Purpose and Context
Page 155 of Through the Looking Glass, The Reagan Years in Words and Pictures, 1984, by Herblock (Herbert Block), who had clarity about nuclear weapons.
What can the environmental citizen do? When one pays attention to what is happening in the world, this question presses so large that it threatens to destroy focus. The welter of messes is confusing and disorienting. Clarity helps.
Some students bring the clarity of urgency to my classes. They are clear that they want to do something even though they don't know what it is yet. Even though such large problems loom and it must also be overwhelming to think how the generations before them failed, the determination to do something brings a sense of purpose, gives you a place in the world, a kind of light, a feeling of clarity. You may not know how the hell you will make progress, but you have found something to believe in.
Our stability is greatly tested when the world falls into war, and nuclear war threats suddenly rise up. Now the environmental citizen has to be thinking about the peace movement. War overshadows all of our plans to figure out what to do about plastics, toxics, climate change, loss of habitat. The environmental movement did, at the beginning, feel like an outgrowth of the VietNam protest era, the next thing you did to change the world after marching wasn’t enough. Things have come full circle and we are back at the beginning, with peace.
I, like other children, was terrified of A- and H-bombs[1] before I knew about pesticides and birds. It was the spreading of radioactive strontium-90 from nuclear testing that was one of the first great alarms about ourselves, about what “we” were doing to the world. Barry Commoner[2] and Linus Pauling[3] helped people understand the relationship – to see the particles raining down on the grass and being eaten by the cows and then in the milk children drink, and then damaging their chromosomes. Fallout’s poisoning showed how we are all connected in a tragedy.
Some students bring the clarity of urgency to my classes. They are clear that they want to do something even though they don't know what it is yet. Even though such large problems loom and it must also be overwhelming to think how the generations before them failed, the determination to do something brings a sense of purpose, gives you a place in the world, a kind of light, a feeling of clarity. You may not know how the hell you will make progress, but you have found something to believe in.
Our stability is greatly tested when the world falls into war, and nuclear war threats suddenly rise up. Now the environmental citizen has to be thinking about the peace movement. War overshadows all of our plans to figure out what to do about plastics, toxics, climate change, loss of habitat. The environmental movement did, at the beginning, feel like an outgrowth of the VietNam protest era, the next thing you did to change the world after marching wasn’t enough. Things have come full circle and we are back at the beginning, with peace.
I, like other children, was terrified of A- and H-bombs[1] before I knew about pesticides and birds. It was the spreading of radioactive strontium-90 from nuclear testing that was one of the first great alarms about ourselves, about what “we” were doing to the world. Barry Commoner[2] and Linus Pauling[3] helped people understand the relationship – to see the particles raining down on the grass and being eaten by the cows and then in the milk children drink, and then damaging their chromosomes. Fallout’s poisoning showed how we are all connected in a tragedy.
The struggle we are in is a war to win attention in the middle of confusion. To gain and provide clarity. The world of belief - that motivates some to follow insane orders, that lulls so many into cooperation - that is the field in which we defend our values, and meet the real enemies, who have no face, and sometimes inhabit our own hearts. The environmental citizen works in the world of ideas, attitudes, dreams, proclivities, tendencies, urges, jokes, stories, myths, beliefs, loyalties, ideologies, hopes, fashions, fears, identifications. To be effective, you have to find the place to stand in all of that swirling mess.
I remember first finding myself in that confusing world, when asking my parents to explain the Herblock cartoons of personified thuggish pointy-headed H-bombs. When they told me that H-bombs were unequivocally horrible, a crime, they gave me a gift of clarity that has helped me think about these things through the years, when people would say it was a topic so big and frightening that they didn’t know what to think about it, and even that you couldn’t think about it.[4] No, I used to think, it’s simple. It’s stupid! I was a child and I could think about it. Fallout is bad. In the same way, I was clear about Silent Spring when that came along: dispersing chemicals is bad. Poison is bad. These are things we can be clear about.
Now the great dictator, the hope of white supremacists, has overreached and turned the world, and maybe his own people, against him. This brings clarity. Trump’s praise of his intelligence, the cheap trick of calling our own leaders “dumb”, maybe that can fall flat, because there’s a little more clarity about things. Romney speaks out against those in his own party who support Putin, saying it is akin to treason, because they are giving him a little more clarity about what he’s against.
