Dwight D. Eisenhower, October 20, 1960
PRESIDENTIAL REFLECTIONS
Dwight D. Eisenhower
President, United States of America; Supreme Commander of NATO Forces (1950-1952); U.S. Army Chief of Staff (1945-1948); Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (1944-1945)
President Graybiel, Mayor Christopher and my fellow Americans, to say that I am grateful for the cordiality of your welcome given to me today by this lovely city and its people is a sheer understatement. My heart is full with thanks to all.
I'm glad to be here this evening to sustain your perfect score as having as a speaker every President of the United States since this club was founded at the beginning of the century. I sincerely hope that my appearance gives you no reason to abandon the practice. Moved by a wisdom developed out of experience, the organizer of this Club devised for their new creation a noble and necessary purpose: better government in their state. Its energizing spark was the belief that - and I take these words from the documents of the time - "California suffers greatly because the best elements of the population fail to cooperate for the common good as effectively as the bad elements cooperate for evil purposes." The dedication of that group and the unremitting efforts of its membership to pursue the course of sound government have remained undue for the almost six decades of the Club's existence.
The word "commonwealth" signifies a group united by common interests. But equally significant is the fact that in the political realm a commonwealth, as Mr. Webster defines it, has come to mean generally, if not always, an association based upon free choice. Tonight, I shall try to apply to some aspects of the world of international affairs the founding principle of this organization, that each state suffered because of the failure of some elements to cooperate as effectively for good as others did for evil.
No group, no matter how well intentioned, can cooperate fruitfully unless there is first established a firm basis of common understanding. This the founders of your club recognized by noting that one of the great difficulties was that different groups in California did not know each other. They were separated at that time by wide areas, and they also distrusted each other. Just as the California of 1903, the year your club was founded, was a far cry from the commonwealth of California today, so the world, as we turned into the twentieth century, is scarcely recognizable as the one we know in 1960.
The multiplication of differences and problems before the international community recalled an old alumnus who returned to visit his college after a half-century absence. Delighted to find one of his old physical science professors still teaching, he was amazed to find him still using the same old questions on examinations that he employed 50 years ago. "Why is this?" the alumnus wanted to know. "Very simple," answered his former teacher. "The questions are the same, but the answers always become different." So today, instead of 53 members in the family of nations, we have 106. Instead of one and a half billion people in the world, we have two and a half billion. Instead of weaponry whose maximum range was a few thousand yards, we have nuclear-tipped missiles that can hurtle 9,000 miles to bring wholesale death and destruction.
Parenthetically, in this particular field our marvelous progress is not measured in decades. Our scientists and government have brought us in a few years from a position of former neglect and indifference to a level of extraordinary efficiency and strength. Here is an example of the absurdity of the allegation that America and its economy and its progress are stagnant. I point out that now we spend on long-range ballistic missiles $10 million a day every day - more than the entire aggregate of all the expenditures for this purpose in all the years from 1945 to 1952. This example could be repeated in a dozen fields.
In 1903, man was still earthbound except for the exploits of a few adventurous balloonists and the Wright brothers, who made their historic flight in December of that year. Today, manmade objects whirl around the sun independent of the Earth's movement. And the same ones will continue to do so for a future measured in millennia. Nineteen hundred and three was the year of the first automobile crossing from San Francisco to New York. It took 64 days, just seven less than it took Columbus to sail from Spain to America. Now, it is not uncommon for air travelers to cross the country twice in a single day.
In the early years of this century, the only impression most voters ever received of a presidential candidate came to them from a printed page. Now, an electronic miracle brings his voice and his face into 40 million living rooms across the land. On all fronts, there have been wrought on the earth great changes that are in themselves important, some almost miraculous. Similar changes are now extending into the celestial regions as well.
Now, in contemplating these great changes and the problems that have followed in their wake, it is essential that we recognize two important truths. First, almost no problem arising between nations today is strictly bilateral. Whether we consider the difficulties arising out of the relationships between Israel and the Arab states or the necessity for our recent embargo on most exports to Cuba, inevitably other nations are affected. We cannot conceive today of an international community operating as a system of bilateral partnerships traveling in unordered and reckless orbit.
