Carl Sagan |
February 8, 1985
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Carl Sagan
Astrophysicist; David Duncan Professor, Cornell University; Founder, The Planetary Society; Author, The Dragons of Eden, Cosmos
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: As a concerned teenager aware of the danger of nuclear war, what can ordinary people in this and the generations ahead do to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear warhead systems?
A: You live in a democracy. If you're over 18, you can vote. If you're under 18, you can still work in political campaigns. There's a very easy litmus test for any candidate. Is their approach to this problem to increase or to decrease the arsenals? It's very clear. Look what they are for and remember that you could slash deep gaps in our nuclear arsenals and still have the ability to annihilate the other side. Remember, there are only 2300 cities on the planet Earth. The United States and the Soviet Union could obliterate every city on the planet and have 15,000 strategic warheads left over, wondering what to do with them.
So, I would say that is certainly one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is to learn what the facts are. There is a great deal of baloney that is proffered in this business and I'm sorry to say that includes a lot of government officials that do the proffering. It is important to know what the facts are and that it means educating yourself. This is not an impossibly difficult subject, it's not as difficult, for example, as mastering baseball box scores, which many people seem to do perfectly easily, to say nothing of the financial pages of the major newspapers. If you can do that, you can do this. Learn the subject and make sure that your elected officials also understand the facts.
Q: This member refers to a presentation given by you and your Soviet counterpart on nuclear winter to U.N. ambassadors. Would you please comment on this presentation and, in particular, the response of the ambassadors to the concept and inevitability of the extension of life on the planet? These are our member's words. Were they surprised?
A: It's hard to know if ambassadors are ever surprised. Just, I don't know, a week or two ago, I did make a presentation somewhat along the lines of what I just did here, but oriented more towards the interests of developing nations and Third World nations to some, I don't know, 80 ambassadors at the United Nations. And, I was joined by Dr. Sergei Kapitsa of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Soviets have also done substantial research in this area, and we presented and the ambassadors listened and they asked questions, many of which were informed, and I did not see anyone saying, "Oh my goodness, the planet is in jeopardy," but I hope that's what they were thinking.
Q: The next question relates to disagreement among scientists. What is the basis for disagreement by scientists such as Dr. Teller with your position?
A: Dr. Teller is the inventor of the most devastating weapon ever invented by human beings and has a personal view, spent the subsequent decades in trying to convince us all that it was a good thing. Dr. Teller is unhappy with nuclear winter, in part because it suggests that nuclear weapons are not a good thing.
Q: There are many questions on Star Wars. This, perhaps, is representative: How destructive would a massive nuclear attack be if, by means of a Star Wars defense, we were successful in destroying incoming missiles at high altitudes?
A: Okay, there are no short answers on Star Wars. There are medium-sized answers and long answers. I don't have time for a long answer. I'll try to give a short, medium-sized answer. Star Wars, or because the administration considers that a derogatory phrase, the strategic defense initiative they prefer, is a proposed scheme that in some decades it would be possible to put some kind of astrodome, that's General Abrahamson's phrase, over the United States, which would in the president's words, "render incoming Soviet missiles impotent and obsolete," an interesting choice of words. It is imagined to be in several successive layers so that Soviet warheads that make it through the first layer are destroyed in the subsequent layers.
Several things to bear in mind; there are 10,000 Soviet strategic warheads. If the Star Wars system, if it was ever built and deployed, were 99 percent efficient, that would let through enough Soviet warheads to destroy the United States and probably to trigger a global nuclear winter - if it's 99 percent impermeable, and virtually no competent analyst believes that it could be anything like 99 percent impermeable. What's more, the system is easily, at much less cost, outfoxed by Soviet counter-measures, decoys and penetration aids, and the Soviets have a much cheaper and much more straightforward response to it. It's not to develop their own Star Wars system, it's simply to increase the number of their strategic missiles.
If they wish to give, to render a certain level of damage on the United States, and we have a Star Wars system which, let us say, can shoot down 50 percent of their warheads, all they have to do is double their number of warheads, which is much cheaper and doesn't involve any new technologies than the Star Wars system. What's more, Star Wars costs, even according to sympathetic critics, something like one trillion dollars, a thousand billion dollars. Which, an administration that claims to be concerned with galloping budget deficits, you would think would be worried about, but apparently not. There are many other problems about Star Wars, including a range of circumstances in which it is likely to increase, not decrease, the chances of nuclear war. But I've mentioned at least one of those circumstances, namely, that the net result will be an increase in the offensive forces on both sides. It is a mistake of a scale that is unprecedented in recent history and, fortunately, the combination of costs, technical problems, the likelihood that it will unravel the Atlantic Alliance, and the legitimate concern in many quarters that it will bring about the very nuclear war it is supposed to avoid, makes it likely that we will not see this system deployed, but there's going to be a long, hard fight ahead of us.
