Billions & Billions

by Carl Sagan

  Have we been wise in spending so much of our vast wealth on the preparations and paraphernalia of war? At the present time we are still spending at Cold War levels. We have made a fool’s bargain. We have been locked in a deadly embrace with the Soviet Union, each side always propelled by the abundant malefactions of the other; almost always looking to the short term—to the next Congressional or Presidential election, to the next Party Congress—and almost never seeing the big picture.

  Dwight Eisenhower, who was closely associated with this Gettysburg community, said, “The problem in defense spending is to figure out how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” I say we have gone too far.

  How do we get out of this mess? A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would stop all future nuclear weapons tests; they are the chief technological driver that propels, on both sides, the nuclear arms race. We need to abandon the ruinously expensive notion of Star Wars, which cannot protect the civilian population from nuclear war and subtracts from, not adds to, the national security of the United States. If we want to enhance deterrence, there are far better ways to do it. We need to make safe, massive, bilateral, intrusively inspected reductions in the strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals of the United States, Russia, and all other nations. (The INF and START treaties represent tiny steps, but in the right direction.) That’s what we should be doing.

  Because nuclear weapons are comparatively cheap, the big ticket item has always been, and remains, conventional military forces. An extraordinary opportunity is now before us. The Russians and the Americans have been engaged in major conventional force reductions in Europe. These should be extended to Japan, Korea, and other nations perfectly well able to defend themselves. Such conventional force reduction is in the interest of peace, and in the interest of a sane and healthy American economy. We ought to meet the Russians halfway.

  The world today spends $1 trillion a year on military preparations, most of it on conventional arms. The United States and Russia are the leading arms merchants. Much of that money is spent only because the nations of the world are unable to take the unbearable step of reconciliation with their adversaries (and some of it because governments need forces to suppress and intimidate their own people). That trillion dollars a year takes food from the mouths of poor people. It cripples potentially effective economies. It is a scandalous waste, and we should not countenance it.

  It is time to learn from those who fell here. And it is time to act.

  In part the American Civil War was about freedom; about extending the benefits of the American Revolution to all Americans, to make valid for everyone that tragically unfulfilled promise of “liberty and justice for all.” I’m concerned about a lack of historical pattern recognition. Today the fighters for freedom do not wear three-cornered hats and play the fife and drum. They come in other costumes. They may speak other languages. They may adhere to other religions. The color of their skin may be different. But the creed of liberty means nothing if it is only our own liberty that excites us. People elsewhere are crying, “No taxation without representation,” and in Western and Eastern Africa, or the West Bank of the Jordan River, or Eastern Europe, or Central America they are shouting in increasing numbers, “Give us liberty or give us death.” Why are we unable to hear most of them? We Americans have powerful nonviolent means of persuasion available to us. Why are we not using these means?

  The Civil War was mainly about union; union in the face of differences. A million years ago, there were no nations on the planet. There were no tribes. The humans who were here were divided into small family groups of a few dozen people each. We wandered. That was the horizon of our identification, an itinerant family group. Since then, the horizons have expanded. From a handful of hunter-gatherers, to a tribe, to a horde, to a small city-state, to a nation, and today to immense nation-states. The average person on the Earth today owes his or her primary allegiance to a group of something like 100 million people. It seems very clear that if we do not destroy ourselves first, the unit of primary identification of most human beings will before long be the planet Earth and the human species. To my mind, this raises the key question: whether the fundamental unit of identification will expand to embrace the planet and the species, or whether we will destroy ourselves first. I’m afraid it’s going to be very close.

  The identification horizons were broadened in this place 125 years ago, and at great cost to North and South, to blacks and whites. But we recognize that expansion of identification horizons as just. Today there is an urgent, practical necessity to work together on arms control, on the world economy, on the global environment. It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together.

  On occasions like this it is customary to quote homilies—phrases by great men and women that we’ve all heard before. We hear, but we tend not to focus. Let me mention one, a phrase that was uttered not far from this spot by Abraham Lincoln: “With malice toward none, with charity for all …” Think of what that means. This is what is expected of us, not merely because our ethics command it, or because our religions preach it, but because it is necessary for human survival.

  Here’s another: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Let me vary it a little: A species divided against itself cannot stand. A planet divided against itself cannot stand. And to be inscribed on this Eternal Light Peace Memorial, which is about to be rekindled and rededicated, is a stirring phrase: “A World United in the Search for Peace.”

  The real triumph of Gettysburg was not, I think, in 1863 but in 1913, when the surviving veterans, the remnants of the adversary forces, the Blue and the Gray, met in celebration and solemn memorial. It had been the war that set brother against brother, and when the time came to remember, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, the survivors fell, sobbing, into one another’s arms. They could not help themselves.

