nuclear taboo

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Calling nuclear powers’ bluff: Ray, 1989, p. 430; Huth & Russett, 1984; Kugler, 1984; Gochman & Maoz, 1984, pp. 613–15. 197. Nuclear taboo: Schelling, 2000, 2005; Tannenwald, 2005b. 198. Neutron bomb compatible with just war: Tannenwald, 2005b, p. 31. 199. Not quite a taboo: Paul, 2009; Tannenwald, 2005b. 200. Daisy ad: “Daisy: The Complete History of an Infamous and Iconic Ad,” http://www.conelrad.com/daisy/index.php. 201. Mark of Cain: Quoted in Tannenwald, 2005b, p. 30. 202. Sanctification of Hiroshima: Quoted in Schelling, 2005, p. 373. 203. Gradual emergence of nuclear taboo: Schelling, 2005; Tannenwald, 2005b. Dulles quote from Schelling, 2000, p. 1. 204.

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The Argentinian junta ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands in full confidence that Britain would not retaliate by reducing Buenos Aires to a radioactive crater. Nor could Israel have credibly threatened the amassed Egyptian armies in 1967 or 1973, to say nothing of Cairo. Schelling, and the political scientist Nina Tannenwald, have each written of “a nuclear taboo”—a shared perception that nuclear weapons fall into a uniquely dreadful category.197 The use of a single tactical nuclear weapon, even one comparable in damage to conventional weaponry, would be seen as a breach in history, a passage into a new world with unimaginable consequences. The obloquy has attached itself to every form of nuclear detonation.

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Dean Rusk, secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, wrote that if the country had used a nuclear weapon, “we would have worn the mark of Cain for generations to come.”201 The physicist Alvin Weinberg, whose research helped make the bomb possible, asked in 1985: Are we witnessing a gradual sanctification of Hiroshima—that is, the elevation of Hiroshima to the status of a profoundly mystical event, an event ultimately of the same religious force as biblical events? I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that the 40th Anniversary of Hiroshima, with its vast outpouring of concern, bears resemblance to the observance of major religious holidays.... This sanctification of Hiroshima is one of the most hopeful developments of the nuclear era.202 The nuclear taboo emerged only gradually. As we saw in chapter 1, for at least a decade after Hiroshima many Americans thought the A-bomb was adorable. By 1953 John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration, was deploring what he called the “false distinction” and “taboo” surrounding nuclear weapons.203 During a 1955 crisis involving Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, Eisenhower said, “In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”204 But in the following decade nuclear weapons acquired a stigma that would put such statements beyond the pale.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Moreover, as discussed at the end of chapter 1, there seems to be a considerable distaste within the military for the battlefield messiness involved—all that radiation to worry about in particular—something that also affected military thinking about the use of chemical weapons.20 As a result, insofar as their battlefield use has been contemplated, nuclear weapons have been held back as weapons of last resort—not so much as the “absolute” weapon but rather as the “ultimate” weapon, something one analyst labels their “all-or-nothing” character. It is commonly contended that Israel, in particular, envisions using them only when it is under a massive attack that credibly threatens its existence.21 The nuclear taboo/convention/norm/tradition has probably helped nuclear countries come to that conclusion, but it does not seem to have been necessary for them to do so. NUCLEAR METAPHYSICS: THE SEDUCTIVE LOGIC OF DETERRENCE The mesmerizing existence of nuclear weapons spawned a truly massive theoretical literature—Robert Johnson has labeled it “nuclear metaphysics”—over their consequences and over how they might or might not be deployed.

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It is extremely important, then, to understand “the scientific, academic, industrial, and economic base a country needs in order to develop and actually produce weapons.”27 MORALITY AND CONCERNS ABOUT PRECEDENTS For many countries and peoples, there is a degree of moral repugnance to the possession of nuclear weapons: they take the nuclear taboo, discussed in chapter 2, seriously. For example, some Canadians, after careful, objective analysis, have concluded that their country is morally superior to their gigantic neighbor to the south, a view that was once caricatured by a Canadian political scientist: “Having studied thousands of Canadian editorials, and listened to as many speeches and conversations, I have come to the conclusion that the fault with North America is an improper division of resources: the Americans got the power; the Canadians the virtue and common sense.”

