WW - Speaking, probably seven years but I've been thinking about them for thirty years. I got started in 1981 and i've been devoting a fair amount of intellectual energy since then.
RK - What kind of progress can you measure in that time?
WW - Personally, in my intellectual understanding, most of the progress came since the year 2000. It's weird how progress happens. You get one realization and you kind of mull over that for a while. Then you realize something else and as a result of that you connect something else with it. It's a little like mapping unexplored territory. You spend lots and lots of time wandering over the surface with no map whatsoever and then you start to recognize some landmarks. Eventually you can begin to map--a relatively coherent map of what the terrain actually looks like. But the initial process is mostly just wandering. Looking amazed at whatever is around you. I would love to tell you that I was tremendously smart and I had a plan and I just went step by step through it but the fact is it what mostly just reading and writing and trying to figure stuff out for a long time, and then slowly realizing a few things.
RK -Since you started and where you are now has anything changed in a way that is significant?
WW - Yes, but not really as a result of what I'm doing. The biggest thing that's happening is that in 2013, in March, the Norwegian government held an International Conference on the humanitarian impact on nuclear weapons. They emphasized that these are weapons that have very bad consequences and that they're consequences that are difficult to ameliorate because hospitals and doctors are all dead. 127 countries came and many of the ambassadors and officials representatives had not been exposed to the information before. There was a follow up conference in Mexico in Nayarit in February of this year. I have to say as a side light that being in Oslo in March is a lot less fun than being in Mexico in February. 140 countries came to the meeting in Mexico and it was a remarkable meeting because they again presented information about nuclear weapons and the dangers and they also talked about the risk of accidental use. We were supposed to close the second day at 4:00 or something but at 7:30 we were still in the room because there were so many countries that wanted to talk to say how they felt. All these countries that for years and years - the United States has been saying, and Russia had been saying, "This is for us to worry about and you sit quietly and don't talk about it. This is our problem, our responsibility." Somebody finally said to all the other countries in the world, "What do you think about nuclear weapons?" It turns out that Nicaragua and the Fiji Islands and countries all over - New Zealand - all these countries around the world have something to say. Because everyone in the world would be affected by nuclear war. There is a growing sense among some countries that - in fact the problem with nuclear weapons is the responsibility of all countries not of just a select few who have the weapons. There's going to be a follow up conference in Vienna in December and I'm hoping to be able to do a side event presentation of some information about deterrence. It feels as if there's a growing momentum internationally to do something about nuclear weapons.
RK - How has your approach to it changed and evolved over the years?
WW - You know you get smarter. People tell you things. People will have smart suggestions and you incorporate those. I had a pretty bad argument against nuclear deterrence when I started out. Patricia Lewis in the UK pointed out that nuclear deterrence may work pretty well, and it may even work 90 percent of the time, but that's not even close to good enough. If the result of nuclear deterrence failing is the possibility of catastrophic nuclear war, then a one in ten chance that you're going to have a catastrophic nuclear war is unacceptable. Nuclear deterrence has to be 99.99999 percent reliable. It has to work every time to prevent that war or it's not good enough. You can't just sit back smugly and say, "Well we lasted seventy years. It must work." You've got to show--if you're going to put the lives of 300 million people at risk--you've got to show that this is a technique that definitely works. It's absolutely reliable and that just is not something that you can show. Not provable. You learn things, you figure things out. I'm doing a paper on climate change and the possibility of nuclear war resulting from conflict over drought or water drying up. I didn't know that 60 percent of the agriculture in Pakistan, one of the nuclear powers, depends on water that comes from glaciers in Kashmir. If you have global warming, the water that's in the glaciers of Kashmir will decline, there will be less food in Pakistan, and here will be a nuclear armed state looking around to find a way to feed its people. That's a serious problem. You keep learning things. You find things out.
RK - You have another book coming? Anything in your head?
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
