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

So a common-sense way to reduce the threat of nuclear war is to announce a policy of No First Use.¹²⁵ In theory, this would eliminate the possibility of nuclear war altogether: if no one uses a weapon first, they’ll never be used. In practice, it would remove some of the temptation of a pre-emptive strike. Nuclear weapon states could all agree to No First Use in a treaty; they could get there by GRIT (with incremental commitments like never attacking civilian targets, never attacking a non-nuclear state, and never attacking a target that could be destroyed by conventional means); or they could simply adopt it unilaterally, which is in their own interests.¹²⁶ The nuclear taboo has already reduced the deterrent value of a Maybe First Use policy, and the declarant could still protect itself with conventional forces and with a second-strike capability: nuclear tit for tat.

No First Use seems like a no-brainer, and Barack Obama came close to adopting it in 2016, but was talked out of it at the last minute by his advisors.¹²⁷ The timing wasn’t right, they said; it might signal weakness to a newly obstreperous Russia, China, and North Korea, and it might scare nervous allies who now depend on the American “nuclear umbrella” into seeking nuclear weapons of their own, particularly with Donald Trump threatening to cut back on American support of its coalition partners. In the long term, these tensions may subside, and No First Use may be considered once more.

Nuclear weapons won’t be abolished anytime soon, and certainly not by the original target date of the Global Zero movement, 2030. In his 2009 Prague speech Obama said that the goal “will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime,” which dates it to well after 2055 (see figure 5-1). “It will take patience and persistence,” he advised, and recent developments in the United States and Russia confirm that we’ll need plenty of both.

But the pathway has been laid out. If nuclear warheads continue to be dismantled faster than they are built, if they are taken off a hair trigger and guaranteed not to be used first, and if the trend away from interstate war continues, then by the second half of the century we could end up with small, secure arsenals kept only for mutual deterrence. After a few decades they might deter themselves out of a job. At that point they would seem ludicrous to our grandchildren, who will beat them into plowshares once and for all. During this climbdown we may never reach a point at which the chance of a catastrophe is zero. But each step down can lower the risk, until it is in the range of the other threats to our species’ immortality, like asteroids, supervolcanoes, or an Artificial Intelligence that turns us into paper clips.

CHAPTER 20THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS

Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.¹ When the Enlightenment began, a third of the children born in the richest parts of the world died before their fifth birthday; today, that fate befalls 6 percent of the children in the poorest parts. Their mothers, too, were freed from tragedy: one percent in the richest countries did not live to see their newborns, a rate triple that of the poorest countries today, which continues to fall. In those poor countries, lethal infectious diseases are in steady decline, some of them afflicting just a few dozen people a year, soon to follow smallpox into extinction.

The poor may not always be with us. The world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across the world’s countries and people. The proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost 90 percent to less than 10 percent, and within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this book it could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in most of human history, has vanished from most of the world, and undernourishment and stunting are in steady decline. A century ago, richer countries devoted one percent of their wealth to supporting children, the poor, and the aged; today they spend almost a quarter of it. Most of their poor today are fed, clothed, and sheltered, and have luxuries like smartphones and air-conditioning that used to be unavailable to anyone, rich or poor. Poverty among racial minorities has fallen, and poverty among the elderly has plunged.