there yet.
KAZEL: That’s interesting. Could it possibly take a blockbuster movie, like [the 1980s nuclear-war TV special] “The Day After,” to shock people into caring again?
ROBOCK: Yes, absolutely. We met a guy who’s a scientist but also writes screenplays. He’s working on it for us. We’ll see how that goes.
KAZEL: In a previous interview, you criticized the mainstream media for how it covers science. You said the media spread errors, that general-assignment reporters are allowed to write about science even though they lack the knowledge for it, and that coverage of science is often sensational. You also said scientists should stop relying on the media and find their own ways to reach the public.
ROBOCK: Sagan didn’t rely on reporters. He had his own TV show, “Cosmos.” As you say, he went on “The Tonight Show” and talked directly to the audience, without reporters involved. He wrote a book [in 1990, The Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race, with UCLA atmospheric scientist Richard Turco]. He wrote articles.
But the people don’t want to hear this. So you need somebody like Carl. It would be great if we had somebody like him around to give this message.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
Several ideas about nuclear weapons germinated in America after World War II, continued to sprout roots during the Cold War, and by now have taken full flower. The public rarely questions them, and neither do many scientists, military leaders, politicians or diplomats.
One: We need these weapons because, should all-out war break out, we’ll need them to overwhelm our enemy and lay waste to its cities. That could win the war for us. Another: Nuclear weapons keep the world stable because they help prevent war in the first place. They have been around for almost 68 years. World War III has failed to ignite in that time. The bombs, it is concluded, have helped keep us safe.
Or maybe that’s all wrong. In his new book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, historian Ward Wilson mines historical case studies – some ancient, some recent – to deflate the assumption that enemy leaders will capitulate if we wipe out a horribly large percentage of their urban populations. Reducing a rival country’s cities to smoking rubble on a massive scale, he writes, actually boosts its morale and determination to prevail.
Wilson’s favorite proof is the behavior of Japan at the end of World War II. Americans generally think the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki spurred Japan to hastily end its fight. Using first-hand accounts of Japanese leaders’ meetings after the bombings and comments in their diaries and memoirs, Wilson concludes the A-bombs weren’t at all decisive. The Japanese had been tolerating the destruction of their cities for months, including the decimation of Tokyo by Allied firebombing. (Wilson argues persuasively that it was the abrupt entry of the Soviet Union into the battle against Japan, which occurred at the same time as Hiroshima, that caused Japanese political and military leaders to lose hope.)
As for the mission of nuclear bombs to be peacekeepers rather than tools of war, Wilson all but dismisses deterrence theory as a straw man that’s never been proven to frighten a crow. Such theories, he maintains, amount to wishful thinking that is “doubtful from the word go.”
What about familiar deterrence success stories, such as President John F. Kennedy’s willingness to bring the world to war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — a strategy of keeping the peace by acting tough? Wilson sees that event, and many others during the Cold War and afterward, as actually a failure of deterrence. Kennedy, he writes, “saw the nuclear deterrence stop sign, saw the horrifying image of nuclear war painted on it, and gunned through the intersection anyway.” We’ve avoided wars mostly out of luck, in spite of ourselves.
Wilson, 56, attended American University and is a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the California-based Monterey Institute of International Studies. This is his first book, and it’s gained attention rapidly inside nuclear policy circles. The author says he wants to write another one, focusing solely on the weaknesses of deterrence theory, in the year ahead.
NAPF spoke to Wilson about his belief that accepting old, unchallenged nuclear lessons will surely lead to eventual disaster. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
KAZEL: You’ve written that after college in 1981 you were hired as a fellow at the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, and the director, David Hackett — who’d been Bobby Kennedy’s best friend — persuaded you that you had the power to change the world. How did he do that?
WILSON: He was Kennedy’s friend so he had great authority in my eyes. He took me for a walk by the Martin Luther King Public Library. I can remember children playing all around. He said, [affects a Boston accent], “Wahd, Wahd, what do you care about?” I said, “Nuclear weapons.” He never said, “I want you to do this, or I want you to do that.” Somehow, wordlessly, in the way he framed it, it seemed so clear to me that he expected that I had to do something about this problem – that I was interested in it, and therefore I had the capacity tochange it. I was young and credulous, so I believed him.
KAZEL: After that you had a conversation with the scientist Freeman Dyson, who gave you a “fundamental insight” into whether nuclear weapons actually are useful or not. What happened there?
WISLON: I got to know Dyson because I went to a conference on nuclear weapons that encouraged me to do more. Helen Caldicott spoke and [nuclear freeze advocate] Randall Forsberg spoke. Dyson spoke.…
[Later Dyson] gave me, to look at, a book review that he was writing. In it he talked about the [1982] Falklands War. He said that Great Britain could have nuked Buenos Aires. But even had they done that, they still would have had to send conventional forces to reconquer the Falkland Islands. It hit me really hard that blowing up cities doesn’t occupy territory. It doesn’t put soldiers on the ground who can enforce boundaries, or inspect people walking by, or check papers.
It suddenly became clear to me, at some intuitive level, that the weapons were limited in the way that they were useful. Yeah, you can blow stuff up, but that doesn’t necessarily get you what you want. After all, the United States and Great Britain blew up Hamburg [in World War II] and they destroyed Dresden, and they bombed Berlin. But that didn’t force Germany to its knees.
KAZEL: You also read Herman Kahn, and you felt he was incorrect in saying that nuclear weapons were so new and unprecedented that we can’t make predictions about them. You now say it’s possible to go back to previous wars, even back to the Siege of Carthage [in 152 BC], and conclude that attacking cities doesn’t help to win a war. Why do you think we can look at history that old and think it’s still relevant?
WILSON: I read this passage from Herman Kahn, and he said, we have so little experience with nuclear weapons – which is true – therefore, everything we think must be theoretical. He [was] essentially making a case for game theory and this logic-based scenario work that was done in the 1950s and ’60s. I said to myself, that can’t be right. War is not fundamentally technological. War is fundamentally a human activity.
The tools we use to wage war may be different. We ourselves are still the same, largely. I believe human nature changes only very slowly over thousands of years. So if it’s true human beings react to the destruction of a city relatively the same across history, and I can’t think of a reason why they wouldn’t, it should be possible to look at Carthage. It ought to be possible to study the sacking and burning of Liège [in 1468] by Charles the Bold. It ought to be possible to look at the destruction of Magdeburg in 1631 by [Johann Tserclaes count von] Tilly, when he burned the city and 30,000 people died…
That ought to give you real experiential information. We can imagine what a nuclear war would be like, but essentially it’s all speculation. It’s theory. Maybe it’s right, but maybe it’s wrong. Fundamentally, I’m a pragmatist. I believe in facts. So, this insight [is] that even though the weapons are new, the soldier, the combatants are essentially the same.
That is why I was not surprised to discover that Hiroshima had not forced the Japanese to surrender at the end of World War II: because I had spent seven years studying history where cities had been truly destroyed. In no case did it ever cause a war to be won.
KAZEL: Is it your conclusion, after conferring with military people, that our military is still focused on destroying enemy cities if a nuclear war ever happens?