Let me say one more thing on this. For a tiny fraction of the cost of Star Wars, it would be possible for the United States and the Soviet Union together to organize a first landing on the planet Mars by human beings in which Americans and Russians would be there on behalf of the population of the planet Earth. A hopeful gesture, something on behalf of the human species, as opposed to what those nations often do, and an aperture to a benign and hopeful future; that, in my view, is the place to put the remarkable technological achievements that exist in the space arena and it can be done for very little money and in the absolute worse case, you do not destroy the global civilization or the species, something in its favor.
Q: Next question: Do you advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament?
A: It's not necessary. I mean, unilateral nuclear disarmament - well, several, several phrases. We've got to distinguish between disarmament and arms reduction. Disarmament means, at least as I read it, that you don't have any arms. And I think that is, even if it were desirable, impractical. Arms reduction means that you reduce the number of arms. I'm in favor of arms reduction. On the question of unilateral, as I mentioned before, either nation could make massive cuts in their stockpiles of nuclear weapons or the delivery systems without compromising national security. But it's not necessary to imagine unilateral actions. Bilateral, negotiated, verifiable actions are what I'm talking about, in which both sides work together on a set of steps by which the arsenals will be reduced. There are many ways to do this. One of the most interesting was proposed by Admiral Noel Gayler, former commander, a four-star U.S. admiral retired, former Commander in Chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, former Director of the National Security Agency, former Deputy Director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, former Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Research and Development and so on. I just mentioned this to show you that he's not a liberal college professor.
Admiral Gayler's proposal is that there is some bilateral facility to which the contending nations bring on a daily basis fission triggers of thermal nuclear weapons, the matches that light the hydrogen bombs. There is no question about verification. You can tell that, sure enough, that's plutonium in there. You can tell how much there is. And as long as there is a regular divestiture rate, a few nuclear weapon triggers per day, let's say, you could reduce the global arsenals to something like minimum deterrence by the year 2001, which seems to me a useful objective. Imagine the actual situation; there's some guys in white coats with stars and stripes on their lapels or something, and they wheel in this gray thing about that size and click-a-click-a-click-click-a, sure enough, it's plutonium. And then some other guys in white and they have a hammer and sickle on their lapels or shoulders. They wheel in something that looks almost the same and click-a-click-a-click-a, sure enough, that's plutonium as advertised. And then, imagine a circumstance in which these fission triggers are not just buried, but used for something useful. Imagine a planet in which there are safe and effective nuclear power plants, in which case you could convert this instrument of death into electricity, the ultimate in beating swords into plowshares. That's Gayler's scheme. There are a range of other schemes. It is technically doable and as I said before, what is missing is the political will or, put another way, a sufficient and long enough seeing self-interest.
Q: This member's concerned about the impact if nations other than the United States and the Soviets engaged in nuclear war, such as India, Pakistan, Israel, Argentina or others. Is the risk the same?
A: The United States and the Soviet Union, I mentioned what their arsenals were, something about oh, 55,000 nuclear weapons. The three next nuclear powers are Britain, France, and China, which the question I did not mention as far as can be told from publicly available information, those three nations can also, with their arsenals alone, trigger a global nuclear winter. France's Force de Frappe, for example, is according to published commentary, exclusively targeted on Soviet cities. It would be enough all by itself to produce nuclear winter. Clearly, you cannot go deep into the arms reduction process without involving these nations. Fortunately, there are all sorts of signs from these nations that they're willing to do it, if the United States and the Soviet Union would shape up. China has repeatedly made this remark in several consecutive sessions of the United Nations.
Now, those other nations which may have a handful of nuclear weapons or the ability to construct a handful of nuclear weapons on short notice, there's no question that they can do a great deal of damage; that a nuclear weapon can destroy a city and that is a catastrophe, that is hard to minimize. But in terms of triggering a nuclear war among the superpowers, in terms of making a nuclear winter from their arsenals alone, this is relatively minor, and I'd like to say one other thing about this. Virtually every talk I give on this subject someone is concerned, say, you haven't said anything about Israel or Iraq or Libya or India or Pakistan - and my perception, I could be wrong - is that this is an example of what psychiatrists call "displacement." That is, there is an awful problem that you think you can't do anything about and then there is a not as awful problem that you think you can do something about, and it's somehow connected. Well, so that we don't do nothing, let's worry about the problem where we seem to have some chance of fixing it, namely, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
Now, I maintain that while Pakistani nuclear weapons might be of considerable concern, especially to India, that this is not the main problem. And, a way to see this is to look at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1972 in which many, most nations around the world promised not to develop nuclear weapons, provided - and the provided is - in Article Six of the Nonproliferation Treaty, that the United States and the Soviet Union immediately enter into negotiations to make massive reductions in their arsenals. Well, since the signing of that treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union have added enough nuclear weapons to destroy everybody on the planet. The United States and the Soviet Union are in flagrant noncompliance with Article Six of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and that's why, if you talk to people from nations like Argentina, they say, don't talk to us about us developing nuclear weapons. You guys are the problems. I think as soon as the United States and the Soviet Union start making massive reductions, we'll find that all sorts of other nations will come along. The United States and the Soviet Union, under those circumstances, will have some moral leverage, which they have almost entirely abandoned by this flagrant and suicidal increase in their nuclear arsenals.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers