We are living before the first nuclear exchange. The probability that a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the next few years is, sadly, high. Indeed, looking at the way our species has developed, it seems inevitable.
A world in which North Korea and other small, poor countries acquire
nuclear weapons is not going to be safe for the liberal values under
which most of us, mainly in the west, are lucky enough to live. We can
see the pessimistic scenarios as a clash of civilizations, or a clash of
values, or shifts in geopolitical power, but I choose to see it as a
problem of perverse incentives.
For most of the people in
politics, holding on to power, or increasing it, is an end in itself. Solution of social problems
can be a means to that end but whipping up nationalistic
fervour at the expense of improving your citizens' well being can
work just as well, with the Russian leader being the current obvious example. Our political systems reward those most adept at acquiring power. Threatening the use of nuclear weapons is one way in which a regime can hold on to that power.
What can ordinary people - those of us who are content not to have the power to kill millions of human beings - do, faced with the realistic possibility that the nuclear taboo will be violoated some time soon? My suggestion is that we issue World Peace Bonds.
These bonds would be redeemable for a fixed sum only when a targeted
array of indicators of peace had been achieved and sustained for a long
period. They would reward people who do what they can to end violence.
Backed by a combination of governments, non-governmental organizations,
philanthropists and ordinary people, they would encourage a vast number
of peace-generating approaches. Some would inevitably fail; the way the
market for the bonds would work means that these efforts would be
terminated and resources diverted into more promising initiatives.
The effect of World Peace Bonds would be to give incentives to
accelerate and guide our progress toward a less violent world more
efficiently than has happened so far: a protracted, haphazard and bloody
path that has, true, given us a less violent world until now, but also one that
has left us fearful of self-induced catastrophe. We can do better than
that. By acknowledging that not all approaches are going to work, and
supplying incentives for those that do, we can guide and accelerate
evolutionary processes to bring about, quickly and efficiently, what is
surely our most urgent goal: world peace
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