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

They are joined by experts such as the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a famous exponent of “realism” in international relations, who predicted in 1979:

In my opinion the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it.⁷⁶

And the journalist Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth ended as follows:

One day—and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon—we will make our choice. Either we will sink into the final coma and end it all or, as I trust and believe, we will awaken to the truth of our peril . . . and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.

This genre of prophecy went out of style when the Cold War ended and humanity had not sunk into the final coma, despite having failed to create a world government or to cleanse the Earth of nuclear weapons. To keep the fear at a boil, activists keep lists of close calls and near-misses intended to show that Armageddon has always been just a glitch away and that humanity has survived only by dint of an uncanny streak of luck.⁷⁷ The lists tend to lump truly dangerous moments, such as a 1983 NATO exercise that some Soviet officers almost mistook for an imminent first strike, with smaller lapses and snafus, such as a 2013 incident in which an off-duty American general who was responsible for nuclear-armed missiles got drunk and acted boorishly toward women during a four-day trip to Russia.⁷⁸ The sequence that would escalate to a nuclear exchange is never laid out, nor are alternative assessments given which might put the episodes in context and lessen the terror.⁷⁹

The message that many antinuclear activists want to convey is “Any day now we will all die horribly unless the world immediately takes measures which it has absolutely no chance of taking.” The effect on the public is about what you would expect: people avoid thinking about the unthinkable, get on with their lives, and hope the experts are wrong. Mentions of “nuclear war” in books and newspapers have steadily declined since the 1980s, and journalists give far more attention to terrorism, inequality, and sundry gaffes and scandals than they do to a threat to the survival of civilization.⁸⁰ The world’s leaders are no more moved. Carl Sagan was a coauthor of the first paper warning of a nuclear winter, and when he campaigned for a nuclear freeze by trying to generate “fear, then belief, then response,” he was advised by an arms-control expert, “If you think that the mere prospect of the end of the world is sufficient to change thinking in Washington and Moscow you clearly haven’t spent much time in either of those places.”⁸¹

In recent decades predictions of an imminent nuclear catastrophe have shifted from war to terrorism, such as when the American diplomat John Negroponte wrote in 2003, “There is a high probability that within two years al-Qaeda will attempt an attack using a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction.”⁸² Though a probabilistic prediction of an event that fails to occur can never be gainsaid, the sheer number of false predictions (Mueller has more than seventy in his collection, with deadlines staggered over several decades) suggests that prognosticators are biased toward scaring people.⁸³ (In 2004, four American political figures wrote an op-ed on the threat of nuclear terrorism entitled “Our Hair Is on Fire.”)⁸⁴ The tactic is dubious. People are easily riled by actual attacks with guns and homemade bombs into supporting repressive measures like domestic surveillance or a ban on Muslim immigration. But predictions of a mushroom cloud on Main Street have aroused little interest in policies to combat nuclear terrorism, such as an international program to control fissile material.

Such backfiring had been predicted by critics of the first nuclear scare campaigns. As early as 1945, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Ultimate perils, however great, have a less lively influence upon the human imagination than immediate resentments and frictions, however small by comparison.”⁸⁵ The historian Paul Boyer found that nuclear alarmism actually encouraged the arms race by scaring the nation into pursuing more and bigger bombs, the better to deter the Soviets.⁸⁶ Even the originator of the Doomsday Clock, Eugene Rabinowitch, came to regret his movement’s strategy: “While trying to frighten men into rationality, scientists have frightened many into abject fear or blind hatred.”⁸⁷

As we saw with climate change, people may be likelier to acknowledge a problem when they have reason to think it is solvable than when they are terrified into numbness and helplessness.⁸⁸ A positive agenda for removing the threat of nuclear war from the human condition would embrace several ideas.