Every arrangement we effect with another nation, whether political, commercial or even cultural seems inevitably to have an impact on other societies. Some degree of world coordination and cooperation obviously becomes necessary. The recognized need for a cooperative international community was responsible for the founding, here in this city, of the United Nations in 1945. It has been in some areas remarkably successful. Yet, as in the early days of California, we have found that the mere existence of an appropriate organizational mechanism cannot maintain the law, order and progress so much desired. In the United Nations, we have a charter and agreements supposed to ensure order and avoidance of conflict. But these can be successful only as the understanding and dedication of the members become equal to the task.
A second important truth is that the dimensions of the tasks that lie before us in helping to straighten out this poor old world are so vast and complex as to make it accomplish beyond the capacity of leaders, governments and peoples, except those of experience, inexhaustible strength, patience, understanding and faith. The supreme need of this century is to find a way to produce an effective international order. And the most obvious way to do this is through improvement of the United Nations. Certainly the way is not through domineering empires, the rise and fall of which the world has witnessed for the past 5,000 years, but through a free and mutually beneficial association of missions. To realize such an international order, of course, great leadership is required. It must be a leadership that can see the nations as partners and equals. It must be leadership that accepts responsibility of power, but one that exercises it in a spirit of trusteeship, through just and patient processes of mutual adjustment. It must always base policies upon a clear identification of long-range common interests. Now upon America has fallen the heavy responsibility of providing this kind of leadership. Unmistakably, we are called upon at this precise moment and in the course of human events, to renew and revitalize our efforts to ensure the health and strength of a mighty international commonwealth. Our own conception of an ordered international community conforms roughly to our own political system. The American system presupposes full information and active participation by every citizen in the processes of both local and federal government. The more nearly universal this informed participation, the healthier and stronger is our government, our nation's policy and our entire social structure.
In our complex industrial society, no thoughtful person would contend that every citizen can become truly informed on so many and such perplexing problems of domestic policy as those involving defense, social services, taxation, employment, public debt, budget and inflation. Yet on each of these subjects there is firsthand information and personal experience available in almost section of our nation, and there's a consequence. The average of general understanding is reasonably high, but achievement of a satisfactory level of understanding is far more difficult in the field of foreign affairs.
Consider, for example, Korea, Indochina, the Suez Canal, Quemoy and Matsu, the Middle East, the turmoil in the Caribbean, the Berlin difficulty, the economic development of India or the 15 newly developing nations in Africa. To extend the range and fullness of understanding on foreign affairs, heroic efforts are made here at home by newsgathering and news distributing agents, and by great numbers of private foundations as well as by study, research and educational institutions. But because no substantial segment of our population has had firsthand experience in international affairs, these particular problems are far more likely to excite our emotions and prejudices rather than to inspire a painstaking search for all the facts pertaining to a problem and their relation to each other.
Yet every citizen is becoming more and more vitally effective by the issues of foreign policy, and his need for knowledge grows correspondingly greater. We cannot anticipate any hasty or simple solutions to such a large and complicated problem. But no matter is more urgent than the establishment of an effective working relationship between the American people and their government for the conduct of foreign affairs and assuring munitions security. This problem completely overshadows, at this period of our history, any other we face. As we push ahead to strengthen the partnership of the citizen with his governments, there are, as I see it, some pitfalls to be avoided. First, we must not be afraid to look at ourselves honestly. We must steadily maintain critical self-examination. Our nation must always concern itself with any failure to realize our national and legitimate aspirations. But while maintaining a healthy critical insight, let us not be misled by those who, inexplicably, seem so fond of deprecating the standing, condition and performance of the entire nation.
Surely we must avoid smugness and complacency, but when in the face of a bright record of progress and development we hear some misguided people wail that the United States is stumbling into a status of a second-class power and that our prestige has sunk to an all-time low, we are simply listening to debasement of the truth. Now, related to this irresponsible practice of defacing the true American portrait is the development of an almost compulsive desire to make counterfeit comparisons, especially between our nation and others. Because of different backgrounds and cultures, such comparisons rarely contain any validity whatsoever. The economic and social statistics of a nation cannot be conveniently compared like Olympic track records. Consider a country, the Soviets, for example, rich in natural resources and abundantly stocked with manpower, which through a violent upheaval suddenly emerges from a feudal, agrarian society into a nation with an expanding and centrally controlled industrialism. What about its growth, its rate of economic growth? Obviously, the temple of its economic growth can, for a time, leap ahead at a rate faster than a nation which has long since become highly industrialized. If a village has a single telephone, which in many cases in the world, it does (or even less), the acquisition of another in a single year is a 100 percent increase in growth. In a mature society such increases are necessarily measured in fractions of the whole. Now, in a broader sense, any attempt at comparison between national patterns of economic organization leads to unfortunate and widespread misunderstandings.
