Demystification

A common observation about the twentieth century is that it has been the bloodiest in history. That is surely true. Wars have claimed, by many estimates, over a hundred million lives in the past ten decades.

But it was not just the continuing carnage that made this century so memorably ugly. Humankind had seen that sort of thing before. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which featured, in the name of Christ, the wholesale slaughter of Muslims in the Middle East and Jews in Europe were extraordinarily sanguine, too.

Nuclear weapons were something else. They defined a new age. For at least three decades, the United States and the Soviet Union embraced the notion that whole cities and civilizations should be held hostage to often narrow national interests. Nuclear deterrence was not just a mutual suicide pact between two superpowers. The act of suicide, if it ever came, would knife across the global neighborhood.

Our cover story, in which authors Norris, Arkin, and Burr describe how Uncle Sam propagated nuclear weapons throughout the world during the Cold War like some demented Johnny Appleseed, is a useful reminder of how dangerously shortsighted U.S. (and Soviet) nuclear policies were. Will matters take a more rational turn in the next century? Yes, of course. Or maybe. The old East-West sabre rattling is long gone. U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles are down from their Cold War peaks. But old ideas die slowly; nuclear weapons in U.S. and Russian arsenals still number in the thousands.

Since birth, the Bulletin has attempted to demystify the Nuclear Age, to present the kind of hard information people need to make critical judgments. The pieces in this issue are in that tradition. With his vignettes from last summer, Hugh Gusterson helps us understand the depth of arrogance one finds at places such as Los Alamos. Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel provide analyses that aid us in putting the depleted uranium controversy in perspective. June Teufel Dreyer explains why the chickens may eventually come home to roost in the Taiwan Strait. Gopi Rethinaraj looks at India's nuclear power program and finds it wanting.

“Whatever mankind has gained in security in the scientific age,” wrote Bulletin Editor Eugene Rabinowitch in January 1972, “it has lost in innocence. It has acquired knowledge of dangers, but not the wisdom to deal with them. Modern man knows infinitely more than did his forefathers about the world in which he lives, but he has not learned to cope rationally with this information. His reactions are still predominantly emotional–that means, qualitative. They are prescientific, because science begins with quantitative analysis of available information and, whenever possible, establishment of mathematical relations among data.

“The TV set, the radio, and the daily newspaper pour a flood of information into the mind of a contemporary American. He is instantly informed about everything that is happening anywhere on the earth. He cannot dismiss, as Goethe's medieval burgher did, events ‘somewhere far in Turkish land’ as irrelevant.”

Since Rabinowitch wrote those words, the information explosion has moved from kilotons to megatons. It would be presumptuous to suggest that the Bulletin has definitive answers for this ever more chaotic age. But in the next century, the Bulletin will continue to contribute facts, reasoned analyses, and–we hope–wisdom to the continuing debate over life-or-death issues, much as founding editor Rabinowitch intended.