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“The Truth About Iraq’s Dying Babies.” Guardian Weekly 15 March: 7. Takeyh, Ray. 2001. “The Rogue Who Came in from the Cold.” Foreign Affairs 80(3) May/June: 62–72. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House. Tannenwald, Nina. 2007. The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. Taubman, William. 1982. Stalin’s American Policy. New York: Norton. Tenet, George, and Bill Harlow. 2007. At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins. Tetlock, Philip E. 2005.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

Wheeler (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ) to Lyndon Johnson, memorandum, February 3, 1968, note 5; online at http://www.state. gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/vi/13690.htm and http://www.mtholyoke. edu/acad/intrel/vietnam.htm. No nuclear weapons were currently…presumably nearby: Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo; “Nuclear Weapons and the Vietnam War,” online at http://www.nautilus.org/VietnamFOIA/background/NuclearWeapons.html. On Monday, February 5…indeed was the case: John Finney, “Anonymous Call Set off Rumors of Nuclear Arms for VN,” New York Times, February 12, 1968, 1–2; Michael Klare, “The Secret Thinkers,” Nation, April 15, 1968, 503–504.

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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Smith, Alice Kimball, and Charles Weiner. “Robert Oppenheimer: The Los Alamos Jeans.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1980. Smith, Bruce L. R. The Advisers: Scientists in the Policy Process, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992. Tannenwald, Nina. The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Townes, Charles H. How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Interview by Suzanne Reiss, 1991, 1992. Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

(In a backhanded acknowledgment that treaties matter, India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed it, and North Korea withdrew.) The world’s citizens are squarely behind the movement: large majorities in almost every surveyed country favor abolition.110 Zero is an attractive number because it expands the nuclear taboo from using the weapons to possessing them. It also removes any incentive for a nation to obtain nuclear weapons to protect itself against an enemy’s nuclear weapons. But getting to zero will not be easy, even with a carefully phased sequence of negotiation, reduction, and verification.111 Some strategists warn that we shouldn’t even try to get to zero, because in a crisis the former nuclear powers might rush to rearm, and the first past the post might launch a pre-emptive strike out of fear that its enemy would do so first.112 According to this argument, the world would be better off if the nuclear grandfathers kept a few around as a deterrent.

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Nuclear weapon states could all agree to No First Use in a treaty; they could get there by GRIT (with incremental commitments like never attacking civilian targets, never attacking a non-nuclear state, and never attacking a target that could be destroyed by conventional means); or they could simply adopt it unilaterally, which is in their own interests.126 The nuclear taboo has already reduced the deterrent value of a Maybe First Use policy, and the declarant could still protect itself with conventional forces and with a second-strike capability: nuclear tit for tat. No First Use seems like a no-brainer, and Barack Obama came close to adopting it in 2016, but was talked out of it at the last minute by his advisors.127 The timing wasn’t right, they said; it might signal weakness to a newly obstreperous Russia, China, and North Korea, and it might scare nervous allies who now depend on the American “nuclear umbrella” into seeking nuclear weapons of their own, particularly with Donald Trump threatening to cut back on American support of its coalition partners.

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The USSR, not Hiroshima, made Japan surrender: Berry et al. 2010; Hasegawa 2006; Mueller 2010a; Wilson 2007. 102. Nobel to the nukes: Suggested by Elspeth Rostow, quoted in Pinker 2011, p. 268. Nuclear weapons are poor deterrents: Pinker 2011, p. 269; Berry et al. 2010; Mueller 2010a; Ray 1989. 103. Nuclear taboo: Mueller 1989; Sechser & Fuhrmann 2017; Tannenwald 2005; Ray 1989, pp. 429–31; Pinker 2011, chap. 5, “Is the Long Peace a Nuclear Peace?” pp. 268–78. 104. Effectiveness of conventional deterrence: Mueller 1989, 2010a. 105. Nuclear states and armed burglars: Schelling 1960. 106. Berry et al. 2010, pp. 7–8. 107.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Even more importantly, can we engender cooperation between the public and private sectors on the global scale to mitigate these threats? Over the second half of the last century, the fear of nuclear warfare gradually gave way to the relative stability of mutually assured destruction (MAD), and a nuclear taboo seems to have emerged. If the logic of MAD has worked so far it is because only a limited number of entities possessed the power to destroy each other completely and they balanced each other out. A proliferation of potentially lethal actors, however, could undermine this equilibrium, which was why nuclear states agreed to cooperate to keep the nuclear club small, negotiating the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the late 1960s.

