Nuclear “optimists” are often portrayed as being naive — e.g., they simply ignore the possibility of accidents, as you wrote. It’s just not true.

Accidents will happen, and when they do lots of people may die.

The argument of nuclear optimists is different: nuclear weapons may have ended once and for all one of the most destructive human activities: major, great power wars of conquest. If so, that achievement may be well worth the continuing risk of accidents or war. You may not think the tradeoff is worth is, which is fine, but don’t mischaracterize the arguments of the other side as ignoring the risk of accidents. (Though I think you and MK are right that Waltz himself understates the risk of accident, in my view.)

I should add that the argument I’ve been making about reducing the likelihood of major wars is an argument that’s particularly appealing to American nuclear “optimists”. In other countries — particularly small ones who live near enemies — the argument is much more visceral and far less abstract: nukes are the final backstop which (nearly) ensures that their lands won’t be overrun, their houses won’t be seized, and their families won’t be killed. Whether you like the Israelis or not, that’s how they see their nukes. It’s why South Korea may want them soon, too. It’s why Iran may want them. For Americans to say that nuclear weapons are an abomination may not be adequately empathetic to the real security problems that others face — others who don’t have the blessings of two big oceans and docile neighbors.

Many people may prefer a world without nukes because of fears of nuclear war, but we should understand what that will do to those who feel weak and vulnerable.

Daryl

Further, I do not see much evidence of their “pacifying effect on world politics” — this may be true from a narrow US/Soviet viewpoint, but not, say, from an Angolan or Vietnamese perspective.

Rather than venting their rage on each other during the Cold War, the superpowers merely destroyed a series of dirt poor, sorry peasant nations in a long series of proxy wars (due to nuclear weapons). If you were a resident of Vietnam or Afghanistan (or even a US GI), nuclear weapons did not necessarily keep you safe.

Lastly, it is not only my viewpoint, but rather also that of the people quoted: Martin Hellman, • Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics • Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, VeriSign Inc. • Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President’s Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board • Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director National Security Agency and Deputy Director CIA • Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University • Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of Food and Drug Administration • Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics.

I suggest you read the linked articles in my earlier message for further details, in case you have not already — they are rather clear eyed as to the dangers of nuclear optimism.

FT: There is an argument that Iran should have nuclear weapons, like at least one of your immediate neighbours [Pakistan].
Salehi: In matters of national security we are not timid. We will assert our intentions. If nuclear weapons would have brought security, we would have announced to the world that we would go after them… We do not think a nuclear Iran would be stronger… If we have weapons of mass destruction we are not going to use them – we cannot. We did not use chemical weapons against Iraq.
Secondly, we do not feel any real threat from our neighbours. Pakistan and the Persian Gulf, we have no particular problems with them, nor with Afghanistan. The only powerful country is Russia in the north, and no matter how many nuclear weapons we had we could not match Russia.
Israel, our next neighbour, we do not consider an entity by itself but as part of the US. Facing Israel means facing the US. We cannot match the US.
We do not have strategic differences with our neighbours, including Turkey.

What’s the evidence that the Iranian leadership values NOTHING in this world? For the nuclear deterrence argument to be undermined by claims of Iranian irrationality, you’d have to convince me that the people in Iran who control the weapons don’t value

(a) their own lives;
(b) their children’s lives;
c their hold on power;
(d) the continued existence of the Iranian state as a political unit;
(e) the Iranian population;
(f) the historic treasures of Persian civilization;
(g) some of the most important religious sites in Shi’ite islam;
(e) more.

Those are the things that would likely be wrecked if Iran got itself into a nuclear war with the United States or Israel. IF Iran’s leaders value NONE of those things, then you’re right that deterrence won’t work. But what’s the evidence of that?

