Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  A similar miscalculation could lead to nuclear war today. For example, North Korea currently has medium-range missiles capable of reaching Japan and South Korea, and has launched a long-range ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) intended to be able to reach the U.S. When North Korea completes development of its ICBM, it might demonstrate it by launching one towards the U.S. That would be considered by the U.S. as an unacceptable provocation, especially if the ICBM by mistake came closer to the U.S. than intended. An American president might then face overwhelming pressure to retaliate, which would create overwhelming pressure on China’s leaders to retaliate in defense of their North Korean ally.

  Another plausible opportunity for unintended retaliation by miscalculation involves Pakistan and India. Pakistan terrorists already conducted a lethal non-nuclear attack on the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008. In the foreseeable future, Pakistan terrorists might stage a more provocative attack (e.g., on India’s capital city New Delhi); it might be unclear to India whether the Pakistan government itself was behind the attack; India’s leaders would be pressured to invade some neighboring portion of Pakistan, in order to eliminate the terrorist threat there; Pakistan’s leaders would then be pressured to use their small tactical nuclear weapons “just” against the invading Indian army, perhaps miscalculating that India would consider such a limited use of nuclear weapons as “acceptable” and not requiring a full retaliatory response; but India’s leaders would be pressured to respond with their own nuclear weapons.

  Both of those situations that could lead to nuclear war by miscalculation seem to me likely to begin to unfold within the next decade. The main uncertainty concerns whether leaders will then pull back as happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or whether escalation will run to completion.

  The third type of scenario that could culminate in a nuclear war is an accidental misreading of technical warning signs. Both the U.S. and Russia have early warning systems to detect a launch of attacking missiles by the rival. Once missiles have been launched, are underway, and have been detected, the American or Russian president has about 10 minutes to decide whether to launch a retaliatory attack before the incoming missiles destroy the land-based missiles of his country. Launched missiles can’t be recalled. That leaves minimal time to evaluate whether the early warning is real or just a false alarm due to a technical error, and whether or not to push a button that will kill hundreds of millions of people.

  But missile detection systems, like all complex technologies, are subject to malfunctions and to ambiguities of interpretation. We know of at least three false alarms given by the American detection system. For example, on November 9, 1979 the U.S. army general serving as watch officer for the U.S. system phoned then-Under-Secretary of Defense William Perry in the middle of the night to say, “My warning computer is showing 200 ICBMs in flight from the Soviet Union to the United States.” But the general concluded that the signal was probably a false alarm, Perry did not awaken President Carter, and Carter did not push the button and needlessly kill a hundred million Soviets. It eventually turned out that the signal was indeed a false alarm due to human error: a computer operator had by mistake inserted into the U.S. warning system computer a training tape simulating the launch of 200 Soviet ICBMs. We also know of at least one false alarm given by the Russian detection system: a single non-military rocket launched in 1995 from an island off Norway towards the North Pole was misidentified by the automatic tracking algorithm of Russian radar as a missile launched from an American submarine.

  These incidents illustrate an important point. A warning signal is not unambiguous. False alarms are to be expected and still happen, but real launches and real alarms are also possible. Hence when a warning alert does come through, the U.S. watch officer and president (and presumably a Russian watch officer and president in the corresponding situation) must interpret the alarm in the context of then-current conditions: is the current world situation such that the Russians (or Americans) are likely to assume the horrible risk of launching an attack that will guarantee immediate mass-destructive retaliation? On November 9, 1979 there were no current world events motivating a missile launch, Soviet/U.S. relations were not acutely troubled, and the U.S. watch officer and William Perry felt confident in interpreting the warning signal as a false alarm.

  Alas, that comforting context no longer prevails. While one might naïvely have expected the end of the Cold War to reduce or eliminate the risk of nuclear war between Russia and the U.S., the result has been paradoxically the opposite: the risk is now higher than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The explanation is the deterioration of relations and of communications between Russia and the U.S.: a deterioration partly due to recent policies of Russia’s President Putin, and partly due to imprudent American policies. In the late 1990’s the U.S. government made the mistake of dismissing the post–Soviet Union Russia as weak and no longer worthy of respect. In line with that new attitude, the U.S. prematurely expanded NATO to encompass the Baltic Republics that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union, supported NATO military intervention against Serbia over strong Russian opposition, and stationed ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe supposedly as a defense against Iranian missiles. Russian leaders understandably felt threatened by those and other U.S. actions.

  U.S. policy towards Russia today ignores the lesson that Finland’s leaders drew from the Soviet threat after 1945: that the only way of securing Finland’s safety was to engage in constant frank discussions with the Soviet Union, and to convince the Soviets that Finland could be trusted and posed no threat (Chapter 2). Today, the U.S. and Russia pose a big threat to each other, from a possible misinterpretation leading to an attack not planned in advance—because they are not in constant frank communication, and they are failing to convince each other that they pose no threat from a possible attack planned in advance.

