Apocalypse Never

4. Accidental Atomic Apocalypse

66 Chapter 4 Accidental Atomic Apocalypse One of the best book titles of recent years was Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies, released in 1999 by Lloyd J. Dumas of the University of Texas.1 You almost don’t need to read the book after seeing that title. You know how it’s going to come out in the end. Dumas issues a stark warning about the hubris of believing that we can control anything we can invent: “We have vastly more power to affect the physical world than we had even 60 years ago. Yet humans are no less error-prone. The clash between our growing technological power and our enduring fallibility has laid us open to disaster on an unprecedented scale.”2 If we expect imperfect human beings to manage infinitely high-risk technologies, we are eventually going to get infinitely cataclysmic results. No technology yet invented by fallible human beings, of course, is more lethal than nuclear weapons. If anything calls for extraordinary efforts at elimination, it is our arsenal of the apocalypse. Yet, astonishingly, the human race, long after the cold war’s end, still faces the real possibility of an accidental nuclear launch, an accidental nuclear detonation, even an accidental nuclear war. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, this risk was his chief concern when he pursued nuclear weapons abolition. “I was quite sure for some reason that the people in the White House were not idiots,” he said in 1998. “I thought that they definitely knew what any nuclear war would mean. . . . More likely, I thought, was that nuclear weapons might be used without the political leadership actually wanting this, or deciding on it, owing to some failure in the command and control systems. . . . That fear motivated me to seek an end to the arms race . . . Nuclear weapons, a colossal threat to humankind, could run out of the control of politicians.”3 CH004.qxd 2/4/10 10:58 AM Page 66 Accidental Atomic Apocalypse 67 As I maintained in Chapter 3, over a long-enough period of time, even a virtually impossible event becomes virtually inevitable. Surely, this truth applies not only to nuclear terror, but just as much to the possibility that our nuclear weapons might somehow be employed accidentally. As California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “mistakes are made in every other human endeavor. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt?”4 Accidents happen, and no matter how secure the systems or how foolproof the procedures, eventually something is going to go wrong. And here, that something could be cataclysmic on a scale beyond imagination. In Chapter 3, I argued that a single atomic bomb detonating in a single American city would be an utterly transformative event, with consequences that would reverberate throughout the human community for many years to come. Now imagine thousands of nucleartipped missiles, each more powerful than anything a nuclear terrorist could procure or construct, launched somehow by mistake. The fullscale global thermonuclear war that we so precariously avoided for fourand -a-half cold war decades could now come about by accident, with consequences for life on earth beyond calculation. “Launch on Warning” Means “Launch by Accident” Although many contemporary nuclear threats are very different from the scenarios we worried about during the cold war, this one is remarkably similar. On the day that Barack Obama was sworn in as president, nearly two full decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the strategic nuclear arsenals of both Russia and America were still probably operating on the enduring cold war principle of “launch on warning.” Our ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), each armed with powerful nuclear warheads and scattered throughout the farmland of the midwest, are poised to launch at a point after American radar detects incoming nuclear warheads directed at these missiles, but before the enemy warheads strike. The idea is that an adversary will be dissuaded from launching a nuclear first strike on our land-based nuclear missiles if that adversary knows that our missiles will get off the ground before they can be hit. In this way, according to the argument, deterrence is enhanced. CH004.qxd 2/4/10 10:58 AM Page 67 A p o c a l y p s e N e v e r 68 But what if the radar warning is a mistake? What if the system thinks it...