Kicking the (nuclear) can down the road

Sometimes we can achieve a short-term goal only by worsening prospects for the long term. Kicking the can down the road, in other words. It's something we may be doing when it comes to peace:

[I]t’s the same with [Steven] Pinker and war. 2011’s Better Angels of Our Nature argued that violence had been in decline steadily and we are now living in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. It was an absurd book, because it required readers to treat our own era, when thousands of nuclear weapons are stationed around the world ready to be fired, as “peaceful.” This is like saying that if somebody puts a gun to your head, they are being “nonviolent” until they actually fire it. A “Mexican standoff” is “peace” in the Pinker sense. The world's most annoying man, Nathan J Robinson, 'Current Affairs', 29 May

We can't say whether the nuclear weapons deployed over recent decades have increased or decreased the probability of a catastrophic nuclear exchange. But for me the more important question is how do we best ensure nuclear peace now and in the future? At first glance, current trends are encouraging:

The good news is that, as poverty has receded worldwide, the proportion of humankind who die in wars and civil strife has fallen sharply, from nearly four per 100,000 each year in the 1980s to less than one in the past decade. How to think about global warming and war, the 'Economist', 23 May

I wouldn't link poverty with war so unambiguously: there's no proof that poverty leads to war, and we don't really know why war and civil strife have declined, nor anything about whether it will continue to decline, whatever happens to poverty. Again, though, the question is how to ensure that the benign trend continues. It's quite possible that some proportion of the world's nuclear weapons stockpile will be used any time now, and the potential for catastrophic war doesn't seem to have diminished. It's quite possible, as many believe, that piling up nuclear weapons did ensure the peace (for a while). It's also quite possible that these weapons will be used, to catastrophic effect, some time soon. Indeed, the period of 'peace' might in future be seen as nothing more than a period of re-armanent or proliferation: a period during which a future war became more likely and more deadly. We simply don't know.

Conflict reduction makes an ideal application for the Social Policy Bond idea because ending war is one of those complex social goals whose causes (1) cannot be reliably identified, (2) vary considerably according to region, and (3) change with time. But the holders of Conflict Reduction Bonds wouldn't need to go about trying to find and address war's supposed root causes. Their goal would be to keep the peace, by whatever means are most cost-effective. Sometimes, in some places, it might be most efficient to try to identify root causes. Sometimes, in some places, it might be best to reduce the number of weapons in the protagonists' arsenals; in other circumstances it might be better to increase the number of weapons. As with many of our social and environmental ills, we need a mix of diverse, adaptive solutions: exactly the sort of solutions that don't come easily to governments or supra-national bodies like the United Nations. It doesn't help that the employees of these bodies aren't rewarded in ways that encourage long-term success in their peace-keeping mission. We need to be rewarding a sustained period of peace, so that short-term peace is not achieved by kicking the can down the road.

The past few decades have seen a heartening reduction in conflict. But have they merely been the prelude to a catastrophic global conflict? Conflict Reduction Bonds that reward a period of nuclear peace sustained for several decades would put in place a system of incentives that would channel our resources and ingenuity into achieving what must surely be one of our most important goals: the removal of the threat of nuclear catastrophe.