  It is time now for us to emulate them—NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Tamils and Singhalese, Israelis and Palestinians, whites and blacks, Tutsis and Hutus, Americans and Chinese, Bosnians and Serbs, Unionists and Ulsterites, the developed and the underdeveloped worlds.

  We need more than anniversary sentimentalism and holiday piety and patriotism. Where necessary, we must confront and challenge the conventional wisdom. It is time to learn from those who fell here. Our challenge is to reconcile, not after the carnage and the mass murder, but instead of the carnage and the mass murder. It is time to fly into one another’s arms.

  It is time to act.

  —

  Update: To some degree, we have. In the time since this address was delivered, we Americans, we Russians, we humans have made major reductions in our nuclear arsenals and delivery systems—but not nearly enough for safety. We seem to be on the verge of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty—but the means of assembling and conveying nuclear warheads has spread or is about to spread to many more nations.

  This circumstance is often described as the exchange of one potential catastrophe for another, with no substantial improvement. But a handful of nuclear weapons, as catastrophic as they can be—as much human tragedy as they could cause—are as toys compared with the 60 or 70 thousand nuclear weapons that the United States and the Soviet Union accumulated at the height of the Cold War. Sixty or seventy thousand nuclear weapons could destroy the global civilization and possibly even the human species. The arsenals that North Korea or Iraq or Libya or India or Pakistan could accumulate cannot, in the foreseeable future, do any of that.

  At the other extreme is the boast by American political leaders that no Russian nuclear weapon is targeted on a U.S. child or city. This may well be right, but retargeting takes at most 15 or 20 minutes. And both the United States and Russia retain thousands of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. That is why, throughout this book, I have insisted that nuclear weapons remain our greatest
danger—even though substantial, even stunning, improvements in human safety have transpired. But it could all change overnight.

  In Paris, in January 1993, 130 nations signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. After more than 20 years of negotiation, the world declared its readiness to outlaw these weapons of mass destruction. But as I write these words, the United States and Russia have still not ratified the Convention. What are we waiting for? Meanwhile, Russia has not yet ratified the START II accords, which would reduce the American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals by 50 percent, down to 3,500 deployed warheads each.

  Since the end of the Cold War, the American military budget has declined—but only by 10 or 15 percent, and almost none of that saving seems to have been effectively applied to the civilian economy. The Soviet Union has collapsed—but widespread misery and instability in the region is reason for worry about the global future. Democracy has to some extent reasserted itself in Eastern Europe, and Central and South America—but has made few inroads, except for Taiwan and South Korea, in East Asia; and is distorted in Eastern Europe by the worst excesses of capitalism. Identification horizons have broadened in Western Europe—but generally narrowed in the United States and the former Soviet Union. Progress has been made at reconciliation in Northern Ireland and in Israel/Palestine—but terrorists are still able to hold the peace process hostage.

  Draconian cuts in the U.S. federal budget must be made, we are told, because of an urgent need to balance the budget. But, oddly, an institution whose share of the gross domestic product is higher than the entire federal discretionary budget is essentially off-limits. This is the military’s $264 billion (compared with $17 billion for all civilian science and space programs). Actually, if hidden military costs and the intelligence budget were included, the military’s share would be much larger.

  With the Soviet Union vanquished, what is this immense sum of money for? Russia’s annual military budget is about $30 billion. So is China’s. The combined military budgets of Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya, and Cuba amount to about $27 billion. The U.S. is outspending all of them put together by a factor of three. It accounts for about 40 percent of world military expenditures.

  The Clinton defense budget for fiscal year 1995 was some $30 billion higher than Richard Nixon’s defense budget in the height of the Cold War, 20 years earlier. With the Republican-proposed increments, the U.S. defense budget will grow in real dollars by 50 percent by the year 2000. There is no effective voice in either political party opposing such growth—even as agonizing rips in the social safety net are being planned.

  Our skinflint Congress turns shockingly profligate when it comes to the military, pressing unsolicited billions on a Department of Defense trying to exercise some modicum of self-control. While freighters in busy harbors and embassy pouches immune to border inspection are now the most likely delivery systems for nuclear weapons to American soil, there is strong Congressional pressure for space-based interceptors to protect the United States from the nonexistent intercontinental ballistic missiles of rogue nations. Wacky $2.3 billion rebate schemes are proposed for foreign nations so they can buy American arms. Taxpayers’ money is given to American aerospace companies so they can buy other American aerospace companies. Around $100 billion is spent every year to defend Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations—virtually all of which enjoy healthier balances of trade than the United States does. We plan to keep almost 100,000 troops stationed in Western Europe indefinitely. To defend against whom?

