Richard Rhodes: prediction

Transcript context

…A nuke going off in anger? That's the way I usually put it. I think the odds are high. A nuke going off in anger? That's the way I usually put it. I think the odds are high. I wouldn’t put a number on it, but it's certainly higher than zero and it's probably higher than 10%. And that's high enough if we're talking about millions of people dying. There was a period when people in the field were talking about, well, maybe we'll have a little regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan and that'll scare everybody to the point where they realize you've got to get rid of these things. The same guys who did the nuclear winter studies back in the 80s decided in 2007 first to look at nuclear winter world scale war using the much better computers of today. And they found out that that would be even worse than they thought it would when they had only one dimensional atmospheric models. Then they said, well, what would a small regional nuclear war look like? So they simulated a war between India and Pakistan where each country explodes 50 Hiroshima sized, 15 kiloton nuclear weapons over the enemy cities. And what would follow from that? And it turned out as the model develops, you can see it online, you can watch the graph develop that even that small in exchange, less than some of our individual hydrogen bombs, about a megaton between the two countries, would be enough to cause enough fire from burning cities to spread smoke around the world and reduce the amount of sunlight. They figured in the end that there would be 20 million prompt deaths from the explosions themselves and the fires. But then over the course of the next several years, up to two billion people would die of starvation because you would have the same phenomenon that the world had in the 18th century when there was an interim of rather cold, the sun was pulling back a bit and it was freezing hard in July in New England and the crops failed. And a mass of people died worldwide during that period of time. Like the flu epidemic of 1918, everybody seems to have forgotten. I don't know where our memory goes with these things. Therefore even a small so-called nuclear war must engage the whole world because it's going to engage us if it ever goes off. So we're still in a very precarious place. And as long as any country in the world has nuclear weapons, we're going to continue to be. There is a sword of Damocles over our heads. That has been the price of nuclear deterrence. It isn't necessary that that be the price. It's possible to have nuclear deterrence without actual weapons, but it's damned hard to convince leaders, particularly in totalitarian and authoritarian countries, that that's the case. So the odds, I don't know, but there's no such thing as a machine that doesn't malfunction sooner or later. And these machines, these weapons that we make us such supernatural powers of, are just machines. We built, put them together. We can take them apart. We can put the ore back in the ground if we want to. We don't have to live with this. I think we're in a big, wide, long transition. just machines. We built, put them together. We can take them apart. We can put the ore back in the ground if we want to. We don't have to live with this. I think we're in a big, wide, long transition. Maybe the world scale problem of solving global warming will help with this, will help people see that if they work together. Here I am saying there could be a good outcome from this technology. Well, there was a good outcome from the telephone. There was a good outcome from television, but there was also a dark side and we're going to have to learn to handle dark sides better. Maybe that's the last thing to say on this subject.…

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