The issue today in the supreme effort to build a thriving international community that can live in peace with justice is not merely Capitalism versus Socialism. We believe that our free and socially responsible enterprise has demonstrated definite value to the economy based upon a socialistic pattern of organizations. But we do recognize that those nations whose particular problems lead them to adopt a socialist economy should not be condemned for doing so. What we do contend is that the issue today is not Capitalism versus Socialism, but rather democracy versus dictatorship, the open society against the closed and secret society. Recognition of this fact compels us to warn new and developing nations of the perils of authoritarianism less they gravitate toward communist control because of the seductive promises of immediate benefits.
So we see the vital importance of having a free world understand the true basis of the world struggle. To return to our own country, the problems before us in the conduct of foreign affairs involve an endless flow of concrete decisions upon specific issues. The difficulties involved are infinite. They arise hour-by-hour, in some instances, day-by-day or week-to-week in others. Each problem, of course, will have to be met by those charged with the particular sphere of responsibility. But though this work is one of the duties of government, the citizen cannot abandon its inherent function of critical self-examination of performance. All of us must see that the policy decisions of our government officials are responsive to the needs, objectives, values and historic tendency of the American people. One vital purpose is to see that while meeting the requirements of foreign affairs, we simultaneously sustain our domestic institutions and traditional liberties.
For example, to support progress in our country and indeed throughout the free world, we must make certain that there is no cheapening, no debasement of our currency. Tasks like this impose a heavy but necessary strain upon our citizen. It calls for experience and mature leadership. This is not a task for a leadership that insists upon agitating small points to the neglect of the nation's true good. This is not a task for a leadership that sees the nation as a giant supermarket for the distribution of special favor. This is not a task for any leadership that scorns fiscal integrity and sees no national disadvantage in deficit spending. Nor is it a task for a leadership that, falsely trumpeting an incompetence within the body politic, assigns to a centralized government the responsibility for all progress. It is a task for a leadership which understands that our job today is to intensify the beliefs that made America great, leadership which recognizes that sound policy arises out of the inner wisdom and experience of countless communities and people throughout America, fully capable, as always before, of responding to a summons to greatness.
To return now to the theme of your organization, which I have borrowed tonight, the importance of cooperating effectively for good: I repeat that the central need in all international affairs today is to forge a commonwealth of nations, a United Nations that will steadily strengthen the bonds and build the structure of a true world community that can live in peace with justice. Before us still is the opportunity to take by firm, steady steps practicable action toward the disarmament. The position of the United States remains, as I have often stated, that our appropriate representatives are willing to meet immediately with those of other countries to consider any feasible and enforceable proposal that will lead mankind to outlaw, for all time, the terrifying tools of war.
We have repeatedly made fair and specific proposals to this end. As yet, the Soviets have refused to negotiate seriously on them. In declaring ourselves ever ready to negotiate the problems of disarmament, we ask only that any program advance shall not give military advantage to any particular country and that it assures the right to inspect the armaments of other nations. A disarmament program failing to offer such assurance is a devious device that could only result in raising rather than decreasing the probability of war. Many other serious international disagreements await resolution. We must never retreat from these purposes, even in the face of discouragement, by the wrecking crew antics of those who want to demolish the United Nations.
We know that peace with justice is not just a matter of bringing about the absence of war. Peace is rather a world living its human ideals and aspirations. Now only there is one kind of righteous war, one we must all wage. It is against poverty, illiteracy, and disease. This we shall do, this we propose to do, as we take up our individual tasks without subordinating the national character of our individual societies, because progress will not be found in a superstate run by superpowers. We believe that cooperation and freedom is the way to build the necessary structure for permanent peace.
As I reflect upon the course of American history, I have full confidence that the political genius and wisdom of the American people are equal to their vital responsibility that the world has now conferred upon them. The search for solutions will be a long one, but fortified by a conviction borne with a spirit and with a national strength unmatched by any other, I know the American people will lead the way on the greatest mission upon which we have ever embarked: the establishment of a durable peace with justice. Thank you very much.
| Carl Sagan, February 8, 1985
NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR WINTER
Carl Sagan
Astrophysicist; David Duncan Professor, Cornell University; Founder, The Planetary Society; Author, The Dragons of Eden, Cosmos
Thank you very much, Mr. Arnelle. I'm delighted to be here. There cannot be many organizations on the planet that have had both Alexander Kerensky and Nikita Khrushchev addressing them, and I'm delighted to have a chance to talk with you. I would much prefer to be talking about the topic that Mr. Arnelle mentioned in the beginning of his introduction, namely the possible opportunities the United States, the Soviet Union and the rest of the nations on the planet, in exploring our local swimming hole in space. But I feel that there is an even more urgent topic that I would like to discuss with you, namely, the nuclear sword of Damocles which is hanging by a thread over our heads and about which we have a remarkable opportunity in this generation to make some major and significant changes.