WILSON: Well, I’ll tell you what I know. At least as late as the Clinton administration, I had a chance to sit down with Lee Butler [retired Air Force general and commander of Strategic Air Command] in his kitchen. He told me what it was like every month…to have someone rush into the room unexpectedly. You don’t have any warning. Some guy runs in and says, “Sir, you’re needed in the War Room.” You go downstairs, and there’s an incoming attack. It’s an exercise – you know it’s an exercise. But even so, all the circumstances are as they would be.
Then you have this conversation with whomever is playing the President at the White House. You go through your checklist. And you have four options, MAO 1 through 4. Major attack options 1 through 4: 1 is leadership, 2 is leadership plus military, 3 is leadership plus military plus economy, and 4 is leadership plus military plus economy plus civilian population. He said to me that every practice scenario was designed in such a way that you had to recommend MAO 4 – the one in which you target civilians.
Has the targeting changed since the Clinton administration? I don’t know. I’ve had some conversations with [military] people who very strongly assert that the U.S. doesn’t target civilian populations because that would be “illegal” and that they have lawyers who check the target list for “legality.”
KAZEL: Under what law?
WILSON: I don’t know whether it’s a military handbook of conduct or international humanitarian law. I don’t know. But at least as late as the Clinton administration, the [war plan] absolutely called for targeting civilians.
KAZEL: About three weeks ago, you made a presentation at the Pentagon for the Air Force nuclear staff. Did they discuss if the Air Force still has targeting plans against cities?
WILSON: No, they were very careful. We had very serious conversations. We didn’t agree. But they took what I had to say very seriously and listened closely, and I listened to them.
KAZEL: What didn’t they agree about?
WILSON: Well, at the end, a guy said, “Well, maybe nuclear weapons are the outmoded weapons of the past, but shouldn’t we then be thinking about what weapon we need in order to deter our opponents?” Obviously that’s their mindset; they’ve been assigned that as their job. But the fact that they couldconsider the notion that nuclear weapons are outmoded, are blundering, clumsy weapons of the past – that seemed to me to be remarkable.
I think that the whole trend in warfare [emerging today] is away from pointless destruction, which is essentially what nuclear weapons do best, and toward drones and targeted, small [missiles]. Obviously, drone missiles create a whole series of very serious problems in terms of accountability. Even smaller missiles like that have terrible consequences for civilians. However, killing a leader of Al-Qaeda with a Hellfire missile and killing 13 other people who are innocent is considerably different from using a nuclear weapon to kill a leader of Al-Qaeda and killing 130,000 people who are innocent.
I think the whole trend in warfare is away from “big” weapons, like nuclear weapons, and toward [accuracy]. What terrifies you [as a leader] is the thought that you may die, you may lose control of your regime, not that somebody else you don’t know will die.
KAZEL: But even by that reasoning, does that necessarily lead to nuclear disarmament? One could argue that tactical nuclear weapons — anything from artillery shells to antisubmarine nuclear torpedoes — could be developed instead of nuclear arms for use against cities. But that still isn’t nuclear abolition.
WILSON: Right. But these arguments I’m making by themselves might not be sufficient. Organizations like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and others have been making powerful moral arguments against nuclear weapons for 20, 30, 40 years. That nuclear weapons are so clearly immoral and not very useful makes a powerful combination. By themselves, either argument might or might not be sufficient. In combination, you have an irresistible argument, it seems to me.
KAZEL: Do you think that the use of any nuclear weapon is immoral?
WILSON: If you use a nuclear weapon to destroy an asteroid coming towards the world, well, that’s fine. That’s moral. Using a nuclear weapon in almost any setting, anywhere on the globe, probably you’ll kill innocent civilians…By and large, nuclear weapons are so clumsy, so messy, that they almost inevitably kill innocents.
KAZEL: Why did you decide for your book to veer almost completely away from the moral arguments against nuclear arms and stress the practical, military arguments?
WILSON: I knew that there have already been so many well-argued, strong moral arguments made over the last 60 years that I can’t do any better than that. This is an area where I thought something new could be said.
KAZEL: Should antinuclear groups be making more of an effort to emphasize strategic, military arguments, instead of what you call arguments based on “moral outrage”?
WILSON: Antinuclear groups should do what works. You have to imagine, I’ve been sitting in a room for 30 years thinking about nuclear weapons. I don’t know what motivates people or how to organize a political [movement].
You know, one of the crucial ingredients to getting the [1997 international landmine ban treaty] was that, at some point, military guys stepped forward and said, “In some circumstances landmines can help, but they’re fundamentally not that useful in a war.” When you combine that with the clear moral cost, and humanitarian impact, it became clear what needed to be done.
KAZEL: Some analysts argue that emerging nuclear nations view the weapons as a sign of national power and prestige – but that they don’t actually expect to use the weapons. How do we persuade nations such as Iran not to want a nuclear weapon?
WILSON: The problem is we’ve over-inflated their value. It seemed like a good idea when we were using that over-inflated value to create deterrence, to deter others. The difficulty is now others take that over-inflated value, and they think, “Oh, nuclear weapons are magic. They can keep my country safe no matter what I do, and I can behave in any way that I want to behind this shield. And I need to eat grass in order to be able to get them.”
The first step in doing something about nuclear weapons is to devalue them, to show they’re not magic, to get people to rethink deterrence. If you go through almost any document about deterrence, and cross it out and put “voodoo” in its place, the document will read essentially the same.
Another thing about the utility question is a two-part evaluation: the usefulness and the danger. They’re dangerous and they’re not useful in hardly any circumstances, and we just need to do something as fast as we possibly can. If you wait a hundred years, you will ensure that someone is going to use nuclear weapons. Either there will be a fight over resources because of global warming, or there will be so many nations with nuclear weapons that someone will sell a nuclear weapon out the backdoor to a terrorist.
KAZEL: You recommend that “extraordinary efforts” should be taken to prevent more nations from getting nuclear weapons. Would you support military action against Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons?
WILSON: I wouldn’t support military action against Iran. I think that’s silly. I think it’s absolutely true that every nation that gets nuclear weapons increases the danger, but I don’t think it’s true that the increase in danger means that nation is more powerful.
Imagine three or four people in your neighborhood felt unsafe, and decided to carry a bottle of nitroglycerine around with them wherever they went. These three or four people, if you bump into them on the street and knock them over and the nitroglycerine explodes, you get killed. So they make your neighborhood more dangerous, but are they really safer? If you want to rob them, you get a gun and stand really close to them and say, “Give me the dough.” Their nitroglycerine doesn’t help because you’re standing right next to them.
But then imagine over time, more and more people in the neighborhood say, “Hey, this is a great idea,I’ll get a bottle of nitroglycerine.” Each neighbor that gets a bottle of nitroglycerine makes your neighborhood less safe — but it doesn’t necessarily protect any of them or give them power. It doesn’t help, but it clearly hurts. That’s the way I see nuclear weapons. It’s bad that Iran seems to be building a nuclear weapon, but will that give them the power to dominate the Middle East once they have them? No, I don’t think so.
KAZEL: So, when you say “extraordinary efforts,” would that mean efforts beyond what is being done now?
WILSON: Yeah, you could take some risks – politically. You could be nice to the Iranians. Now, they are an ancient civilization, with a long tradition of scholarship, very strong religious views, and a unique perspective on religion. Ancient culture, sophisticated, subtle. Very much like France – once much more powerful, dominant culturally in the world.
My assessment is Iran wants nuclear weapons so they will be treated with the respect they believe they deserve. There’s a lot you can do [diplomatically], and maybe that gets you in trouble on the Right in the United States.
I really don’t think military action makes much sense. The Iranians close the Straits of Hormuz, and then we have an oil crisis and the world economy crashes. Moral issues aside, it’s just stupid policy.
KAZEL: You recommend in your book a world study of the usefulness of nuclear weapons, and a “full stop” on the development of new nuclear systems. But you don’t recommend nuclear abolition in it. However, in a presentation you made at the UN three weeks ago, you seemed more resolute. You said abolition is not impossible if the worldview of pro-nuclear advocates is questioned. You said abolitionists “clearly have the more convincing case” than proponents of the weapons.
WILSON: Part of the process of talking about this with a lot of people is that you listen and you find out what they think you’ve missed, or not. The reaction that I’m getting, so far at least, is that people don’t feel there is any serious mistake or flaw [in my arguments]. That’s reassuring, and that makes me feel I can push what I intuitively feel a little bit more.
KAZEL: You did feel strongly enough about your evidence in the book to recommend that the U.S. and Russia decrease their nuclear weapons to the low hundreds. You also say it’s very dangerous to have nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
WILSON: I got in a lot of trouble with the Pentagon for that. I sat at lunch with a squadron commander of one of the missile facilities in Montana. He was talking to me about what it’s like to work in the facility and how you go down underground. I think they have 72 hours on and 72 hours off. They want to have pride in what they do, and they believe that the thing about hair-trigger alert is wrong because they have all these careful rules in place. What they take pride in is making sure you could never have an accident…
I had to explain to him that I think the problem with hair-trigger alert is not that the U.S. mechanism for maintaining its nuclear forces is prone to breakdown, not that they’re doing a bad job. But I thinkleaders need to have time to think [an urgent situation] over and double-check. Kennedy said if he had been forced to decide about the Cuban Missile Crisis on the first day, he’d have launched the air strikes instead of doing the less-militaristic blockade. The air strikes could have led to nuclear war, since we now know they had tactical nuclear weapons on Cuba.
People go off half-cocked. They lose their heads. They get overwhelmed by emotion. They want retribution, and when leaders have the power to launch nuclear weapons without a chance for reflection, then that’s a danger.
Something that causes leaders to be forced to think about it for at least 24 hours, and maybe longer, makes a lot of sense to me. You read history and people make rash decisions. It happens all the time.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
With few exceptions, the major Hollywood movie studios have ignored the ongoing peril of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. While moviemakers can generally rely on stories about zombies, mutants and superheroes to draw today’s crowds, films that spark genuine fear for the survival of our nation and world have become rare.
Three decades ago, however, several films depicting either circumstances leading up to a Third World War, or dire post-cataclysmic worlds, were spurring wide debate. If the late 1950s and early 1960s were the first golden age of nuclear-menace movies, including “On the Beach,” “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” “Fail-Safe,” and “Seven Days in May,” 1983 and 1984 can be seen as the second such age – and, so far, the last.
Thirty years ago, international events clearly were exacerbating the worries of people already concerned about U.S.-Soviet relations. The year 1982 had seen NATO moving ahead with plans to place new mid-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Secretary of State Alexander Haig was talking freely about “levels” of nuclear war, how such wars might be “limited,” and whether the U.S. could someday explode a nuclear bomb as a warning to scare Russian leaders during a crisis. President Ronald Reagan’s “defense modernization program” was a euphemism for a vast arms build-up seeking to add 17,000 warheads to the 25,000 that the U.S. already had. The government also had begun planning to pump much more funding into civil defense shelters.
As tensions between the U.S. and the USSR persisted, the nuclear freeze movement hit its full stride. Protests and state and local referenda on the issue abounded. In one event, some 500,000 people gathered in New York’s Central Park in June 1982 to demand the bilateral freeze that Reagan fervently opposed.
In theaters and on TV, anxiety over nuclear war was reflected in acclaimed movies such as “Threads” in Great Britain and “Testament” in the U.S. – both stark depictions of people suffering and dying amid nuclear fallout. The movie that reached the greatest audience was “The Day After,” a 1983 ABC-TV production watched by a record 100 million people. The program dramatized the nuclear destruction of Lawrence, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., and shocked and depressed many – including Reagan, who supposedly was profoundly troubled by it.
But it’s the 1983 nuclear action-adventure movie “WarGames” that probably is remembered most today as a memorable artifact of that era. The film presents the story of David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), a high school student, computer prodigy and hacker who uses a dial-up modem to play what he thinks is a computer game – only to reach a top-secret system at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The intrusion is accidental but triggers a domino effect that accelerates toward world war, as government computer experts and generals find themselves helpless to halt the “game” that NORAD’s overzealous computer has initiated on Lightman’s suggestion.
The movie was a huge, and perhaps unexpected, summer hit, grossing $79.6 million at the box office. It earned high praise from most critics and received three Oscar nominations. It also led to new media attention to whether accidental nuclear war was more likely in a new age of easy, widespread availability of computers. In addition, for the first time for the young audiences of the ’80s, “WarGames” made vivid the implications of U.S. nuclear missiles being on high-alert: the impossibly brief amount of time that the White House, and military, have to decide if signs of an enemy attack are real or a mistake.
To mark the 30th-anniversary year of “WarGames,” NAPF talked to John Badham, the film’s director. Badham (also known for his direction of the 1977 iconic disco movie “Saturday Night Fever”), was brought in by MGM/United Artists early in the film’s production to replace another director. Badham’s decision to mix the right amounts of humor, action and teen romance into the film is now credited with making it a smash hit – without sacrificing a serious moral about the futility of war and a nightmarish quality of dread that persists throughout.
The following is an edited version of the conversation.
KAZEL: I’ve been watching nuclear-war-related movies from the early ’60s and late ’50s, and the ’80s, and it seems a lot of the directors and producers who did those projects went into them with strong political views about the arms race. I know that Stanley Kubrick was deeply troubled about nuclear war, and Sidney Lumet was worried about it – and so were several of the actors who did [Lumet’s] Fail-Safe. Do you remember having any strong feelings about the topic before you were asked to directWarGames?
BADHAM: It was a time, going of course back to the middle 1940s, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that even as a real youngster you became aware of the power of nuclear weapons and the frightening danger of them. In my grammar school, and this is late 1940s, we were having nuclear-war drills, as silly as they were – duck-and-cover and all that. It was very much on our minds. It was an environment setting up for the McCarthy business in the 1950s and that kind of paranoia. It’s always interesting that it takes a while for those kinds of worries to emerge in the popular media, in the form of Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Were they not almost the same year?
KAZEL: Yes, Fail-Safe came out just a few months after Strangelove[in 1964].
BADHAM: Right. Strangelove was such a definitive piece, but then along comes Lumet with a much darker take on it, in a way, because it was so serious. There was no laughing allowed (laughs) in the theater for Fail-Safe.