There seems to be a big choice, right now, in the world, between autocracy – Iron Curtains again ringing down – and a world at least safe for democracy. It is clear that the threat to Russia is the desire for democracy next door, which can influence Russians who want a real government. They are demonstrating now, because many are clear about how they feel about war, about this potential of autocracy. This increased clarity – always on the edge of breaking up – is our hope. President Zelenskyy and his people – their courage is like a clear light in a world that has been slowly darkening. Europe is now clear about acting as one people, and the democracies of the world have woken up some. We have something to hold onto and use.
Maybe now we can have more clarity, in the struggle for hearts and minds, about nuclear weapons. Our inability (unwillingness, failure) to control them has given us this moment, when an insane, coldly uncaring dictator can threaten to use them in assistance of an aggressive invasion. Can there be any more doubt that beyond deterrence, they can play no other role in the relationships that civilized nations seek with each other?
With the advent of this new hot Cold War Vladimir Putin rings down the curtain on the logic of the past nuclear age and shows us how the nuclear threat helps aggression.
We need to revisit the history of our nuclear posture because the public has never really processed the thinking that is necessary. The original decisions were made behind a wall of military secrecy. We can do better now with the clarity that the passage of time can bring and with the fresh reminder that this threat, once famously holding the world, yet holds the world.
There has been a lack of clarity about first-use. First, the nuclear bombs meant we could bring our soldiers home from the Pacific and Europe and we could threaten to use them if we had to. What does that mean? Nixon actually thought it was good for the Russians to think he might be unstable – putting the real "mad" in Mutual Assured Destruction. Trump shook the nuclear rattle to put people off balance. We have had the policy of possible first use - a shocking point made by Fred Kaplan in his 2020 The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. We need to be clear about our nuclear posture: we don’t just have bombs for deterring a nuclear attack. If that was all, it could be under international control. We have to be clear that we can change that.
Using nuclear bombs in military threat posture didn’t make sense to the nuclear scientists – so many tried to stop the bomb from actually being used, and so many worked for its control afterwards. It was clear to them that there was faulty logic at work. Albert Einstein told the public in 1947 that a big mistake was being made:
…an understanding over the supranational control of atomic energy has been made more remote. That may be no military drawback so long as the United States has the exclusive use of the bomb. But the moment another country is able to make it in substantial quantities, the United States loses greatly through the absence of an international agreement, because of the vulnerability of its concentrated industries and its highly developed urban life.
In refusing to outlaw the bomb while having the monopoly of it, this country suffers in another respect, in that it fails to return publicly to the ethical standards of warfare formally accepted previous to the last war. It should not be forgotten that the atomic bomb was made in this country as a preventive measure; it was to head off its use by the Germans, if they discovered it. The bombing of civilian centers was initiated by the Germans and adopted by the Japanese. To it the Allies responded in kind—as it turned out, with greater effectiveness—and they were morally justified in doing so. But now, without any provocation, and without the justification of reprisal or retaliation, a refusal to outlaw the use of the bomb save in reprisal is making a political purpose of its possession; this is hardly pardonable.[5]
Though he was respected, he wasn’t heeded. Ethical standards gave him clarity. Understanding that they were abandoned brings clarity.
Now we hear everyone saying we’re not going into Ukraine – we don’t have a treaty with them and that would be a provocation of a nuclear-tipped nation that is aggressing. So the first-use possibility that we kept because we wanted every advantage we could have, something we hope never to use, is just what the mad leader finds useful. He can escalate the nuclear threat level so no one will attack his convoy. While we are lucky to have a calm President who refuses to escalate the alerts in response to Putin’s, his nukes let him send tanks and small bombs to Kyiv without others interfering. When Trump used the words Fire and Fury to frighten North Korea, we knew it would encourage more such behavior, and now we see clearly what it really means. The nuclear “shield” protects the aggressor. We who have kept but would likely never again exercise the first-use option must realize that any Putin can just keep threatening to use the nukes, deterring us from entering with conventional arms. This war clearly reveals that there is no “balance” in the nuclear standoff.
