The Way Out of the Dark?
These are the stakes:
To make a world in which all of God’s children can live,
or to go into the dark.
We must either love each other, or we must die.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1964
Fighting About Violence
In the tumult of modern daily life, it is sometimes hard to step back and gain perspective. This can be especially true during election years, when the sound and the fury magnify to headache-inducing levels, while still signifying very little to most of us.
Every so often, however, an idea comes along — in an article, a book, these days a blog or even a tweet — which can cut through the fog and help large numbers of us make sense of the world around us.
Such an idea was contained in Steven Pinker’s 2011 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:
[M]oral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. (p. xxv.)
Moral progress is, in this case, measured through the proxy of violence. All kinds of violence — writ large, small and everything in between:
How are we to study violence and to assess whether it has been increasing or decreasing? What analytic tools do we bring to the table? Pinker, sensibly enough, chooses to look at the best available evidence regarding the rate of violent death over time, in pre-state societies, in medieval Europe, in the modern era, and always in a global context; he writes about inter-state conflicts, the two world wars, intrastate conflicts, civil wars, and homicides. (Neil Boyd, “The Empirical Evidence for Declining Violence”, Huffington Post 16 January 2012.)
And what does Pinker have to say about violence, in these categories and more?
Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. (p. xx.)
Pinker spends over 800 hardcover pages attempting to prove his thesis, in the process crossing boundaries among many academic disciplines: History, economics, military strategy, sociology, and his own specialty, evolutionary psychology. In academia, this is not necessarily a formula for winning friends and influencing people, and the praise for Better Angels, while broad and often strong, has certainly not been universal.
While there have been criticisms of Pinker’s work on a number of grounds (philosopher John Gray for an alleged cherry-picking of Enlightenment thinkers by Pinker to reinforce his case; psychologist Robert Epstein for Pinker’s use of rate of violent deaths per 100,000 population rather than absolute numbers of violent deaths), the most telling critique has come from another Internet celebrity, derivatives-trader-turned-risk-engineering-professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Taleb’s career-making insight, that much of history has been driven by unpredictable major events which only seem obvious in retrospect, has made his brand of “skeptical empiricism” akin to common wisdom. Indeed, what shocked so many in 2007 now reads like a (fairly snarky) introduction to a college survey course:
To summarize: in this (personal) essay, I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge) — and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This implies the need to use the extreme event as a starting point and not treat it as an exception to be pushed under the rug.
I also make the bolder (and more annoying) claim that in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable, while both human nature and social “science” seem to conspire to hide the idea from us. (pp. xxvii-xxviii)
Taleb’s criticism of Pinker stems from the latter’s (alleged mis-)use of statistics, for which Taleb has little time:
It turned out, the entire exchange with S. Pinker was a dialogue de sourds. In my correspondence and exchange with him, I was under the impression that he simply misunderstood the difference between inference from symmetric, thin-tailed random variables and one from asymmetric, fat-tailed ones — the 4th Quadrant problem. I thought that I was making him aware of the effects from the complications of the distribution. But it turned out things were worse, a lot worse than that. Pinker doesn’t have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. (“The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion”, p. 2)
Pinker, in turn, has been equally dismissive of Taleb’s reading skills:
The book’s structure was lost on Taleb, who blends the different chapters and then criticizes his own confusion. (“Fooled by Belligerence: Comments on Nassim Taleb’s ‘The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion’”, p. 1)
This high-profile spat, played out across Twitter, Facebook, numerous blogs and no doubt faculty rooms everywhere, has provided entertainment for many, but unfortunately generated far more heat than light. Nor has it added clarity to the overarching question of whether the world is a safer place today than in the past.
The reason? Pinker and Taleb are both right.
In the Dark, and Cold
The year is 2022. The Cold War has been over for roughly 30 years, depending on which event you choose to mark its passing. According to the Arms Control Association, there are some 13,080 nuclear weapons in the world. While this is a 80+% reduction from the peak 69,368 extant in 1986, it still represents enough destructive power to drive what little remains of post-nuclear war human civilization into the deep crevasses of a nuclear winter, if not a new Little Ice Age, should even one percent of the global nuclear arsenal be used in anger.