I want to talk to you about nuclear winter, the surprising and unexpected recent discovery that even a relatively small nuclear war may be capable of producing a global climatic catastrophe. And I want to talk just a little bit about the idea of nuclear winter and then something about its implications for policy and what is called doctrine. When it became clear that nuclear winter was a real possibility and that it had what seemed to me significant policy implications, being a newcomer to this field, I felt it was important to talk to senior practitioners of dark arts and see how they would respond to this. And so, an informal meeting was arranged in Washington, in fact, in the capitol, which had some very distinguished figures there, Avrell Harriman and many others. And I presented the ghastly consequences, long-term consequences of nuclear war, which were emerging then from our computer modeling, and went through some of the policy implications, which I will do here for you as well. After I was done with all this, one senior practitioner said that if I thought that the mere prospect of the end of the world was enough to change policies in Washington and in Moscow, I clearly had not much experience in those two cities.
Therefore, bearing in mind this sympathetic criticism, I have to say I'm really delighted at the extent to which nuclear winter has entered the debate on nuclear policy, and not just in the United States and in the Soviet Union, but increasingly worldwide. Okay, so nuclear winter. What is it, how certain is it and so what? Everybody knows nuclear war is bad and for a lot of people their capacity for horror has already been fully saturated by the prompt effects of nuclear war, and telling them that there are catastrophic long-term effects does not rouse much additional concern, since all the concern that's in a lot of people has already been roused or at least that's what some people say.
The prompt effects of nuclear war are well known: the blast, heat, the prompt radiation, mainly neutron and gamma rays, the plumes of poisonous radioactive fallout that have blown downwind of targets. The World Health Organization estimates that in a major nuclear war some 1.1 billion people would be killed outright - 1.1 billion human beings. And another 1.1 billion people would also die if they did not receive prompt medical attention. But, of course, this is extremely unlikely, since the doctors in the hospitals are almost entirely concentrated at the targets. So the prompt effects have a real prospect of killing something like, if you wish to believe the World Health Organization, something like two billion people, almost half the human inhabitants of the planet. And it's certainly not hard to understand that many people think that's bad enough.
What our group has done is to try and calculate for a very wide range of nuclear war scenarios what the longer-term consequences would be. Mainly, we are talking about the attenuation of sunlight by dust and especially smoke from the burning of cities that would follow in the weeks and months after a nuclear war. But also such questions as the depletion of the ozone protective shield, which protects us against ultraviolet radiation from the sun and the generation of clouds of poisonous gases from the burning of modern cities. In our baseline case, we imagined a 5,000-megaton war. There are something like 13,000 megatons in the combined arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. Let me try to give a sense of what these arsenals are.
The global arsenals contain the explosive equivalent of one million Hiroshima bombs. In terms of the energy expended in explosives in the Second World War, you could have a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon before you would exhaust the horrendous power of these global nuclear arsenals. Our baseline case was somewhere between a half and a third of the present nuclear arsenals, but we covered a very large range of possible cases as I mentioned. In this baseline case there was both counter-force and counter-value targeting, that is, targeting against the adversary's retaliatory capability, hardened missile silos, command and control facilities, organizations of national leadership, submarine refurbishing facilities, and the like. But also counter-value attacks in which cities are burned. Both sides claim that they don't intend to target cities, that they're good guys. But it just happens there's this awkward fact that there's a remarkable co-location or proximity of strategic targets with cities. So, in a nuclear war in which only military targets are intended, nevertheless it is very clear and has been repeatedly confirmed by testimony of those who know, including former officials of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, that lots of cities would be destroyed in nuclear war.
Human beings have concentrated burnable materials in the places that they mainly live. And so a nuclear war would produce enormous clouds of dark city smoke, which would rise, merge and spread first in longitude and then in latitude. Even high-yield ground bursts at hardened targets in which, let us imagine, not a single blade of grass is burned would also inject fine dust particles into the stratosphere of the Earth.
