The good news is that we might be about to solve the Fermi paradox. Many have long suspected that the reason why there don’t seem to be millions of talkative aliens out there in space is because when an intelligent civilisation develops the technology to enable interstellar communication it also develops weapons that enable it to quickly destroy itself.
So far, we’re matching exactly this trajectory. We’ve sent probes far beyond the solar system – and vast quantities of electronic data fizzing in all directions at the speed of light – but we’ve also got thousands of thermonuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert that can in just a few hours reduce our entire world to a dark, freezing wasteland.
Whether or not we can confound the apparent inevitability of this doomsday outcome is perhaps the ultimate test of our species-level intelligence. But the omens aren’t good. Russia and the United States currently have 1,500 fully deployed nuclear warheads and over 5,000 each in their total arsenals. China is racing to reach nuclear parity by 2030. The current geopolitical instability raises the risk of superpower world war to perhaps the greatest level since the hottest periods of the Cold War.
America’s ‘launch-on-warning’ posture means that ICBMs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) must be out of their silos and in the air while the incoming missile attack is still blips on a radar screen. Once launched ICBMs cannot be recalled, nor can their targets be altered. When warning is received of imminent attack, the US president has as little as six minutes to decide whether to launch an all-out retaliation that would destroy most life on Earth.
A major thermonuclear exchange would likely kill about 770 million people in blasts and city firestorms across the major combatant powers. Technical language can obscure the reality here: this means several hundred million people – women, children, men, the elderly – being burned alive. Many more would quickly die from radioactive poisoning, but the biggest killer would come after: a decade-long worldwide nuclear winter that would starve billions more to death and wreck our civilisation beyond repair.
And all for what? Nothing matters this much; not any current-day flashpoint or contested piece of territory. The probability of nuclear war in any single year is small, probably around 1%, but this compounds to a two-thirds risk over a century. We have been extremely lucky with past near-misses, from Black Saturday of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to the notorious ‘3am phone call’ incident in 1980 when President Carter was nearly woken in the night when 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles were erroneously displayed on warning screens.
We would be unwise to trust to luck forever. It should be obvious that nuclear weapons and human civilisation cannot co-exist together long-term. Either we abolish them or they abolish us. To do so we will need to build a citizens’ movement singularly focused on the goal of total abolition. This will need to be very different from the anti-nuclear movements of the past: we can learn a huge amount from both the successes and failures of CND and other previous campaigns. Nor is it about abolishing nuclear power, which is a vital technology to tackle the climate crisis and can even help remove warheads from our world by burning them up as fuel.
Nor can we be unilateralist, because the process can only work via simultaneous trust-building disarmament by all the nuclear nations. This new movement must involve millions of people of all political persuasions in every country of the world whose only reason for participation is that they want to survive. We have a good head start in the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, already signed by 93 countries. In other words, almost half the world’s nations are now on board with the drive towards abolition.
This should be an easy decision. Collective suicide is in nobody’s interest. We don’t need to burn alive millions of men, women and children, and usher in a nuclear winter that destroys the biosphere. But the first step is to break out of the fatalistic denial that views nuclear weapons as inevitable and the aim of abolishing them as impossible. That way the Fermi paradox can remain unanswered, and humanity can continue to flourish on our beautiful, living planet.
For the full published version see the NewScientist magazine.