Einstein said (emphasis added):
I am not saying that the United States should not manufacture and stockpile the bomb, for I believe that it must do so; it must be able to deter another nation from making an atomic attack when it also has the bomb. But deterrence should be the only purpose of the stockpile of bombs. In the same way I believe that the United Nations should have the atomic bomb when it is supplied with its own armed forces and weapons. But it too should have the bomb for the sole purpose of deterring an aggressor or rebellious nations from making an atomic attack. It should not use the atomic bomb on its own initiative any more than the United States or any other power should do so. To keep a stockpile of atomic bombs without promising not to initiate its use is exploiting the possession of bombs for political ends. It may be that the United States hopes in this way to frighten the Soviet Union into accepting supranational control of atomic energy. But the creation of fear only heightens antagonism and increases the danger of war. I am of the opinion that this policy has detracted from the very real virtue in the offer of supranational control of atomic energy.
We have emerged from a war in which we had to accept the degradingly low ethical standards of the enemy. But instead of feeling liberated from his standards, and set free to restore the sanctity of human life and the safety of noncombatants, we are in effect making the low standards of the enemy in the last war our own for the present. Thus we are starting toward another war degraded by our own choice.[6]
There is a new logic that overturns the great lucky event of history, we thought – that the Allies got the bomb and Hitler didn’t. Now, our modern Hitler has the bomb. He has had it for a long time because we failed to use our power to bring about its elimination. Instead, we thought it was doing something for us. We can argue about this mistake for a long time.
One hundred twenty-two states voted on July 7, 2017, to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the 50th ratification occurred on October 24, 2020, and the treaty entered into force on January 22, 2021.[7]
Nuclear weapons are the ultimate environmental problem not just because of their potential immediate, long-term, and broadly destructive nature but because their very presence in our lives is a profound distortion of relationship between people, between nations, and between reality and logic. We cannot expect to solve any environmental problems unless we establish a more sensible way of relating to each other. It never made sense to threaten other nations with nuclear weapons. Clarity concerning the overwhelming idiocy of it would change international relations, refocusing it from hysterical fear and outrageous threat to the need to focus on forming a sensible pattern and practice of friendly relations. It would save a lot of money we could use to repair the wounds that the nuclear bombs have caused and to accomplish the purposes we thought they served: sensible national defense. Insane national defense is not in our interest. Nuclear foreign policy was a fantasy drawn from the warps of history and opportunity, not sense or promise.
Maybe we still need bombs right now to deter Putin, and will need to keep them until there is no such threat. Einstein said deterrence needs to remain in place for now, then, and it’s still true. But there’s no need for absurd overkill and we need to work on that international system that works. J. Robert Oppenheimer thought we didn’t need hydrogen bombs.[8] His position of influence went to Edward Teller, whose passion for the H bomb was matched by his passion for Star Wars. At the Reykjavik accords, when Reagan famously was going to get real disarmament, it failed because of Gorbachev’s insistence that Stars Wars had to go. Star Wars, the mythical idea of a nuclear umbrella to shoot down missiles from space – could have enabled us to strike Russia with impunity. Reading Fred Kaplan one learns that:
the targeteers out in Omaha would just keep generating targets that they might have to hit in the event of a nuclear war, and then SAC - Strategic Air Command - would raise that as a requirement for how many nuclear weapons we needed. It was a self-generating circular logic that had increasingly little relationship to any sense of what war aims might be or of what U.S. policy was or should be.[9]
It seems clear, looking back, that the whole thing was a fool’s errand. It seems like one of those awful algorithms twisting our social order big time, a mechanism gone awry, another sacrifice of humanity to a senseless thing. It seems clear, looking back, that threatening the rest of the world was a great way to convince others that they need to acquire nuclear weapons, so they can deter our aggression.
Maybe we can take another look at the seemingly “unrealistic” treaty to prohibit and see it as a foundation we can stand on. Maybe we can regain the clarity of the Nuclear Freeze movement. Maybe we can join the community of nations working to be free of the nuclear prison. If our experts say we cannot join the treaty as it is and as we are right now, because it does not recognize the current situation which still requires deterrence, still we can demand that our government get to work on figuring out how we can escape the dead hand of that old, empty logic still at work in our lives. A country is a people, and must have sensible relationships with other peoples. It is something we can do if we set our minds to doing it.