KAZEL: I’ve read your stepfather retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force. He served in both World War I and II?
BADHAM: He learned to fly in WWI.
KAZEL: Did you also serve in the military?
BADHAM: I did. I was in the Air Force from 1964 to 1970, some active duty and some National Guard – California National Guard.
KAZEL: Did you actually fly?
BADHAM: No, I was a medic. My father was all for me going to Officer Candidate School, and so on. But I had other thoughts – directing theater and directing movies. I think for a brief while I disappointed him until he started coming to my sets and saying, “Well, I guess the kid may survive after all.”
KAZEL: So, you’ve said before that Dr. Strangelove is one of your favorite movies. I was wondering what made it such a great film to you, and also what you thought of Kubrick’s decision to make it a very funny, black comedy instead of his original idea to do it as a serious suspense film.
BADHAM: Was that his original idea?
KAZEL: Yes, then he rewrote the script.
BADHAM: Well, once you got involved in the casting of Peter Sellers, that starts to twist it right there. You know, it [farce] is almost unavoidable. But, it certainly happens with films. My friend, the late Frank Pierson, who wrote the screenplay for Cat Ballou, said that what he was given to rewrite was a very serious piece. A serious Western. He kept going to the producers and saying, “Guys, it keeps coming out funny. I don’t know what to tell you.” Maybe they [the writers of Dr. Strangelove] started to think it was more accessible and less grim if they were to approach it in this way – that they would get the message across clearly without totally alienating an audience. As interesting as Fail-Safe is, it’s a tough one to take.
KAZEL: You have said before that you really disliked Fail-Safe, actually.
BADHAM: The reality of it is so heavy. It’s hard to enjoy that movie. (Laughs.) I don’t dislike it — you know, Sidney Lumet doesn’t do anything that you can really dislike. But the tone of it can sometimes be a downer.
KAZEL: Leonard Goldberg [producer of WarGames] said the idea, the goal of WarGamesfrom the start was just to create entertainment. In fact, as you know, when the script was first developed, it wasn’t even about nuclear war. It was just about a kid who was a genius. I think the title was “The Genius.”
BADHAM: That’s right.
KAZEL: When you were making the film, did you have any political goals in mind?
BADHAM: I’m one of those people who believe you tell the story, not the message. The old Broadway saying is, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. Now, I guess you could tweet it. (Laughs.) Walter Kerr, the drama critic for the Times, used to say, “They sold the play for a pot of message” – you know, a funny old Biblical reference. So, the message comes out of the subject matter. In this particular case, we’re talking about a very strong character of a little boy who starts in playfully, playing [computer] games and gets in way over his head. Out of it…you begin to see the other terrifying possibilities as we continue to automate our [military] system.
But a strong story about a character is what caught my attention, and that led you to something else entirely – which was made very accessible by the playfulness of this little boy and the almost black-comic situation he found himself in. There’s certainly a lot of influence from Dr. Strangelove coming to me, though I tried not to think about it while I was doing WarGames because that was not a place to go. But certainly the humor that’s sprinkled liberally throughout comes from the perception that as frightening as this is, it’s also kind of funny.
[Under the original director] they were treating it, in every scene I saw, in the tone of Fail-Safe. The actors, the lighting, the direction – it was extremely dark. The Matthew Broderick character was seen as a dark, rebellious kid lurking up in his room doing God-knows-what. I said to Leonard [Goldberg], if I could do that in high school – show a girl how I could change her grade [using a home computer], I would be peeing in my pants with excitement. I mean, good God, could you imagine how terrific that would be? You’d feel just on top of the world.
I took the script and changed the character of The General [commander of NORAD] to someone who had a great, funny Southern sense of humor, based a lot on my father.
KAZEL: To me, it seems a strong difference between what you did, and what Kubrick did, is you didn’t want to make the military or the government officials seem like idiots or clowns, or crazy. Some of the adults in your movie were eccentric or strange, but they were very earnestly trying to prevent World War III – something that the kid had started.
BADHAM: I think it’s easy to kind of write off the danger when you’re looking at people who are being portrayed as idiots. As much as I love Peter Sellers’ portrayal of the crazy scientist in the wheelchair with the arm that won’t behave, you have a tendency to write them off. A lot of what WarGames is talking about is technology taking over on us, and even though we may have good intentions and are trying to do our best, it could bulldoze us.
Of course we see evidence of this all the time. Larry Lasker and Walter Parkes, the screenwriters, and I, started talking back in those early days about the possibilities of cyber war, and what could happen if what was then innocent hacking became really serious stuff. Of course, that’s what we’re watching now. I don’t think we were prescient. I just think we were letting our imaginations say, “Where could this go to?”
KAZEL: Even though the movie seems dated in some ways, as you’re saying, in other ways — the threat of cyber warfare and the idea that unauthorized people could tap into a nuclear defense system — seems even more possible now than in the ‘80s.
BADHAM: Right. We’re seeing it. Our government’s going in and messing with Iran’s system. The Chinese government is coming in and tapping the New York Times’ addresses. It is sort of spooky. We’re in that age. Information is just flying everywhere, with nobody able to control it the way they’d like to control it.
KAZEL: Do you think that your film appeals to audiences of today? Can young people take something away from it?
BADHAM: Well, yes. It’s still very appealing to young film watchers because of the characters they can relate to. Once they get past the ancient, dated [home computer] equipment…it’s still fun for them to relate to it. At the end, I think, as you see what could catastrophically go wrong, it’s as clear as a bell.
KAZEL: The nuclear freeze movement was reaching its height right around the time that the movie came out. Do you think the context of what was happening in the world had a lot to do with drawing people to see WarGames, or would it have been popular with a youthful audience regardless of the events of the time?
BADHAM: I think the concept was just appealing. We’re talking about a 16-year-old boy who suddenly breaks into NORAD and almost starts [a war]? And, a very appealing young character. You know, the movie was in the Top 10 of the year, I think, and yet there’s not a star in it. Dabney Coleman was our big name. (Laughs.) And advertising was not necessarily great. There was just something about the package that seemed like this would be fun. People don’t really want to go to the theater to be lectured to, or frightened in a real way. They like to be frightened by Jaws because they’re not going in the water. … We were walking a fine line in that movie between how threatening and frightening would we make it.
KAZEL: Do you think a movie such as WarGames – about the danger of nuclear war, and deterrence theory, games theory – could be made today? Would there be any audience, or would studios be interested in it?
BADHAM: Well, at the time, nobody wanted to make WarGames. Leonard [Goldberg] managed to get it set up with United Artists…. It was tough to make, and the attitude of the studios was, “It’s about some kid with a computer, and who believes that?” Nobody got it. And yet, lots of imitations came out – lots of films trying to copy it afterwards, about kid geniuses running around.
KAZEL: Is it your impression that your film changed the way any leaders thought about nuclear weapons? It seems President Reagan may have thought that the movie was, in some ways, factual. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon has written that Ronald and Nancy Reagan screened the film before its release, and at a meeting with some Democratic congressmen to talk about the MX missile, he put aside his notes and started talking in a very excited way about WarGames and how it showed that a kid with a computer could break into NORAD.
