Nuclear Chicken: An Interview with Martin Hellman

[bananas]

http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/article.php?article_id=433

Nuclear Chicken: An Interview with Martin Hellman
February, 2010
by Stanford Progressive

Martin Hellman is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He is a member of National Academy of Engineering. Along with two student, Hellman invented public key technology, the backbone of internet cryptography. For almost 30 years his primary concern has been nuclear weapons and how human beings will survive having possession of them.

Stanford Progressive: What has your involvement with nuclear weapons and nuclear policy been?

MH: Well, it started in the early 80s. Reagan came to office, and the nuclear threat which had been almost as great under previous presidents came into sharp focus because he talked honestly about war fighting plans we had. We had plans to fight and win a nuclear war under previous presidents including Carter. That's when I got interested, when I got concerned, and when I started to do things about it.

<snip>

SP: And what are the limits to nuclear weapons that the public isn't thinking about right now?

MH: The public, by and large, perceives nuclear weapons as essential to our security and safety. We need to re-examine that. For example, take even the word “nuclear deterrence.” It implies that it works because with nuclear weapons you “deter” bad behavior. But is it nuclear deterrence or is it nuclear chicken? If we are in a crisis, the first side to behave rationally loses...that's something people need to start thinking about. They don't have to agree with me, but I'd like them to start thinking about these issues instead of letting their lives depend on conventional wisdom which can be wrong. Just like conventional wisdom in the early 1800s was wrong that slavery would be part of civilization into the indefinite future just as it had been into the indefinite past.

SP: Could you talk a little more about this statement that you said was signed by several people on your website?

MH: Several years ago, I realized that there was a big hole in the research on nuclear weapons: no one had estimated the risk inherent in relying on nuclear weapons for our security. Everybody says we need them, but no one estimated how risky they are...Yes, they make us more cautious in certain situations, but what is the risk of us using them when we don't want to such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis? As I researched this and talked with some of my colleagues here I realized there was a branch of engineering called Quantitative Risk Analysis which can come up with a rough approximation - not an exact one – for how risky certain behaviors are even when they haven't occurred...When I came up with that paper I also composed a one-page summary statement, and I sought signatories for it, and I have seven signers...One of them here at Stanford is Don Kennedy, former president, two nobel laureates, Ken Arrow in economics - and economic risk is an area that he is an expert in – Martin Perl in physics, and Bill Kays, former dean of engineering. Then three outside people from the business community...and Admiral Bobby Inman...he had been our top professional intelligence officer in the 80s, Director of NSA and Deputy Director of the CIA, and Dick Garwin who played a key role in the development of the first H-bomb. That statement is called “Defusing the Nuclear Threat” (http://nuclearrisk.org) and it says that the first step is for the public to understand how much risk we face, and we call on the international scientific community to undertake with a sense of urgency – because studies can be a way of putting things off- risk analyses of nuclear deterrence, and if the results confirm my initial results, to use them as a vehicle to raise alarm with the public.

<snip>

SP: As you say, the public's mind is already very set. So what should Stanford students be doing if they want to change minds?

MH: They need to become educated. Some of the education is very simple. Rethinking concepts such as is using nuclear weapons for defensive purposes “nuclear deterrence” or is it “nuclear chicken?” Is Nato's “nuclear umbrella” just that or a “conveyer belt of war?” Take Georgia, if it had been in NATO, we would have been treaty bound to go to war with Russia in August 2008. We really need to reexamine all these terms. Courses like MS&E 193 that Bill Perry and Siegfriend Hecker teach, the students I know who have taken that understand this much better than the average person so I really encourage people to do that. I have a project which I have just started at Stanford which has the idea that Stanford students could actually be the catalyst to solve this problem.

<snip>

[kristopher]

1. You foolish, foolish person...

Don't you know that we aren't to quantify the risks of nuclear detonations? It is forbidden by the Nuclear Energy Institute because nuclear proliferation isn't related to nuclear power anyway.

(I know that doesn't make sense, but it isn't my stance, it is the NEI shills reasoning.)

[bananas]

2. As Professor Hellman says, "They need to become educated."

Which is why I post these here.