As those of you who know me at all are aware, I'm pretty pro-science. It has been suggested that if science were anthropomorphic and female we would probably be like, married by now. That said, there's one subject--and really pretty much just this one--that makes me almost question the entire enterprise, and that's nuclear weapons. (This post is inspired by me reading the first few chapters of Richard Rhodes's "The Arsenals of Folly", but see also Feynman's comments on the matter, and see also Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle".)
You might think that, since nuclear weapons have only been deployed twice, and there is an argument to be made that those were justified--I'm not convinced, but I can see the point of view--you might think that while dangerous, nuclear weapons are not the worst scientific sin. What about the Tuskegee Experiment, or Nazi eugenics, or DDT, or the Industrial Revolution? Right, well. Obviously I'm not ok with those. But to me those have always been human faults, expressed in the scientific realm, you know? They occurred in the presence of science and technology, but there was nothing unique about them that required that presence. They could have happened--and indeed, things just as bad HAVE happened--for the sake of ideological or religious fundamentalism.
Not nuclear weapons. See, the thing that gets me is the inevitability: You're investigating electricity. That's a good thing! It's useful. It's important to our civilization. I think everyone would agree that we are glad electricity was investigated. But, of course, if you investigate electricity, you inevitably discover the electron. Suddenly, you've stumbled right into the structure of matter. That's a fascinating question. And clearly, a very important one; it's something mankind has worried about since the ancient Greeks.
You probe a little more, and you discover that these electrons are actually incredibly light--nearly all the mass of an atom is contained in its very center, in a bundle of particles you name a "nucleus." At first you suppose that these nuclei are particles themselves, but you then discover that they are made of smaller pieces, protons and neutrons. That's cool! You have a positive, a negative, and a neutral particle discovered. It's also fantastically useful. This theory can explain pretty much all of chemistry, after all, from a few simple principles. You explore a little more, because you'd like to understand how all these different elements came to be--imagine the excitement, finally being able to understand the diverse forms matter takes and why it does that. You discover something about the nucleus: it's incredibly tightly bound together. It must be, to hold all the positive charges together. Furthermore, certain nuclei are more tightly bound than others--the larger ones are naturally a little less stable than the smaller ones. (And the really small ones are less stable than the larger ones, actually--the peak is at Iron-56.) So if you take a large nuclei and split it apart, you get two smaller, each at a lower energy state. And then there's extra energy released, in the form of kinetic energy/heat. Fascinating!
Wait, shit. Ok. Wait. Suppose we had a large sample of fairly unstable atoms. Suppose then that we started them splitting. Would the first one to start splitting be able to use that excess energy to trigger another split? I want to note here that it's not inevitable that this would be possible. At least, I can imagine in my mind a world where there was no substance that this was possible in. That's not the way the universe works though, and at this point "all" you have to do is to do the math and show that. And there it is, it's possible.
Until this point we've been entirely curiosity-driven, but actually a few sentences into that last paragraph the motivations shifted entirely. As soon as the question, "is a chain reaction possible?" is properly formulated, it becomes vitally important that we answer it. Because if it is possible, and someone else does it first, we may be screwed. Suddenly, scientific curiosity isn't running the show. Suddenly, it's the cold logic of game theory guiding our hand irrevocably. We have to investigate fission, and we have to confirm that it is possible.
I think there's actually another equilibrium here--the equilibrium where nobody has nuclear weapons and nobody has the infrastructure to make them. It's such a huge effort that you can't reliably create them in secret, and so you and everyone else can happily sit around not having them, secure in the knowledge that if anyone tries, you can either get up to speed just as quickly as them, or you can take military action to stop them. I think this is the ideal equilibrium in a disarmed world, and arguably the one that kinda-sorta exists in the Middle East. (EVERYONE KNOWS, Israel.)
That's not the equilibrium we have though. Because of the circumstances of its invention, because of the timeline history happened to take, we built bombs. And so, they built bombs. They had to, really. So we built bigger, and more bombs. They replied in kind, again, because that was the game theory-mandated course of action.
Imagine that a nuclear attack was launched, once the arms race was well and truly under way. We see the nukes coming. We know that we are all dead. America's cities are minutes from turning into hellish fireballs, flash-incinerated. If you don't live in a city, chances are you too close from one to escape the radiation--even if your dose isn't that bad, the infrastructure to treat you is going to be gone. The absolute logic of MAD demands that we counterattack. Not just their military--after all, the first strike is already out, we are not winning this war. No, we have to fire on enemy population centers. It is important that we launch a counter-genocide. Because if we didn't, if we weren't willing to carry out the logic to its fatal conclusion, then the whole structure wouldn't work.
This isn't science's fault, really. At some point, we fell into the prisoner's dilemma, and it was a matter of logic and sociology and politics. But that's how we got here. We asked questions about the natural world. We didn't do anything malicious, we didn't break any ethical rules--we just wondered, and we followed our curiosity. All my life, I've held that emotion in the highest regard, and thought it one of humanity's greatest traits. I am studying physics because I want to understand the world. But...was it worth it? We sought to understand the world and in doing so we discovered a way to end it. And it's not like we directed research towards it--we were well out of the curiosity regime by the time the Manhattan Project was formed. Simple questions, experiments--the natural flow of our desire for knowledge endowed us with powers to murder on a scale previously thought unthinkable. It led us to a situation in which we were required to develop ever-greater destructive capabilities. How many nuclear weapons are pointed at New York? How many guns do we have to the head of Washington D.C.? Moscow, Pyongyang, Beijing, Havana, Tehran?
I didn't do this. And maybe it's not fair to say that physics did this, either. The possibilities we discovered are a part of the laws of physics. They're the same laws that led to us being formed, the same rules that allow stars to forge hydrogen into heavier elements that make life possible. The same structure that allows us to arise from stardust, allows us to return to dust should we so choose. Still, it chills me to the bone to realize that the warm, wondrous view of the universe I hold can be so easily married to a cold logic of death.
The question becomes: is it worth the risk? Is it worth it to wonder and to discover, if there is some chance you might discover Armageddon? I suspect there's no good answer to this. I suspect that any answer to this will be entirely emotional and essentially a leap of faith. Scientists, it seems, are not immune to great questions of conscience.
Of course, I myself hold that it is worth it. The desire to explore something is tied up in who we are, as humans. We explore the world around us through science, we explore ourselves through art, and we explore each other through love and friendships. None of them are risk-free scenarios. None of them are all that safe and many of them are discomforting, sometimes over and over again. But we keep trying--because if we didn't, we may as well die. So I intend to keep exploring. I'm not sure I have a choice.
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