There are many examples of when technological progression outstrips society's ability to adjust swiftly to the social, cultural, economical and political consequences brought about by such change. In the current era, the most visible instance of society's slow rate of adaptation is in response to the Internet and the explosion of social media with positive effects like connecting people around the world clashing with more negative consequences like mental illness and electronic addiction. It's also the same today with climate change, as the fossil-fuel based technologies we built our civilization around are also altering the ecological balance of the planet and threatening more extreme weather events. Nevertheless, underneath these more visible trends that could go towards catastrophe if we fail to take collective responsibility for these issues is a similarly potentially apocalyptic problem: the development of nuclear weapons and the shadowy policy surrounding them. Daniel Ellsberg, who first gained notoriety for leaking the classified Pentagon Papers that revealed a troubled history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, takes on a concurrent investigation into the history of American nuclear policy in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
While having lost the official documents copied alongside the Pentagon Papers to Mother Nature (and having to compensate with recently declassified documents in both American and Russian archives as well as his notes and recollections from his defense work), Ellsberg still gives the reader an important and chilling window into the development of American nuclear policy and the larger geopolitical consequences of secrecy through his time as a government worker and contractor at the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon during the Cold War. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki haven't been the only times America has threatened to or actually used nuclear weapons in order to end a prolonged conflict or prevent one from breaking out in the first place. These weapons have permeated American foreign and military policy (and continue to do so presently) despite a significant reduction of superpowers America and Russia's nuclear arsenals through many international and bilateral nonproliferation treaties primarily due to a hybrid strategic doctrine that has been in vogue since WWII: strategies that deliberately target cities in their capacity as the production centers of the enemy (note: targeting noncombatants is illegal and considered morally reprehensible under international law) in order to end wars quickly with less risk to one side's military and security objectives in combination with the principles of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Having studied theories of decision-making under uncertainty, I found its combination with nuclear weapons in an era of threats of non-state terrorism and continued proliferation (such as President Trump's proposed build-up of America's nuclear arsenal) to be troubling (to put it mildly). This book proved the insanity of trusting the planet's fate to such a strategy. There's a point where the supposed strategic value in MAD is lost because of the vulnerability of these nuclear arsenals to a variety of actors (outside of the state actors possessing nuclear weapons, like the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, Israel, India, and Pakistan) and seemingly random institutional and situational factors.
Starting with the institutional factors, one of the more troubling vulnerabilities of our nuclear infrastructure (known as "the Doomsday Machine") are the seemingly lax security measures around communication and weapons-lock codes that delegate the authority and access to nuclear weapons to many subordinates underneath the president and their commanders (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 274). Centralized control would make a strike on HQ devastating to a nation's response to such a strike, but...this policy also leads to more fingers on the proverbial nuclear button. As for situational factors, Ellsberg found that America's command centers around the world regularly experience communications outages for hours at a time due to atmospheric conditions, which can lead to dangerous assumptions by commanders or individual pilots to go-ahead with a retaliatory nuclear strike after a false alarm in a situation of heightened alarm (such as a runway crash involving a nuclear-armed aircraft on a base where such attack drills are not routine) after not hearing from Washington (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 51). After all, HQ probably couldn't send communications to launch if they'd been destroyed by a nuclear attack (even if it actually was an accident and they are in that narrow window of non-communication with Washington and will regain it soon) and the pilots could then act as if nuclear war was underway. (Did I mention that such orders to launch cannot be taken back, because of military fears of America compromising its ability to survive a nuclear strike because of hesitation by civilian leadership?) Additionally, the same aforementioned communications issues mean a simultaneous, coordinated response to stop a nuclear war from escalating becomes near impossible. Oh and there are poor password protections on the safety locks on the weapons themselves.
Okay, so far we have a nuclear policy in which the U.S. can potentially survive a nuclear war by launching all their weapons first (in order to prevent their defense capabilities from being destroyed), such launch orders (accidental or not) cannot be taken back, and there are a lot of fingers on the red button who are often acting underneath situations of uncertainty and a greater degree of incomplete information than their commanders. (In fact, this naiveté about nuclear war plans and their implications was fostered by the smoke-screen of secrecy about the most sensitive aspects of the plans by the military, leaving the commander-in-chief and lower parts of the military in the dark.) These latter factors all played a role in both known and unknown nuclear crises from Vietnam to Cuba (in the latter, a Russian submarine almost fired a nuclear missile at an American naval group in the area whom they thought was attacking them, the first time humanity came the closest to all-out nuclear war). Ellsberg shows there is no shortage of dangerous situational factors like the latter that can throw off what seems to be the most sound of plans when he zooms out to show that America's use and threatened uses of nuclear weapons has made other countries feel increasingly insecure, essentially pushing them to escalate by developing their own nuclear arsenals and equivalent Doomsday Machines (and then following America's example by engaging in dangerous levels of secrecy about such programs in the name of strategic ambiguity which paradoxically undermines the value of strategic deterrence in doing so as enemies would be in the dark to exactly what an attack on the homeland would do to the other side, making them more confident in their similarly dangerous escalations). Especially dangerous are partially or fully-automated "Dead Hand" systems that would launch all nuclear weapons if HQ were destroyed by a strike, assuring everyone on the planet would die immediately or over time from starvation and fallout. Human error can be catastrophic. Death by automation? Even more dangerous. Both the latter and former penchants for dangerous escalation due to misreadings of various situations is an especially sickening combination.
Bad enough yet? I wish it had stopped there. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project discovered the phenomenas of "atmospheric ignition" and "nuclear winter" (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 17, 275). The latter idea may be one that is more known to the public as it has slipped out into popular culture, in which the smoke and soot from the burning remains of nuclear-bombed cities and other terrestrial sites would be carried into the stratosphere where it would "remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight" leading to mass crop death and starvation by any survivors of the nuclear strikes (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 17). With the development of the more powerful cousin to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki known as the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), the heat generated by such explosions resulting from the fusion of hydrogen atoms (itself a reaction due to the ignition of a fission-based atomic bomb core, which supplies the necessary heat for a fusion reaction) had the theoretical potential to overcome "the Coulomb barrier between atoms of hydrogen in water and nitrogen in the air...and ignite...all the hydrogen in the oceans and set the air around the globe afire" (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 274-275). Cheery thought, eh? I shiver to think if the technology already harnessed for such evil purposes of annihilation starting with the A-bomb through the H-bomb could be "improved" further for another generation of super-weapons.
Ultimately, The Doomsday Machine proves the insanity of relying on ever-expanding arsenals of any weapons, especially nuclear weapons, to preempt war between two or more adversarial parties. Therefore, Ellsberg's concluding non-proliferation message is an important clarion call for the global public, who ideally could put pressure on their policymakers and militaries to dismantle the Doomsday Machines around the world. But can we overcome decades of institutionalized policies that risk annihilation of all life on the planet in the name of potentially securing the chance of survival in a nuclear conflict? Ellsberg acknowledges the seemingly insurmountable odds of overcoming a very profitable venture for existing military-industrial-political complexes, suggesting first a commitment to not launch nuclear weapons preemptively in any situation (a "no first strike" policy), then proceeding in an incremental reduction of nuclear arsenals until they are ultimately eliminated (Ellsberg, 2017 p. 249). This will take an unprecedented effort from all sectors of society to address all threats to life on Earth, from nuclear weapons to climate change. Can we all muster the will to overcome what Friedrich Nietzsche described as the collective "insanity" (read: dangerous group-think) of societies (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 348)? I sure hope so, for our world depends on it.
Works Cited:
Ellsberg, Daniel. (2017). The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury.
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