The Nuclear Threat Initiative: A "New Way"?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
Have you seen that powerful made-for-television movie The Day After that depicted a nuclear attack on us and the aftermath? The movie came out in November 1983 and at the time was watched by more than a million of us in the United States, which was some kind of record. More of us watched it than had watched anything on TV before that wasn’t a sporting event.
If you haven’t watched it, you can click the title above and do it now.
Among those who watched The Day After was our president at the time, Ronald Reagan. President Reagan liked movies and watched them a lot. I think watching The Day After in 1983 may well have been what brought him from being someone who in 1981, soon after he took office, had ordered the Pentagon to develop plans for a “limited” nuclear conflict that we would “win” to someone who two years later would join the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit meeting in Geneva in declaring “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Unfortunately, watching The Day After was not an experience that allowed him to team up with Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1986 when Gorbachev proposed at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland that they commit themselves to eliminating nuclear weapons. And do it in the next ten years. President Reagan had instead listened to his scientific and political advisors who believed we should rely on developing a technologically sophisticated and hugely expensive anti-missile system that would render nuclear weapons and their delivery systems “impotent and obsolete.” President Reagan had not listened to the scientists who, like Hans Bethe, had said that trying to develop a system of this kind would be fool’s errand.
Which it was. All that would be necessary to defeat it, as Bethe had pointed out, would be the much less expensive measure of attacking with more missiles and using decoys. What Bethe said is, I believe, still true today when it comes to nuclear weapons delivered by Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, in spite of what are no doubt advances in anti-missile technology. There is no reason to think it will stop being true. And no reason to think its promoters will stop promoting anti-missile technology.
The Day After depicted what it might be like after a nuclear exchange. Very dramatic and graphic stuff. And definitely within the realm of the possible. Nobody disagreed with that, almost nobody. The film itself carried a disclaimer at the end that said that the result of an actual exchange would be worse than what the film had depicted.
Many films about suffering a nuclear attack have some version of the cavalry coming to the rescue at the end. In The Day After, no cavalry comes. There’s no happy ending. The end, we see, is the end.
In 1946, shortly after the beginning of the atomic era, Einstein said, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” He apparently thought that eliminating nuclear weapons would be less a matter of will than of developing a new “mode of thinking.” Maybe not a “new” mode, but one that was fundamentally different from the one that seemed to have us in its grip.
The 2021 Annual Report of the Nuclear Threat Initiative said that to educate and build “political will” to eliminate nuclear weapons, NTI would now make use of the new, or at least newfangled, “social media.” This “social media” did seem to have the ability to create “viral” bursts of interest, or “views” at least. The viral bursts of interest produced seemed as quickly to be forgotten when replaced by the next viral thing. Nothing fundamental had changed. What social media provided seemed to me to be more a matter of distraction than anything else. I suppose NTI had to try to do something with it, but I couldn’t see how social media was going to get us there, to the elimination of nuclear weapons, I mean.
In 2022, NTI released a computer game called Hair Trigger that they said was meant to show how difficult it would be—in spite of how easy we might think it would be—for our political leaders to take our Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles off the terribly risky Cold War “hair trigger” alert they were on, still, thirty years after the end of the Cold War. I’m not a gamer but I tried playing the game. It did show that—mostly because of political problems—taking our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert wouldn’t be as easy as we might think. So where did that leave us?
NTI also got behind something now called Cranes For Our Future. Little origami cranes made out of paper had come to be seen as a symbol of peace. Here’s one:
The cranes had gained global attention thanks to a young girl named Sadako Sasaki. When Sadako was two years old, she was blown out of the window of her house by the Hiroshima bomb. She survived but it was soon apparent that she had suffered radiation poisoning. Inspired by a Japanese tradition, Sadako set out to fold 1,000 paper cranes in the hope that her wish to live would be granted. She was 12 when she died. Accounts differ as to whether she had reached her goal.
The idea of Cranes For Our Future was that every August, the anniversary month of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people around the world would make paper cranes and if possible set them afloat somewhere to show a commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. The practice did spread widely, I’m not sure exactly how widely.
Which of these two projects—the computer game or the folding and floating of the cranes—would do more to advance the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, would you say? I’m guessing a lot of us would choose the computer game. I’d say Cranes for Our Future. It’s an invitation to expand and explore possibilities at least.
In imagination . . . we experience intimations of matters that are glimpsed but only partly seen; our conscious minds obscure them. They resist explicit formulation, because thereby they become something else. This tentative, but rapt, attraction toward something that is not cognised, but at some deep level re-cognised, is not the work of fantasy but of imagination. Imagination is far from certain, of course; but the biggest mistake we could make would be never to trust it—never to believe in it—for fear of being mistaken. For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths, so that reality is for the first time truly present…. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 768
Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. Iain McGilchrist, from Home Page on YouTube’s Channel McGilchrist, retrieved 12/8/23
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
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