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Ferguson, Charles and Michelle Smith, ‘Assessing Radiological Weapons: Attack Methods and Estimated Effects’. Defence Against Terrorism Review, 2:2 (2009), 15–34. Fink, Carole. ‘The search for peace in the interwar period’. The Cambridge History of War. Vol. IV. Eds. Chickering et al. 285–309. Fitzpatrick, Mark. The World After: Proliferation, Deterrence and Disarmament if the Nuclear Taboo is Broken. Paris: IFRI, 2009. ‘Flight of the Drones: Why the Future of Air Power Belongs to Unmanned Systems’. The Economist, 8 Oct. 2011. Foley, Robert. German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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President Putin’s September 2014 comment is noted in Tom Parfitt, ‘Ukraine crisis: Putin’s nuclear threats are a struggle for pride and status’, The Telegraph, 26 Sept. 2014. Available: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11064978/Ukraine-crisis-Putins-nuclear-threats-are-a-struggle-for-pride-and-status.html. 11. Mark Fitzpatrick, The World After: Proliferation, Deterrence and Disarmament if the Nuclear Taboo is Broken (Paris: IFRI, 2009). 12. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, (London: Allen Lane, 2008). 13. Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham, 2006), and Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 14.

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

See Joseph Cirincione, “The Declining Ballistic Missile Threat,” Policy Outlook, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2005, available at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/pdf/The_Declining_Ballistic_Missile_Threat_2005.pdf. 4. See Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal, Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), pp. 57–82. 5. Ibid. 6. Nina Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime,” Remarks at Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference, Washington, D.C. November 7, 2005, available at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/static/npp/2005conference/presentations/tannenwald_remarks.pdf. 7. David Hobson, “U.S. Nuclear Security in the 21st Century,” Arms Control Association Luncheon Address, Washington, D.C., February 2005, available at http://www.armscontrol.org/events/20050203_transcript_hobson.asp. 8.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

The most effective weapons will not fire bullets, and nonkinetic elements like information, refugees, ideology, and time will be weaponized. Big militaries and supertechnology will prove inept. Nuclear weapons will be seen as big bombs, and limited nuclear war will become acceptable to some. Why do we assume the nuclear taboo will last forever? Others are already fighting in this new environment and winning. Russia, China, Iran, terrorist organizations, and drug cartels exploit durable disorder for victory, hastened by the West’s strategic atrophy. These foes have significantly fewer resources than the West but are more effective in warfare.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

The prospect of nuclear annihilation has acted as a sobering brake on gambling.24 At the brink, in October 1962, that’s exactly what Khrushchev and Kennedy chose to do. The awful prospect of nuclear war chilled the deliberations of the antagonists. Indeed, a minimax preference has reinforced the nuclear taboo over the decades since Hiroshima. And perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised—humans are, broadly, loss averse, and nuclear bombs amount to a catastrophic loss. We can learn much from the big international crises of the Cold War years like Cuba; not least that coercion to compel and deter enemies is an uncertain affair.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

New York Times, March 14, 2011. Tabuchi, Hiroko, and Matthew L. Wald. “Japan Scrambles to Avert Meltdowns at Two Crippled Nuclear Reactors.” New York Times, March 13, 2011. Tanikawa, Miki. “Japan Gets Electricity Wake-Up Call.” New York Times, October 26, 2011. Tannenwald, Nina. “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo.” International Security 29, no. 4 (Spring 2005). Taubman, Philip. “No Need for All These Nukes.” New York Times, January 7, 2012. Teller, Edward. Memoirs. New York: Perseus, 2001. Teller, Edward, and Allan Brown. The Legacy of Hiroshima. New York: Doubleday, 1962. Thomson, Sir William (Lord Kelvin).

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

.: History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1996. Stumpf, David K. Titan II: History of a Cold War Missile Program. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Sutton, George P., and Oscar Biblarz. Rocket Propulsion Elements: Seventh Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. Tannenwald, Nina. The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Taubman, Philip. The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Taylor, Maxwell D. The Uncertain Trumpet. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960.