The nuclear winter hypothesis is nearly 40 years old, and while initial projections of human extinction have long since moderated, the basic premise is largely unchallenged these days (indeed, the modeling involved in the original nuclear winter studies now underpins our understanding of extinction events): Soot (aka Black Carbon, or BC) from nuclear detonations and their attendant firestorms would block out sunlight, lower global temperatures to well below freezing (even in summer), and lead to massive, widespread crop and livestock destruction. Follow-on effects, including dangerous reductions in upper-atmosphere ozone levels, would probably not eliminate H. sapiens as a species, but would almost certainly spell the end to civilization as we know it.
As has been the case for the entire Cold War nuclear arms race, two nations possess over 90% of all nuclear weapons: The Russian Federation and the United States of America. Clearly, what danger exists of nuclear war lies largely within the borders of these two states — but not completely.
A 2014 paper by a team of climate scientists from Colorado applied modern climate modeling techniques to the question of nuclear winter, and discovered that, contrary to the findings of the 1980s studies which modeled the effects of 100-to-5,000 megaton exchanges involving hundreds or even thousands of large warhead detonations to achieve nuclear winter, a regional conflict involving 100 weapons of Hiroshima size (15 kilotons) — a grand total of 1.5 megatons of nuclear explosives — could set in train catastrophic consequences:
Our calculations show that global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years. We calculate summer enhancements in UV indices of 30%–80% over midlatitudes, suggesting widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10–40 days per year for 5 years. Surface temperatures would be reduced for more than 25 years due to thermal inertia and albedo effects in the ocean and expanded sea ice. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine. (“Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict”, Mills et. al. 2014, p. 161.)
So that’s the bad news — it would only take a relative handful of smaller yield nuclear weapons to accomplish, in nuclear winter terms, what was previously thought to require massive numbers of larger warheads. What, one might ask, is the really bad news?
South Asia.
India and Pakistan have been at each other’s throats since their mutual parting of the ways at independence from the United Kingdom in 1947. Four full-blown wars, several near misses, and ongoing attempts at infiltration and subversion have characterized the neighbors’ relations since then.
Unfortunately, since 1998 we can include “nuclear arms race” in the mix. India possesses roughly 130 nuclear warheads; Pakistan, around 150. Ominously, these are enough to trigger the catastrophe envisioned in the 2014 nuclear winter paper; indeed, the scenarios of Mills, et. al., were modeled on a regional exchange of a hundred 15-kiloton warheads between India and Pakistan.
The Black Swan potential here is obvious — an unforeseen (at the time) major event with the potential to kill, not 10 million human beings, but well over a billion. We clearly cannot afford to ignore the possibility of such an event as we strive to reduce global tensions, even while we continue to find ways to improve US-Russian relations — and it is abundantly clear that US-Russian relations need all the help they can get these days.
Errors of Comity
Once filled with promise, the post-Soviet relationship between Moscow and Washington (and through the US, its military proxy in Europe, NATO) died a slow and painful death during the 1990s and early 2000s. Shorn of its raison d’être, forestalling a Soviet invasion of western Europe, NATO has since 1991 floundered badly in the self-definition stakes, choosing to substitute continued expansion eastward for a post-Soviet reason for existing.
This series of expansions from 1999 to 2009 (with yet more potential Allies currently under consideration) has not got unnoticed. Russian displeasure at having its core strategic red lines ignored has simply increased over time, especially since the ascent to power in the Russian Federation of President Vladimir Putin.
Putin, it should be remembered, was the first foreign leader to contact President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, unilaterally calling off Russian military maneuvers in the Far North as an unnecessary potential provocation in a time of American crisis. His reward from NATO in 2004 was its largest single expansion to date, adding seven new members — including three former Soviet republics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The coup de grâce to NATO-Russia relations, however, came in April 2008 at the NATO Bucharest Summit: Both Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual NATO membership, despite clear warnings from Putin that these two invitations in particular would represent an intolerable violation of Russian strategic interests. Four months later Russia invaded Georgia under the pretext of “peace enforcement” in the disputed breakaway region of South Ossetia. In 2014, in turn, Russian complicity in separatist movements in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine was transparently open, with Russia voting to absorb Crimea, leading to further Western sanctions against Moscow.