In typical cases - in our baseline scenario, for example - we find that the attenuation of sunlight, averaged over the Northern Hemisphere, is down to something like 1 percent sunlight transmitted. That is, at noon it is as dark as - what's a local analogy - Muir Woods at twilight. And the temperature then falls because, after all, it is the sunlight which heats the surface of the Earth, and there is an effect, which I will not go into, in which the greenhouse effect is, in effect, turned off.
Temperatures drop - different people make different estimates - but we estimate ten, 20, 30, 40 degrees on hemispheric average. I point out this is a very large temperature drop. The 1815 explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora produced less than a one-degree temperature drop hemispheric average, and that was enough for the following summer to be called "1800 and froze to death." In New England and in Europe it was called "the year without a summer." A one-degree average Northern Hemisphere temperature drop is enough to eliminate most wheat growing in Canada. A typical ice age temperature is something like eight degrees less than the current ambient temperature. So if we were talking about 10, 20, 30, 40 degrees, we're talking about extraordinary temperature declines larger than any since the tenure of humans on the planet Earth.
Now, not only major nuclear wars involving a third, or a half or two-thirds of the strategic arsenals can produce nuclear winter, but much smaller wars can also, we calculate. By the way, "we" is a group of five of us who are mainly planetary scientists who got into this by a most circuitous and accidental route and let me mention who the others are. They're all Californians except myself. I'm also partly a Californian and lived here for some years in the '60s. Richard Turco from Marina Del Rey, California, and from the NASA Ames Research Center, down the Peninsula. Brian Toon, Tom Ackerman, and Jim Pollack.
As I was saying, much smaller nuclear wars we calculate can produce major nuclear winter effects and we calculate that a nuclear war, with less than 1 percent of the strategic inventories will do it, provided cities are targeted. You burn a hundred downtowns and it looks as if you generate nuclear winter. The prevailing wisdom used to be that nuclear war conducted at northern mid-latitudes would have its effects confined to northern mid-latitudes. But we now discover that the heating of the fine, dark particles aloft propels them into the Southern Hemisphere with the consequence that nuclear winter is almost certainly a global, not a regional, effect.
Now, if you imagine all of these put together: the infrastructure of the society utterly destroyed by the prompt effects, billions of people wiped out immediately, the civic and sanitary services, medical facilities, water, electricity, communication, transportation all wiped out. The sun, in effect, turned off. The temperatures dropping much more than they do in winter, although winter is enough. Water supplies frozen to a depth of meters. A deadly smog of poison gases spreading out over the countryside. Radioactive fallout in dangerous quantities, dangerous enough to compromise the human immune system, falling over most of the Northern Hemisphere. The destruction of agriculture and food supplies. The inability to grow a new harvest. With the effects, as I say, propagating into equatorial and Southern Hemisphere regions, you have a ghastly, grizzly picture of what is in store for us if we are so foolish as to permit a nuclear war, even a small one, to occur.
Now, a group of distinguished biologists, some 20 of them, have examined the biological consequences of such a nuclear war, of such a nuclear winter with an eye towards the fragility of the global ecosystem, and conclude that under the circumstances that I've just described, massive species extinctions, not just deaths but extinctions, wiping out every last member of the given species, are likely. And, if you think of the interrelatedness of life on the planet, how dependent we are on plants and animals, to say nothing of industries that most of us never even see, you have some sense of how in the years, decades and centuries following such a nuclear war, the human community might dwindle first to a medieval kind of subsistence level and then back to still earlier levels with the human population falling to prehistoric values and the biologists emphasize that the extinction of the human species cannot be excluded under these circumstances.
Now, this is serious stuff. Extinction is forever. Extinction undoes the lives, makes pointless the lives of all of our ancestors, of everyone who came before us, of all of those 40,000 generations of humans whose accomplishments we are the beneficiary of. And it also undoes the lives of all those humans who might come after us if we do not permit nuclear war to occur. I claim that there is a new set of stakes that nuclear winter has introduced. The stakes are simply much higher than was ever realized before. Now, how certain are these results?