  The remaining scenario that could result in use of nuclear weapons involves terrorists stealing uranium or plutonium or a completed bomb from, or being given it by, a nuclear power: most likely Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran. The bomb could then be smuggled into the U.S. or another target, and detonated. While preparing for the 2001 World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda did seek to acquire a nuclear weapon for use against the U.S. Perhaps terrorists could steal uranium or a bomb without the help of the bomb-producing country, if security at the bomb storage site were inadequate. For instance, at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 600 kilograms of former-Soviet bomb-quality uranium remained in the Soviet republic that became newly independent Kazakhstan. The uranium was stored in a warehouse secured by little more than a barbed-wire fence and could easily have been stolen. But more likely, terrorists might obtain bomb material by an “inside job,” i.e., with the help of bomb storage personnel or leaders of Pakistan, North Korea, or Iran.

  A related risk often confused with that danger of terrorists acquiring a nuclear bomb is the risk of their acquiring a so-called “dirty bomb”: a conventional non-nuclear explosive bomb whose package includes non-explosive but long-lived radioactive material, such as the isotope cesium-137 with a half-life of 30 years. Detonation of the bomb in an American or other city would spread the cesium over an area of many blocks that would become permanently uninhabitable, as well as having a big psychological impact. (Just think of the permanent consequences of the World Trade Center attack on U.S. mindset and policies, although no explosives or long-lived isotopes were used.) Terrorists have already demonstrated their capacity to explode bombs in cities of numerous countries, and cesium-137 is readily available in hospitals because of its medical uses. Hence it’s surprising that terrorists haven’t already added cesium-137 to their non-nuclear bombs.

  Of these four sets of scenarios, the most likely is the one involving terrorists using a dirty bomb (easy to make) or a nuclear bomb. The former would kill just a few people, the latter “just” a Hiroshima-like death toll of a hundred thousand people—but both would have consequences far eclipsin
g those death tolls. Less likely, but still possible, are the first three scenarios that could kill hundreds of millions of people directly, and ultimately most people on Earth.

  The next of the world’s four big problems that will shape our lives in the coming decades is global climate change. Almost all of us have heard of it. But it’s so complicated, confusing, and bristling with paradoxes that few people except climate specialists actually understand it, and many influential people (including lots of American politicians) dismiss it as a hoax. I’ll now try to explain it as clearly as possible, with the help of a flow diagram of the cause/effect chain that can be used to follow my explanation.

  The starting point is the world’s human population, and its average impact per person on the world. (That latter expression means the average amount of resources such as oil consumed, and of wastes such as sewage produced, per person per year.) All three of those quantities—the number of people, and an average person’s resource consumption and waste production—are increasing. As a result, total human impact on the world is increasing: because total impact equals the increasing average impact per person, multiplied by the increasing number of people.

  FIG. 9 Causation Chain of Global Climate Change

  An important waste is the gas carbon dioxide (CO2), which is constantly being produced by the respiration of animals (including us) and being released into the atmosphere. However, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent human population explosion, that natural CO2 release has been dwarfed by CO2 production resulting especially from human burning of fossil fuels. The next most important gas causing climate change is methane, which exists in much smaller quantities and is presently much less important than CO2, but which could become important due to what is called a positive feedback loop: namely, global warming melting the Arctic’s permafrost, which releases methane, which causes more warming, which melts more permafrost, which releases more methane, etc. etc.

  The most discussed primary effect of CO2 release is to act as a so-called greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. That’s because atmospheric CO2 is transparent to the sun’s shortwave radiation, allowing incoming sunlight to pass through the atmosphere and warm the Earth’s surface. The Earth re-radiates that energy back towards space, but at longer thermal infrared wavelengths to which CO2 is opaque. Hence the CO2 absorbs that re-radiated energy and re-emits it in all directions, including back down to the Earth’s surface. The surface thus gets warm like the inside of a glass greenhouse, although the warming’s physical mechanism is different.

  But there are two other primary effects of CO2 release. One is that the CO2 that we produce also gets stored in the oceans as carbonic acid. But the ocean’s acidity is already higher than at any time in the last 15 million years. That dissolves the skeletons of coral, killing coral reefs, which are a major breeding nursery of the ocean’s fish, and which protect tropical and subtropical sea-coasts against storm waves and tsunamis. At present, the world’s coral reefs are contracting by 1% or 2% per year, so they will mostly be gone within this century, and that means big declines in tropical coastal safety and protein availability from seafood. The other primary effect of our CO2 release is that it affects plant growth, variously either stimulating or inhibiting it.

