Annihilation from Within Fred Iklé (cool books to read .txt) 📖

the attack, benevolent activists would advocate an international agency to assume worldwide control of all biotechnology laboratories and offer “absolute” assurance that such activities stay within the bounds of peaceful use. If a nuclear bomb had been used for the attack, they would cry out for universal nuclear disarmament. This would be a flashback to the beginning of the nuclear age, when quite a few Americans favored some form of world government to avert nuclear war. The United World Federalists, an organization that attracted politically active and influential Americans in the late 1940s, called for a global federation of nation-states to control nuclear technology, essentially a greatly strengthened United Nations.1 Even today, proposals for abolishing all nuclear weapons easily gain support. In the fall of 2005, 74 percent of the American public (according to a Pew Research Center poll) favored the United States’ signing a treaty to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons. The governments struggling to put an end to nuclear or biological stealth attacks must not be distracted by such delusory solutions. Undoubtedly, the advocates of these global agreements will mean well and will bristle with their sense of rectitude.

How on earth could an international treaty prevent another sneak attack with mass destruction weapons—and especially one launched from within a nation? After the first nation was attacked from within, surely every other national government would do its utmost to avert the same fate. How could the United Nations enforce arms control measures that these very same nations could not enforce within their own territory? Would the UN suddenly become a world government with superior enforcement power in every country? And if this magically happened, would we not end up with a world tyranny? As the renowned political theorist Hedley Bull wrote several years ago: “The advocate of world government makes the tacit assumption that it is his own moral and political preferences that will be embodied in it; he conceives the world authority as a projection of his own ideas…. One of the difficulties in all prescriptions about future world order is to determine to whom they are addressed…. Mankind as such is not a political agent or actor.”2

Since these proposals for a benignant world authority would woefully fail—save for garnering a couple of Nobel Peace Prizes—we need an alternative. After a clandestine mass destruction attack, the leading nations must first restore their own security before they can commit themselves to join international efforts for controlling destructive technologies. Until the calamity’s initial aftermath can be assessed, the multiple pathways for long-term restoration will remain obscured by vast uncertainties. At most, four broad priorities might be anticipated:

■   First, for the survival of democracies, their legal and constitutional foundation must be reinstated (or if left undestroyed, must be revitalized). Only if the vast majority of the people regards the government as legitimate can the restoration proceed. The chronic violence and lawlessness in Iraq after 2004 illustrate how a society can become entrapped in a vortex of anarchy.

■   Second, the initial period of restoration must somehow find a way back to nuclear nonuse as a lasting dispensation in which national leaders and the public can have some confidence. Obviously, after a nuclear power-grab, there will be lingering uncertainty about nuclear weapons being used again. It will be absolutely essential to prevent this uncertainty from stoking a multipolar nuclear arms race that might end in a nuclear 1914.

■   Third, the restoration must focus hard on the global economy. A clandestine use of mass destruction weapons by unknown evildoers will make governments suspect that a foreign terrorist organization might be responsible. The stronger the belief that the deadly weapons were smuggled across the border—even if in fact they originated within the attacked country—the greater will be the pressure to close all borders. If several large trading nations felt obliged to do this, the global economy would collapse, and there would be severe food shortages in several countries.

■   Fourth, the spiritual dimension of the restoration will be of great importance. The calamity and suddenness of the annihilating attack will induce people to seek refuge and comfort in transcendental spheres of thought. For many people, the motivating emotions and intellectual imagery will now be about life after death, rewards in paradise, a coming judgment day. One might reasonably regard this change in thinking as beneficial and appropriate for such dreadful times, except that it would make the worldwide clash of religions more violent. Jihadist suicide bombers who are about to kill themselves—the better to kill children or elderly shoppers—are fixated on their promised reward in paradise.

Note also that technology’s threat to nation-states derives not just from weapons of mass destruction. The ongoing progress in computer science and brain science will lead to proposals for building a system with superhuman intelligence. Any nation that can command science to work on such a project is likely to pursue it—up to the point where moral scruples call for a halt. But as soon as a major power appears to make significant advances in this area, other nations will wake up to the immense national security implications of superhuman intelligence. As day follows night, they will enter the race with competing projects. Thus, the ultimate threat to nations approaches from two sides. First, if the quest for superhuman intelligence succeeds with a dramatic breakthrough, the identity of the human race will be challenged, as adumbrated in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Second, as weapons of mass destruction truly move beyond the control of nation-states, we, or our descendants, may have to cope with the most violent global anarchy.

A frightful question would then grip our mind: have we reached the twilight of the glorious era when technology kept making us ever more prosperous and more comfortable? This era was ushered in by mankind’s cultural split more than two centuries ago, and led to a widening divergence between the scientific mode of human activity and the societal-political mode. Must this divergence end in the destruction of the world’s entire