How much of this was avoidable? NATO was quick to label Russian actions “hybrid war”, where non-military activities can form three-quarters of a state’s hostile actions; yet NATO itself seemed to believe that ignoring repeated calls by Moscow for no further eastward expansion was somehow a form of diplomacy — “hybrid”, perhaps.
Other Swans in the Pond?
Whether looking at South Asia or greater Europe, the possibility of nuclear war is not the only Black Swan candidate. Today’s rapid technological developments throw up possibilities all around us. One such stems from the widespread increase (and rapid price drops) in additive manufacturing, better known as 3D printing. The ubiquitous Kalashnikov AK-47 and its variants and accessories are now within reach of the techno-nerdy home armorer; at present the only thing that stands between us and a loaded automatic rifle in every home is the inability to 3D-print military-quality ammunition. On current form, this deficit can be counted on to last at least another 10–15 years.
(In truth, it will probably take slightly longer than that to replicate military-specification weapons and ammunition through the additive process — but not much. Nor should legal bans on the software blueprints required to 3D-print an AK or its 7.62 mm ammunition be taken too seriously — if samizdat literature was produced in secret in thousands of Soviet homes under the nose of the KGB, how will it be possible to enforce bans on automatic rifle plans over the Internet? More to the point, have even harsh legal crackdowns stopped the massive, global on-line pirating of films and music?)
Why include the lowly AK-47 in a discussion of potential Black Swans? Largely because of “unknown unknowns”, to re-appropriate the phrase which then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously borrowed from engineering to describe the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: “But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
How does this notorious Rummyism apply to Taleb’s insights?
To offer one obvious candidate, how about a small group of men, including a few lightly-trained pilots, smashing airliners into skyscrapers and government buildings armed only with box-cutters? To say that the total ubiquity of automatic rifles would not present Black Swan possibilities is to misunderstand Taleb’s concept.
Then there is the specter of biological warfare, terrorist or otherwise — recombinant techniques which can transform, e.g., the already-lethal smallpox virus into something far more contagious, virulent and vaccine-proof. All it would take to accomplish this disaster — one of very few man-made, non-nuclear threats which could rise to the level of an extinction event — would be several people with biochemistry training to an undergraduate university level, a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fermentation and lab equipment, and a live strain of the smallpox virus, Variola major. (To demonstrate just how cost-effective bioterrorism can be, the Iraqi chemical weapons program cost Saddam Hussein over $500 million, as did his ballistic missile program. In contrast to the billion-dollar-plus price tag for weaponizing sarin gas, however, Iraq’s BW program cost a mere $75 million while weaponizing several biological agents for delivery by Scud missile.)
Too hard to imagine a terrorist group getting its hands on tightly controlled V. major virus? With the oil resources that the so-called Islamic State has at its disposal as of this writing, who is to say that a “demon in the freezer”, to quote Richard Preston’s terrifying story of ongoing attempts to bio-engineer and weaponize recombinant smallpox virus, cannot be purchased for petrodollars? Taleb’s insights remind us, in fact, that the less likely we find such a scenario, the more likely a Black Swan will be to swim up and bite us, hard.
Pinning Hopes o’ Both Your Houses
Clearly, although Pinker appears correct in his assertion that violence in all forms has declined over time, especially over the last half century or so, the above scenarios remind us that opportunities for future Black Swans abound, affirming Taleb’s contentions. Taleb is absolutely correct in his criticism of Pinker’s Better Angels, in every technical/statistical sense that matters, when he writes:
For a conflict generating at least 10 million casualties, an event less bloody than WW1 or WW2, the waiting time is on average 136 years, with a mean absolute deviation of 267 (or 52 years and 61 deviations for data rescaled to today’s population). The seventy years of what is called the “Long Peace” are clearly not enough to state much about the possibility of WW3 in the near future. (What are the chances of a third world war? (Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2015, p. 1)
…and yet he has missed the forest for the trees, since his hypothesis cannot be proven for another half century or more — and we simply cannot afford to wait that long before we revise our understanding of conflict, its avoidance and its resolution.
