Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Some of the threats to humanity are fanciful or infinitesimal, but one is real: nuclear war.⁶⁶ The world has more than ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries.⁶⁷ Many are mounted on missiles or loaded in bombers and can be delivered within hours or less to thousands of targets. Each is designed to cause stupendous destruction: a single one could destroy a city, and collectively they could kill hundreds of millions of people by blast, heat, radiation, and radioactive fallout. If India and Pakistan went to war and detonated a hundred of their weapons, twenty million people could be killed right away, and soot from the firestorms could spread through the atmosphere, devastate the ozone layer, and cool the planet for more than a decade, which in turn would slash food production and starve more than a billion people. An all-out exchange between the United States and Russia could cool the Earth by 8°C for years and create a nuclear winter (or at least autumn) that would starve even more.⁶⁸ Whether or not nuclear war would (as is often asserted) destroy civilization, the species, or the planet, it would be horrific beyond imagining.

Soon after atom bombs were dropped on Japan, and the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear arms race, a new form of historical pessimism took root. In this Promethean narrative, humanity has wrested deadly knowledge from the gods, and, lacking the wisdom to use it responsibly, is doomed to annihilate itself. In one version, it is not just humanity that is fated to follow this tragic arc but any advanced intelligence. That explains why we have never been visited by space aliens, even though the universe must be teeming with them (the so-called Fermi Paradox, after Enrico Fermi, who first wondered about it). Once life originates on a planet, it inevitably progresses to intelligence, civilization, science, nuclear physics, nuclear weapons, and suicidal war, exterminating itself before it can leave its solar system.

For some intellectuals the invention of nuclear weapons indicts the enterprise of science—indeed, of modernity itself—because the threat of a holocaust cancels out whatever gifts science may have bestowed upon us. The indictment of science seems misplaced, given that since the dawn of the nuclear age, when mainstream scientists were sidelined from nuclear policy, it’s been physical scientists who have waged a vociferous campaign to remind the world of the danger of nuclear war and to urge nations to disarm. Among the illustrious historic figures are Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Isidor Rabi, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, Harold Urey, C. P. Snow, Victor Weisskopf, Philip Morrison, Herman Feshbach, Henry Kendall, Theodore Taylor, and Carl Sagan. The movement continues among high-profile scientists today, including Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark. Scientists have founded the major activist and watchdog organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, the Pugwash Conferences, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose cover shows the famous Doomsday Clock, now set at two and a half minutes to midnight.⁶⁹

Physical scientists, unfortunately, often consider themselves experts in political psychology, and many seem to embrace the folk theory that the most effective way to mobilize public opinion is to whip people into a lather of fear and dread. The Doomsday Clock, despite adorning a journal with “Scientists” in its title, does not track objective indicators of nuclear security; rather, it’s a propaganda stunt intended, in the words of its founder, “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality.”⁷⁰ The clock’s minute hand was farther from midnight in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, than it was in the far calmer 2007, in part because the editors, worried that the public had become too complacent, redefined “doomsday” to include climate change.⁷¹ And in their campaign to shake people out of their apathy, scientific experts have made some not-so-prescient predictions:

Only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind.

—Albert Einstein, 1950⁷²

I have a firm belief that unless we have more serious and sober thought on various aspects of the strategic problem . . . we are not going to reach the year 2000—and maybe not even the year 1965—without a cataclysm.

—Herman Kahn, 1960⁷³

Within, at the most, ten years, some of those [nuclear] bombs are going off. I am saying this as responsibly as I can. That is the certainty.

—C. P. Snow, 1961⁷⁴

I am completely certain—there is not the slightest doubt in my mind—that by the year 2000, you [students] will all be dead.

—Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976⁷⁵