Nuclear weapons and effective defense

Type classification: this is an essay resource.

This essay is on Wikiversity to encourage a wide discussion of the issues it raises moderated by the Wikimedia rules that invite contributors to “be bold but not reckless,” contributing revisions written from a neutral point of view, citing credible sources -- and raising other questions and concerns on the associated '“Discuss”' page.

Both Presidents Obama and Trump worked to renovate the US nuclear arsenal.

However, is there any substantive evidence that the existing nuclear arsenals have ever made any major power safer? If you know of any such evidence, please rewrite this essay -- or at least summarize what you know on the “Discuss” page associated with this article.

Perhaps the most authoritative commentary on this issue is Daniel Ellsberg's book on The Doomsday Machine.^[1] In 1961, a decade before he became famous for releasing the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was planning nuclear wars for the US Department of Defense. He said that at that time, the Pentagon estimated that roughly a third of humanity would likely be killed within six months of a nuclear war,^[2] with 85 percent of those dying during the initial exchange and the rest dying of radiation poisoning in the next six months.^[3] However, this did not consider the near certainty of a nuclear winter, which would likely produce such massive crop failures that roughly 98 percent of those who survived the initial exchange would starve as existing food stores were consumed and not replaced.^[1]

The information from Ellsberg and other sources can be summarized as follows:

1. As long as large nuclear arsenals exist, it is only a question of when, not whether, they will be used -- and such use will likely lead to the destruction of civilization.^[4]

2. There is no feasible scenario under which nuclear weapons could profitably be used.^[5]

3. The use of "only" one nuclear weapon could easily generate a nuclear response by a country not initially involved. The situation could easily spin out of control resulting in substantial destruction of lives and property even in countries not directly involved.^[6] Virtually all large wars like World Wars I and II started small. They grew, because countries not initially involved left the sidelines to support the side they felt was unjustifiably attacked.^[7]

4. The continued possession of nuclear weapons by major powers like the United States entails multiple risks:

4.1. It legitimates their use by people for whom Armageddon and the total destruction of civilization and / or humanity is a desirable goal, e.g., some elements of the Daesh (also known as ISIL).^[8]

4.2. Nuclear war by miscalculation, as has almost happened on multiple occasions, e.g., during the Cuban Missile Crisis^[9] and the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident, which occurred less than a month after the Soviet Union shot down a civilian passenger jet, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, that had strayed into their air space, killing all 269 passengers and crew.^[10]

4.3. Nuclear war initiated without authorization by one or more military personnel with the knowledge and access required to defeat the safeguards and start a nuclear war on their own initiative.^[11]

4.4. It is humanly impossible to design, build and manage any sufficiently complex system, such as a nuclear arsenal, to ultrahigh levels of reliability. Nuclear accidents have happened in the past, including involving nuclear weapons,^[12] and it is only a matter of time before another nuclear accident worse than all previous accidents will occur -- unless all nuclear weapons are destroyed first.^[13]

5. The possession of a few nuclear weapons by minor powers like North Korea may actually enhance their security by deterring threats from other powers.^[14] A leader like Kim Jong-un might use his nuclear weapons if he believes he will likely be killed or overthrown otherwise. (Any existing nuclear power would not need a rocket or aircraft capable of delivering such a nuclear weapon to a target. They could already have one in place delivered by an ocean going vessel waiting to be detonated by a cell phone signal -- or the lack of one.)

If these claims accurately summarize the available evidence on this issue, why are they not more widely known? An answer to this question can be found in the research in human psychology led by Daniel Kahneman, for which he won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. We next discuss this and related research on media funding and governance, followed by suggestions for political action by people all over the world, all of whom could be seriously impacted if not killed outright in a nuclear war.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman noted that everyone makes most decisions quickly and effortlessly based on what comes most readily to mind. This is Kahneman's “fast thinking”. We all make too many decisions every day to do otherwise in most cases.

This becomes a dominant feature of human conflict, because different parties think they know different and conflicting things. Kahneman noted that we are capable of research to discover things we don't know and errors in our understanding -- his “slow thinking”. However, Kahneman and others have found that few people devote enough time to researching and understanding the most important issues they face.

This is exploited by ambitious leaders and by media organizations.

• Every media organization sells changes in the behaviors of its audience to their funders, the people who pay their bills.

Thus, every media organization has a conflict of interest in honestly presenting information that might offend someone with substantive control over its funding -- unless the funding is primarily controlled by the audience, as it was in the first 70 years or so of US history, as discussed in the next section.

Political corruption thrives the world over in part because the mainstream media are either owned or substantially influenced by the beneficiaries of the corruption:

• Political corruption expands to consume the available money.
• The primary restraint on corruption is an adversarial press.

In this regard, a case can be made that the US Postal Service Act of 1792 made a greater contribution to making the US what it is today than the American Revolution. This claim is contrary to the standard narrative of US history and therefore requires evidence.

The first big question of the American Revolution is why it seems so different from other violent revolutions like the French, Latin American, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions as well as the French-Algerian War, the First Indochina War, and the US war in Vietnam? At least by some interpretations, the American Revolution was the only one of these that did NOT replace one brutal repressive system with another. Why?

