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

Fears of runaway nuclear proliferation have also proven to be exaggerated. Contrary to predictions in the 1960s that there would soon be twenty-five or thirty nuclear states, fifty years later there are nine.⁹⁶ During that half-century four countries have un-proliferated by relinquishing nuclear weapons (South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus), and another sixteen pursued them but thought the better of it, most recently Libya and Iran. For the first time since 1946, no non-nuclear state is known to be developing nuclear weapons.⁹⁷ True, the thought of Kim Jong-un with nukes is alarming, but the world has survived half-mad despots with nuclear weapons before, namely Stalin and Mao, who were deterred from using them, or, more likely, never felt the need. Keeping a cool head about proliferation is not just good for one’s mental health. It can prevent nations from stumbling into disastrous preventive wars, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the possible war between Iran and the United States or Israel that was much discussed around the end of that decade.

Tremulous speculations about terrorists stealing a nuclear weapon or building one in their garage and smuggling it into the country in a suitcase or shipping container have also been scrutinized by cooler heads, including Michael Levi in On Nuclear Terrorism, John Mueller in Atomic Obsession and Overblown, Richard Muller in Physics for Future Presidents, and Richard Rhodes in Twilight of the Bombs. Joining them is the statesman Gareth Evans, an authority on nuclear proliferation and disarmament, who in 2015 delivered the seventieth-anniversary keynote lecture at the Annual Clock Symposium of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled “Restoring Reason to the Nuclear Debate.”

At the risk of sounding complacent—and I am not—I have to say that [nuclear security], too, would benefit by being conducted a little less emotionally, and a little more calmly and rationally, than has tended to be the case.

While the engineering know-how required to build a basic fission device like the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb is readily available, highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium are not at all easily accessible, and to assemble and maintain—for a long period, out of sight of the huge intelligence and law enforcement resources that are now being devoted to this threat worldwide—the team of criminal operatives, scientists and engineers necessary to acquire the components of, build and deliver such a weapon would be a formidably difficult undertaking.⁹⁸

Now that we’ve all calmed down a bit, the next step in a positive agenda for reducing the nuclear threat is to divest the weapons of their ghoulish glamour, starting with the Greek tragedy in which they have starred. Nuclear weapons technology is not the culmination of the ascent of human mastery over the forces of nature. It is a mess we blundered into because of vicissitudes of history and that we now must figure out how to extricate ourselves from. The Manhattan Project grew out of the fear that the Germans were developing a nuclear weapon, and it attracted scientists for reasons explained by the psychologist George Miller, who had worked on another wartime research project: “My generation saw the war against Hitler as a war of good against evil; any able-bodied young man could stomach the shame of civilian clothes only from an inner conviction that what he was doing instead would contribute even more to ultimate victory.”⁹⁹ Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes. Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible. All kinds of weapons have been dreamed up that never saw the light of day: death rays, battlestars, fleets of planes that blanket cities with poison gas like cropdusters, and cracked schemes for “geophysical warfare” such as weaponizing the weather, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, the ozone layer, asteroids, solar flares, and the Van Allen radiation belts.¹⁰⁰ In an alternative history of the 20th century, nuclear weapons might have struck people as equally bizarre.

Nor do nuclear weapons deserve credit for ending World War II or cementing the Long Peace that followed it—two arguments that repeatedly come up to suggest that nuclear weapons are good things rather than bad things. Most historians today believe that Japan surrendered not because of the atomic bombings, whose devastation was no greater than that from the firebombings of sixty other Japanese cities, but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the Soviet Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.¹⁰¹