The nuclear threat posture has been with us for a long time, under our thoughts and over our heads. Having it in our lives in essence says, we can eliminate pesticides, stop climate change, halt extinctions, save the forests and the ocean and all the beauty we love, and yet still blow it all up. To eliminate this unnecessary stupidity is not unthinkable. It is arguable that nothing else is really doable or truly valued unless we do.
The Ukrainian invasion should bring some clarity about this. We should be able to see ourselves as children playing with loaded guns in a sandbox. We should be able to see clearly that we have every right to grow up.
[1] Herblock’s cartoons in the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/herblock/.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/us/barry-commoner-dies-at-95.html
[3] In a debate with Edward Teller on KQED radio, Feb. 20, 1958 he said “Radioactive fallout causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm that does result in the birth of an additional number of defective children. I have estimated that the amount of increase in the mutation rate as the result of radioactive fallout from testing carried on at the present rate is one per cent - a one per cent increase in the number of defective children who will be born in the future.” “Fallout and Disarmament: A Debate between Linus Pauling and Edward Teller”, Daedalus, Spring, 1958, Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 147-163 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20026443.
[4] Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable, 1962.
[5] In the November 1947 Atlantic Magazine “Atomic War or Peace”, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1947/11/atomic-war-or-peace/305443/
[6] After Einstein died eight years later, the Einstein-Russell (Bertrand) Manifesto was published, which said “We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”
[7]https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/#:~:text=The%20Treaty%20on%20the%20Prohibition,threaten%20to%20use%20nuclear%20weapons.
[8] Peter Galison and Barton Bernstein, “In Any Light: Scientists and the Decision to Build the Superbomb,” 1952-1954, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences , 1989, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1989), pp. 267-347, University of California Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27757627.
[9] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/800014687/new-book-presents-a-secret-history-of-nuclear-war-planning-in-america
I remember first finding myself in that confusing world, when asking my parents to explain the Herblock cartoons of personified thuggish pointy-headed H-bombs. When they told me that H-bombs were unequivocally horrible, a crime, they gave me a gift of clarity that has helped me think about these things through the years, when people would say it was a topic so big and frightening that they didn’t know what to think about it, and even that you couldn’t think about it.[4] No, I used to think, it’s simple. It’s stupid! I was a child and I could think about it. Fallout is bad. In the same way, I was clear about Silent Spring when that came along: dispersing chemicals is bad. Poison is bad. These are things we can be clear about.
Now the great dictator, the hope of white supremacists, has overreached and turned the world, and maybe his own people, against him. This brings clarity. Trump’s praise of his intelligence, the cheap trick of calling our own leaders “dumb”, maybe that can fall flat, because there’s a little more clarity about things. Romney speaks out against those in his own party who support Putin, saying it is akin to treason, because they are giving him a little more clarity about what he’s against.
There seems to be a big choice, right now, in the world, between autocracy – Iron Curtains again ringing down – and a world at least safe for democracy. It is clear that the threat to Russia is the desire for democracy next door, which can influence Russians who want a real government. They are demonstrating now, because many are clear about how they feel about war, about this potential of autocracy. This increased clarity – always on the edge of breaking up – is our hope. President Zelenskyy and his people – their courage is like a clear light in a world that has been slowly darkening. Europe is now clear about acting as one people, and the democracies of the world have woken up some. We have something to hold onto and use.
Maybe now we can have more clarity, in the struggle for hearts and minds, about nuclear weapons. Our inability (unwillingness, failure) to control them has given us this moment, when an insane, coldly uncaring dictator can threaten to use them in assistance of an aggressive invasion. Can there be any more doubt that beyond deterrence, they can play no other role in the relationships that civilized nations seek with each other?
With the advent of this new hot Cold War Vladimir Putin rings down the curtain on the logic of the past nuclear age and shows us how the nuclear threat helps aggression.
We need to revisit the history of our nuclear posture because the public has never really processed the thinking that is necessary. The original decisions were made behind a wall of military secrecy. We can do better now with the clarity that the passage of time can bring and with the fresh reminder that this threat, once famously holding the world, yet holds the world.
There has been a lack of clarity about first-use. First, the nuclear bombs meant we could bring our soldiers home from the Pacific and Europe and we could threaten to use them if we had to. What does that mean? Nixon actually thought it was good for the Russians to think he might be unstable – putting the real "mad" in Mutual Assured Destruction. Trump shook the nuclear rattle to put people off balance. We have had the policy of possible first use - a shocking point made by Fred Kaplan in his 2020 The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. We need to be clear about our nuclear posture: we don’t just have bombs for deterring a nuclear attack. If that was all, it could be under international control. We have to be clear that we can change that.