We certainly see examples of people willingly giving their lives for their causes — but that’s not evidence of their irrationality, let alone their leaders’ craziness. When we think of people giving their lives, our minds immediately leap to the murderers who flew planes into buildings on 9/11. But you should also think about the beautiful lines of grave stones at the American Cemetery at Normandy. Many of those men fought in circumstances in which they essentially knew they would die. Almost all US Medal of Honor winners did some act of heroism that essentially guaranteed their own death. But that doesn’t mean that the US leaders don’t care about (a) through (g). Frankly, it’s hard to succeed in the rough-and-tumble politics of authoritarian states if one doesn’t have a pretty sensitive risk / threat meter.

Perhaps FSB is right and Iran wants the bomb because it feels threatened – or perhaps he’s wrong and Iran wants the bomb to help them extend their power in the region. (Or perhaps they don’t want it!) I don’t know — neither do any of us. But as long as Iran’s leaders care dearly for SOMETHING on the list above, they’re not the “irrational” undeterable folks that people often assert.

(When James Baker tried to deter Saddam from using CW or BW in the 1991 war, he seems to have casually turned the conversation to Saddam’s and Tariq Aziz’s children. We all care about something.)

— Daryl

1) The existence of 64 years of non-catastrophe might be a poor basis for extrapolating that nuclear deterrence will always hold in the future if the argument were merely based on that evidence — but this is not merely an inductive argument (ie, one based solely on an observed pattern in the data). Rather, the arguments about nuclear deterrence are also supported by pretty strong deductive arguments about human behavior: if people are remotely sensitive to costs, they will be very unlikely to take actions which vastly increase the odds of triggering massive nuclear retaliation. That’s a pretty reasonable statement — every human I’ve met (though I’ve never wandered through an insane asylum) is sensitive to costs — even my 3 year old son. So we don’t merely have 64 years of non-use to make us expect that deterrence will be pretty robust: that data goes hand-in-hand with a pretty reasonable theory of how the world works.

2) “64 years” understates our evidence. We have 64 years of US behavior, nearly as many years of evidence about Soviet behavior, 20 years of Russian behavior, decades of French and British behavior, same with Indian and Pakistani behavior, and Chinese behavior, and depending on when one starts counting we are accumulating data on NK behavior too. I forgot Israel. There’s even pretty nice variation within that data for type of govt, even religion.

3) Your argument looks only at the risks associated with nuclear deterrence failure. What about accounting for the risks that nuclear deterrence reduces? A deterrence failure that kills 10 million people would be terrible — but how does that tragedy compare with the benefit of avoiding the “missing” great power war of the 2nd half of the 20th century? How many lives will be saved if nuclear deterrence mitigates the mutual fears and dangers associated with China’s rise? Remember that great power war — which killed roughly a hundred million people in the first half of the 20th Century — stopped happening when people developed nukes.

4) Why assume that a deterrence failure would put the survival of the world at stake? In most plausible circumstances — a Pak – India exchange — or a terror attack on Israel (or the US) followed by a dozen or so weapons in response, lots and lots of people would die. It would be a tragedy. But “world at stake” is at the far end of the continuum of possibilities — when we weight the national security benefits of these things, and their pacifying effects on world politics — against the risks, we need to maintain a clear view of the scale of tragedy if nuclear deterrence fails.

— Daryl

Maybe Iran sees that neighbors on either side of it have been attacked by the US.

Maybe Iran sees that Israel has attacked 3 of its neighbors in 3 years: Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria. Before that Iraq too.

Maybe, just maybe, Iran also feels threatened.

Maybe Iran has greater reason to fear the actions of the US and Israel, than Israel has to fear the words of Mr. Ahmedinejad.

Maybe the implications of a nuclear armed Iran will not be so dire.

Maybe, just maybe, the Hidden Imam will return at the End of Days. That will be one party I’d like to be at.

For a more accessible version, see here.

Just like nuclear weapons have kept us safe, the space shuttle programme also kept astronauts safe — until 1986.

Nuclear Optimism (“nuclear weapons keep us safe”) is not based on any statistical analysis and therefore its conclusions are ill-founded, and downright dangerous.

