Free Global Communications and Social Networking

This is the third of ten posts by Nathan Pyles in a series called "Our Nuclear-Free Opportunity." I respect Nathan and like what he says.

At the height of the Cold War my father went to Vietnam in the first of many waves of U.S. servicemen. In 1965 international telephone service was unreliable and incredibly expensive. While he wrote letters home daily, I remember him calling only twice. His miraculous calls sent me and my brothers bouncing around our mother impatiently waiting our turn.

Last year while our daughter was studying in Asia, my wife’s and my weekly high point was our Skype video chat. It was free and easier than dialing a phone. My daughter and her friends are more than the first internet generation – they are a nascent global generation. Of her nearly two hundred Facebook friends, nearly half are from countries other than the U.S.

All these communication advancements in less than two generations. The number of transnational Facebook or Linked-In relationships will only grow. Business and science colleagues work daily on international projects in real time using instant messaging to exchange quick thoughts and gather immediate feedback. Gamers from every country, between plotting gory headshots, are pausing long enough to build global friendships.

Free instant global communication is more than just a convenience or a cost savings. It is a sledgehammer to our cultural and national boundaries. Our lives are already laced with virtual artifacts from this splintering blow. A surprised world turned to YouTube to witness candidate Obama win a most unlikely victory, won in part by his supporters’ viral creativity. Susan Boyle of Scotland is being cheered on by over 100 million people from every country in a four minute real-life Rocky recreation. Our shared experiences are now global, not just national, not just local.

Increased transnational exchanges, while also exposing our darker undersides, do far more to dissolve barriers and perceived differences. So much so that I’m going out on a limb with a prediction – that Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, will one day receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Berners-Lee’s innovation and decision to make web access unfettered and free, has been a diplomatic tsunami. The web and social networking have democratized foreign relations. Affordable travel brings us into more frequent international contact – free global communication makes it easy for these relationships to last.

Meanwhile, there are policy makers within the nuclear weapons states who continue to make the case that we are somehow made safer by wielding weapons which can annihilate us at any time. While they talk targeting strategies, counterforce versus countervalue, and extended deterrence – global communication technologies are racing ahead of them obliterating borders and eroding national differences. These nuclear proponents seem oblivious to how these communication innovations are rapidly remaking our social, economic, and political worlds. Their worldviews still shaped as if the Cold War were a current event.

Nearly 180 nations already get it. These nations have renounced nuclear weapons and any attempt to acquire them. Several South American nations abandoned their fledgling nuclear weapons programs years ago. Just this spring the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone entered into force with five more nations agreeing to forever forgo nuclear weapons. South Africa once achieved nuclear capability and subsequently dismantled both their warheads and their nuclear weapons program. And in doing so, they demonstrated to others that the nuclear genie can indeed be coaxed back into its bottle when accompanied by genuine political will.

It is the nuclear weapons states who are now the risk-taking minority. To have any chance of marshalling global consensus for effective sanctions to halt North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the current nuclear weapons states must simultaneously turn their sights on their own nuclear arsenals.

The nuclear weapons states will need to lead by example if we are to finally halt proliferation and reduce our nuclear risks.

The Goal of War

War is not a competition in killing and destruction. Imagining that it is will seriously distort thinking about important topics - like nuclear weapons.

Soldiers sometimes say their job is to "kill people and break things." This is wrong.

At least, those activities do have to be done by soldiers sometimes, but that is not the goal of war. Consider: in war civilians are often left alone and buildings are sometimes left standing. True, some civilians do die in almost every war and some works of man (buildings, bridges, power plants, etc.) are destroyed. But if that is the only goal of war, then the people carrying out this task have been wildly inefficient throughout history. In war the killing of even 5% of the civilian population is a brutal slaughter rarely equalled in history. If the goal of war is to kill people, how can armies have killed so few, how can they have been so consistently ineffective in the past?

The goal of war is clearly not to kill civilians. The goal in war is defeat the soldiers of your enemy. To whip his army. Killing civilians is only incidental.

What does this say about a weapon whose most obviously use is to destroy cities?

Top ten books

Michael Krepon posted his top ten books about nuclear weapons on Arms Control Wonk and I kind of disagreed with several of the books he chose. Herman Kahn was charming, smart and original but - in my opinion - got almost everything wrong. Thomas Schelling is a towering figure: logical, sound, and winner of the Nobel prize. But my feeling is that over the long run game theory will be seen as an intellectual dead end (as far as nuclear weapons are concerned.) Bernard Brodie remains either the best or second best writer - in terms of style - who has ever written about nuclear weapons. (George Kennan is the other fellow who was really elegant with a pen.) But putting two of Brodie's books on a top ten list exaggerates how much he has to say.

So rather than just complain about Krepon's list, I thought I'd draw up my own.

1. Thirteen Days by Robert Kennedy. Gripping, well told, and moving, it is the most important first-hand account of a nuclear crisis ever written. Nothing brings you to the heart of the issues - emotionally, intellectually, politically - as strongly and as quickly as this book.

2. Hiroshima by John Hersey. No one should be allowed to talk about nuclear weapons until they have at least tried to stand imaginatively in the shoes of the recipients of a nuclear attack. Hersey's is one of the mildest of the books in this genre. [Read Children of Hiroshima to test how stern your character is.]