BADHAM: Well, he certainly had a history, as an actor, of being able to suspend his disbelief and think about the possibilities: Could this happen and wouldn’t it be interesting? People have told me that maybe the Star Wars [strategic missile defense] initiative was bolstered by his seeing WarGames. … It definitely got some people thinking about it. I know we did a running in Washington that I attended, at the Motion Picture Association, where Dr. Helen Caldicott, who ran [Physicians for Social Responsibility] and Sen. Alan Cranston came. There definitely was an effort on MGM and United Artists’ part to get politicians aware of the film.
KAZEL: I think many people who saw WarGames when they were young still have strong memories of it. Also, there’s a page on Facebook dedicated to the movie, and a lot of people post messages saying they’ve discovered it for the first time and that it’s one of their favorite films. When you were making it, did you have any clue it would endure as long as it has?
BADHAM: Quite honestly, I don’t think about things like that. I can only judge my initial reaction, which on reading that script was a very powerful reaction to the characters and the situation they found themselves in. A similar thing happened to me with Saturday Night Fever. I just loved that script. I had an amazingly strong reaction to it. Other people did not. Studio executives just dismissed it as a little movie. People asked me afterward, did I know that Saturday Night Fever was going to be this giant hit? No, I didn’t know. I just knew I really liked it and thank goodness, for once, my taste and the public’s tastes were in sync.
KAZEL: For WarGames, could a movie of its type have had anything other than a happy ending? At the end, everyone is smiling and hugging and the NORAD officers are throwing papers into the air. The final music is very lighthearted and breezy. There was very little criticism of the movie, but some critics have said there wasn’t even a glimmer of anything menacing at the end, or that nuclear weapons were still a huge danger.
BADHAM: That was definitely the ending that everybody wanted. I did not have a good idea at the time of [implying] that there is still something lurking in the background, that [the risks] haven’t gone away, as a little dangling thing to put out there. We were under the gun in delivering this to the theaters because it had been promised and we had started late. So we flew through post-production, and everybody was very happy with that kind of ending – though I absolutely understand what you’re telling me, and that criticism is very fair. It might have added a whole layer of extra texture and meaning to the film.
KAZEL: They [studio executives] wanted it entertaining instead of dark because the demographics of theater audiences had changed since the days of Fail-Safe?
BADHAM: Yeah. You can look at Fail-Safe and say, that really didn’t go anywhere. People who liked films, maybe, saw it. Here [with WarGames, we said,] “We’re going to spend a lot of money on a dodgy subject. Let’s at least make it entertaining.”
Badham, 73, now teaches would-be directors in the film program at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Historically, he says, he’s refused to read critics’ reviews of his films, good or bad, so he was unaware that Chicago Tribune movie maven, the late Gene Siskel, in 1983 wrote glowingly of his nuclear-brink hit. “Who is to say that WarGames won’t have the same connection to this generation of moviegoers that the wicked burlesque of Strangelove had to a generation earlier,” Siskel asked. In particular, the critic lauded the film’s spotlight on the growing role of computers in military systems, writing that “we have come to trust our computers more than ourselves, thus allowing our own personal responsibility for the future to be taken out of our hands and placed on autopilot.”
In WarGames, the teenage protagonist finds that no one understands or appreciates hackers, who haven’t appeared on the country’s radar screens yet. He’s arrested by the FBI, which accuses him of espionage. Much has changed. Today, the government is giving young hackers jobs. According to Fast Company magazine, the Pentagon believes cyber attacks on U.S. computer networks soared 17-fold between 2009 and 2011. Last year, the National Security Agency said it was supplying government-designed curriculums to four U.S. universities so that college computer hackers can be fast-tracked into cyber-security jobs, not only at the NSA but at such places as the CIA and nuclear weapons labs.
The curriculum recommended by NSA would be right at home on David Lightman’s bookshelf: Applied Cryptography, The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing, Practical Malware Analysis.
At one of the colleges that have adopted the coursework, the government-run Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., cyber-warfare students also take part in a special 11-week project: War games.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
Is the world any closer to destroying itself now than it was a year ago? According to the nuclear and world-climate experts who advise the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the answer is a complicated yes and no. But the complexity didn’t deter the organization from sending President Barack Obama a letter that’s critical of the progress his Administration is making on preventing global catastrophe.
Last year, the scientists wrote to Obama, “was a year in which the problems of the world pressed forward, but too many of its citizens stood back. In the U.S. elections the focus was ‘the economy, stupid,’ with barely a word about the severe long-term trends that threaten the population’s well-being to a far greater extent: climate change, the continuing menace of nuclear oblivion, and the vulnerabilities of the world’s energy sources.”
Each year, the Chicago-based Bulletin convenes a forum of scientists to help decide whether to adjust the hand of the Doomsday Clock, a warning symbol that has appeared on the cover of the magazine, and now its Web site, since 1947. At the beginning of 2012, the Bulletin announced it would move the clock’s hand from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight – a warning that, all risks taken together, civilization was inching steadily closer to annihilation. Risks now considered are nuclear war, global warming, the threat of nuclear power plant mishaps, and potential emerging threats such as bioterrorism.
The annual “Doomsday Clock Symposium” was held in late November, and the decision of the organization’s Science and Security Board to keep the clock’s hand at 5 minutes to midnight, at least for another year, was announced in January. The reasoning behind the decision not to change the clock, despite the progressive worsening of certain global risks, was outlined in an open letter from the Bulletin to President Obama. It was the first time that the decision regarding the clock took the form of a letter to a U.S. president. The communication to the president largely was an appeal for bolder, more decisive action rather than congratulations for what he already may have achieved.
While the Bulletin did praise Obama for his continued support of New START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the nuclear arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia that became effective in February 2011, the group’s leaders were critical of “unrealized opportunities” to make even more serious cuts in nuclear stockpiles. The Bulletin also said the U.S. should make more progress to take its nuclear weapons off high-alert status, and to stop the spread of fissile materials that can be used by terrorists or hostile nations to make weapons of mass destruction.
The Bulletin is calling on the U.S. to cut nuclear stockpiles beyond the terms of New START so that each side has fewer than 1,000 deployed strategic warheads. Under the treaty, the U.S. and Russia are permitted to have a total of 1,550 warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The organization also is calling for quantities of non-deployed strategic warheads to be “significantly reduced,” and for tactical nuclear warheads to be completely put out of commission.
Tactical nuclear weapons, which generally are less powerful and are considered “battlefield” weapons, are not covered by New START. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. in 2011 was thought to have about 500 tactical nuclear warheads deployed in Europe, as well about 700 to 800 more tactical nuclear warheads in storage. It was estimated by the Federation of the Atomic Scientists that Russia had as many as 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads deployed and more than 3,000 in storage or retired in 2010.
In addition, the Bulletin wants the Obama administration to seriously question if all three legs of the nation’s nuclear “Triad” – ICBMs, bomber jets, and nuclear submarines – are necessary to national defense, arguing that maintaining redundant systems is “an expensive legacy of a bygone era.” The administration should “fundamentally restructure” the Triad as a way of making more extreme reductions in the nation’s deployed nuclear warheads, the Bulletin told Obama. This process should include cuts in the number of warheads on submarines and bombers as a signal to the world that the U.S. is interested in peace, the magazine said.