Martin Hellman has an email distribution list where he recently sent the following:
September 7, 2009

How Confident Should a Nuclear Optimist Be?
Martin E. Hellman*

Nuclear optimism is a school of thought which argues that more nuclear weapons make the world safer. Given that our nation and Russia each have around 10,000 such weapons in its arsenal, such thinking is more widespread than might be thought. The following assessment is therefore much more than an academic exercise, and has vital implications for humanity’s future.

In a five-page essay in the September 7 issue of Newsweek, Jonathan Tepperman explains Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb by quoting the dean of nuclear optimism, Prof. Kenneth Waltz: “We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It’s striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states.” Tepperman calls for “coldblooded calculations about just how dangerous possessing them [nuclear weapons] actually is.” This response rises to that challenge and shows that the data used to justify nuclear optimism is highly misleading.

In the same way that life-insurance companies utilize statistical analysis to produce cold blooded projections of fatality rates for individuals, statistics tells us that, to be 95% confident of our statements, we cannot project the last 64 years of nuclear non-use more than 31 years into the future. Even if one drops the required confidence level to 50%, that only increases the time horizon from 31 to 44 years. And, with the fate of the earth at stake, a higher confidence level would seem appropriate. If we want to be 99% confident about our statements, the 64 years of non-use that we have experienced cannot be used to justify a time horizon of even 14 years. Statistics does not rule out that we might survive significantly longer than these time horizons, but it does say that the data thus far cannot be used to justify such hopes with any degree of confidence.

To understand why we can only be confident of surviving time horizons significantly shorter than the 64 years of non-use already experienced, it helps to consider related “space shuttle optimism” arguments that led to the loss of Challenger and her crew. The engineers who had designed the shuttle’s booster engine tried to delay Challenger’s final launch because the weather that morning was unusually cold, and previous cold weather launches had a higher incidence of partial “burn through” on O-rings designed to seal the booster. But those at NASA responsible for the launch decision suffered from the common misperception that the shuttle’s prior 23 successful launches provided ample evidence that it was safe to proceed with launch number 24. Instead, as we now know, that launch suffered catastrophic burn through of the O-rings, with resultant loss of the shuttle and her entire crew.

NASA’s optimistic reasoning was literally dead wrong. Even 23 perfect launches would not have provided sufficient evidence to confidently predict success for launch number 24, and previous near misses, in the form of partial O-ring burn through, made optimism even more outrageous and unsupportable. The unassailable, cold blooded conclusion provided by statistics and Challenger’s deadly lesson is that 64 years of nuclear non-use, particularly with near misses such as the Cuban missile crisis, is no cause for nuclear optimism.

* Martin E. Hellman is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. His current project applies risk analysis to nuclear deterrence, and is described in detail at NuclearRisk.org. A summary statement has been endorsed by:

• Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics
• Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, VeriSign Inc.
• Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President’s Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board
• Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director National Security Agency and Deputy Director CIA
• Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
• Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of Food and Drug Administration
• Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
To create greater public awareness of this critical issue, I hope you will forward this email to friends who might be interested and encourage them to sign up for future updates via the JOIN US box at http://nuclearrisk.org/.

RESOURCES:
To better understand the problem and solution check out:
“Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons” at http://www.nuclearrisk.org/soaring_article.php
and
Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.nuclearrisk.org/faq.php.

If you missed earlier emails to the group, they are at http://nuclearrisk.org/resources.php along with other sources of information. Emails #4 and #5 describe recent events which had the potential to produce a crisis comparable to the 1962 Cuban crisis.

Well said. Much more nuanced than my post.

Waltz does pretty well in his debate with Sagan. He hasn’t been proven wrong — yet.

This unfortunately is not the case in Iran, with the mullahs and Ahmadinejad being, to a greater or lesser degree, devoted to bringing about the conditions whereby the Hidden Imam [the Mahdi] might return, only one of the reasons why the country must be prevented from ever obtaining nuclear weapons.