Briefly, the National Academy of Sciences in a recent report says that nuclear winter is at least a "clear possibility." There has been a lot of debate about whether the temperature decline is ten degrees or 20 degrees or 30 degrees, but I stress that an ice age has a typical temperature decline of some six or eight degrees. Now, if you are faced with even a small probability of an absolutely major disaster, you take steps. If the floodwaters are rising and the levees and dams are clearly insufficient, you do not say the probability of a massive flood is, I guess, small, so I will ignore this subject. If there is even a small chance of a major catastrophe, you take steps. Insurance companies know this very well; actuarial statistics work along these lines exactly. You don't say I have nothing to worry about because there's only a small probability of the undesired event. You say, how improbable is the event, how bad would it be, and it's the multiplication of those two factors that determines what insurance premium you're willing to pay. If there is a very small chance that your house will be washed away, at the very least you take a suitable insurance policy and if you're wise, you encourage the local officials to start refurbishing levees and dams. That is, I maintain, the situation that faces us here.
Let me first indicate a few of the consequences for policy and doctrine of nuclear winter. Consider first the issue of first strike. First strike is something which has propelled the arms race, has captivated the attention of strategists on both sides, and, indeed, terrified both the United States and the Soviet Union. Each of them is absolutely petrified that the other will one day, in a slowly escalating crisis or in a bolt from the blue, attempt to strategically disarm the adversary by making a massive strike against their retaliatory capability.
Now, this concern on some level is misplaced because both sides have an invulnerable retaliatory capability as it is. Submarines will survive a first strike. Aircraft aloft will survive a first strike, enough of them, at any rate, to provide an absolutely devastating response after a first strike. But, consider the implications in nuclear winter for first strike, what does it say? Suppose you have two countries, country A and country B, never mind who they are. And country A, for whatever reason, inadvertence or malice, launches a devastating first strike against the land-based strategic arm of its adversary and suppose that country B, for whatever reason, does not retaliate, does not defend itself, simply sits there and takes it. What happens? What happens is that an immense cloud of soot and dust rises over country B, is carried in something like ten days by the prevailing winds halfway around the planet, and nuclear winter ten days later then visits its devastation on the aggressor nation. Justice is done through the global circulation. It does not depend on exigencies and the psychology of the leaders of the adversary nation. Now, if this is true and if it is recognized as true equally by both the United States and the Soviet Union, it has a very mollifying effect on the contentious superpowers. If they are aware that they will suffer from their own first strike to the tune of national devastation, this should, one would hope, moderate the hotheads on both sides.
We've heard a lot about crisis relocation and civilian shelters, the idea that we will leave the cities and go to a benign and receptive countryside where people will welcome us. And then, a few weeks later when the effects are over, kiss our hosts and tell them we'll write and go back to where we came from. But nuclear winter lasts, as far as we can tell, for months. There are some possibilities it may last for years, and if this crisis relocation ever made sense, which I strongly doubt, it surely no longer makes sense in the light of nuclear winter. And, the same is true for civilian shelters, especially in target areas. Think of what the shelter would have to provide compared to what the nominal contemporary shelters do to hold even a small group for the month or years until nuclear war is over, until nuclear winter is over.
Now another major consequence has to do with other nations, nations far removed from the northern mid-latitude target zone, nations that might have thought they could sit this one out and let the two superpowers wipe each other out, and then these other nations might inherit a planet freed of the uncomfortable presence of these nations that smaller nations feel push them around. Well, that also is an untenable view. You cannot any longer imagine catching an Air New Zealand flight at a time of high crisis. And, as a result, you find in the last year or two a remarkable concern among nations that are unlikely to be nuclear targets about the consequences of nuclear war. Those nations can be utterly destroyed without a single nuclear weapon dropping on their territories. And so, the stakes of nuclear war, as perceived, have now become worldwide, and that is a new element in what the United States and the Soviet Union will have to deal with if they continue their present policies, and my guess is that we will see this to be an increasingly effective leverage force on the major nuclear powers.
Now, you might ask yourself what happens if one nation believes in nuclear winter and the other doesn't. That is, what about an asymmetry of perception, as it is called in the nuclear strategy business, which has, as a major sub-industry, the generation of phrases and acronyms which put emotional distance between the speaker and the subject. An asymmetry of perception, I like to call it a fear gap. What happens if Americans are afraid of nuclear war and Russians aren't? This argument has been used to say, well, let's keep the facts of nuclear war from Americans so that we will not have a fear gap. But it turns out that the Soviet Union has widely reported the results - both of American and of their own scientists - on nuclear winter there have been extensive discussions on Soviet television, in Izvestiya and Pravda and so on. It turns out there is enough fear to go around.
