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Just You Wait!

The doomsayers’ answer to failed predictions

This article was originally published in Free Inquiry magazine Vol. 36, No. 6. in September 2016.

If I had to summarize Phil Torres’ thoughtful analysis of the existential threat of terrorism (“There’s No Time to Wait”) in a phrase it would be “just you wait!” So 68 national security experts of the 85 surveyed in 2005 gave the bookmaker’s odds of a terrorist nuclear detonation on American soil by 2015 at an average of 29.2% (and a range of 10 to 50%), but since it didn’t happen what do such failed predictions mean? The odds makers are wrong? Fissile material is hard to procure? Nuclear weapons are difficult to build? Our national security agencies are doing their job? Terrorists are too incompetent to pull it off? No, says Torres, the only reason we escaped the projected decade unscathed by nuclear fallout is…luck! Plain old dumb luck, the same reason we narrowly escaped thermonuclear doomsday for the 45 years of the Cold War.

The “luck” explanation implies that it is only a matter of time before the die come up snake eyes (or double sixes if you prefer) and mushroom clouds are rising above our cities. This is a “just you wait” explanation that doomsayers decry when their predictions fail. It’s a timeframe problem—move the time horizon out far enough and the laws of probability must strike against us. But this assumes that human behavior is subject to the same laws as those governing the roll of die, which it isn’t. It also discounts the game theory strategic efforts during the Cold War such as Mutual Assured Destruction, negotiation, and tit-for-tat reciprocity, all of which were in play during the Cuban Missile Crisis that really did forestall nuclear Armageddon. But luck had little to do with it. Kennedy and Khrushchev and their respective cabinets reasoned their way to a solution to untie the knotted rope each side had helped to tighten. And it sells short the heroic efforts of our intelligence agents who have, to date, prevented the terrorist apocalyptic nuclear scenarios in the offing. (continue reading…)

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Nuclear Nada

Does deterrence prohibit the total abolishment
of nuclear weapons?
magazine cover

When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, we were periodically put through “duck and cover” drills under the risibly ridiculous fantasy that our flimsy wooden desks would protect us from a thermonuclear detonation over Los Angeles. When I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University in 1974, the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, spoke at our campus about the effectiveness of mutual assured destruction (MAD) to deter war. He said that by stockpiling many weapons neither side has anything to gain by initiating a first strike because of the retaliatory capability of both to send the other back to the Paleolithic.

So far MAD has worked. But as Eric Schlosser reveals in his riveting 2013 book Command and Control, there have been dozens of close calls, from the Cuban missile crisis to the Titan II missile explosion in Damascus, Ark. And popular films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove have played out how it could all go terribly wrong, as when General Jack D. Ripper becomes unhinged at the thought of a “Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” and orders a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. (continue reading…)

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