The letter to Obama did not address international concerns that Iran is moving closer to achieving nuclear weapons capability. At the symposium in November in Washington, however, John Polanyi, chemistry professor at the University of Toronto, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1986, and a leading arms control advocate, said proliferation of nuclear weapons to more countries, including Iran, “surely adds to the risk of nuclear war.”
Nonetheless, Polanyi told fellow scientists that Obama’s recent assurances that the U.S. will do whatever’s necessary to prevent Iran from gaining such weapons do not add to the cause of peace, and that preemptive strikes to prevent other countries from gaining nuclear weapons are based on the philosophy that “might makes right” or “the law of the jungle.” Polanyi noted that the U.S. refrained from taking military action to prevent nations such as the Soviet Union, India, Pakistan or North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Polanyi added that the notion that all nuclear nations might someday peacefully agree to international control over their weapons stockpiles may seem hard to imagine, but is “not preposterous.” There is no “divine right of nations to behave as they please,” he said, noting that in 1945 the original member states of the United Nations agreed to the UN Charter’s specification that nations are prohibited from attacking other UN member states – a recognition that war must only be declared for purposes of self-defense. Thus, there is precedent that national leaders may be willing to give up power to ensure international peace and security, Polanyi said.
On the issue of preventing fissile materials from falling into hostile hands, the Bulletin called for the U.S. to “rejuvenate and expand” international efforts to get control of both civilian and military stores of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The organization warned that approximately 2,000 tons of fissile materials are not yet safeguarded, and that theoretically such an amount could be incorporated into “several hundred thousand” nuclear bombs.
The U.S. needs to put all missile materials not currently in warheads under the control of international monitoring and, in cooperation with other nuclear nations, declare a moratorium on making more fissile materials for weapons until a permanent Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty is signed, the Bulletin told Obama.
The cut-off treaty is a proposal to ban worldwide any more production of materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons and related devices. Although in the early 1990s the UN General Assembly voted that such a treaty should be negotiated internationally, the agreement has failed to become reality as various nations have disagreed on verification and other terms.
The organization also addressed the dangers of climate change, reminding Obama that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the continental U.S. While praising the U.S. government for spurring some progress in promoting alternative energy sources, those advances have been “dwarfed” by unchecked expansion in fossil fuel production, such as coal, tar sands, oil shale, and shale gas, the Bulletin said.
Obama must pursue the expansion of natural gas resource development, tempered by careful regulation to prevent methane leakage, water pollution, and other harmful environmental side effects, the letter said.
The president in general needs to “confidently face those who irresponsibly argue that climate change science is not relevant” and instead listen attentively to knowledgeable experts who are charged with making recommendations to the government about climate change, it said.
Daniel Kammen, professor of public policy and nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, told symposium attendees that China and the U.S. lead the world in greenhouse gas pollution, with China releasing the most pollutants overall but the U.S. leading by far in per capita pollution. In 2007, China emitted nearly 7,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, while the U.S. emitted almost 6,000 million metric tons. When figured per capita, however, the U.S. was responsible for about 23 tons of carbon dioxide per person, as opposed to just 5 tons per person for China (2005 figures).
China has declared a goal of reaching 11.4 percent of its national energy consumption from non-fossil fuels by 2017, through increasing use of such alternative fuel sources as wind turbines, various types of solar energy, and hydroelectric power. Kammen said it’s unclear if that goal can be reached.
The Doomsday Clock has been adjusted 20 times since 1947 to reflect increasing or decreasing perceived dangers to world peace, and, more recently, climatic stability. It was initially set at 7 minutes to midnight in 1947, and reached its closest position to “doomsday” in 1953, when the Bulletin set it at 2 minutes to midnight to convey alarm and dread over the explosion of the first thermonuclear device by the U.S. in 1952, followed in suit by the Soviets with a test of an H-bomb several months later. The farthest the clock’s hand has been moved away from midnight was in 1991, after the Cold War ended, arms limitations agreements were reached between the U.S. and Russia, and each nation removed most missiles and bombers from high alert.
The clock was moved from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight in January 2012 because, the Bulletin said, “the potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts in the Middle East, Northeast Asia and South Asia are alarming; safer nuclear reactor designs need to be developed and built, and more stringent oversight, training, and attention are needed to prevent future disasters; [and] the pace of technological solutions to address climate change may not be adequate to meet the hardships that large-scale disruption of the climate portends.”
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
Yale University Professor Paul Bracken is worried, and he’s impatient.
In Bracken’s new book, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (Times Books, 2012), Asia and the Mideast are depicted as zones of extreme hazard where insecure, unstable national actors are gaining prominence. He criticizes Western powers such as the United States as lingering in a sort of sticker-shock state while they view, with almost a sense of unreality, the rapid rise of new nuclear nations. U.S. leaders may not know how to intervene if a crisis threatens to spark a massive regional war, he argues, because they rarely discuss it now.
He rails against the U.S. establishment of politicians, military leaders, academics, and strategists, whom he views as being obsessed with risks that might have been worrisome in the Cold War, but which he says have scant importance today. Officials, he believes, are failing to do contingency planning on how the U.S. could deescalate tensions to deter nations such as North Korea, Pakistan, India, and eventually Iran, from using the Bomb.
Bracken traces his interest in international affairs to his youth in Philadelphia, when he got a gift of a short wave radio and spent hours listening to foreign broadcasts, including propaganda of the early 1960s beamed globally by Radio Moscow. He remembers mailing letters to “Moscow Mailbag,” a daily show that responded to questions about Russian life, and hearing the announcer read his queries on the air.
After studying engineering at Columbia, Bracken in 1974 became an analyst at the New York-based Hudson Institute, working with controversial nuclear strategist Herman Kahn. In the early 1960s, Kahn had prompted international discussion, and much furor, by writing On Thermonuclear War, which declared such a conflict to be winnable and described policies that supposedly could reduce U.S. casualties in World War III. These included more attention to civil defense shelters, readiness to order urban evacuations, and the ability to counter a Soviet nuclear attack with a massive second strike.
Bracken became an authority on nuclear command-and-control issues, analyzing whether the U.S. military could adequately manage its arsenals amid the pandemonium of an actual war (his answer then: possibly not). He earned his Ph.D. in operations research at Yale in 1982. Like Kahn, he’d become adept at “scenario modeling” –participating in the staging of war games that purported to tell the government how to win, or who would win, in many varieties of hypothetical battles. In one such war game in the early 1980s, in a make-believe nuclear fight between the U.S. and the Soviets, Bracken was stunned when at least 1 billion people “died” in a series of imaginary missile exchanges – either immediately, or eventually because of radiation or hunger.
In 1983, Bracken returned to Yale as a professor of political science and international business. Now 64, he characterizes the U.S. need to anticipate regional political crises as a challenge of management, drawing on many of the same lessons he uses to teach MBA students. But unlike commerce, he thinks, a failure to “game” contingencies involving nuclear bombs could leave the U.S. open to surprises — and world regions susceptible to unprecedented levels of death and destruction.