Pinker, in turn, is correct in pointing out that the global reductions in human violence of every measurable type over several centuries require explanation, and may — may — deserve consideration as a glimpse into humanity’s future. However, he is technically correct but wrong-headed when he writes:
Finite resources have to be allocated across many foreseeable risks, and we have no choice but to assess which of them are most worth worrying about. The dangers go both ways; it would be rash to dismantle the military on the assumption that war was no longer possible, but it is just as rash to plan for every improbable catastrophe. The bloated American military budget is notoriously based on black-swan thinking, with its profligate overseas bases and lavish weapons systems that anticipate every military contingency without concern for their likelihoods. (Fooled by Belligerence: Comments on Nassim Taleb’s “The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion”, p. 4)
We find ourselves, therefore, at a juncture of history where Pinker’s observations may give us hope, while Taleb’s admonitions point towards the vital work to be done in identifying and reducing Black Swan risks, and soon. What is needed is a new paradigm to replace the dominant neorealist school of international relations with something that allows us to approach the future of IR with Pinkerian hope and Talebian caution. Fortunately, Pinker misses the mark above because there is, in fact, a way of effectively and efficiently directing policy to match resources to risks: Trinitarian Realism, based on strategic kindness.
This is not the Strategic Kindness of game theory and business school curricula, however — or better said, they are only tangentially related. This theoretical tool for conflict avoidance and resolution is instead linked to the insights into human conflict of Thucydides, the historical/diplomatic/Christian writings of the noted English historian, Sir Herbert Butterfield, and the human and societal motivational observations of Abraham Maslow.
Before we explore these concepts further, however, let us look briefly at the dominant IR Weltanschauung, born of neorealism, which I call the Parabellum Paradigm.
La Bellicosa Nostra
The 160 years since the end of the Crimean War have provided a lengthy and detailed test case for the current way of doing diplomacy, waging war and making peace. What I call the Parabellum Paradigm — the idea that empathetic negotiation is to be eschewed in favor of demonization of the enemy, in concert with an insistence in almost all cases upon unconditional surrender for conflict termination — has certainly received a fair hearing.
And it has failed.
In Crimea in 1853, in the American South in 1861, in Flanders in 1914, in Poland in 1939, across the global confrontation we call the Cold War from 1945–1990 (notably in the Falklands Islands in 1982), and in the years since then as the so-called War on Terror has taken shape, the Parabellum Paradigm has led time and again to disaster, as the take-no-prisoners approach to pre-conflict negotiations has, time and again, resulted in unnecessary bloodshed and chaos. As Butterfield wrote of the First World War (in the early days of the Cold War):
The struggle which began in 1914…was fought on a basis that was bound to give the maximum scope to the hysterias and frenzies associated with the fury of battle. Precisely because it was conducted as a war “for righteousness”, a war “for the destruction of the wicked”, that whole conflict was turned into one that could admit of no compromise.
Precisely because of the myth of “the war to end all war”, we made it more true than it had been for centuries that war breeds war, provokes revolution, generates new causes of conflict, deepens resentments, and produces those reversions which we call modern barbarism. (Christianity, Diplomacy and War, 1953, p. 17.)
Although, in a comparative discussion stemming from the “basis for war” Butterfield cites, there is a great temptation to turn the clock back a century and contemplate the near-limitless horrors of the Battle of the Somme, I would prefer to focus on a more recent conflict, one spurred on by motives even more idiotic than the push to make the world safe from the scourge of Kaiserism (snuffing out, in the process, over 17 million lives): The Falklands War of 1982. The conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina for possession of “Las Islas Malvinas”, which eventually cost 1,000 lives and £3 billion, was entirely preventable. If the United Kingdom had even once listened to Argentine pleas for negotiations on control and ownership of the islands, some diplomatic device (say, a once-renewable 99-year lease) could have left both parties satisfied, honor restored, sovereignty clarified, and a hell of a lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen and money not thrown away uselessly.
