It would be a pity to let go without comment Obama’s recent speech in Prague. For those of you who didn’t follow it (the North Korean missile launch an hour before somewhat overshadowed it), it was surprisingly consequential. A decent number of commentators dismissed it, echoing Slate’s Anne Applebaum in critiquing Obama’s “odd obsession with universal nuclear disarmament”. It’s interesting in that nuclear policy is one of the issues that truly knows no partisan guide; before Obama, the last President to call for nuclear disarmament was Ronald Reagan. Some people dismiss the threat of nuclear weapons as being a piddling inconvenience, as Applebaum or The New Republic’s Marty Peretz do, and insist that the US has bigger problems to deal with.
Well, yes and no. The important point is that while nuclear war is improbable, it has extremely high costs (not unlike a total meltdown of the US financial industry). The likelihood of global thermonuclear war is, yes, less than it used to be. But one has to recognize that it is not and can never be zero. All it would take is a glitch in decades-old Russian missile defense systems (or a psychotic hacker) to set one off. God knows we’ve had enough close calls; just in 1995, we came within five minutes. And those are only the incidents we’ve been told about. Every single day, there is a small but finite chance of the destruction of humanity. And while I’m not good at math, I understand well enough what that means: given nuclear weapons and a sufficient amount of time, the probability of human self-destruction asymptotically approaches one. And if the Big One ever goes down, it takes little imagination to know what the survivors will say as they huddle in their bunkers: We should have seen this coming.
Since the Soviets invented the bomb and gave us the “balance of terror”, human civilization has been going through the motions with a loaded gun pressed its head. It’s easy to dismiss the danger because it hasn’t happened, but when discussing the possibility we really ought to remember we wouldn’t be able to discuss it if it had. Our good record so far makes it easy to overestimate our future security. Not to mention that if no one had nukes, the relative power of the US military would be far great: nukes are a relatively cheap way to project power. All in all, I find it hard to see why skipping along the precipice of human extinction is considered the “mainstream” of US foreign policy.