Article content continued

Sober and not-entirely-sociopathic people tend to differ mostly about the precise ways in which states ought not to use nuclear weapons, and how they can best ensure that no one else uses them either.

Nuclear deterrence is designed to keep an anxious peace. Hostile states are supposed to threaten each other with nuclear weapons without ever attacking each other with them. In theory, being rational self-maximizing individuals, political leaders will avoid carrying out a suicide pact with each other and seek to preserve themselves by exercising restraint.

The most obvious trouble with this theory is that it presumes that the person in possession of the nuclear codes is not certifiably insane. This isn’t a safe assumption. Imagine that Kim “I will keep any cesspool of evils in the Earth, including the U.S. mainland, within our striking range” Jong-un were to further develop North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and pick a fight with a President Donald “I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me” Trump. Maybe they’d argue over who has the most ill-fitting suits; maybe over how many women they’ve pretended to sleep with. Whatever the source of tension, neither man can be trusted to make a rational calculation when assessing the costs of nuclear conflict. Nor can a suicidal terrorist organization.

As this weakness of deterrence theory has become increasingly and painfully clear, many advocates urge abolishing nuclear weapons altogether. For them, none is too many. I don’t know that they have an achievable goal, but they certainly have a point. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War has found that in a war where only 100 nuclear weapons are used out of the 15,000 that exist, more than two billion people could die from famine alone.