Cheese-based dogfood versus WMD

Ending the chapter on Weapons of Mass Destruction in his book, Another Bloody Century, Colin Gray writes:

War, allegedly, can hardly be an instrument of policy if it would entail mass slaughter, especially reciprocal mass slaughter. Alas, that all too reasonable point of view is not correct. Nuclear strategy is not an oxymoron.... [The] persisting lore of war applies no less to WMD than to all other kinds of weapons.

Professor Gray's pessimism is probably justified. The proliferation and use of WMDs seems to be another of those social problems that everybody wants to solve, but for which we are bereft of solutions. With WMD, any solution needs a long lead time. If more and more people begin to see their use as thinkable, then stopping their use become more and more difficult.

There's no clear solution. We need to mobilize the ingenuity of people who, if they weren't busy trying to maximize sales of cheddar-based dogfood, would just as happily devote their talents to reducing the risk of nuclear war. It comes down to incentives. There are excellent people working for a more peaceful world. But we need more of them, and we need them to have more resources at their disposal. Many of our social and environmental problems are currently solved as a byproduct of the private sector and its income- and wealth- generating activities. Others are the responsibility of the public sector which, for whatever reasons, functions by rewarding activities rather than outcomes. This can work, if we know in advance those activities that will ensure the desired outcome. But for seemingly intractable problems, like war, we don't, and that's why Conflict Reduction Bonds could be helpful. Conflict Reduction Bonds would reward people for bringing about peace, however they do so.

There are no easily specified solutions to nuclear proliferation, or the use of WMD, but that's no reason not to encourage people to find them. We need diverse, adaptive programmes - the sort that government or supra-governmental bodies like the United Nations, find hard to support, but that a Conflict Reduction Bond regime would stimulate.