P1 “New nuclear powers are a threat, old nuclear powers keep the peace” as quoted by Anne Harrington de Santana who discerned that nuclear weapons have acquired the status of fetish objects: “Just as access to wealth in the form of money determines an individual’s opportunities and place in a social hierarchy, access to power in the form of nuclear weapons determines a state’s opportunities and place in the international order.”
The 1970’s/80’s were frightening times: The USSR was at war in Afghanistan and the US was widely referring to them as “the evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world”. President Carter threatened to use nuclear weapons if the USSR continued its thrust to the Arabian Sea. The USSR was building nuclear bombs quickly in order to achieve parity with the USA and the US right wing was “howling for blood”. Ronald Reagan more than doubled military spending. NATO held a field exercise, Able Archer 83, that was designed as a run-up to nuclear war foolishly (and even had world leaders at it) on Russia’s doorstep, very nearly scaring the Soviets under an ailing Andropov into launching a nuclear first strike.
P2. ”I found it Harvard to believe that a species as clever and adaptable as ours would voluntarily destroy itself, even though it had voluntarily manufactured the means to do so.” “Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?” RR
P3. Niels Bohr articulated that: though nuclear weapons are the property of individual nation-states, which claim the right to hold and to use them in defence of national sovereignty, in their indiscriminate destructiveness they are a common danger to all, like an epidemic disease, and like an epidemic disease they transcend national borders, disputes and ideologies.
Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, a time during which physicists were exploring, collaborating across borders, only one, Leo Szilard saw the possibility of a weapon of mass destruction. Physicists in Germany, Japan, Britain, France, USA, Russia, Denmark, Italy were all working on the structure and energy of atomic nuclei. Furthermore they were not only sharing information across boundaries, they were honourably given credit where it was due.
P4 “Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome.” RR
P5 The USSR and the United States prefer to sacrifice a portion of their national sovereignty - “prefer to forego the power to make total war - rather than be destroyed in their fury. Lesser wars continue, and will continue until the world community is sufficiently impressed with their destructive futility to forge new instruments of protection and new forms of citizenship. But world war at least has been revealed to be historical, not universal, a manifestation of destructive technologies of limited scale.”
Until recently, natural violence in the form of bacteria and viruses were the human race’s worst enemies. The invention of public health, vaccines and antibiotics sent death to the side-lines at the same time that war began rapidly and pathologically to increase, reaching horrendous peaks in the twentieth century’s two world wars. Man-made death claimed not fewer than 200 million human lives before 1945 and an average of 1.5 million/year ever since in guerrilla conflict and conventional interstate wars.
P6 “Nuclear weapons, the ultimate containers of man-made death, made the consequences of sovereign violence starkly obvious for the first time in human history. Since there was no sure defence against such weapons, they also made the consequences certain.” “Every great and deep difficulty bears within itself its own solution,” Niels Bohr
In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons - no more than the yield of some single warheads in the US and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation. Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation - from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
P7 From the 1996 Canberra Commission on the Eliination of Nuclear Weapons identified the “axiom of proliferation” “As long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will seek to acquire them.” Australian ambassador-at-large for nuclear disarmament, Richard Butler, said “The basic reason for this assertion is that justice, which most human beings interpret essentially as fairness, is demonstrably a concept of the deepest importance to people all over the world.” It is manifestly clear that attempts over the years of those who own nuclear weapons to assert their security justifying having those weapons while the security of others does not is an abject failure.
P8 When Butler was with the UN commission in monitoring Iraq, Iraqis demanded that I explain why they should be hounded for their weapons of mass destruction when, just down the road, Israel was not, even though it was known to possess 200 nuclear weapons. I confess too that I flinch when I hear American, British, and French fulminations against weapons of mass destruction ignoring the fact that they are the proud owners of massive quantities of those weapons, unapologetically insisting that they are essential for their national security and will remains so.” “Human beings will not swallow such unfairness. This principle is as certain as the basic laws of physics itself.” “My attempts to have the Americans enter into discussions about double tankards have been an abject failure……I sometimes felt I was speaking to them in Martian, so deep is their inability to understand….that their weapons of mass destruction are just as much a problem as are those of Iraq or of Iran or North Korea.”
President Obama in his Prague speech in 2009 said “if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”
The knowledge of how to make nuclear bombs will not disappear with nuclear disarmament but instead of having the ability to attack using these weapons within minutes or hours, much longer periods of time, significantly longer times, would be required. In the interim, we might have pause to negotiate our differences before destroying all of civilization. MD
LeoSzilard,aHungariantheoreticalphysicist,bornofJewishheritagebutraisedasaChristianhadasoulfulexpression.Hisgreatestambiton,moreprofoundeventhanhiscommitmenttoscientce,wassomehowtosavetheworld.HewasdeeplyaffectedbyH.G.Wells’tract,theOpenConspiracy-apubliccollusionofscience-mindedindustrialistsandfinancierstoestablishaworldrepublic.”WhenIwasyoung,Ihadtwogreatinterestsinlife;onewasphysicsandtheotherpolitics”Rhodessays,”Totheendofhislife,hemadedullmenuncomfortableandvainmenmad.
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