Imagine no nuclear weapons

A great insanity of the modern era is the nuclear weapon. At peak, the US had some 30,000 nuclear weapons and the USSR some 40,000. Today each still has several thousand. A calculation made in 2009 shows that the world's nuclear arsenal has the same power as 6.4 billion tons of TNT. That's almost a ton of TNT per human being on the planet! Even if you believe in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), surely ten nuclear weapons would be a sufficient deterrent, threatening to destroy America's top ten cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose.  What do you even do with 30,000 nuclear weapons? Or with the 4,500 the US has today?

But of course MAD only works if all the parties who have nuclear weapons are all rational and if the security of the weapons were 100% reliable. Neither assumption has any validity. The world has several times come precariously close to nuclear war.

In 1961 an American B-52 crashed over North Carolina releasing two American hydrogen bombs.  One was found hanging from a tree with three out of it's four safety mechanisms released. This bomb hanging from a tree in North Carolina had an explosive yield more than all munitions (outside of testing) ever detonated in the history of the world by TNT, gunpowder, conventional bombs, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts combined! Worse, had it exploded, there was presumably a real risk that the US would have "retaliated" against the USSR triggering a nuclear holocaust.

The next year brought the Cuban Missile Crisis with the US reaching an alert level of DEFCON 2, and placing hundreds of bombers including B-52s on airborne alert and some 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to fire.

In 1983 a snap judgement of Russian lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov determined the fate of all of humanity. He was on duty when Russia's nuclear early-warning system reported 5 incoming US missiles. He took the risky decision to treat this as a false alarm, which it was, rather than report it to his superiors who would have probably launched an all our "retaliatory" attach on the US.

At times during the cold war the US nuclear weapons were protected by mechanical combination locks and the secret code set to 00000000.

So people are not rational and security systems are not foolproof. That's why MAD is mad. It's an example of prisoner's dilemma running wild.

Since then the cold war has ended (although making a comeback in the Ukraine) but there are new risks. India, Pakistan and presumably Israel have gone nuclear. Isolated and eccentric North Korean leader Kim Jong-un controls a confirmed nuclear stockpile. Muslim extremist organizations like IS could perhaps get their hands on nuclear weapons. For example self-confessed radical turned moderate Maajid Nawaz describes how he moved from the UK to Pakistan in a serious attempt to recruit Pakistani generals to his extreme Islamic group with the ultimate aim of securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons for a Muslim Caliphate.

So we have probably been lucky to survive to this point (although Steven Pinker questions this pointing out we have also been unlucky). We shouldn't push our luck any further.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Obama has spoken openly in favor of nuclear disarmament, most recently repeating this when visiting Hiroshima. How disappointing to read that he has dismantled far fewer nuclear war heads than either of the President Bush's.

We need to end this madness before it literally blows up in our faces. Clearly Obama and Putin aren't going to do it.

And now IMAGINE. Imagine a direct global democracy in which us human beings could decide the future of nuclear weapons. 80.6% of youth across multiple countries believe there should be a ban on nuclear weapons. I think the common sense of humanity could quickly overcome the dangerous positioning of competing states.