Also, the land claimed by 13 British colonies in America that declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776, was roughly a third of that of the contemporary Spanish colony of New Spain, most of which became Mexico in 1821. Since then, the US has grown substantially, while Mexico has shrunk. Why?

Simón Bolívar, the acknowledged “Liberator” of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama, complained shortly before he died in 1830 that,

"America is ungovernable. Those who served the revolution have plowed the sea. ... This country will fall unfailingly into the hands of ... tyrants".^[15]

How did the US avoid the level of internal conflict that contributed to the dismemberment of Mexico and other countries after independence?

By some accounts, these differences can be explained by two things:^[16]

1. The British colonies that rebelled in 1776 already had possibly the most advanced democratic culture on the planet at that time: almost 60 percent of adult white males could vote in 1776, and the Revolution did not change that.^[17]

1.1. This democratic culture made it easier for the revolutionaries and the leaders in the early United States to settle their disagreements in ways that maintained their cohesion.

1.2. Because the Revolution had essentially no impact on democracy, it was NOT different in this regard from other violent revolutions of history.^[18] The American Revolution did NOT bring democracy, liberty and justice for all, as suggested by the standard narrative.^[19]

2. Citizen-directed subsidies for newspapers provided by the US Postal Service Act of 1792 helped limit political corruption and encourage literacy, both of which contributed to the cohesion and economic growth of the brand new United States of America.

By contrast, New Spain and its successors, primarily Mexico, had neither a comparable tradition of local self governance nor a comparably subsidized and diverse adversarial press to limit political corruption and facilitate resolution of conflicts that maintained cohesion. These two points provide a plausible explanation for why the US grew by a factor of more than four while Mexico shrank, losing territory in many ways, mostly to the US and to new countries south of Yukatán.^[20]

This is also consistent with the database of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century created by Chenoweth and Stephan. In broad outline, they found that nonviolent revolutions tended to improve the level of democratization, but violent revolutions on average had no statically significant impact on democracy.^[21]

We next look a bit more closely at the US Postal Service Act of 1792.

The US Postal Service Act of 1792 is not well known but may be the single greatest achievement of the men who organized and led the American Revolution: Under this act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny and beyond for a penny and a half, when first class postage was between six and twenty-five cents depending on distance. These were citizen-directed subsidies for media amounting to roughly 0.2 percent of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to media scholars McChesney and Nichols.^[22] This seems to have impacted the evolution of the US political economy during its first 70-100 years in two important ways:

1. It limited political corruption.
2. It encouraged literacy.

Both of these factors tend to increase economic growth.^[23]

Comparing the post-revolutionary experience of the US with that of the other violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts mentioned above suggests the following:

1. Democracy, liberty and justice likely would have advanced quicker if the American revolutionaries had limited themselves to nonviolent actions.^[24]
2. The citizen-directed subsidies for journalism provided by the US Postal Service Act of 1792 and the relative democratic character of the new US likely made substantially greater contributions to extending democracy and justice for all than the violence of the American Revolution.

McChesney and Nichols have further recommended that the US (and presumably other countries) devote 0.2 percent of GDP to citizen-directed subsidies for journalism.^[25] That translates into roughly $100 per person per year in the US.

Any such investment could help educate the public and build trust in the media and in people with different perspectives. Media funded by advertising have an inherent conflict of interest in disseminating honest information: As noted above, they sell changes in audience behaviors to the people who pay their bills. Market forces push them to segment their market, thereby Balkanizing and exploiting the international body politic to benefit the powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Public subsidies for media should be managed to help people everywhere understand why others believe differently, thereby building bridges rather than walls.

This is important, because political and military leaders are generally selected on their ability to win short term political and sometimes military battles. Some of the enemies manufactured in this way last for generations. For example, the US has yet to overcome the destruction of its Civil War.

Effective defense requires media that help build bridges rather than walls.

There are many aspects to effective defense that seem virtually unknown and often denigrated by existing leaders. Some of these are discussed elsewhere, e.g., in the Wikiversity article on “Winning the War on Terror”.

Every individual and group have a right and an obligation to defend themselves. If others use violence, do not assume that the most effective response is also violent, because violence often produces collateral damage that drives people off the sidelines to support the opposition. Indeed, collateral damage that they create is why we fight, but collateral damage that we commit is unfortunate but necessary. This asymmetry helps explain why wars nearly always last longer, cost more, and produce less than any of the leaders initially believed.^[26]

In this section we discuss legislation (1) banning first use, (2) banning a single decision maker, (3) eliminating foreign nuclear weapons, (4) approving the UN nuclear weapons ban, (5) developing a proposed treaty requiring an immediate trade embargo on any country using a nuclear weapon, and (6) levying a national security tax on goods and services coming partly from nuclear nations.

