Nuclear peace: dogs and cats would also win

Nuclear war is as likely as ever, says former defense secretary William Perry

America’s nuclear weapons are thousands of times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago. They’re on hair-trigger alert: ready to be set off by a false alarm, computer malfunction, or by human error. President Trump has the sole authority to start a war that would end civilization as we know it. KCRW, 31 July

That's really all we need to know, though the whole interview is worth a read. Nuclear proliferation demands a multiplicity of approaches. 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.


Government cannot solve the problem, but it could set in place a system of incentives that would encourage a solution - or rather, the necessarily diverse and adaptive array of partial solutions. Government could recognise that, while it doesn't have all the answers, it can at least mobilise the private sector to come up with solutions. Collectively, we have the brainpower and the desire: look at the ingenuity and resources that go into analysing the pet food market, for instance. Or, worse, perhaps, see where even more of our best intellectual resources end up: in the, arguably parasitic, financial services sector. To divert some of our talents away from almost-useless (or worse) activities into reducing the probability of a nuclear conflict would, you might think, be worthwhile. Government could do this by issuing something along the lines of Nuclear Peace 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. If we're misanthropes, with a gloomy view our own species, its worth keeping in mind that nuclear peace would benefit our dogs and cats too.