The Planet Would Vote Against Nuclear Weapons, and Cannot

Here is a sentence I believe to be true: if the entire population of the planet voted on whether anyone should possess nuclear weapons, it would vote no.

Not narrowly. Overwhelmingly. Almost nobody, asked directly and privately, wants to live under the possibility of being incinerated over a dispute they were not consulted about. The people who want the weapons are the people who hold them, or hope to, and they are a very small fraction of the species.

I want to follow that sentence to where it leads, because I think it leads somewhere uncomfortable about the future of the human race and about what would have to change to avoid it.

We Cannot Stop the Spread

Start with the observable facts. Two states that were poor, isolated and under sustained international pressure set out to acquire nuclear weapons. One has them. The other has come close enough that the argument is about months. Decades of sanctions, negotiations, sabotage and threats did not stop the first and have not stopped the second.

The lesson every other regime has drawn is plain. A state that wants the weapons badly enough can have them, and once it has them it is safe from the kind of intervention that removed other dictators. The process by which the whole world becomes nuclear is slow, but nothing in the current arrangement of the world is capable of halting it.

Where That Leads

Two outcomes follow, and both are bad.

The first is that the weapons will be used to protect tyranny. A regime that possesses them cannot be removed from outside, and its population cannot be helped from outside, indefinitely. The second is that the weapons, or the materials, will leak from a state to an organisation with no territory to defend, no population to protect and therefore nothing to deter.

Either of these is a grim prospect. Both together describe a future in which the worst predictions about our species are not paranoia but extrapolation.

The Species Knows Better Than Its Leadership

Now return to the sentence I began with. The population of the planet does not want this. Its intuition about the weapons is correct and nearly unanimous.

So the situation is not that humanity is suicidal. It is that humanity is fighting its own organisational structure, and losing. The will exists. The weapons are held by hierarchies, hierarchies act in their own interest, and the interest of a hierarchy that holds a weapon is to keep it. Every state that has them has a foreign ministry that can explain, sincerely, why disarmament is impossible until the others go first. The others say the same. The public in each of those states, asked directly, would say something different, and is never asked.

I have written about leaders believing their own ideology less than the public does, and about how organisations are steered by interests rather than by the people nominally heading them. The nuclear case is those arguments at planetary scale.

Why the Long Struggle Is Not Safe

There is a comforting view that this will sort itself out. Nuclear exchanges may happen, they will be terrible, they will not end the species, and the shock will finally push the world toward representative government as the settled form, after which the problem will be managed.

I find that view unconvincing on its own terms. Representative regimes have shown no particular commitment to ending the arrangement; they hold most of the weapons. And the incentive for any one of them to break ranks and deal with a dictator, for oil, for markets, for a base, is compelling and is acted upon constantly. A struggle between forms of government conducted at that pace could last a very long time.

Meanwhile the ceiling on destruction is rising. It is true that today's arsenals, used in full, would probably not extinguish us. It is not true that this will remain so. Engineered pathogens are already a plausible path; a large object diverted toward the planet by a nuclear device is speculative but not physically absurd. Anyone who calls this science fiction should consider what Napoleon would have made of a cruise missile. If the struggle lasts long enough, we reach a point where it can be lost for everyone, while it is still going on. Waiting for it to resolve is a bet that the resolution arrives before the capability does.

The Step That Is Available

The only lever I can see is to close the gap between what the species wants and what its structures do.

That gap is largest on exactly this question. If even a few countries governed themselves directly, and demonstrated that a decision of this magnitude could be taken by a population rather than by a ministry, two things would follow. The first is proof: large decisions can be made that way, which is currently asserted by people like me and denied by everyone who runs a ministry. The second is a bloc whose position on the weapons matched its population's, which no current state can claim.

That is a long road and I do not pretend it is short. But I cannot find an alternative that does not amount to hoping. The intuition exists, in billions of people. What is missing is a mechanism for it to become a decision. Building that mechanism is the step available to us, and the case for taking it soon is the ceiling I described, which does not wait.