The good news is that we might be about to solve the Fermi paradox. Many have long suspected that the reason why there don’t seem to be millions of talkative aliens out there in space is that, when an intelligent civilisation develops the technology to enable interstellar communication, it also develops weapons that enable it to quickly destroy itself.
So far, we are matching this trajectory. We have sent probes beyond the solar system – and vast quantities of electronic data fizzing in all directions at the speed of light – but we have also got thousands of thermonuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert that can reduce our entire world to a dark, freezing wasteland.
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Whether or not we can avoid this doomsday outcome is perhaps the ultimate test of our species-level intelligence. But the omens aren’t good. Russia and the US each have around and more than 5000 in their total arsenals. China is racing to reach nuclear parity by 2030. The current geopolitical instability raises the risk of world war to perhaps its greatest level since the hottest periods of the cold war.
Due to its “launch-on-warning” posture, the US requires its intercontinental ballistic missiles to be out of their silos and in the air while an incoming nuclear salvo is still blips on a radar screen. Once launched, these missiles cannot be recalled, nor can their targets be altered. If a warning of imminent attack is received, the US president has as little as 6 minutes to decide whether to launch an all-out retaliation that would destroy most life on Earth.
A major thermonuclear exchange would be likely to in blasts and city firestorms. Many more would quickly die from radiation poisoning, but the biggest killer would come after: a decade-long nuclear winter that would starve billions more to death and wreck our civilisation beyond repair.
The probability of nuclear war in any single year is small, , but this compounds to a two-thirds risk over a century. We have been lucky with past near misses, from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to the notorious “3am phone call” in 1979, when US President Jimmy Carter was nearly woken in the night because 2200 incoming Soviet missiles were erroneously displayed on warning screens.
We would be unwise to trust to luck forever. It should be obvious that nuclear weapons and human civilisation cannot co-exist long term. Either we abolish them or they abolish us. To do so, we must build a citizens’ movement focused on the goal of total abolition. This will need to be very different from earlier anti-nuclear movements: we can learn from the successes and failures of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other previous efforts. Nor is it about abolishing nuclear energy, which is vital for tackling the climate crisis and can even help remove warheads by burning them up as fuel.
We can’t be unilateralist either, because the process can only work via simultaneous, trust-building disarmament by all the nuclear nations. This movement must involve millions of people in every country whose only reason for participation is that they want to survive. We have a good head start in 2017’s UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, already signed by 94 countries, almost half the world’s nations.
This should be an easy decision for countries. Collective suicide is in nobody’s interest. We don’t need weapons that could burn millions alive and usher in a nuclear winter. But the first step is to break free of the fatalistic denial that views nuclear weapons as inevitable and their abolition as impossible. That way the Fermi paradox can be sidestepped and we can continue to flourish on our beautiful, living planet.
Mark Lynas is author of