  The most discussed effect of CO2 release, though, is the one I mentioned first: to heat the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere. That’s what we call global warming, but the effect is so complex as to make the term “global warming” a misnomer; the term “global climate change” is a better one. First, cause/effect chains mean that atmospheric heating paradoxically ends up causing some land areas (including the southeastern U.S.) to become temporarily colder, even while most areas (including most of the rest of the U.S.) are getting warmer. For instance, a warmer atmosphere melts more Arctic Ocean sea ice, permitting more cold Arctic Ocean water to flow south and to cool some land areas downstream from those currents.

  Second, rivaling the average warming trend in its importance for human societies is an increase in climate extremes: storms and floods are increasing, hot weather peaks are getting hotter, but also cold weather peaks are getting colder, producing effects like a snowfall in Egypt and a cold wave in the U.S. Northeast. That leads skeptical politicians who don’t understand climate change to think that this disproves its reality.

  A third complication is that climate change involves big time lags between causes and effects. For example, the oceans store and release CO2 so slowly that, even if every human on Earth died tonight, or stopped breathing, or stopped burning fossil fuels, the atmosphere would still heat up for several more decades. Conversely, there are potential big non-linear amplifiers that could make the world heat up much faster than in current conservative projections that assume linear relations between causes and effects. Those amplifiers include permafrost and sea ice melting, and the possible collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

  As for the consequences of the world’s average warming trend, I’ll mention four. (At this point in my “clear explanation,” you may be ready to agree that global climate change really is complicated!) The most obvious consequence to people in many parts of the world is drought. For example, my homeland of Southern California is getting drier and drier, and the year 2015 in particular was the driest year in the history of my city of Los Angeles since weather records began being recorded in the 1800’s. The droughts caused by global climate change are uneven around the world: the worst affected areas are North America, the Mediterranean and Mideast, Africa, Australia’s farmland in southern Australia, and the Himalayas. For instance, the Himalayan snow pack provides most of the water for China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and that snow pack and the resulting water supply that those countries have to share are shrinking, but those countries have a poor track record of peacefully settling their conflicts.

  A second consequence of the average global warming trend is decreased food production on land, from the drought that I just mentioned, and paradoxically from increased land temperatures (e.g., because they can favor growth of weeds over growth of crops). Decreased food production is a problem because the world’s human population, standard of living, and food consumption are in the process of increasing by a projected 50% over the next few decades, but we already have a food problem now with several billion people currently underfed. In particular, the U.S. is the world’s leading food exporter, and American agriculture is concentrated in the western and central U.S., which are becoming uniformly hotter and drier and less productive.

  A third consequence of the average warming trend is that tropical disease-carrying insects are moving into the temperate zones. The resulting disease problems so far include the recent transmission of dengue fever and the spread of tick-borne diseases in the U.S., the recent arrival of tropical chikungunya fever in Europe, and the spread of malaria and viral encephalitis.

  The last consequence of the warming trend that I’ll mention is rising sea levels. Conservative estimates of the average sea level rise expected during this century are 3 feet, but there have been past rises by up to 70 feet; the main uncertainty now involves possible collapses and melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which would dump a lot of water into the oceans. Even an average rise of just 3 feet, though, amplified by storms and tides, would be enough to undermine the livability of Florida and some other areas of the U.S. eastern seaboard, the Netherlands, lowland Bangladesh, and many other densely settled places—as well as damaging estuaries that serve as “nurseries” for ocean fish.

  Friends sometimes ask me whether climate change is having any good effects for human societies. Yes, there are some, such as the prospect of opening ice-free shipping lanes in the far North as Arctic sea ice melts, and perhaps increased wheat production in southern Canada’s wheat belt and some other areas. But most of the effects for human societies are big bad ones.

  Is there any quick technological fix to these problems? You may have heard of various s
uggested geo-engineering approaches, such as injecting particles into the atmosphere, or extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, in order to cool the Earth’s surface. But there isn’t any geo-engineering approach that is already tested and known to work; the proposed approaches are very expensive; and testing and implementing any such approach is certain to take a long time and likely to uncover unforeseen bad side-effects. For instance, when non-poisonous chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) replaced the poisonous gases previously used in refrigerators until the 1940’s, it seemed like a wonderful and safe engineering solution to the refrigerator gas problem, especially because laboratory testing had revealed no downside to CFCs. Unfortunately, lab tests couldn’t reveal how CFCs, once they got into the atmosphere, would begin to destroy the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation. As a result, CFCs became banned in most of the world—but only several decades later. That illustrates why geo-engineering would first require “atmospheric testing”—an impossibility, because we would have to ruin the Earth experimentally 10 times before we could hope to figure out how to make geo-engineering produce just the desired good effects on the 11th try. Hence most scientists and economists consider geo-engineering experiments as extremely unwise, even lethally dangerous, and deserving to be banned.