Global anxiety has worsened after the deplorable invasion of Ukraine by Russia. There has been some discussion of the possible use of nuclear weapons somehow occurring as a result of the Ukraine invasion, through some "match thrown in the tinderbox" effect. Supposedly there has been a big spike in sales of potassium iodide pills providing partial protection against radiation. The Ukraine invasion has caused many to remember something that the average person rarely remembers: that Russia and the US are armed with many thousands of nuclear weapons, which at any time could bring the civilized world to ruins.
It is astonishing that so many stopped thinking about nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Between 1960 and 1990 the existence of huge nuclear arsenals was like some huge dark cloud that loomed large in the average person's mental sky. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was widely regarded as a high point of nuclear tension. However, at that time the risk of an all-out nuclear war may not have been so high, because the United States had many times more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union, making it likely the Soviets would avoid a full-scale conflict. But between 1960 and 1980 the Soviet Union produced so many nuclear weapons that it caught up with the United States in terms of its total nuclear arsenal. By about 1980 there were about 50,000 nuclear weapons in existence. The peak came around 1985, when the total number of nuclear weapons climbed to about 65,000.
The threat of nuclear war was on the radar of most informed persons living during that decade. I remember all the publicity that occurred in November, 1983 surrounding a TV movie called The Day After, depicting the horror of a nuclear holocaust. I was so spooked I couldn't watch the whole film, except for turning into one harrowing scene near the end. The scene showed a couple who had been engaged to be married, and the woman had radiation burns all over her face. As I remember it, she was saying to her fiance something like "you can phone me," but the fiance was saying that there were no longer any phones.
The threat of nuclear war loomed large during the rest of the 1980's, but in late 1991 the Soviet Union broke up. Around that time, communism collapsed in Russia, and soon thereafter communism started declining in China. Despite the persistence of a party calling itself communist, communism faded in China, with capitalism flourishing. By the time Bill Clinton was elected US president in 1992, it seemed that the Cold War was over. People began to forget about the world's huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The global stockpile of nuclear weapons went down from about 60,000 in 1990 to about 25,000 in the year 2000, reaching only about 10,000 in the year 2010.
Somehow people largely seemed to forget that there were still enough nuclear weapons to destroy civilization many times over. You don't need an exchange of 50,000 nuclear weapons to create some new Dark Age. An exchange of a mere 1000 weapons would do the trick just fine.
Who is to blame for the decades of terror, in which every young person would frequently wonder whether the current year was his last? The people who got things started were the politicians and the physicists.
The book The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg is a gripping and frightening look at how militarists have put the world not far from destruction by creating machinery of nuclear devastation that has often had inadequate safeguards. Chapter 17 deals with how American nuclear scientists gave the go-ahead for testing a nuclear bomb even though they seemed to have thought there was a real possibility that the bomb might destroy all earthly life by setting the entire atmosphere on fire.
The idea may seem absurd today, but that's only because so many nuclear bombs have been tested, without such a thing happening. Let's consider a scientist judging the question in 1943 or 1944. The idea behind a nuclear bomb is to start a chain reaction. The neutrons of one atom are stripped off by the explosion, and these neutrons travel out into space, hitting other atoms, causing those atoms to lose their neutrons. The process continues over and over again. But when would this chain reaction stop? Before the first atomic bomb was exploded, scientists didn't know.
A scientist in 1944 could have been certain that a nuclear bomb exploded in space would have only caused a limited chain reaction, because eventually neutrons traveling out from the explosion would run into the vacuum of space, causing the nuclear chain reaction to stop. But the earth's atmosphere is not a vacuum. It has many atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. So a scientist around 1944 must have been worried about a terrifying possibility: that a nuclear bomb exploded in the atmosphere would cause a chain reaction that would keep spreading throughout the atmosphere, being fueled by the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere.
One scientist named Hans Bethe thought that such an ignition of the atmosphere was impossible. But we are told on page 276 of Ellsberg's book, “[Enrico] Fermi, in particular, the greatest experimental physicist present, did not agree with Bethe's assurance of impossibility.” On page 279 Ellsberg states, “Nearly every account of the problem of atmospheric ignition describes it, incorrectly, as having been proven to be a non-problem – an impossibility – soon after it first arose in the initial discussion of the theoretical group, or at any rate well before a device was actually detonated.” On page 280 Ellsberg quotes the official historian of the Manhattan Project, David Hawkins:
"Prior to the detonations at the Trinity site, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, Hawkins told me firmly, they never confirmed by theoretical calculations that the chance of atmospheric ignition from any of these was zero. Even if they had, the experimentalists among them would have recognized that the calculations could have been in error or could have failed to take something into account."
The second part of this quote makes a crucial point. Anyone with engineering experience knows that there is usually no way that you can prove on paper that some engineering result will happen or will not happen. The only way to have confidence is to actually do a test. An engineer can go over some blueprints of a bridge with the greatest scrutiny, but that does not prove that the bridge will not collapse when heavy trucks roll over it. A software engineer can subject every line of his source code to great scrutiny, but that does not prove that his program will not crash when users try to use it. When you are doing very complex engineering, the only way to discover whether something bad will happen is by testing. So the idea that the nuclear engineers did some calculations to make them confident that the atmosphere would not explode is erroneous. They could have had no such confidence until a nuclear bomb was actually tested in the atmosphere.
According to one source Ellsberg quotes on page 281, Enrico Fermi (one of the the top physicists working on the atomic bomb) stated the following before the test of the first atomic bomb, referring to an ignition of the atmosphere that would have killed everyone on Earth:
"It would be a miracle if the atmosphere were ignited. I reckon the chance of a miracle to be about ten percent."