The biggest lesson Bracken has learned from war games he’s taken part in? “A small, insulated group of people, convinced that they are right, plows ahead into a crisis they haven’t anticipated or thought about,” he warns, “one that they are completely unprepared to handle. The result is disaster.”
Bracken talked to NAPF about his new book and his thoughts on the alarming challenges the U.S. could face abroad. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Kazel:Dr. Bracken, in your new book you argue the American public no longer thinks much about nuclear weapons. The exception now is that we do see media attention every day about the threat that Iran poses. You write that taking everything into account, you feel that Israel probably shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities because of the danger that it would expand into an unpredictable crisis for the whole region. Do you still feel that way?
Bracken: There’s a couple questions you’ve asked. One is whether the American public is engaged, and I would say it’s not really, compared to the Cold War, when there was a consensus – right or wrong – a widespread support for U.S. [military] policies, at least until the Vietnam War. I don’t feel there’s a real traction or engagement with the public anymore. And I would add to that, there’s not a lot of Congressional interest in nuclear weapons anymore, for understandable reasons. The Cold War’s over. Even in academia, there’s only a handful of specialists who really work these issues anymore.
The second question of whether Israel and/or the United States should launch a military strike on Iran…A military strike on Iran, I think, will produce long-term, enormously negative consequences. Somebody sent me the other day a [hypothetical] “news report” of the first 72 hours of a strike on Iran. My reaction was it was like the first 72 hours of the Vietnam War in 1959. That probably went just fine. It’s just the next 10 or 15 years that I would worry about.
[It would be] a long war. The Iranians are not going to give up. In my view, you will be signing a contract for a long conflict that will rival Vietnam and Iraq, which is just very, very dangerous.
Kazel:If you were forecasting what you think will happen, do you think the U.S. can reach a diplomatic solution with Iran?
Bracken: I’m not in the prediction business, but…I would say Israel will not launch a military attack on Iran in the next one to two years, during this early phase. With a little less confidence, I would say the same for the United States.
Kazel:Why with less confidence?
Bracken: I think because the U.S. has the much greater military capability to damage the Iranian program compared to the Israelis. It would cause such mayhem throughout the Middle East for Israel to do it alone. The self-deterrence is too great. The United States has greater wherewithal and would be less likely to be struck back immediately.
Kazel:Another point you raise is that nations are so motivated to develop nuclear weapons because they’re a symbol of prestige and power and can be used in a variety of ways short of war to manipulate neighbors as well as major powers. You write that even a small number of bombs means a country will be taken “more seriously.” When U.S. officials threaten to stop nations from acquiring nuclear weapons, do they understand the motivations for why leaders want the weapons?
Bracken: I think many times they do, but they don’t know how to factor them into a U.S. policy that would prevent them from going nuclear. So they really don’t know what else to do other than to turn to a small number of arguments: It’s dangerous for you, yourself. Of course, those countries turn around and say, “Why did you build 30,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War? You must not have believed that.” It’s not an unreasonable question.
The U.S. government officials would deploy better arguments if they had them, but they really don’t know what else to do other than to appeal to the self-interest of the country, and to argue that there’s something called the international community embodied in the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], the UN system, and the NPT [Nuclear Proliferation Treaty] regime, which says that you should not do this. They [emerging nuclear powers] would accuse the U.S. of doing this selectively, and overlooking Israel and now India.
I guess the other argument the U.S. uses is, “We will supply this ‘world order’ commodity, which will keep you safe.” I think the other countries simply don’t believe that would exist in the wide range of contingencies that would develop.
Kazel:You also emphasize that from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, there was restraint, together with fairly conservative strategic doctrines – and that neither the governments nor the populations of the U.S. or the USSR viewed each other with hatred or passion. But you say now the smaller countries with nuclear weapons could be pushed by nationalistic fervor or angry mobs in the streets to use their weapons.
Bracken: The Cold War did have an overarching ideology, whether you call it a liberal regime or democracy, versus Communism…a basis of understanding each other’s views even if they didn’t agree with them.
It was very emotionless, in that while there was anti-Communism hysteria in the United States, and I guess [animosity] in the Soviet Union against America, it really never [dominated] the major institutions of the Executive Branch or the Pentagon or the State Department. Policy was largely insulated from public opinion, because it was controlled by specialists, whether in the military or influential think tanks.
The ideology of the second nuclear age, I think, is nationalism, and I don’t think it’s confined only to the secondary powers. It’s also characteristic of India and China…This is a fundamental different type of ideology that has already displayed tendencies toward mass hysteria, street demonstrations, calling for the blood of the other side, which does influence policy.
Kazel:A big difference between you and someone like Bruce Blair of Global Zero is that you’re not focusing anymore on the risk of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. You’re focusing on the danger of regional wars. You really downplay the risk of an accidental world war due to something like a technical failure or misunderstanding. Dr. Blair continues to make de-alerting of ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] one of his top recommendations, while you don’t think that’s a pressing issue.
Bracken: The notion of them being “on alert,” does that mean they could be fired on short notice? Not in any meaningful sense of the term. [Protocols concerning] emergency authorization to use nuclear weapons have been all revoked. It is true that ICBMs very likely have targets, but that doesn’t make them ready to go on short notice.
There’s no reason to go on short notice. The idea that Russian nuclear weapons could launch from missile silos where they have never been tested, over trajectories that have never been tested…I cannot imagine a scenario where the Russians would launch a full-scale thermonuclear attack on U.S. missile forces in a disarming first strike.
I don’t think [Russian missiles] are anything close to being on a hair-trigger alert. The trigger is so stiff in both [U.S. and Russian] cases. Given Russian reliability, one of these things would have gone off [already] if they were on a hair-trigger.
Kazel:You think that U.S. weapons aren’t able to be launched quickly?
Bracken: Yes.
Kazel:So if the President gave the launch order, there would be something stopping them from launching within a few minutes?
Bracken: Yes – just a couple of examples would be the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Kazel:Well, I think Dr. Blair’s view isn’t that there is much danger of a massive launch of U.S. missiles because they’re on alert, but that one or a small number might be launched due to a technical error –that if we de-alerted, the error could be spotted early.
Bracken: Look, if anyone comes to me and says they want to lower the chance of an accidental war, who’s going to oppose that? I don’t think it’s the right problem. The right problem is what do we do if China starts transferring targeting information to Pakistan? What do we do if there’s a nuclear alert between Iran and Israel, where there are serious problems of accidental war?
Focusing on the U.S. and accidental launch probability is a non-problem. I know a lot about the system, and I think the chance is as approaching zero as we’re ever likely to make it. We can’t ever hit absolute zero because we just don’t understand enough.
Kazel:So do you see any value anymore in dramatic de-alerting, for example removing warheads from missiles – things that would require the U.S. to take hours or days to launch missiles?
Bracken: I would need more time to think about that, because of the immediate political and strategic consequences, of a diplomatic character, on countries like Japan and conceivably Israel. But would we suffer militarily? I don’t think we would at all. I wouldn’t have any problem with it.