3. Strategy in the Missile Age by Bernard Brodie. There are several things in this book that I disagree with, but Brodie's arguments are so gracefully made and his general view of the situation so sound that it is difficult not to include this book.

4. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy by Lawrence Freedman. This thorough and balanced review of the thinking that has been done about nuclear strategy is invaluable. Freedman is careful, fair and extraordinarily precise. Enormously useful.

5. Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance by Richard Betts. I find Betts' study of nuclear threats to be a substantive and useful study of a slippery and important subject.

6. Fear, War, and the Bomb by P. M. S. Blackett. Blackett saw so far ahead and understood the fundamental issues so clearly that one might be tempted to accuse him of clairvoyance. An extraordinary book.

7. Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I think Allison's current trumpeting of the danger of nuclear terrorism is sensationalist and wrong-headed. This book, however, is a masterful analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis and should not be overlooked. Allison examines the crisis from three differing vantage points and identifies key decisions and the sources from which they flowed. Fascinating.

8. Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint edited by Henry Shue. Shue oversaw a number of interesting projects on nuclear weapons when he was at the University of Maryland and this is one of the best. It is difficult to find a book about morality and nuclear war that is not afflicted with over-inflated emotions. This volume has intelligent discussion of the issues and thought-provoking analyses. No top ten list is complete without some reasoned discussion of morality.

9. Acheson-Lillienthal Report. When people talk about a world free of nuclear weapons they inevitably refer (with respect) to this report. These guys saw far ahead and got much of it right.

10. [Suggestions?]

Interdependence of Global Economies and Financial Systems

This is the second in a series of articles by Nathan Pyles on the top ten reasons why a nuclear free world is achievable.

People’s Square Shanghai, China Photo: Steve Mushero

Several years ago I was in Shanghai during China’s National Day. Most of the central city was closed to traffic because of expectations for huge crowds gathering in the Bund - the old colonial district - along the arcing Huangpu River. With no work and a rare cool breeze, I walked the several miles from the French Concession to the Bund.

China’s National Day celebrates the final victory and ascension of Mao’s revolutionary communist government. The incongruity between the meaning of this day, and the miles of storefronts I passed could not have been starker. I walked by store after store of some of the best merchandised and meticulously maintained shops and boutiques found anywhere in the world.

Every one of them was open. The proud capitalist shop owners carefully primped their displays and polished the already immaculate windows. Between these boutiques were the occasional Starbucks, KFC, or McDonalds. There were also the Hilton and Marriott hotels. And on nearly every other street corner were ATM’s with instructions in a half-dozen languages. I could at any time enter my bankcard from one of the smallest banks in the Midwest and withdraw cash in Chinese RMB.

So what does this have to do with nuclear weapons? With largely open trade borders, the business community is running light years ahead of much public and foreign policy. Business sprints, government lags, and nuclear policy sucks serious wind – still rounding the first bend on heavy, leaden legs while business leaders from around the globe consistently find new ways to cooperate for their mutual benefit. Sometimes the deals work. Sometimes they go bust. But each success inexorably binds nations ever closer.

The global economy is, as it has been since the days of the Silk Road, a powerful social lubricant. Adam Smith’s invisible hand not only drives efficiency and rational resource allocation, it harnesses self-interest to break down barriers between tradesmen all across the world.

My Taiwanese colleagues laugh whenever they read in the Western press about a mainland threat on their tiny nation. The Chinese and Taiwanese all know that Taiwan is an indispensable bridge for foreign capital (est. U.S. $200B+) and Western market contacts and sales. A military conflict would bring both nations’ economic interests to a crashing and costly halt. A nuclear assault? Somewhere just above a meteor strike on the real-world threat scale. The cross-channel saber rattling is now as formalized and as harmless as a Beijing mask opera.

What has happened in Shanghai over the last decade at a breakneck pace foreshadows what will be happening around the globe, albeit at a slower pace. Unprecedented levels of global trade now bring people from every country together with daily global communication the new business norm. More and more individuals are experiencing these interactions first-hand. Much has already been written about this linkage of interests on the macro level - with China holding one quarter of the entire U.S. national debt. Each year, commerce and global exchange further twines our economic co-dependency.

Like it or not, open economies sand away our differences and slowly form a more homogeneous world. The daily execution of a global economy builds strong personal bonds between tens of millions of individuals and makes demonization and dehumanization of another nationality more difficult. Both of which are prerequisites for pulling the nuclear trigger.

Besides commerce’s benefits of cross-border relationships, it is hardly rational to contemplate any possible upside for a trade partner to send nuclear weapons hurtling toward its own customer base, manufacturing base, or own currency reserve. Simply put, any nuclear weapons policy that might chance nuclear war is bad for business.

Adam Smith identified and anticipated the inevitable demise of the worn-out mercantilist economies. The spread and growth of global commerce is now helping accelerate the demise of anachronistic nuclear weapons policies.

Service

Everywhere I go recently I meet people who want to serve. A young woman wants to find books that will empower people harmed by nuclear testing in Australia. Someone has a plan for saving Detroit. A nurse wants to leave the ER and go to distant lands where she's more needed. It is remarkable and inspiring to meet the passion to do work in the service of something larger than yourself face to face. It fuels me.

Update on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 07:23AM by Ward Wilson

Oh, and Julia: you were right about the iPhone. Thanks.