Sunflowers, and reconsidering nuclear war
A couple of weeks ago, I spent some time with the sunflowers at Dix Park. It’s been ungodly hot in Raleigh, so I went early in the morning to avoid the heat. Even then, I worked up a good sweat just walking around and taking pictures. Happily, the sunflowers and a cooperative tiger swallowtail butterfly cheered me up.
In other news, I finally published my first novel. The title is The Book of Bob, the author is Rob Tiller (unaided by either other human or artificial intelligence), and it’s available on Amazon as an ebook. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel in the form of short essays, which is to say it is not easy to categorize by genre. I hesitate to recommend it to the world at large, because some will find parts of it disturbing. But you might like it. It’s intended to be engaging, funny, easy to read, and meaningful.
Among other things, my book reexamines some bad ideas that have big impacts. Since today is the 80th anniversary of the world’s first attack with a nuclear weapon (the US attack on Hiroshima), it seems like a good time to think about an existentially bad idea of our age: the need to stand ready for nuclear war.
We live in a world where there are some 12,000 nuclear warheads – many more than enough to end the world as we know it. Nations with those weapons are now building still more, and some without weapons are working to join them. The nuclear powers are not visibly working on continuing and expanding arms control agreements. Last week, the President took offense at a Tweet from a Russian politician and threatened Russia with a nuclear attack by submarine. Almost certainly Russia raised its defcon threat level in response, bringing us that much closer to World War III.
The prevailing theory for having these weapons is known as mutually assured destruction. The basic idea is that our enemies won’t use them against us because we might reciprocate by incinerating their entire populations. We would take this horrific step even though it would likely be followed by their revenge – incineration of our entire population. That is, across much of the planet, entire populations, including citizens of the US, are forced to serve their own governments as hostages and human shields. The objective of our balancing on this narrow precipice is – guess what? Preventing nuclear war.
There are, to be sure, some other ideas about nuclear warfare that are slightly less crazy. Nuclear powers sometimes imagine that their weapons will allow them to dominate lesser powers. But that never works. The initial US monopoly on nuclear weapons didn’t stop the Soviet Union from taking control of eastern Europe for decades.
More recently, Russia thought that the threat of nuclear annihilation would bring Ukraine to heel. Of course, it didn’t. Israel’s nuclear weapons have not subjugated its enemies. India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have not prevented their continuing conflicts. The massive nuclear arsenal of the United States didn’t prevent us from losing wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, or discourage our adversaries in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Syria, or any other of our military actions since WWII.
So, it’s doubtful whether nuclear weapons have ever achieved any realpolitik objectives. What is not doubtful is that, even assuming the humans managing them are sensible, moral, and careful, accidents will happen. There have been several widely reported incidents of mistaken reports of nuclear attacks, communications breakdowns, plane crashes, submarine collisions, and other events that could have caused a massive disaster. Unless we can find our way to nuclear deescalation, a disastrous accident is all too likely.
Finally, if our situation weren’t already dire enough, the control of the US nuclear arsenal is in the sole and complete control of a single individual – the President. Without getting into the inadequacies of the current President, we can probably agree that even the best of us are subject to intellectual and moral failures. We all make mistakes, especially under intense pressure. In the event of a nuclear crisis, the President would have as little as 15 minutes to make a decision on whether to end the world.
A tiny bit of good news: There has been some good journalism on our nuclear peril recently, including in the Washington Post, which published this good overview and a description of a hypothetical nuclear crisis. There’s even been activity in Congress. Bills have been introduced in the House that, even if they aren’t likely to become law, show that some people are working on the problem.
H.R. 1888 is titled “A bill to direct the United States to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and convert nuclear weapons industry resources and personnel to purposes relating to addressing the climate crisis, and for other purposes.” As the title indicates, this bill would have the US would join the dozens of nations that have already agreed to the prohibition treaty, and would spend the vast resources now wasted on nuclear weapons to mitigate the climate crisis.
In addition, there’s H.R. 669, titled the “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2025.” This one addresses the problem of a runaway president by restricting his or her ability to authorize a first-use nuclear strike. It would require a declaration of war by Congress before such an action can be taken.
Finally, House Resolution 317 “calls on the President to … actively pursue a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative; and … lead a global effort to move the world back from the nuclear brink, halt and reverse a global nuclear arms race, and prevent nuclear war ….” Trump seems like an unlikely guy to do this, but he really wants a Nobel Peace prize, and accomplishing this would surely put him in the running. So who knows?
H.R. 1888, H.R. 669, and H. Res. 317 are all pending in House committees. If you’re in touch with your Congressperson, please consider him or her them to support these measures.
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