Science and nuclear disarmament
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010046
I spent Monday morning at the Washington, DC, headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The event that drew me there was a symposium entitled “Science and Nuclear Disarmament: Progress and Challenges.” Its sponsors were the AAAS and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Scientists continue to devise new weapons, nuclear or not. When Joseph Rotblat accepted the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, he quoted Solly Zuckerman, who was chief scientific adviser to the British government from 1964 to 1971:
When it comes to nuclear weapons . . . it is the man in the laboratory who at the start proposes that for this or that arcane reason it would be useful to improve an old or to devise a new nuclear warhead. It is he, the technician, not the commander in the field, who is at the heart of the arms race.
Rotblat worked on the Manhattan Project and was among several physicists who campaigned against nuclear weapons. He, Albert Einstein, and others argued that using nuclear weapons was inhumane.
At Monday’s symposium, I learned of another, perhaps more subtle argument: The possession of nuclear weapons by a few countries is intrinsically unstable and inevitably leads to a nuclear arms race.
According to one of the symposium’s speakers, Michiiji Konuma of Keio University in Tokyo, the orignators of the argument were Japan’s first two Nobel laureates: Hideki Yukawa and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Konuma didn’t cite any references, but it’s not hard to imagine a paper by the two imaginative theorists. In it you’d find the world’s nuclear arsenals and security concerns represented by dynamical equations that, when analyzed, are revealed to have no stable solution.
Another speaker, George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued that a world without nuclear weapons makes sense from a geopolitical point of view. Countries without nuclear weapons will always find it difficult to accept that only a few countries—the current count is nine—get to have the weapons and tell the rest of the world to forgo them.
Some nuclear-armed countries would also resist multilateral nuclear disarmament because their conventional forces are weaker than those of their perceived rivals. The US and Russia have more or less the same number of nuclear warheads. But the US has more conventional forces at its disposal than Russia does and outspends Russia on military hardware and personnel by 17 to 1. In a world without nuclear weapons, the US would be even more predominant.
Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland noted that he hasn’t yet seen a thorough and comprehensive analysis of whether a world without nuclear weapons is stable—or even desirable, given the ease with which nuclear weapons can be manufactured. The lack of analysis reminded him of the early stages of the cold war. It took a decade, he said, for the US to recognize the strategic imperative of making sure that its nuclear arsenal be invulnerable to a surprise attack.
Hearing about nuclear weapons is gloomy. Fortunately, an uplifting note came from the symposium’s cohost and first speaker, Hirotaka Sugawara, who directs JSPS’s Washington office. He challenged physicists to devise ways to detect and thwart nuclear weapons:
The nuclear bomb is a product of “devil’s work” by physicists. If the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be repeated again somewhere, sometime by someone, physicists should seriously consider contributing to “God’s work,” which is to nullify the nuclear bombs.
Sugawara acknowledged that the goal would be dificult. But, to quote another physicist, Phil Anderson, about another unmet goal, understanding high-Tc superconductors, “Since when did physicists stop working on something because it’s hard?”
