Nuclear peace or exotic cat food? It's up to us.

So what progress are we making with avoiding a nuclear conflict? In addition to the dangerous fragility of nuclear Pakistan, Joseph Cirincione tells us that the US (and the rest of the world) now face:

(1) a nuclear-armed North Korea; (2) the possibility of a Middle East with several nuclear states, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia among them; (3) the increasing danger of weapons from other countries falling into the hands of terrorist groups, while American-led programs to secure nuclear bomb materials around the world are being neglected; (4) an upsurge in the pursuit of civilian nuclear power by many countries that could put them within reach of nuclear weapons capacity; and (5) the possibility that flaws in US and other command and control systems—including those exposed last August by the unauthorized flight from North Dakota to Louisiana of a B-52 bomber armed with six nuclear bombs —could result in the accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. The greatest threat to us all, 'New York Review of Books', 6 March 2008

I think this crisis is caused by the absence of any clear means of dealing with it. Nuclear proliferation demands a multiplicity of approaches. It cannot command the imagination of, for instance, climate change which, policymakers are convinced, can be addressed by cutting back on our greenhouse gas emissions. That may or may not work, but it is a coherent policy; one that thousands of government officials can work on, and one that all of us can understand whether or not we agree that it's worthwhile. Nuclear proliferation is different. It's probably at least as great a threat to our survival as climate change, but there's no single, over-arching way of dealing with it. Government is especially bad at dealing with issues like this, where solutions are unlikely to come from the limited repertoire of command and control bureaucracy. Unless Government identifies solutions that it can implement, it's discouraged and tends not to follow through. It lacks the imagination to conceive of non-bureaucratic solutions, and it's not keen on relinquishing control. The result is our current perilous position.

But government could deal with the problem. It could recognise that, while it doesn't have all the answers, it can at least mobilise the private sector to come up with solutions. The ingenuity and resources that go into pet food advertising campaigns, for instance, is phenomenal. (See here for cat food 'inspired by the tastes of Tuscany'.) To divert some of them into reducing the probability of a nuclear conflict would surely be a worthwhile initiative. Government could do this by issuing something along the lines of Conflict Resolution Bonds. It would define a set of nuclear peace targets, and back the bonds with rewards to be paid after specified periods during which a nuclear exchange does not occur. Bondholders would be motivated to bring about nuclear peace by whatever means they see as being efficient. They would not be limited to the solutions or activities that only government can implement. With a decent monetary incentive they could bring in our undoubted, boundless ingenuity to remove what is probably one of the greatest threats to our survival.