Nobody wants nuclear war. So why is it increasingly likely?

Some recent reporting:lurk

South Korea is again considering developing and manufacturing its own nuclear weapons. The cause is the growing instability of North Korea and South Korean fears that the United States won’t fulfill its pledge to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons if the North attacks South Korea with nukes. source

Of the total global inventory of an estimated 12 512 warheads in January 2023, about 9576 were in military stockpiles for potential use—86 more than in January 2022. source

China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as possibly Russia, are all thought to be increasing their stockpiles. source

There are two things that we can be almost certain about:

1. Very few people want to see a nuclear conflict, and
2.  the chances of a nuclear conflict are rising.

Why the disconnect between what most people want, and what we are very likely to get? In the nuclear policy arena, there is the self-entrenching idea of deterrence. 'If they were ever used they'd be failing in their purpose,' went the caption to a picture of UK nuclear-armed submarines lurking deep in the sea, in an advertisement for naval recruitment. Other countries have them, so we need them too. The logic is persuasive; the cost of not following it incalculably great - possibly. The problem is that very few of us have sufficient incentive to question this logic and to think of alternatives. There are organisations of all sorts, staffed by well-intentioned, hard-working people who do what they can, with their scanty resources, to minimise conflict. But they are institutionally bound to think and act along conventional lines. 

What I propose is that we offer incentives for people to think of alternative approaches, all of which would have as their aim to reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict as efficiently as possible. I have no idea how to halt the drift towards nuclear conflict, but I can suggest that we put in place a system that encourages and rewards people for researching, refining and implementing the most promising of such alternative approaches. 

Nuclear Peace Bonds would be an ideal application of the Social Policy Bond concept, which is a way of rewarding verifiable outcomes that we are currently failing to achieve. In this instance, the targeted outcome could be nuclear peace sustained for thirty years. 'Nuclear peace' could be defined as something like 'the number of people killed within 24 hours by the detonation of a nuclear device is less than 500'. The bonds would reward those who achieve such a sustained period of nuclear peace, whoever they are and however they do so: only the outcome would be stipulated. For a short piece on how Nuclear Peace Bonds would work, please click here. For essays about applying the bonds to conflict in general, click here.

As well as pursuing activities the exact nature of which we cannot anticipate, investors in Nuclear Peace Bonds could do things that cannot be done by existing organisations, constrained as they are by precedent, and their perceived need to maintain their existence and so satisfy the bodies that fund them. So, for example, in today's world, nobody would have any incentive to bribe people close to decision makers in politics or the military to advocate nuclear disarmament. Likewise, an existing body is unlikely to try to get religious extremists to tone down their rhetoric, even if it believed that were the most efficient way of reducing the probability of nuclear conflict. The risk and consequences of exposure and backlash are too great for current institutions to bear. Holders of Nuclear Peace Bonds, however, would not be deterred from whatever actions they think most effective: funds to redeem their bonds could be held in escrow. Once nuclear peace had been achieved and sustained, their reward would be guaranteed.

Make saving the planet profitable

"Making oil is more profitable than saving the planet ..."

...says the headline, accurately. There are many other activities that are more profitable than saving the planet: fomenting conflict, manufacturing, office work, mining...etc. We try to curb some of their most obvious environmentally destructive by-products with taxes and regulation, but we also support activities that destroy the environment - to the tune of $1.8 trillion, annually.

I don't know whether making oil will destroy the planet: there are many negative externalities that accompany oil production and consumption, but there are also many positive externalities. Thus, Alex Epstein writes:

There are many other positive externalities of fossil fuels that are almost never discussed—including ... clear benefits [arising from] warmer temperatures in many places where cold-related deaths far, far exceed heat-related deaths. To not consider these is pure benefit denial, regardless of whether you use a word like “externalities.” Fossil Future, Alex Epstein, 2022

Whether the benefits of oil production and consumption outweigh all its costs to society, to the environment and to the long-term future of the planet can never be calculated in a meaningful way. With such urgent, hugely important and complex issues, I suggest that we set in place a range of acceptable outcomes and reward people for achieving them. These outcomes could be expressed, to take those relevant to oil, in terms of atmospheric composition and human, animal and plant well-being. That means that we should target reductions in polluting gases (not only greenhouse gases) while maintaining acceptable levels of human welfare and indicators of environmental well-being.

Doing that would recognise that there are trade-offs; that rapidly reducing oil production and consumption could drastically reduce the quality of life for millions of people. That is one reason why there's been no discernible progress in actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions:

'Climate activism became a big public cause about halfway along this graph. Notice any effect?' From Riding the Climate Toboggan, John Michael Greer, 6 September

Targeting atmospheric composition and, simultaneously, indicators of planetary well-being would, I think, be less unpopular and more attainable than the current efforts supposedly aimed at reducing climate change. My suggestion is that we achieve our aims by issuing bonds that would be redeemed only when all our targets have been achieved and sustained for some decades. This we could do by applying the Social Policy Bond concept to our targets. We do need, though, some clarity about what we are trying to achieve: do we want to target the Earth's climate, or the impacts of adverse climatic events or  - to take the current focus - the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? At this late stage it's probably best to aim for more immediately verifiable goals, so I suggest that it might be preferable to target atmospheric composition rather than the stability of the climate, which has been the focus of my previous work. If such an application of the Social Policy Bond concept were ever implemented then we'd go some way to making saving the planet more profitable than activities that have, as a by-product, accelerating its destruction.

To be frank, I don't think anything like this will happen. Our political systems are incapable of solving global problems, even if our leaders had the will to do so. The Social Policy Bond concept has, to my knowledge, never been tried, and there are few incentives and commensurately few resources that are channelled into saving the planet. It's sad.