I mean, the contingencies for firing the Minuteman missiles – at what are we going to fire these things? I just find it so inconceivable. It would be like saying the Pentagon must not draw up plans for an invasion of Canada…If you force the rule on me, I wouldn’t be giving anything up.
Kazel:Some analysts advocate that the U.S. could go to a totally submarine-based nuclear defense system and eliminate our ICBMs so that our cities would not be destroyed because they’re near military targets. Is that something you could support?
Bracken: In principle I could support it. But I don’t know how to even think about what the size and structure of U.S. nuclear forces should be in a world where the chance of a Russian attack or a Chinese attack on us is so remote.
What strikes me is people use this “nuclear balance” measurement from 1975 to measure arms-control stability, when it seems to me it’s defined for a two-player game and doesn’t take into account the spread of nuclear weapons to Israel, North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan, or China, and the complex interactions that could develop between them.
So, I don’t have anything against the particular policy you just enunciated, but what does it solve? It solves that the Russians won’t hit us with a surprise attack on land-based missiles and the fallout won’t drift into Chicago and New York…It might have been a good policy by the late ‘70s. I’m not sure. But for the 21st century, it seems to me not very creative.
Kazel:Some scientists argue that when we think about risk, we should factor into the equation how destructive the negative event would be, relatively. So while the chance of a world nuclear war might be small today, if the consequence could be something like a billion deaths, this remains a tremendous risk that should merit a lot of attention and study, as compared to regional wars.
Bracken: My argument is we already have, by making sure these things are not going to go off easily – U.S. nuclear forces. And I believe the Russians have done the same thing. The problems lie in other places.
Kazel:You’ve said that you think world disarmament could happen some day, but you can only imagine it resulting from a disaster such as a regional nuclear war. The major powers could then come in and more easily be able to disarm other nations or restrict their weapons. Do you see any other context where the major powers could use their influence to restrict the development of nuclear arms?
Bracken: Well, of course, they already have – in the NPT, and in the agreements of the [nuclear] suppliers club not to sell certain technologies to certain countries. There may be imperfections in these agreements, but as I argue in the book, this isn’t any reason to throw out, say, the NPT or several of the other [agreements].
Kazel:In your writing there seems to be a real sense of pessimism. You say that it’s “positively likely” that a nation such as Pakistan or North Korea might make “calculated” plans to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, and that in this sense the dangers are greater than during the Cold War. You criticize nuclear abolitionists in your book as being overly idealistic. But is it ironic that their views may be similar to yours in that they’re the ones highlighting the catastrophic dangers of these weapons?
Bracken: I don’t find it ironic…There’s not a lot in there about the nuclear abolitionists, who, first of all, share the same goal that I do — at least to a degree. I would commend them for tackling a very difficult problem. Just putting it on the agenda is something I would commend them for. Even if I might disagree with some of the things that they might argue, they are at least looking under the right street lamp, so to speak.
It’s up to other people, including me, to invent better arguments for their case. Their arguments about the destructive potential of these weapons are quite right. I didn’t want to write this book as a broadside against naïve thinking because I don’t really think it is, in important ways, naïve.
Kazel:You mean disarmament?
Bracken: Yeah. I would say we need a lot more creative thought on disarmament. I don’t believe we’re on the cusp of abolishing nuclear weapons, but on the dangers of these things I would be right on board. I think there’s a contract or pledge you can sign through Global Zero. I would be happy to sign it. I think major political figures have signed it, to give up nuclear weapons as a goal. The devil is in the details. But I wanted to focus my thinking on the management aspects of living in a second nuclear age, and if that’s pessimism, I guess it is.
Kazel:In your career, have you ever felt the time was ripe for the world to disarm — for example, right after the fall of the Soviet Union?
Bracken: I did. Maybe not with the conviction of some in the disarmament community, but in the early-to-mid ‘90s my view was that although global disarmament wouldn’t work, it was a very good time to advocate it for official policy and through non-governmental organizations. I have been more pessimistic than the “extreme disarmers,” but it was still worth a shot. I support it today. I would be the first to give up U.S. nuclear weapons, all of them – every single one – if other countries would do so.
Kazel:There are actually commonalties between certain things you recommend and what many nuclear abolitionists advocate. For example, abolitionists often support a no-first-use nuclear policy by the United States. Why do you think that would be a positive step?
Bracken: It would show the United States takes the existence of nuclear weapons in nine countries, and counting, seriously. It’s also something we could do without international negotiation or a treaty. I think arms control has gone about as far as it can go at present because of the complexities involved in the multilateral negotiations to get all these countries to sign on.
Another reason is it would force the bureaucracies in the United States to think through what our nuclear weapons should be used for, how many there should be, and it would get away from this “disarmament by atrophy,” a consequence of a lack of thinking about these things. My view is that most of [our arsenal] is nuclear junk in the attic; it’s totally unusable for technical reasons. The yields are too big. We don’t really know how they would perform. There’s not much thinking about them in the military.
I would say no-first-use introduces a dimension of morality, political and moral considerations, that are absent from the narrow calculation of the self-interest of the United States. When I talk to [military] people in Washington, generally they do not favor no-first-use because the view is, “Why should we give up something for nothing?” I think that’s a very wrong way to look at international policy, because the United States has obligations that extend beyond the national interests of the United States.
Kazel:On the topic of disarmament, Bruce Blair, as well as your colleague at Yale, Jonathan Schell, and other nuclear abolitionists, argue that the exact details of the road to disarmament are hard to imagine now, especially the final stages. But they strongly feel that the declaration of the final goal should come first. Then, lesser steps that would precede it could be taken more confidently. Does that make sense to you?
Bracken: I guess where I may differ from that is that I think there will be such significant problems along any path that we should start thinking about them: preparing for what we would do if North Korea or Pakistan or India used the Bomb. What would we do? I’m writing about a world in which these [challenges] are probably going to exist for 50 years. There’s going to be shocks to the system the way there were in the Cold War. If we don’t manage those shocks, it doesn’t matter what the long-term goal [of disarmament] is.
Kazel:So do you see a role for nuclear abolition groups in today’s world?
Bracken: They certainly have a role. I would say emphatically yes. The role is to point out to people in governments around the world that these weapons are not like any others, to come up for ideas on how you can reduce their numbers even if you don’t have a path to get to absolute zero, to reinforce the tendency that exists in the United States and Russia to cut the size of their arsenals.
Just the mere fact that they’re thinking about the nuclear problem is a good thing, because so many people in government and the think tanks are not thinking about it.
Kazel:You do seem to have real impatience over the current level of debate over nuclear weapons —
Bracken: Well, that’s true.
Kazel:— both in academia and government, and in the military. When you refer to “level of debate,” do you mean that people just aren’t educated on it the way they were in the last generation?
Bracken: I think the level of discussion of these issues has gone down. I hardly think that the previous generation in the Cold War was some golden age where these things were well understood. I lived through that, and I didn’t feel that way at the time.
Looking back, I was right. The U.S. gave so much attention to the [potential Soviet] “bolt-from-the-blue-surprise attack” on Minuteman missiles, and overspent so much money, while ignoring so many much-more-likely routes to nuclear war.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
