Discussion of nuclear war returns to people’s minds – 08/25/2023 – Science

Nuclear war has returned to the dinner table conversation, and weighs more heavily on the public mind than it has in a generation.

It’s not just because of the huge success of the movie “Oppenheimer”: Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s authorities have been issuing nuclear threats. Russia also suspended its participation in a nuclear arms control treaty with the United States. North Korea launched demonstration missiles. The United States, which is modernizing its nuclear weapons, shot down a surveillance balloon from China, which is increasing its atomic arsenal.

“I believe the threat of nuclear use today is as high as it has ever been in the nuclear age,” said Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an influential nonprofit group in Washington, DC.

In this environment, a conventional crisis runs a great risk of becoming nuclear. All it takes is for a world leader to decide to launch a nuclear attack. And this decision-making process must be better understood.

Historically, studies of core decision-making have grown out of economic theory, where analysts often irrationally assume that a “rational actor” is making the decisions.

“We all know that humans make mistakes,” Rohlfing said. “We don’t always have common sense. We behave differently under stress. And there are so many examples of human failure throughout history. Why do we think nuclear power will be any different?”

But the growing scientific understanding of the human brain has not necessarily translated into tweaks to nuclear launch protocols.

Now there is momentum to change that. The organization led by Rohlfing, for example, is working on a project to apply insights from cognitive science and neuroscience to nuclear strategy and protocols — so leaders don’t stumble and fall into atomic Armageddon.

But finding truly innovative and scientifically backed ideas to prevent an accidental or unnecessary nuclear attack is really difficult. The same happens with the task of presenting the work with adequate nuances.

Experts also need to convince policymakers to apply research-based ideas to real-world nuclear practices.

“The boundaries of that discourse are extraordinarily well protected,” said Anne I. Harrington, a core scholar at Cardiff University in Wales, referring to the internal resistance she says members of governments have faced in challenging the current nuclear situation. “So anyone who thinks they’re only going to make changes externally… I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

The world’s nuclear powers have different protocols for making the serious decision to use nuclear weapons. In the United States, barring an unlikely shift in the balance of state powers, the decision rests with a single person.

“The most devastating weapons in the US military’s arsenal can only be mobilized by the president,” said Reja Younis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., who is also a doctoral candidate in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In a crisis involving nuclear weapons, Younis said, the president would likely meet with the secretary of defense, military leaders and other advisers. Together they would evaluate the information and discuss strategy, and the advisors would present possible actions to the president.

“What can range from ‘let’s do nothing and see what happens’ to ‘let’s go full-scale nuclear,'” said Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and head of a research project called “The President and the Bomb”.

In the end, however, only the president makes the decision — and he can waive the advisers’ guidance. A president could simply press the proverbial button.

“These are the president’s weapons,” Rohlfing said.

Before Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, pundits and political opponents began raising concerns about giving him the power to order a nuclear strike. That debate continued in Congress during his presidential term. When Trump left office, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had openly asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to limit his ability to fire nuclear weapons.

It was in this environment that Deborah G. Rosenblum, executive vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, invited neuroscientist Moran Cerf, now a professor at Columbia University’s School of Business, to give a talk for the organization in 2018. He titled it ” Your brain at catastrophic risk.” (Today, Rosenblum serves in the Biden administration as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs — a department that reports to the president on nuclear issues.)

Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, Cerf presented a room of experts and researchers with what brain science had to say on existentially troubling topics like nuclear war. The visit preceded a collaboration between Cerf and the nonprofit PopTech, whose conference Cerf conducts.

The groups, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, work to provide the government with science-based suggestions for improving nuclear launch protocols. Changing these policies is not impossible, but it would require a specific and appropriate policy setting.

“You would need to have some sort of consensus that comes not just from outside groups but also from political and military insiders,” Harrington said. She added, “You probably also need to have the right president, honestly.”

Cerf has the rapid cadence of a TED Talk speaker. Born in France and raised in Israel, he majored in physics, earned a master’s in philosophy, joined a consciousness study lab at Caltech, and then transitioned to a doctorate there in neuroscience.

Along the way, he did mandatory military service in Israel, worked as a “good” hacker, consulted on film and TV, and won a Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition.

Cerf said his main criticism of the system for starting a nuclear war is that, despite advances in our understanding of the ever-evolving brain, the status quo largely presupposes rational actors. In reality, he says, the fate of millions of people depends on individual psychology.

One of Cerf’s suggestions is to examine the brains of presidents and understand the neurological peculiarities of presidential decision-making. Perhaps one Commander-in-Chief works best in the morning and another in the evening; one is better hungry, the other satiated.

Other ideas for improving protocols that Cerf has spoken about in public can generally be traced back to existing research on decision-making or core issues.

The group’s main recommendation, however, echoes proposals from other advocates: demand that someone else (or people) approve a nuclear attack. Wellerstein, who was not involved in the group’s research, says that person must have the explicit power to say no.

“Our belief is that the system we have, which relies on a single decision maker, who may or may not be equipped to make that decision, is a fragile system and very risky,” Rohlfing said.

Another study by Cerf involves climate change. He found that when people were asked to bet money on climate outcomes, they bet that global warming was happening and were more concerned about its impact, more supportive of action, and more knowledgeable about relevant issues—even if they were skeptical at first. “You basically change your own brain without anyone telling you anything,” Cerf said.

He thinks the results could be applied to nuclear scenarios because betting could be used to get people concerned about nuclear risk and support policy changes. The findings could also be used to gauge the thinking and predictions of the president’s aides.

Some decision science scholars disagree with such extrapolations.

“To go from that to giving advice about the fate of the world … I don’t think so,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist who studies decision-making at Carnegie Mellon University.

Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of the nonprofit organization Decision Research, said no psychological investigation can stop at experiment.

“You have to switch between laboratory studies, which are very narrow and limited, and looking out the window,” he said.

Any brain, even that of a commander in chief, struggles with the large-scale empathy needed to understand what it means to fire a nuclear weapon. “We fail to really understand what it means to kill 30 million people,” Cerf said.

There is an old psychological term for this: psychic numbing, coined by Robert Jay Lifton. Just because humans are smart enough to master destructive weapons “doesn’t mean we’re smart enough to wield them once they’re created,” said Slovic, whose research has broadened the concept of psychic numbing.

This effect is compounded by the difficulty of paying due attention to all important information. And this is made worse by the tendency to make a decision based on one or a few important variables. “If we are faced with choices that represent a conflict between safety and saving distant foreign lives, which we are insensitive to because they are just numbers, we will opt for safety,” Slovic said.

In the past, Wellerstein explained, nuclear launch plans adapted to changing circumstances, philosophies and technologies. And presidents changed protocols because of fears that arose in their historic moments: that the military would launch a nuclear bomb on its own, that the country would experience a nuclear Pearl Harbor, or that an accident would occur.

Perhaps the fear today is that individual psychology governs a world-changing option. With that in mind, it’s worth working to understand how brains might work in a nuclear crisis — and how they might work better.

What comes after science — how to change policy — is tricky, but not impossible. Core protocols may have a sense of permanence, but they are written in word processors, not in stone.

“The current system we have didn’t fall out of the sky fully formed,” Wellerstein said.

^{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}