The Nuclear Threat Initiative and Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: What's Holding Things Up? Ignorance? Complacency?
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 other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the danger. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021)
In 2021, in its twentieth anniversary year, the Nuclear Threat Initiative recommitted itself to building the “political will” to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
If a lack of “political will” is the problem, what do we think accounts for it? Is it a matter of simple ignorance? If so, we might like to think that a program of “education” is what would correct it. From its founding in 2001, the Nuclear Threat Initiative had been committed to education about the nuclear threat. It still is.
When it comes to “education,” I think we need to recognize some wrinkles.
Education is not “training.” It is not a matter of simply providing information. Nor is it a matter of “conditioning.” It should not amount to “indoctrination” but it does call for what the Ancient Greeks called “metanoia,” a change in minds.
I was a college teacher. I know that before education can change anything, the “students” must realize that they have something to learn, something that matters to them, something they are at least curious about and open to. Developing that state of mind may be the biggest challenge for a teacher. Except with young children, who haven’t learned better.
Later, ignorance can come, not simply from a lack of information, but from not being open to information that doesn’t fit what we already believe—not just not wanting to know but wanting not to know. If we are too scared or if our livelihood depends on the maintenance of “the nuclear enterprise”—and at this point a great many livelihoods in the United States do—we may be among those who want not to know.
Learning can trouble certainties. Sometimes we would rather be certain and wrong than to recognize the uncertainties of truth. The uncertainties of truth? Isn’t truth what we have found to be certain? Not according to Iain McGilchrist (and other important philosophers). “The more certain our knowledge, the less we know,” McGilchrist has written. Of that, he went on to say, he was as certain as he was of anything.
Complacency can be an obstacle. As far as I know, complacency about nuclear weapons has never been encountered among those who survived the attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those called by the Japanese the hibakusha, which translates, I’m told, as “the people of the bomb.” The hibakusha may or may not attempt to describe for the rest of us their experience of the atomic bomb. Doing justice to our experience in words is never easy. It may not be possible ever, let alone in a case like this.
From what I know, what the hibakusha say most often is that the weapons must never be used again. Simply that.
What about those who haven’t survived an attack but have witnessed an above-ground test of a nuclear weapon?
Here I will re-post part of an entry I posted in You Might Want to Know on April 16, 2021. That entry asked if any of our presidents had ever witnessed a detonation in the atmosphere. The answer, you may remember, is that none ever has. If the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty ratified in 1963 during the Kennedy administration holds, none ever will. Unless we are attacked with nuclear weapons. Which, as long as nuclear weapons exist, could, of course, happen.
The entry from You Might Want to Know I’ll quote from here tells a story about the man who may have witnessed more detonations in the atmosphere than anyone, Harold Agnew.
Among actual witnesses of above-ground nuclear detonations, Harold Agnew must have been unique. As a recent college graduate, he had been present on December 2, 1942 when the first nuclear chain reaction—a controlled nuclear chain reaction in this case—was achieved under the football stands at the University of Chicago in Enrico Fermi’s Pile-1, which Agnew had helped build. Three years later, Agnew was present at Trinity, the first test on earth of an atomic bomb. Less than a month after that, from The Great Artiste, the B-29 that flew with the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, Agnew took the movies of the mushroom cloud over the city that are the only pictures we have from the air of the event. Three days later, at our base on Tinian Island, he helped assemble Fat Man, the bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki. You may have seen the photograph of him at the base on Tinian carrying in one hand the small reinforced metal box that contained the grapefruit-sized plutonium core for the Nagasaki bomb.
The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, and the Nagasaki bomb, Fat Man, were small bombs by today’s standards. In the 1950’s, however, Agnew also witnessed most of the major hydrogen bomb tests conducted at our Pacific Proving Ground, including the biggest one, Castle Bravo, in 1954, that yielded fifteen megatons.
As far as I know, he is the only person who witnessed all that.
From July 1970 to 1979, Agnew served as the third director (following J. Robert Oppenheimer and Norris Bradbury) of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos was where our first atomic bombs were designed, and then the place where most of our nuclear weapons were designed over the years.
In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 8, 1977, Agnew testified
…I firmly believe that if every five years the world’s major political leaders were required to witness the in-air detonation of a multimegaton warhead, progress on meaningful arms control measures would be speeded up appreciably.
In 1984, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, he added that every leader should be in his underwear for the experience “so he feels the heat and understands just what he’s screwing around with….”
Many of us, especially if we belong to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, would find it hard to support Agnew’s suggestion. The radioactive fallout from any “in-air detonation of a multi-megaton warhead” would mean some people would die before their time because of the fallout produced. That is a big reason why the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was agreed to in 1963. It might not be okay with members of the Physicians for Social Responsibility even if we consented to take the risk of being one of those who died early.
Also, would convincing the “major political leaders” be all that was needed to get to elimination? What if the rest of us aren’t convinced? What if the leaders believe, as President Reagan seems to have, that a means of defense can be developed that renders the weapons “impotent and obsolete”?
So what else might cure complacency, not just in major political leaders but in the rest of us, if that is what is keeping us from developing the “political will” that is needed to commit to eliminating nuclear weapons?
How about the detonation of a nuclear device in an American city by some of those undeterrable terrorists? Followed by threats to detonate other devices hidden in other cities? That’s the very real possibility that the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s first film, Last Best Chance, released in 2007, had wanted to warn us about. A possibility we have no reason to think has become less likely in our time.
But if that were what cured our complacency, what would the complacency be replaced by? Something better? Or would it be replaced by panic, chaos, followed by military rule, and eventually, perhaps, by hellish a world like that imagined in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road?
No way of knowing, is there?
We’ll know when we know.
Next: The Will But No 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 other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.