Focusing on nuclear peace

Back in April 2014 just after Russia had annexed Crimea, the London-based think-tank , Chatham House, published a report on the dangers of unintended nuclear conflict: 'The probability of inadvertent nuclear use is not zero and is higher than had been widely considered,' it stated. 'The risk associated with nuclear weapons is high' and 'under-appreciated.'

You don't need to know much about, say, the origins of the First World War to be scared by the possibility that Russia and NATO might be sleepwalking towards a nuclear catastrophe. We could spend a lot of energy trying to allocate blame, but doing so is far less important than striving to reduce the likelihood of such a conflict. There are bodies that are working toward that end, either as their main activity or indirectly, with peace being a hoped-for result of such aims as poverty reduction, climate change mitigation or mass vaccination.

I think, though, that we need to be more focused: a nuclear conflict is one of the worst scenarios imaginable, dwarfing our other serious social and environmental problems. I cannot suggest a way out of any impending nuclear conflict, but what I do propose is that we offer incentives for people to find ways of avoiding such a disaster. Rather than leave everything to the politicians, ideologues, military men and the war-gamers, we could encourage people to back Nuclear Peace Bonds that would be redeemed only when there has been a sustained period of nuclear peace. Backers would contribute to the funds for redemption of the bonds, which would occur only when nuclear peace, defined as, say, the absence of a nuclear detonation that kills more than 100 people, has been sustained for three decades. Backers could comprise any combination of governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations and philanthropists, and their funds could be swelled by contributions from the rest of us.

The maintenance of nuclear peace is an ideal for targeting via the Social Policy Bond concept:

•     it has an unambiguous, verifiable metric,
•     existing policy doesn't seem to be working,
•     nobody now knows the best ways of achieving the goal,
•     the goal is long term, and
  
•     the goal is likely to require a multiplicity of diverse, adaptive approaches.   

Of course, the bond approach can run in parallel with existing efforts. It's likely to channel resources into those bodies whose activities are most promising. It would also encourage new approaches, the precise nature of which we cannot and need not know in advance.