If you ask the man on the street what's the biggest threat to the continued existence of human civilization, he'll probably say global nuclear war. And yet, even as someone who worries a lot about threats to civilization, I don't spend much time thinking about nuclear war.
Global nuclear war is a lot like a cataclysmic asteroid collision. There's a non-zero probability of it happening, and the expected damage is huge. Multiply the low probability by the high expected damage and, for the sake of argument, let's say it turns out to be the single greatest threat the world faces over the next 500 years in expected value terms. Even so, there's not much point in worrying.
The thing about asteroid collisions is, they're freak events. They happen without any influence from what we do on the ground, and barring the return of a supergroup helmed by Bruce Willis, there's not much one can do about it in any case.
So, worrying about asteroid collisions, as compelling as it might be in expected value terms, looks like a sort of neurosis. "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…"
Now, you're probably saying, nuclear war isn't at all like that. Sure there's nothing to be done about a giant asteroid that's completely external to the earth. But nuclear weapons are built by humans, deployed by humans, for human purposes, and can be dealt with using human methods. Far from a freak occurrence, nuclear war is possible to avert, and profitable to worry about.
Suppose we had the power to move the earth to a solar system where the probability of asteroid strikes was zero. Would we want to do it? Would we want to have done it?
Human civilization certainly benefited from asteroid collisions. Mammals would be of little account if not for the mass extinction of larger lizards – primates likely wouldn't exist, let alone be a dominant species. So, at the very least, we wouldn't want to have lived in a solar system without asteroid collisions.
Similarly, the global order that has resulted in a more or less peaceful equilibrium with only one territorial annexation1 since the end of World War II is largely the result of the decisive nuclear victory by the Allies in that war. This is a phenomenal accomplishment in the age of nation-states. The construction of global governance institutions has been relatively successful in maintaining global peace, and spurred in large part by the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
Indeed, the case for life with nukes is even stronger than the case for life in an asteroid field. Even if we did turn out to benefit ex post from an asteroid collision, it would still be in our interest, were it possible, to move to a safer solar system now. Living with the prospect of asteroids is still undesirable ex ante. This isn't true of nuclear war! Not only did humanity happen to benefit ex post from the single use of a nuclear weapon, we continue to benefit ex ante from the continued prospect. Global institutions were not only constructed in response to nuclear weapons, but derive their continuing justification in large part from that continued threat. Disarmament, more than likely, results in a return to the pattern of opportunistic annexation and constant petty war that characterized nation-states in the pre-atomic age.
Now, obviously, there's a limit to this logic. Cooperation becomes much harder to sustain, even with a huge downside, as the number of players increases – especially if you add unstable players like Iran or North Korea without much of a downside. For this reason nuclear consolidation, say into NATO, could make things safer – certainly safer than disarmament – assuming that NATO is less likely to unilaterally disarm than the US, which I doubt.
But granting that the existence of nuclear weapons is necessary to sustain much that's worth preserving about modern human civilization in the first place, once we've settled into an equilibrium where civilization is sustained by the threat of its annihilation, the actual realization of nuclear war starts to look like a freak occurrence in the same way as an asteroid collision. The threat has to be real for it to work, and a real threat implies a non-zero probability of realization. If the prospect of moving to a different solar system (disarming) is off the table, as it should be, there's not a lot of sense in worrying about collisions.
More and more I’ve come to appreciate the aphorism: “if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” – not as a slogan for gun rights, but as an instance of a much more fundamental insight that non-self-enforcing norms tend to select for increasingly bad outcomes when you can’t guarantee . . .
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A.J.
Nov 03, 2016 at 18:33 |A fresh perspective and strangely comforting. Thank you.
Adam
Nov 03, 2016 at 20:56 |Well done. I’ve thought this for some time. That’s why despite the huff-and-puff lately, I doubt we will ever actually come to blows with Russia (if I’m wrong, well what can we do about it? psychos will be pyschos…). I would say one addendum that would be interesting to hear your thoughts on. It’s that having nukes makes you a real “world player”, or at least someone who can’t just be bullied by a big power. I honestly think this is why Iran, North Korea, etc want nukes. Well okay, maybe North Korea is just crazy. Anyway, my thinking is they want them because we can’t just steam roll them like we do to every other country we don’t like or gets in our way. Note we didn’t do that to Pakistan despite the fact they were more-or-less housing Bin Laden. I also doubt we would have attempted to take out Saddam, had he actually possessed the WMD’s that a certain administration said he had. Just some thoughts. Of course open for discussion
Cameron Harwick
Nov 03, 2016 at 22:45I think the big reason that a nuclear Iran or North Korea are so much more frightening than other places is that institutions there are much more personality-centric, and accordingly much more erratic. There’s a lot of procedure and bureaucracy built into the institutions of first-world nuclear powers that nullifies individual personalities, which makes the prospect of a fluke rather unlikely.
Incidentally, this is part of why Trumpism and Putinism are both so worrying: they’re both pushing for much more personality-centric institutions in the two biggest nuclear powers.
Which sounds like it contradicts the post, but if US institutions become so personality-centric that we start having to seriously worry about nuclear war, civilizational breakdown will probably be likely (or have already happened) regardless of anything nuclear. Nuclear annihilation will be the symptom, not the cause.
entirelyuseless
Nov 03, 2016 at 21:32 |This is reasonable as far as it goes, but it seems to me a good argument for promoting a world government. Or is the response to this that there simply is no feasible way to promote it?
Cameron Harwick
Nov 03, 2016 at 21:55A lot of the arguments I hear against world government are fine in theory, but not really applicable to the world we live in. In reality, the global institutions we have – UN, NATO, IMF, World Bank, etc, even the EU to some extent – look a lot like federalism. Partly by necessity; maybe the UN would turn into a leviathan if we let it, like the US federal government did when the states let it. It’s very possible that delegating any further power to them would be counterproductive. But up to the current margin, such global governance as we have looks like it’s done a lot more good than harm.
entirelyuseless
Nov 04, 2016 at 21:37I agree. I didn’t mean “this looks like it supports world government, and therefore it must be wrong,” but rather that world governance (at least to some extent, and in a federalist sense) could make the world safer.
Nicholas Ennos
Feb 14, 2018 at 11:08 |No need to worry, nuclear weapons do not exist. No caesium 137 in the atmosphere before first nuclear power station accident in 1952.
Nicholas Ennos
Apr 13, 2018 at 6:53 |It is almost as if the Jewish scientists who invented the fake nuclear bomb in 1945 wanted to promote one world government with the Jews at its head. Surely not?
Oliver
Aug 18, 2024 at 8:51 |What can you say, trough the prism of your point about situation nowdays?