Using nuclear bombs in military threat posture didn’t make sense to the nuclear scientists – so many tried to stop the bomb from actually being used, and so many worked for its control afterwards. It was clear to them that there was faulty logic at work. Albert Einstein told the public in 1947 that a big mistake was being made:
…an understanding over the supranational control of atomic energy has been made more remote. That may be no military drawback so long as the United States has the exclusive use of the bomb. But the moment another country is able to make it in substantial quantities, the United States loses greatly through the absence of an international agreement, because of the vulnerability of its concentrated industries and its highly developed urban life.
In refusing to outlaw the bomb while having the monopoly of it, this country suffers in another respect, in that it fails to return publicly to the ethical standards of warfare formally accepted previous to the last war. It should not be forgotten that the atomic bomb was made in this country as a preventive measure; it was to head off its use by the Germans, if they discovered it. The bombing of civilian centers was initiated by the Germans and adopted by the Japanese. To it the Allies responded in kind—as it turned out, with greater effectiveness—and they were morally justified in doing so. But now, without any provocation, and without the justification of reprisal or retaliation, a refusal to outlaw the use of the bomb save in reprisal is making a political purpose of its possession; this is hardly pardonable.[5]
Though he was respected, he wasn’t heeded. Ethical standards gave him clarity. Understanding that they were abandoned brings clarity.
Now we hear everyone saying we’re not going into Ukraine – we don’t have a treaty with them and that would be a provocation of a nuclear-tipped nation that is aggressing. So the first-use possibility that we kept because we wanted every advantage we could have, something we hope never to use, is just what the mad leader finds useful. He can escalate the nuclear threat level so no one will attack his convoy. While we are lucky to have a calm President who refuses to escalate the alerts in response to Putin’s, his nukes let him send tanks and small bombs to Kyiv without others interfering. When Trump used the words Fire and Fury to frighten North Korea, we knew it would encourage more such behavior, and now we see clearly what it really means. The nuclear “shield” protects the aggressor. We who have kept but would likely never again exercise the first-use option must realize that any Putin can just keep threatening to use the nukes, deterring us from entering with conventional arms. This war clearly reveals that there is no “balance” in the nuclear standoff.
Einstein said (emphasis added):
I am not saying that the United States should not manufacture and stockpile the bomb, for I believe that it must do so; it must be able to deter another nation from making an atomic attack when it also has the bomb. But deterrence should be the only purpose of the stockpile of bombs. In the same way I believe that the United Nations should have the atomic bomb when it is supplied with its own armed forces and weapons. But it too should have the bomb for the sole purpose of deterring an aggressor or rebellious nations from making an atomic attack. It should not use the atomic bomb on its own initiative any more than the United States or any other power should do so. To keep a stockpile of atomic bombs without promising not to initiate its use is exploiting the possession of bombs for political ends. It may be that the United States hopes in this way to frighten the Soviet Union into accepting supranational control of atomic energy. But the creation of fear only heightens antagonism and increases the danger of war. I am of the opinion that this policy has detracted from the very real virtue in the offer of supranational control of atomic energy.
We have emerged from a war in which we had to accept the degradingly low ethical standards of the enemy. But instead of feeling liberated from his standards, and set free to restore the sanctity of human life and the safety of noncombatants, we are in effect making the low standards of the enemy in the last war our own for the present. Thus we are starting toward another war degraded by our own choice.[6]
There is a new logic that overturns the great lucky event of history, we thought – that the Allies got the bomb and Hitler didn’t. Now, our modern Hitler has the bomb. He has had it for a long time because we failed to use our power to bring about its elimination. Instead, we thought it was doing something for us. We can argue about this mistake for a long time.