To be sure, the Parabellum Principle pre-dates Kenneth Waltz’s 1979 foray into neorealism, Theory of International Politics. Waltz didn’t invent the Parabellum Paradigm, but I would argue that he sought to explain and justify it. Such justifications, however, serve only to underline the opportunities lost before great wars, when a bit of patience, diplomacy, and, well, listening, might have spared lives and loot; as well as after them, as the process one hardly dares mock with the name “diplomacy” which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles proved.
British and American fecklessness in the face of revanchist French intransigence at Versailles meant, as Butterfield ruefully noted, that the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany (“deepens resentments”), the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Russia (“provokes revolutions”) and even the continued starvation of the German civilian population through economic blockade a year after the war ended (“modern barbarism”) would be the true legacy of H.G. Wells’ “War to End War”.
Newer Than Neorealism; Realer, Too
Since 16 July 1945, the date of the Trinity Event at Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first man-made nuclear explosion was unleashed on the world, war has no longer been about the use of force for political ends, nor diplomacy its thinly veiled threat; now all is about survival of the species. This point has been slow to filter down through the layers of political theorizing which multiplied after the Second World War, but it appears as though its time is finally near.
If war is not the answer, and demonizing the potential foe is clearly not the optimal path toward peace and stability, what is left? Trinitarian Realism, based on strategic kindness: Informed, targeted charity, combined with (armed) self-restraint and diplomatic empathy, to address pre-crises and crises.
The idea is to be able to make intelligent use of all of a society’s assets — economic, social, intellectual, cultural, diplomatic and, yes, military — in heading off conflict before it begins, or in bringing it to a sudden and minimally destructive halt where it does break out.
What is Trinitarian Realism, and how does it differ from Waltz & Co.? For starters, there are three trinities involved: the Holy Trinity of Christian tradition; the “remarkable trinity” of Carl von Clausewitz; and the Trinity event of July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
To be a Trinitarian Realist requires the knowledge:
- That peccavi is important, but peccavimus is crucial — that we have all sinned and fallen short, that no one comes to the table — any table, anywhere — with completely clean hands. While this principle clearly derives from Christian theology, I believe it is universal in its importance and applicability, as a powerful means of forestalling the demonization of current or potential enemies.
- That a deep understanding of Carl von Clausewitz’s “remarkable trinity” is more vital than ever: How the prospect of war moves the citizenry to violence, hatred & enmity, an essentially irrational response; how commanders face “the play of chance & probability,” which fall outside the realm of rationality; and how the government attempts to “subordinat[e war] as an instrument of policy,” which is the very definition of rational policymaking. Unfortunately, popular representations of Clausewitz tend to define his trinity as “people/military/government”, missing Clausewitz’s underlying point entirely: War is the only human endeavor he knew of which routinely combined the irrational, the non-rational and the über-rational, with totally unpredictable results thereby guaranteed.
- Finally, that, as noted above, Alamogordo changed conflict, diplomacy and international relations forever. Threats of war that can escalate, under any circumstances, into a nuclear exchange that approaches the threshold of nuclear winter are now unthinkable.
(Taleb actually captured this aspect of conflict very nicely in The Black Swan:
What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). [p. xx.])
So how does this new paradigm for conflict avoidance and resolution work?
As mentioned above, Trinitarian Realism relies on strategic kindness for its basic approach, or, to put it another way, “leading with compassion.” As the global process of switching over from the neorealist paradigm begins, it may have to be armed compassion with which one leads, but this is a process, not an event. Informed, targeted charity becomes the means to address pre-crises and crises. Why? Because for some 2500 years now, our basic concepts of conflict triggers have come from a Greek historian.
Thucydides of Athens wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War toward the beginning of the 4th century BC. In it, he identified three eternal factors which lead to strife: Fear (phobos), reputation/honor (doxa) and self-interest (kerdos). This list has been adopted by many others over the intervening centuries, not least by Thomas Hobbes, whom Pinker credits as citing the conflict triggers “diffidence”, “glory” and “competition” — by which Hobbes meant exactly the same things as Thucydides’ phobos, doxa and kerdos.
