Today, at the other end of the long trek down the glacier of the
Cold War, the nuclear threat has seemingly calved off and fallen into
the sea. In 2007, the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project
found that 12 countries rated the growing gap between rich and poor as
the greatest danger to the world. HIV/AIDS led the list (or tied) in 16
countries, religious and ethnic hatred in another 12. Pollution was
identified as the greatest menace in 19 countries, while substantial
majorities in 25 countries thought global warming was a "very serious"
problem. Only nine countries considered the spread of nuclear weapons
to be the greatest danger to the world.
The response was very different among nuclear and national security
experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in
2005. This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD
attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real
and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear
attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an
attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though
not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be
carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group
was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to
obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after
obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material.
"The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a
security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the
economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On
September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of
international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close
to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear
weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small
nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people
in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World
War II.
"The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable
future, the United States and other nations will face an existential
threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction."
It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear
exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at
least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and
that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be
Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear
attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I
think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear
attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear
strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the
perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round of
nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however
illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate
our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact
that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do
with those attacks in the name of sending a message.
Richard Butler, the former chairman of the Canberra Commission on
the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and the last chairman of UNSCOM,
often makes the point that the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear
weapons. People don't always understand what he means. He means that it
is the weapons themselves that are the problem, not the values of the
entities that control them. U.S. nuclear weapons are just as
potentially dangerous to the world as, say, North Korean nuclear
weapons. More, I would say, since we have greater numbers of them and
have not hesitated to brandish them--even to use them--when we thought
it in our interest to do so.
That the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons may seem
counterintuitive, but two centuries ago governments began to think that
way about disease, with untold benefits to humanity as a result.
Epidemic disease had been conceived in normative terms, as an act of
God for which states bore no responsibility. The change that came when
disease began to be conceived as a phenomenon of nature without a
metaphysical superstructure, a public health problem, a problem for
government and a measure of government's success, was revolutionary.
More lives were saved, and spared, with public health measures in the
twentieth century in the United States alone than were lost throughout
the world in all of the twentieth century's wars.
As my Scottish friend Gil Elliot wrote in his seminal book Twentieth
Century Book of the Dead, "[These lives] are not saved by accident or
goodwill. Human life is daily deliberately protected from nature by
accepted practices of hygiene and medical care, by the control of
living conditions and the guidance of human relationships. Mortality
statistics are constantly examined to see if the causes of death reveal
any areas needing special attention. Because of the success of these
practices, the area of public death has, in advanced societies, been
taken over by man-made death--once an insignificant or 'merged' part of
the spectrum, now almost the whole.
"When politicians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as
one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigor in
destroying it, they seem to feel they are indicating some mysterious
paradox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The
difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and
secured by the forces of reason; the other has not. The pioneers of
public health did not change nature, or men, but adjusted the active
relationship of men to certain aspects of nature so that the
relationship became one of watchful and healthy respect. In doing so
they had to contend with and struggle against the suspicious opposition
of those who believed that to interfere with nature was sinful, and
even that disease and plague were the result of something sinful in the
nature of man himself."
Elliot goes on to compare what he calls "public death," meaning
biological death, death from disease, to man-made death: "[I do not
wish] to claim mystical authority for the comparison I have made
between two kinds of public death--that which results from disease and
that which we call man-made. The irreducible virtue of the analogy is
that the problem of man-made death, like that of disease, can be
tackled only by reason. It contains the same elements as the problem of
disease--the need to locate the sources of the pest, to devise
preventive measures, and to maintain systematic vigilance in their
execution. But it is a much wider problem, and for obvious reasons
cannot be dealt with by scientific methods to the same extent as can
disease."
To advance the cause of public health it was necessary to
depoliticize disease, to remove it from the realm of value and install
it in the realm of fact. Today we have advanced to the point where
international cooperation toward the prevention, control, and even
elimination of disease is possible among nations that hardly cooperate
with each other in any other way. No one any longer considers disease a
political issue, except to the extent that its control measures a
nation's quality of life, and only modern primitives consider it a
judgment of God.
In 1999, for the first time in human history, infectious diseases no
longer ranked first among causes of death worldwide. Public health, a
discipline which organizes science-based systems of surveillance and
prevention, was primarily responsible for that millennial change in
human mortality. One-half of all the increases in life expectancy in
recorded history occurred within the twentieth century. Most of the
worldwide increase was accomplished in the first half of the century,
and it was almost entirely the result of public health measures
directed to primary prevention. Better nutrition, sewage treatment,
water purification, the pasteurization of milk, and the immunization of
children extended human life--not surgeons cutting or doctors
dispensing pills.
Public health is medicine's greatest success story and a powerful
model for a parallel discipline, which I propose to call public safety.
Where nuclear weapons--the largest-scale instruments of man-made
death--are concerned, the elements of that discipline of public safety
have already begun to assemble themselves: materials control and
accounting, cooperative threat reduction, security guarantees,
agreements and treaties, surveillance and inspection, sanctions,
forceful disarming if all else fails.
Reducing and finally eliminating the world's increasingly vestigial
nuclear arsenals may be delayed by extremists of the right or the left,
as progress was stalled during the George W. Bush administration by
rigid Manichaean ideologues who imagined that there might be good
nuclear powers and evil nuclear powers and sought to disarm only those
they considered evil. Nuclear weapons operate beyond good and evil.
They destroy without discrimination or mercy: Whether one lives or dies
in their operation is entirely a question of distance from ground zero.
In Elliot's eloquent words, they create nations of the dead, and
collectively have the capacity to create a world of the dead. But as
Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist and philosopher, was the first
to realize, the complement of that utter destructiveness must then be
unity in common security, just as it was with smallpox, a fundamental
transformation in relationships between nations, nondiscrimination in
unity not on the dark side but by the light of day.
Violence originates in vulnerability brutalized: It is
vulnerability's corruption, but also its revenge. "Perhaps everything
terrible," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "is in its deepest
being something helpless that wants help from us." As we extend our
commitment to common security, as we work to master man-made death, we
will need to recognize that terrible helplessness and relieve it--in
others, but also in ourselves.