Apparently the atomic bomb scientists gambled with the destruction of all of humanity. There is no record that the scientists ever informed any US president about the risk of atmospheric ignition. What the scientists should have done is to refuse to do the finalizing work on the atomic bomb on the grounds that they could not rule out the possibility that igniting an atomic bomb would have destroyed the atmosphere. If they had taken such an approach, nuclear weapons might have never been tested. The atomic bomb was never even necessary for the defeat of Japan. By the time it was used, the US had a naval blockade of Japan and relentless bombing of Japan by conventional bombers, with fire bombing raids so severe that more that 50,000 died on a single night, the night of March 10, 1945. Such non-atomic military pressure would have led to a Japanese surrender (particularly if Japan was informed it could keep its emperor, which the US was late in doing).
After the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945, scientists got busy working on a vastly more lethal weapon: the hydrogen bomb. When the first hydrogen bomb was exploded in 1952, with a destructive force a thousand times greater than that of the first atomic bomb, the ignition of the entire atmosphere (or some similar unexpected side-effect) was again a possibility that could not be excluded prior to the test. Again, our physicists recklessly proceeded down a path that (for all they knew) might well have destroyed every human. Even if you ignore the risk of an atmospheric detonation, there was a whole other reason why scientists were gambling with mankind's destruction: the fact that there is always a risk of a nuclear holocaust in a world packed with H-bombs.
For at least 30 years (between about 1962 and 1992) there occurred what can be called the Long Terror. The Long Terror was the large threat of nuclear war in a world that was accumulating more and more nuclear weapons. It is obvious the physicists and politicians created the Long Terror. What is not so obvious (although rather clearly true) is that biologists and psychologists were guilty of making the Long Terror more of a terror.
Put yourself in the shoes of a person named Jack who reached the age of 18 around 1980 or 1984. Jack may have feared very much that he would never reach the age of 25 or 30, because of the large chance of a nuclear war starting. But if Jack had been properly educated in matters of biology and psychology and the history of human mental experiences, such a terror might have been greatly lessened.
Jack might have learned facts about the enormous organization and functional complexity and fine-tuning of biological organisms, which may have led him to think that he is part of a purposeful universe rather than some mere accident. Jack might have learned about a host of observations by groups such as the Society for Psychical Research, observations that will tend to lead someone to believe he has an immortal soul that survives death. Jack might have learned about many reasons for believing that the brain is utterly inadequate as an explanation for human mental phenomena such as consciousness, understanding, thinking, memory acquisition and instant memory recall. Learning such things, Jack would not have been so terrified during the period of the Long Terror. He might have been worried that his earthly lifespan might be cut short because of the threat of nuclear war. But he would have tended to believe that he was a soul who would survive death.
But during the period from 1960 to 1990 our biologists and psychologists did their best to prevent people from learning such things. Our biologists taught the ludicrous legend that some man in the nineteenth century had figured out that earthly biological effects are all accidental. Because this man knew nothing of the complexity and organization of cells and protein molecules, this legend was as absurd as claiming that the ancient philosopher Plato explained all of our modern electronic devices (something Plato had no knowledge of). Teaching us fables that were never justified by facts, our biologists and psychologists told us that the brain was responsible for all human mental phenomena, hiding from us a great many observations inconsistent with such a dogma. Our biologists and psychologists did their best to hide from us a thousand important and relevant observations contradicting their opinion that humans are merely accidents of nature and their opinion that mind and memory are purely products of the brain. They made sure no such observations were mentioned in their textbooks and essays (or mentioned only in some unfair, misleading way). The diagram below illustrates part of what went on. Our biologists and psychologists should have told us about the blue observations, but told us only about the green observations, using some silly "nothing spooky allowed" rule as their justification. Many of the blue observations were those suggesting that the mind of a human will not perish at death.
The result of all this was that the Long Terror was made so much worse. Learning only cherry-picked observations selected by dogma-spouting professors, many millions of misinformed and authority-indoctrinated people who never should have feared death ended up fearing death, and also feared that some nuclear war might soon kill them and end their minds forever. But thankfully shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, we saw the rise of the Internet. It became easier and easier for people to search for information. Now people can easily discover information that our biologists and psychologists have tried to prevent them from learning about, observations that defy the socially constructed dogmas of such professors.
If biologists and psychologists had properly educated us about the most important facts of biological phenomena and mental phenomena (many of which are very inconsistent with the dogmas of current biologists), the Long Terror's fear might have been lessened. But instead, some biologists got busy with their own risky research programs involving tinkering with genes and playing around with viruses. Some have wondered whether the risk from such research programs may eventually be as high as the risk from nuclear warfare.
The Long Terror persists, and will persist as long as there are thousands of nuclear weapons in the world (or virus-tinkering labs which may pose a comparable risk). Those who fathered or intensified the Long Terror (including those who made it so much more psychologically oppressive) were or are largely professors of academia and other PhD's.
Teachings about the basic nature of life have consequences. Raise a man in a communist regime in which he is taught "the ends justify the means" and that he will never have to answer to some transcendent authority for his actions, and that man may feel free to make some immoral decision such as ordering the invasion of Ukraine. Teach a man that his thoughts are merely chemical activity and that his self is merely the arrangement of some neurons and synapses and that his species is a mere accident of nature, and he may a thousand times tremble at the idea of his earthly death, an idea that would not terrify him if he were better educated. Teach a man to regard some other man as a set of genes rather than a soul, and he may let his mind get stained by racism, and he may even slaughter his fellow humans, claiming his act was a gene-pool improvement. Teach a man the malignant nonsense that he has no free will, and he may cheerfully commit the most horrible crimes, believing that he is not to blame because he had no choice but to act as he acted.
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