As widely accepted as the Thucydidean conflict triggers have been over the years, however, responses which attempted to map those triggers to potential responses have not been common. Among the bravest attempts came from Cambridge University’s Sir Herbert Butterfield, a dedicated Christian and historian by profession whose insights into the value of diplomacy “as a means of mitigating some of the excesses of power politics” make him both a perfect foil for Waltz’s neorealism and a candidate for answering Thucydides.
As it turns out, Butterfield did so in his writings on diplomacy in particular:
…power gives way to diplomacy, diplomacy becomes more urbane, the diplomatic profession develops into an international society, and morality itself comes to have its place amongst the recognized conditions of the intercourse between states. (Christianity, Diplomacy and War, 1953, p. 76.)
Writing in appreciation of Butterfield, political scientist Paul Sharp has noted the correspondence between Butterfield’s prescription for effective diplomacy, on the one hand, and the Thucydidean triggers on the other:
Butterfield’s writings on Christianity and international relations suggest these are instances of problems in human relations which are certainly ancient and probably essential. They provide a sparse account of how these problems arise out of the cupidities and insecurities of human nature, and suggest the moral principles of self-restraint, empathy and charity upon which an effective diplomacy should be based. (The English School, Herbert Butterfield and Diplomacy, 2002, p. 21.)
Applying Trinitarian Realism to a given conflict or pre-conflict becomes an exercise in proportional compassion. The Trinity Event tells us when inter-state bellicosity is now out of the question: We can be firm, we can defend ourselves and make it known that we intend to do so, but we cannot risk saber-rattling for its own sake, especially where nuclear weapons may become involved (always remembering the possibility of Black Swan unpredictability). The Clausewitzian trinity, meanwhile, tells us that the outcomes of conflict are inherently unknowable, however cleverly our soothsayers have scried the battlespace. Finally, the Christian Trinity reminds us that we, too, have sinned, and that the moral high ground is no safe place from which to conduct negotiations, especially in time of crisis.
If there is value in the concept of Trinitarian Realism, how can society adapt its current endeavors in conflict prevention to better reflect these insights?
One response might be to attempt to construct tools to allow for the three-dimensional depiction of a given society’s responses to different stimuli and circumstances, working under the assumption that these differences are at least to a certain extent knowable, and that such knowledge can help avoid, ameliorate and/or resolve conflicts.
A method by which these propositions could to be tested might involve, e.g., a physical mapping of Maslow’s five levels of human needs (Survival, Security, Social, Self-Esteem, and Self-Actualization) along the three axes of Thucydidean conflict stimuli: fear (phobos), honor (doxa) and interest (kerdos). This would involve the expansion of the familiar two-dimensional “pyramid of needs” into a 3D rendering which would show how, for a given society, each conflict stimulus was reflected by corresponding levels of human need fulfillment (see diagram at top of article).
The use of such a device could provide visual cues to those working to avoid or resolve conflicts and allow them to tailor their efforts to the specific needs of a given situation and society. The underlying principles, however, have long since been delineated by Thucydides, Maslow and Butterfield. Therefore, following the work of these men, where we find fear, let us bring self-restraint; where we find concern for reputation (perhaps in its special sense as the basis of deterrence), let us show empathy; and where we find concerns based on self-interest, let us consider charity.
Again, at least at first, we must do so from a well-defended position, and with a reputation for dealing justly with all and as harshly with malefactors as we must. It will likely take time to prove the superiority of this approach to the Parabellum Paradigm, but given the realities of Black Swan uncertainties in the 21st century, we truly have little choice in the matter — we simply cannot risk our civilization’s future on a few more iterations of an inter-state game of Chicken.
Finally, and echoing the Civil Rights movement-era humor of Dick Gregory (who once complained that he waited until the local lunch counter desegregated, only to find that they didn’t serve anything he liked) imagine the chagrin of a leader whose government has invested in the resources, infrastructure, and capital, human and otherwise, to build a nuclear weapon. S/he has likely been spurred on by the promise of “sitting at the nuclear high table” — only to discover on arrival that everyone sitting around that table has an explosive vest strapped on and a detonator taped to one hand.
Because the undeniable fact is that, in this era of deeper knowledge of nuclear winter and its prerequisites, the leaders of the nuclear weapons states, declared or otherwise, are morally and functionally equivalent to suicide bombers.