  Meanwhile, the hundreds of billions of dollars it will cost to clean up the military nuclear and chemical waste are a burden passed on to our children that we somehow don’t have much problem with. Why do we have such difficulty grasping that national security is a much deeper and more subtle matter than the number of rocks in our pile? Despite all the talk of the military budget’s being “cut to the bone,” in the world we live in, it’s bulging with marbleized fat. Why should the military budget be sacrosanct when so much else that our national well-being depends on is in danger of being thoughtlessly destroyed?

  There is much left to do. It is still time to act.

  * Cowritten with Ann Druyan. The speech has been revised and updated for this book.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE TWENTIETH

  CENTURY

  To realize in its completeness the universal beauty and perfection of the works of God, we must recognize a certain perpetual and very free progress of the whole universe … [T]here always remain in the abyss of things slumbering parts which have yet to be awakened …

  GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ,

  On the Ultimate Origination of Things (1697)

  Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but … for everything that is given something is taken.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

  “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1841)

  The twentieth century will be remembered for three broad innovations: unprecedented means to save, prolong, and enhance life; unprecedented means to destroy life, including for the first time putting our global civilization at risk; and unprecedented insights into the nature of ourselves and the Universe. All three of these developments have been brought forth by science and technology, a sword with two razor-sharp edges. All three have roots in the distant past.

  SAVING, PROLONGING, AND

  ENHANCING HUMAN LIFE

  Until about ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, the human food supply was limited to fruits and vegetables in the natural environment and game animals. But the sparsity of naturally grown foodstuffs was such that the Earth could maintain no more than about 10 million or so of us. In contrast, by the end of the twentieth century, there will be six billion people. That means that 99.9 percent of us owe our lives to agricultural technology and the science that underlies it—plant and animal genetics and behavior, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, preservatives, plows, combines and other agricultural implements, irrigation—and refrigeration in trucks, railway cars, stores, and homes. Many of the most striking advances in agricultural technology—including the “Green Revolution”—are products of the twentieth century.

  Through urban and rural sanitation, clean water, other public health measures, acceptance of the germ theory of disease, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, and genetics and molecular biology, medical science has enormously improved the well-being of people all over the world—but especially in the developed countries. Smallpox has been eradicated worldwide, the area of the Earth in which malaria flourishes shrinks year by year, and diseases I remember from my childhood, such as whooping cough, scarlet fever, and polio, are almost gone today. Among the most important twentieth-century inventions are comparatively inexpensive birth control methods—which, for the first time, permit women safely to control their reproductive destinies, and are working the emancipation of half of the human species. They permit major declines in the perilously increasing populations in many countries without requiring oppressive restrictions on sexual activity. It is also true that the chemicals and radiation produced by our technology have induced new diseases and are implicated in cancer. The global proliferation of cigarettes leads to an estimated 3 million deaths a year (all of course preventable). By 2020, the number is estimated, by the World Health Organization, to reach 10 million a year.

  But technology has given much more than it has taken away. The clearest sign of this is that life expectancy in the United States and Western Europe in 1901 was about 45 years, while today it is approaching 80 years, a little more for women, a little less for men. Life expectancy is probably the single most effective index of quality of life: If you’re dead, you’re probably not having a good time. That said, there are still a billion of us without enough to eat, and 40,000 children dying needlessly every day on our plan
et.

  Through radio, television, phonographs, audiotape players, compact discs, telephones, fax machines, and computer information networks, technology has profoundly changed the face of popular culture. It has made possible the pros and cons of global entertainment, of multinational corporations with loyalties to no particular country, transnational affinity groups, and direct access to the political and religious views of other cultures. As we saw in the highly attenuated rebellion at Tiananmen Square and the one at the “White House” in Moscow, faxes, telephones, and computer networks can be powerful tools of political upheaval.

  The introduction of mass-market paperback books in the 1940s has brought the world’s literature and the insights of its greatest thinkers, present and past, into the lives of ordinary people. And even if the price of paperback books is soaring today, there are still great bargains, such as the dollar-a-volume classics from Dover Books. Along with progress in literacy such trends are the allies of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other hand what passes for literacy in America in the late twentieth century is a very rudimentary knowledge of the English language, and television in particular tends to seduce the mass population away from reading. In pursuit of the profit motive, it has dumbed itself down to lowest-common-denominator programming—instead of rising up to teach and inspire.