Over the summer I attended a meeting of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that challenges conventional green thinking. What appeals to me most about Breakthrough is its optimism, which motivates activism better than pessimism and is warranted by human progress.
But optimism based on denial is counter-productive—which brings me to an exchange I had at the meeting with counter-culture icon Stewart Brand, a Breakthrough Institute senior statesman. When I mentioned my concerns about nuclear weapons, Brand replied that the risks of nuclear war—and even the effects of nuclear detonations—have been exaggerated. If nuclear war breaks out, humanity will bounce back; after all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now flourishing.
In the 2013 pro-nuclear-energy documentary Pandora’s Promise, Brand notes that as a child he was terrified of nuclear weapons, which he ended up conflating with nuclear energy. “You had this very strong residue that this is not primarily an energy source. This is a primarily a weapon that we feel very badly about.” Brand apparently thinks our fears of nuclear weapons—as well as of nuclear energy–have been irrationally inflated.
No doubt some visions of nuclear Armageddon—like the 1959 film On the Beach, in which radiation wipes out humanity—were exaggerated. But those who emphasize our ability to survive nuclear attacks remind me of General “Buck” Turgidson, who in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove assures the U.S. President that the U.S. can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” Turgidson says. “But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”
To grasp the effects of nuclear weapons, check out NUKEMAP, a website created by Stevens historian Alex Wellerstein. NUKEMAP, which calculates the effects of nuclear blasts anywhere in the world, estimates that a Hiroshima-size (15 kiloton) device detonated above Manhattan would kill 263,000 people and injure 512,000.
In the 1950s, the U.S. and Soviet Union developed fusion weapons orders of magnitude more powerful than the fission bombs dropped on Japan. By the early 1960s, the Soviet arsenal included 2.42-megaton, missile-mounted warheads. One detonated above New York today would kill 2,400,000 people and injure about 4 million, according to NUKEMAP.
If you think Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon were excessive, read Wellerstein’s blog post on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In spite of the superiority of U.S. nuclear forces, he notes, “the Soviets still could have easily killed tens of millions in the United States and in Europe” [italics in original]. Wellerstein concludes that the crisis was “even more dangerous than most people realized at the time, and more dangerous than most people know now.”
According to a 2013 report of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in 1962 the U.S.S.R. possessed 3,346 warheads in all, and the U.S. possessed 25,540. Over the next two decades, the average yield of U.S. and Soviet warheads dropped, but the total number of warheads surged to almost 60,000. In 1983, the world came perilously close to nuclear war once again, due to Soviet fears that the U.S. was planning a pre-emptive strike.
Today, the number of U.S. and Russian warheads has fallen to about 16,000. The seven other nuclear-armed states–China, United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—possess another thousand or so weapons.
Reductions in the U.S. and Russian arsenals are heartening, and the likelihood of a massive nuclear war seems greatly reduced. But the U.S. plans to spend $1 trillion to upgrade its nuclear arsenal, money that could be spent on education, health care and clean-energy development. The U.S. plan is also likely to “trigger a response by Russia and China to build up their weapons programs,” Peter Rickwood of the watchdog group “Atomic Reporters” told me last year.
Moreover, a world with even a single nuclear weapon is an unsafe, unstable world. The current Russian arsenal includes the 800-kiloton Topol warhead, one of which, detonated above New York, would kill 1,500,000 people and injure twice as many, according to NUKEMAP. Given the drastic overreaction of the U.S. to the 9/11 attacks, the detonation of even one low-yield device could have devastating political, economic and military consequences.
At the end of Pandora’s Promise, Stewart Brand enthuses over a U.S. program to buy warheads from Russia and turn them into reactor fuel. “Ideally,” he says, “every single nuclear weapon in the world, eventually, can get turned into electricity.”
That’s the kind of optimism I like. Rather than assuring us that we can survive nuclear attacks, optimists such as Stewart Brand should spell out how we can eradicate nuclear weapons once and for all.
We fear nuclear weapons too little, not too much.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