Another question which nuclear winter raises is, What else have we missed? It took almost 40 years from the first nuclear explosion for people to tumble to the fact that nuclear winter was a - I'll use the National Academy's phrase - clear possibility in the wake of nuclear war. Why did it take so long? There are vast establishments in the United States and the Soviet Union and other nations with annual budgets and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars whose job it is to inform national leaders on the consequences of nuclear war. These organizations simply failed. We can talk about why they failed, some people have some ideas, but the main fact is that they failed. And this then raises another very awkward question. What else have we missed? Nuclear war has never happened except for the abortive nuclear war at the end of the Second World War, which used up all the nuclear weapons that existed at the time. We do not have experience with nuclear war. We see that at least one, and in fact, I will argue three or four major effects have been missed. What else has been missed? Whatever it is, we can be reasonably certain that it will not be something that ameliorates the consequences of nuclear war; it will be something that makes things still worse. There is a kind of arrogance that supposes that everything we know is all there is to know, particularly when the stakes are as high as in nuclear war.
Well, I want to draw to a conclusion. I would like to ask you to consider the present arsenals with 55,000 nuclear weapons, with 18,000 of those nuclear weapons in delivery systems which can take them thousands of miles, halfway around the world, to visit instant devastation on human beings on the other side of the planet. Fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons. A single U.S. nuclear submarine can destroy 160 Soviet cities. One submarine sitting silent, undetected, in the ocean depths. But the United States has some 30 such submarines. The Soviet Union has a roughly comparable amount. There are the bomber forces of the two nations: the strategic intercontinental missiles; the intermediate range missiles; cruise missiles; munitions; nuclear weapons fired out of cannons; depth charges; nuclear armed mines; suitcase nuclear weapons, which for all we know are sitting in the embassies all over the world in a basement waiting for orders. Is this a rational way to organize the planet?
If you were a Martian and came to the Earth and knew nothing about the past history of argumentation and dispute among the various contending powers but only knew that here was a nation, a planet that had reasonable people, they were able to build things; they were reasonably smart; they were apparently concerned about their own future. And yet, on this planet, they spend one trillion dollars a year on armaments, while people are starving all over the planet. And they have amassed a grotesque and bloated arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of destroying their global civilization surely, and at least possibly their species. And their response to this is to add each year to this arsenal. What would you think of them? Would you think that they knew what they were doing? Would you think that they truly had their own best interest in mind? I don't think so. I think you would conclude that this was a species that might be smart in some small areas, but in what really counts, they had simply missed the main point.
If we are content with world inventories at this level - ten or a hundred times more than can initiate nuclear winter - we are saying that it's safe to trust the fate of our global civilization and, perhaps, our species to all leaders, civilian and military, of all present and future nuclear powers, and to the command and control efficiency and technical reliability in those nations now and into the indefinite future. We are risking, we are betting our lives on the competence of Soviet computers, among other things. For myself, I would far rather have a world in which the climatic catastrophe cannot happen independent of the vicissitudes of leaders, institutions and machines, independent of the possibility of machine failure and miscommunicated orders and madness in high office. This seems, to me, elementary national patriotism as well as elementary planetary hygiene. There are too many nuclear weapons in the world - they serve no useful purpose. If you like the idea of a mutually assured destruction, a strategic retaliatory force, which discourages the other side from doing something stupid, you can maintain that retaliatory capability at a tiny fraction of the present arsenals. Why do we have so many nuclear weapons in the world? What we clearly have to do is to arrange for a massive, bilateral, verifiable reduction in these instruments of death.
The problem cries out for an ecumenical perspective that rises above "can't" and doctrine and mutual recrimination, however apparently justified, and that at least partly transcends our parochial fealties in time and space. What is urgently required is a coherent, mutually agreed upon, long-term policy for dramatic reductions in nuclear armaments and a deep commitment embracing decades to carry it out. There are no technical difficulties. This is a matter of political will. Our talent, while imperfect, to foresee the future consequences of our present actions and to change our course appropriately is a hallmark of our species. It's one of the chief reasons for our success over the past few million years. Our future depends entirely on how quickly and how broadly we can refine this talent to foresee the future consequences of present actions.
We should plan for and cherish our fragile world as we do our children and our grandchildren. Indeed, there will be no other place for most of them to live. It is nowhere ordained that we must remain in bondage to nuclear weapons forever. Thank you very much.
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