The end of the nuclear arms race?

Almost forty years have passed since Karl Jaspers published his apocalyptic book The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Mankind, in the midst of one of the most dramatic periods of the Cold War. At the time, little more than thirteen years had passed since August 1945, when, three days apart, two nuclear devices had devastated two Japanese cities and Robert Oppenheimer, one of the scientists responsible for their development, declared: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has abruptly and profoundly altered the nature of the world.”

The German philosopher’s book struck the conscience of the educated world. In agreement with the American scientist, it argued that the atomic bomb had created an entirely new situation and raised the possibility of the total physical disappearance of humanity.

With the Manhattan Project, scientists had come to know sin. Very soon, a large group of the most distinguished among them began the enormous task of raising awareness about the abyss that nuclear weapons and military paranoia had opened beneath civilization.

One of the most effective expressions of the campaign that began in 1945 and remained active for decades was the remarkable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a highly influential forum for scientific and political debate. Its emblematic clock gradually came to represent, through the distance of its hands from midnight, how close the world stood to nuclear catastrophe.

In Who Got Einstein’s Office?, Ed Regis says of Freeman Dyson, the English physicist working at Princeton, that he is almost impossible to classify as a scientist. His interests range from molecular biology to theoretical mathematics, particle physics and the construction of nuclear reactors and spacecraft.

This same man predicted twenty years ago that the abolition of nuclear weapons would not come through a sudden burst of goodwill, but through a slow process of erosion, as the missions for which those weapons had been designed came to be seen as unnecessary and absurd. He has now written a paper on the United States nuclear arsenal based on his direct experience with it. That experience made him feel the precariousness of the human situation firsthand and encouraged him to think seriously about ways of improving his grandchildren’s chances of survival.

Dyson’s conclusion is that this represents a historic milestone marking the end of the nuclear arms race. “This marks the disappearance of nuclear weapons from our thinking about the future. It is a historic change for which we should be deeply grateful. Nuclear danger dominated our thinking for half a century. The nuclear arms race was the central ethical problem of our time.”

How did the nuclear arms race come to an end? Beginning in 1960, three stages can be identified: a scientific one, a military one and a political one.

Scientific competition ceased to be a major challenge between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1960s, once both had developed fully reliable and effective thermonuclear weapons. The military race gradually faded during the 1970s as both sides acquired missiles and submarines that were effectively invulnerable. The political race lost much of its intensity during the 1980s, after it became clear that the enormous nuclear industries were economically and environmentally disastrous for everyone.

Specific treaties accompanied those stages: the 1963 ban on atmospheric testing; the ABM and SALT military agreements of the 1970s; and, in the 1980s, the START agreements, which confirmed the end of the political struggle.

In Dyson’s view, the technical stability now achieved in the nuclear stockpile means that, gradually, as the decades of the twenty-first century pass, these weapons will become increasingly irrelevant to the problems of international order in a hungry and turbulent world.

The day will come when nuclear weapons are regarded as useless relics of a vanished age, like the horses of an aristocratic cavalry regiment kept only for ceremonial purposes.

But this does not confirm Oppenheimer’s self-exculpatory hope that the existence of nuclear weapons would eventually lead to the abolition of war. Conventional weapons —tanks, aircraft and ships— will continue to be produced and sold around the world. The abolition of war does not depend on the obsolescence of nuclear military technology, but on the spiritual and ethical possibilities of the human species.

Even so, we can only welcome the fact that the apocalypse that threatened the planet for half a century through political and military paranoia appears to be fading from the horizon.

To return, in closing, to the period of Jaspers’s apocalyptic book with which this article began: in 1957, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, described by one biographer as “a physicist by profession, a philosopher by passion and a politician against his will,” spoke of the hope for an “immanent ethic of the technological world.” He described the proper attitude toward the atomic threat through a fable, an old story that can serve as the moral of this article.

Three frogs, the story goes, fell into a container filled with milk. The optimistic frog said: “What a beautiful pond!” But when it plunged into the milk, the liquid filled its throat and lungs and it drowned.

The pessimistic frog cried: “I will drown. Nothing can save me!” And indeed, it drowned.

The prudent frog realized that the pessimist was right, but even though it did not know what to do, it refused to give up. It kicked for hours until it felt a soft but solid mass beneath its feet. It had churned the milk into butter, giving itself a firm surface on which to stand. It jumped out of the container and survived.