The Markey-Lieu bill on “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017” was introduced into the US Senate by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA)^[27] and the US House by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) as H.R.669^[28] on January 24, 2017. It so far has languished, apart from roughly 500,000 Americans signing petitions supporting it by May 4, 2017.^[29]

On November 15, 2017, House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) introduced H.R. 4415, a different bill that would make it the policy of the United States not to use nuclear weapons first.^[30] This issue was also discussed two days later in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but a report of that discussion did not mention any specific bill.^[31]

Similar legislation has been suggested in the [[w:United Kingdom|UK].^[32]

Citizens in every nuclear democracy could organize and campaign for similar legislation where adequate safeguards of this nature are not already in place.

Especially since the bellicose comments by both Presidents Donald Trump of the US and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, some have suggested that governments should require approval by multiple decision makers before nuclear weapons could be used. This issue was discussed in a symposium organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility in the fall of 2017^[33] and by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 14, 2017.^[34]

Germany has US nuclear weapons on its soil under the control of the German military. This appears to violate the 1990 treaty on German reunification, in which "Germany reaffirmed its renunciation of the manufacture, possession, and control of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons." It is also seems to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Germany is a party.

There has been an active anti-nuclear movement in Germany. They could ask their government for legislation with two provisions:

1. Make it a serious felony for German military personnel to do anything with nuclear weapons.
2. Require the US to remove all such weapons within, say, a month of the passage of such legislation.

Citizens of other countries with foreign nukes could take similar action.

On July 7, 2017, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was approved by the United Nations General Assembly with a vote of 122 in favour, 1 against (Netherlands), and 1 official abstention (Singapore). 69 nations did not vote, among them all of the nuclear weapon states and all NATO members except the Netherlands.

As of 22 September 2017, 53 states have signed the Treaty and three have ratified it. It will become effective if and when at least 50 countries have ratified it.

Citizens of countries that have not signed it can organize to push their governments to do so. In countries that have signed but not ratified it, citizens can lobby for ratification.

In addition to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, countries could also develop a treaty that would require an immediate reaction by all parties to the treaty in response to any report of a nuclear explosion, including the following:

1. The immediate suspension of trade with countries accused of having used a nuclear weapon pending resolution before the International Court of Justice.
2. The temporary confiscation by all countries not accused of such use of all property of citizens of accused countries.
3. Any mutual defense treaty with an accused country would be immediately suspended pending a ruling by the International Court of Justice. Military personnel of an accused country in a non-accused country would be required to leave immediately or place themselves under the command of the military of the host country.
4. Hearings before the International Court of Justice leading to decisions regarding which countries used a nuclear weapon. In these deliberations, citizens of accused countries would be required to recuse themselves, and both accused and aggrieved countries would be invited to present evidence. In these deliberations, the detonation of a nuclear device would be ascribed to the country of origin, whether it was stolen or used legally. There are at least two reasons for not making a distinction between legal and illegal use of nuclear weapons: First, states could secretly order the use of a nuclear weapon while officially denying it. Second, theft of a nuclear weapon indicates a failure of oversight, and that failure should be treated equal to legally authorized use.
5. The Court would be authorized to award both compensatory and punitive damages to be paid from property temporarily confiscated under item “2” above and to return any property not so awarded to the people who owned it before the case was referred to the Court.

The entirety of humanity could suffer greatly from nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea.^[35] If Russia or China chose to respond with some of their nuclear weapons, nuclear fallout could become a major problem for people everywhere.^[36]

Recognizing this, non-nuclear nations could adopt a tax or tariff on trade with nuclear powers, because the mere possession of nuclear weapons by any state, especially a superpower, threatens everyone the world over.

• Allison, Graham (2012). "The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50". Foreign Affairs 91 (4). http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137679/graham-allison/the-cuban-missile-crisis-at-50. Retrieved 9 July 2012. 

• Bacevich, Andrew J. (2008), The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Metropolitan Books, pp. 178–179, ISBN 0805090169.

• Chenoweth, Erica; Stephan, Maria J. (2011), Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Columbia U. Pr., ISBN 978-0-231-15683-7. For their data see, Chenoweth, Erica, NAVCO Data Project, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, retrieved 2017-03-17. For further discussion of this work, see Winning the War on Terror.

• Dunnigan, James F.; Martel, William (1987), How to stop a war: the lessons of two hundred years of war and peace, Doubleday, ISBN 0385240090.

• Ellsberg, Daniel (2017-12-05), The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Bloomsbury USA, ISBN 978-1608196708, retrieved 2017-12-05. See also Ellsberg, Daniel; Goodman, Amy; González, Juan (2017-12-06), Daniel Ellsberg Reveals He was a Nuclear War Planner, Warns of Nuclear Winter & Global Starvation, Democracy Now, retrieved 2017-12-06.

• McChesney, Robert W.; Nichols, John (2016), People get ready: The fight against a jobless economy and a citizenless democracy, Nation Books, ISBN 9781568585215.

• Robert McNamara; James G. Blight (2003). Wilson's ghost: reducing the risk of conflict, killing, and catastrophe in the 21st century (in en). PublicAffairs. Wikidata Q64736611. ISBN 1-58648-143-6. .

• Sagan, Scott D. (1993), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons, Princeton U. Pr., ISBN 0-691-02101-5.