One hundred twenty-two states voted on July 7, 2017, to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the 50th ratification occurred on October 24, 2020, and the treaty entered into force on January 22, 2021.[7]
Nuclear weapons are the ultimate environmental problem not just because of their potential immediate, long-term, and broadly destructive nature but because their very presence in our lives is a profound distortion of relationship between people, between nations, and between reality and logic. We cannot expect to solve any environmental problems unless we establish a more sensible way of relating to each other. It never made sense to threaten other nations with nuclear weapons. Clarity concerning the overwhelming idiocy of it would change international relations, refocusing it from hysterical fear and outrageous threat to the need to focus on forming a sensible pattern and practice of friendly relations. It would save a lot of money we could use to repair the wounds that the nuclear bombs have caused and to accomplish the purposes we thought they served: sensible national defense. Insane national defense is not in our interest. Nuclear foreign policy was a fantasy drawn from the warps of history and opportunity, not sense or promise.
Maybe we still need bombs right now to deter Putin, and will need to keep them until there is no such threat. Einstein said deterrence needs to remain in place for now, then, and it’s still true. But there’s no need for absurd overkill and we need to work on that international system that works. J. Robert Oppenheimer thought we didn’t need hydrogen bombs.[8] His position of influence went to Edward Teller, whose passion for the H bomb was matched by his passion for Star Wars. At the Reykjavik accords, when Reagan famously was going to get real disarmament, it failed because of Gorbachev’s insistence that Stars Wars had to go. Star Wars, the mythical idea of a nuclear umbrella to shoot down missiles from space – could have enabled us to strike Russia with impunity. Reading Fred Kaplan one learns that:
the targeteers out in Omaha would just keep generating targets that they might have to hit in the event of a nuclear war, and then SAC - Strategic Air Command - would raise that as a requirement for how many nuclear weapons we needed. It was a self-generating circular logic that had increasingly little relationship to any sense of what war aims might be or of what U.S. policy was or should be.[9]
It seems clear, looking back, that the whole thing was a fool’s errand. It seems like one of those awful algorithms twisting our social order big time, a mechanism gone awry, another sacrifice of humanity to a senseless thing. It seems clear, looking back, that threatening the rest of the world was a great way to convince others that they need to acquire nuclear weapons, so they can deter our aggression.
Maybe we can take another look at the seemingly “unrealistic” treaty to prohibit and see it as a foundation we can stand on. Maybe we can regain the clarity of the Nuclear Freeze movement. Maybe we can join the community of nations working to be free of the nuclear prison. If our experts say we cannot join the treaty as it is and as we are right now, because it does not recognize the current situation which still requires deterrence, still we can demand that our government get to work on figuring out how we can escape the dead hand of that old, empty logic still at work in our lives. A country is a people, and must have sensible relationships with other peoples. It is something we can do if we set our minds to doing it.
The nuclear threat posture has been with us for a long time, under our thoughts and over our heads. Having it in our lives in essence says, we can eliminate pesticides, stop climate change, halt extinctions, save the forests and the ocean and all the beauty we love, and yet still blow it all up. To eliminate this unnecessary stupidity is not unthinkable. It is arguable that nothing else is really doable or truly valued unless we do.
The Ukrainian invasion should bring some clarity about this. We should be able to see ourselves as children playing with loaded guns in a sandbox. We should be able to see clearly that we have every right to grow up.
[1] Herblock’s cartoons in the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/herblock/.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/us/barry-commoner-dies-at-95.html
[3] In a debate with Edward Teller on KQED radio, Feb. 20, 1958 he said “Radioactive fallout causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm that does result in the birth of an additional number of defective children. I have estimated that the amount of increase in the mutation rate as the result of radioactive fallout from testing carried on at the present rate is one per cent - a one per cent increase in the number of defective children who will be born in the future.” “Fallout and Disarmament: A Debate between Linus Pauling and Edward Teller”, Daedalus, Spring, 1958, Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 147-163 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20026443.
[4] Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable, 1962.
[5] In the November 1947 Atlantic Magazine “Atomic War or Peace”, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1947/11/atomic-war-or-peace/305443/
[6] After Einstein died eight years later, the Einstein-Russell (Bertrand) Manifesto was published, which said “We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”
[7]https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/#:~:text=The%20Treaty%20on%20the%20Prohibition,threaten%20to%20use%20nuclear%20weapons.
[8] Peter Galison and Barton Bernstein, “In Any Light: Scientists and the Decision to Build the Superbomb,” 1952-1954, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences , 1989, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1989), pp. 267-347, University of California Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27757627.
[9] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/800014687/new-book-presents-a-secret-history-of-nuclear-war-planning-in-america
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