How to avoid a nuclear war

Andrew Cockburn quotes a four-star general, Lee Butler, former head of the US Strategic Air Command, and who wrote recently:

Arms control is now relegated to the back burner with hardly a flicker of heat, while current agreements are violated helter-skelter. ...Sad, sad times of the nation and the world, as the bar of civilization is ratcheted back to the perilous era we just escaped by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention. How to start a nuclear war, Andrew Cockburn, 'Harper's Magazine', August

Eric Schlosser's Command and Control, bears this out, with its alarming tales of accidents and blunders that came close to bringing about catastrophe during the Cold War. It's quite disturbing how little incentive the people in control, at all levels, have to think about the potential impacts on society rather than on themselves or the organisation of which they were part.

The goal of sustained nuclear peace makes an ideal target for the Social Policy Bond idea. It's a complex, long-term goal that will require diverse, adaptive solutions. It's a goal that, from all indications, is unlikely to be reached under current policy. And it's an easy goal to verify.

My proposal would be to issue bonds that reward a sustained period of nuclear peace. This could be defined, as, say the non-detonation of a nuclear device that kills more than 50 people for 30 years. They could be backed by a combination of governments, non-governmental organisations, philanthropists and members of the public. With sufficient backing the bonds would help offset and (one hopes) outweigh the the incentives currently on offer, which essentially are those of the military and weapons manufacturers to maintain a nuclear posture.

Those billions of us who would benefit from nuclear peace are presumably a massive numerical majority, but we have few means of expressing our wishes in a way that is likely to bring it about. The tendency is to assume that governments will do what's necessary, with the support of hard-working, well-intentioned people in the private sector.
But these people are not rewarded for success, which is not only problematic in itself, but also discourages people from investing in their efforts. More cogently, it's not working.

We need to reward those who achieve nuclear peace at least as much as those working to undermine it. We don't know exactly how to reduce the chances of a nuclear exchange, nor who will be best placed to do so, over the long period during which our goal is to be achieved, but we have no excuse for not encouraging people to find out. Nuclear Peace Bonds would apply the Social Policy Bond principle to this goal. Investors in the bonds would form a protean coalition of people dedicated to achieving it as efficiently as possible. Their goal would be exactly the same as society's. Human ingenuity knows no limits. Currently, too much of it is devoted to relatively unimportant or socially questionable. Nuclear Peace Bonds would encourage some of that ingenuity into helping avoid a global catastrophe.

My short piece on Nuclear Peace Bonds is here. The links in the right-hand column of that page point to papers on similar themes: Conflict Reduction, Disaster Prevention, and Middle East Peace