by Ashutosh Jogalekar
As the saying goes, if you believe only fascists guard borders, then you will ensure that only fascists will guard borders. The same principle applies to scientists working on nuclear weapons. If you believe that only Strangelovian warmongers work on nuclear weapons, you run the risk of ensuring that only such characters will do it.
We can therefore be thankful that there are sane scientists with diverse opinions about America’s nuclear weapons who work on these fiendish creations. And we can be doubly thankful that journalist and writer Sarah Scoles has taken the trouble to write about them in her book, “Countdown”. Scoles has an eye for the interesting, the droll and the ironic. She tours the sites where nuclear weapons have been developed and maintained – most notably America’s national labs – and spends ample time with a handful of scientists and engineers who work with them. She talks at length to these patriotic men and women and paints a revealing portrait of people who, apart from their work, are just…well, people. They have families and hobbies and take their kids to soccer and swim practice. They love to chat up their neighbors and drink wine with them. They love to argue and are well aware of both sides of the debate. They are smart and highly skilled at their trades. Most importantly, while they would like to see a world free of nuclear weapons, they know that until that happens, deterrence is our best bet to keep the peace. They have taken it upon themselves to shoulder that grim responsibility. We should be glad that America’s nuclear weapons are in such safe hands.
But deterrence only works when its reliable. That is where the crux of the problem, and the main narrative of Scoles’s book, lies. You can only deter an adversary if you and the adversary believe that the weapons you are using to deter them work and are foolproof. You can only ensure the workings of a weapon if you test it on a regular basis. And since 1992 after the Cold War ended, the United States has not done any full-scale tests of a nuclear weapon. Doing such tests would be a major destabilizing move against Russia and China, still our most important adversaries when it comes to nuclear weapons. But not doing tests risks reducing the reliability of our nuclear weapons and undermines the very idea of deterrence. Therein lies the dilemma. Read more »
I’m haunted by the enormity of all of that which I’ll never read. This need not be a fear related to those things that nobody can ever read, the missing works of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost poems of Homer; or, those works that were to have been written but which the author neglected to pen, such as Milton’s Arthurian epic. Nor am I even really referring to those titles which I’m expected to have read, but which I doubt I’ll ever get around to flipping through (In Search of Lost Time, Anna Karenina, etc.), and to which my lack of guilt induces more guilt than it does the real thing. No, my anxiety is born from the physical, material, fleshy, thingness of the actual books on my shelves, and my night-stand, and stacked up on the floor of my car’s backseat or wedged next to Trader Joe’s bags and empty pop bottles in my trunk. Like any irredeemable bibliophile, my house is filled with more books than I could ever credibly hope to read before I die (even assuming a relatively long life, which I’m not).
Physicists writing books for the public have faced a longstanding challenge. Either they can write purely popular accounts that explain physics through metaphors and pop culture analogies but then risk oversimplifying key concepts, or they can get into a great deal of technical detail and risk making the book opaque to most readers without specialized training. All scientists face this challenge, but for physicists it’s particularly acute because of the mathematical nature of their field. Especially if you want to explain the two towering achievements of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, you can’t really get away from the math. It seems that physicists are stuck between a rock and a hard place: include math and, as the popular belief goes, every equation risks cutting their readership by half or, exclude math and deprive readers of a deeper understanding. The big question for a physicist who wants to communicate the great ideas of physics to a lay audience without entirely skipping the technical detail thus is, is there a middle ground?
Religion has always had an uneasy relationship with money-making. A lot of religions, at least in principle, are about charity and self-improvement. Money does not directly figure in seeking either of these goals. Yet one has to contend with the stark fact that over the last 500 years or so, Europe and the United States in particular acquired wealth and enabled a rise in people’s standard of living to an extent that was unprecedented in human history. And during the same period, while religiosity in these countries varied there is no doubt, especially in Europe, that religion played a role in people’s everyday lives whose centrality would be hard to imagine today. Could the rise of religion in first Europe and then the United States somehow be connected with the rise of money and especially the free-market system that has brought not just prosperity but freedom to so many of these nations’ citizens? Benjamin Friedman who is a professor of political economy at Harvard explores this fascinating connection in his book “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”. The book is a masterclass on understanding the improbable links between the most secular country in the world and the most economically developed one.
Throughout history there have been prophets of doom and prophets of hope. The prophets of doom are often more visible; the prophets of hope are often more important. The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg is a prophet of hope. For more than ten years he has been questioning the consensus associated with global warming. Lomborg is not a global warming denier but is a skeptic and realist. He does not question the basic facts of global warming or the contribution of human activity to it. He does not deny that global warming will have some bad effects. But he does question the exaggerated claims, he does question whether it’s the only problem worth addressing, he certainly questions the intense politicization of the issue that makes rational discussion hard and he is critical of the measures being proposed by world governments at the expense of better and cheaper ones. Lomborg is a skeptic who respects the other side’s arguments and tries to refute them with data.