Doomsday

Doomsday

The global balance of terror, pioneered by the United States and the Soviet Union, held hostage the citizens of the Earth. Each side draws limits on the permissible behavior of the other. The potential enemy is assured that if the limit is transgressed, nuclear war will follow. However, the definition of the limit changes from time to time.

Each side must be quite confident that the other understands the new limits. Each side is tempted to increase its military advantage, but not in so striking a way as seriously to alarm the other. Each side continually explores the limits of the other’s tolerance, as in flights of nuclear bombers over the Arctic wastes; the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars – a few entries from a long and dolorous list. The global balance of terror is a very delicate balance. It depends on things not going wrong, on mistakes not being made, on the reptilian passions not being seriously aroused.

So we look back at L. F. Richardson, a British meteorologist interested in war. He wished to understand its causes. There are intellectual parallels between war and weather. Both are complex. Both exhibit regularities, implying that they are not implacable forces but natural systems that can be understood and controlled. To understand the global weather you must first collect a great body of meteorological data; you must discover how the weather actually behaves. Our approach must be the same, Richardson decided, if we are to understand warfare. So, for the years between 1820 and 1945, he collected data on the hundreds of wars that had been fought on our poor planet.

Doomsday: this is merely another way of saying what we have known for decades: the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems will, sooner or later, lead to global disaster. (Quotations from Megan Jorgenson). Anime Light World War. Image by © M. Jorgenson (Elena)

Richardson’s results were published posthumously in a book called The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Because he was interested in how long you had to wait for a war that would claim a specified number of victims, he defined an index, M, the magnitude of a war, a measure of the number of immediate deaths it causes. A war of magnitude M=3 might be merely a skirmish, killing only a thousand people (10-3). M=5 or M=6 denote more serious wars, where a hundred thousand (10-5) or a million (10-6) people are killed. World Wars I and II had larger magnitudes. He found that the more people killed if a war, the less likely it was to occur, and the longer before you could witness it, just as violent storms occur less frequently than cloudbursts.

In the Richardson’s diagram the solid line is the waiting time for a war of magnitude M – that is, the average time we would have to wait to witness a war that kills 10-m people (where M represents the number of zeroes after the one in our usual exponential arithmetic). Also shown, as a vertical bar at the right of the diagram is the world population in recent years, which reached one billion people (M=9) around 1835 and is now about 4.5 billion people (M-9.7). When the Richardson curve crosses the vertical bar we have specified the waiting time to Doomsday: how many years until the population of the Earth is destroyed in some great war. With Richardson’s curve and the simplest extrapolation for the future growth of the human population, the two curves do not intersect until the thirtieth century or so, and Doomsday if deferred.

But World War II was of magnitude 7.7: some fifty million military personnel and non-combatants were killed. The technology of death advanced ominously. Nuclear weapons were used for the first time. There is little indication that the motivations and propensities for warfare have diminished since, and both conventional and nuclear weaponry have become far more deadly.

Thus the top of the Richardson curve is shifting downward by an unknown amount. If its new position is somewhere in the shaded region of the figure, we may have only another few decades until Doomsday. A more detailed comparison of the incidence of wars before and after 1945 might help to clarify this question. It is of more than passing concern.

Nuclear Superpowers

Every major power has some widely publicized justification for its procurement and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, often including a reptilian reminder of the presumed character and cultural defects of potential enemies (as opposed to us stout fellows), or of the intentions of others, but never ourselves, to conquer the world. Every nation seems to have its set of forbidden possibilities, which its citizenry and adherents must not at any cost be permitted to think seriously about. In the Soviet Union these includes capitalism, God, and the surrender of national sovereignty. In the United States, socialism, atheism, and the surrender of national sovereignty. It is the same all over the world even today.

We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth? 3D Model. Image by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

How would we explain the global arms race to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer? How would we justify the most recent destabilizing developments of killer-satellites, particle beam weapons, lasers, neutron bombs, cruise missiles, and the proposed conversion of areas the size of modest countries to the enterprise of hiding each intercontinental ballistic missile among hundreds of decoys? Would we argue that ten thousand targeted nuclear warheads are likely to enhance the prospects for our survival?

What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers.