Sharing My Boston Globe Article

It's less depressing than my last post

Just a brief note to share my article published this week in The Boston Globe:

An upside to the end of privacy:
It might someday abolish nuclear weapons.

The article was in the pipeline with Globe editors well before the crisis with my poor dog. So if it seems like oddly indecent timing to already be yammering on about world events, I can only shrug and say yes, it looks weird to me as well.

This seems as good a time as any to note that my shift schedule as a full-time ER doctor has long been erratic — so my writing schedule will be similarly unpredictable. I will have runs of productivity followed by occasional lulls. But it feels good to be doing this, and I’m glad to have interested (and interesting!) readers. So I will try not to disappoint!

I don’t really know what to do about the Substack paywall. I also don’t want The Boston Globe cheesed off at me if I send out my / our article for free, while they have it behind a paywall. I’ve decided this time to split the difference, and paste my Globe article below for paying Substack subscribers. So one can either subscribe here to see it, or check it out at The Boston Globe site.

OK, thanks, and on to the article …

An upside to the end of privacy:
It might someday abolish nuclear weapons

Now that it’s harder than ever to keep secrets,
there’s never been a better time to disarm.

In Stanley Kubrick’s comedic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” a series of unfortunate events has the world hurtling toward all-out nuclear war. Desperate to prevent this, the US president has the Russian ambassador brought to the White House’s top secret “War Room” for emergency consultations.

“Am I to understand that the Russian ambassador is to be admitted entrance to the War Room?” asks General Buck Turgidson, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a legendary scenery-chewing performanceby George C. Scott.

“Are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean, he’ll see everything!” The general starts gathering briefing books from the conference table to hide them from Russian eyes and then points in alarm to the giant wall map of nuclear force deployments and cries: “He’ll see the Big Board!”

And the president responds, “That is precisely the idea, general. That is precisely the idea.”

It’s a cinematic exchange from nearly 60 years ago that speaks to a modern dilemma. We want to abolish nuclear weapons — that, at least, is the stated policy of the United States, sworn to in treaties, reiterated in presidential pronouncements. But if nations eventually are persuaded to start zeroing out their arsenals, how can one nation confirm to its satisfaction that the others aren’t cheating?

In other words, who gets admittance to the equivalent of the “Strangelove” War Room? Who’s allowed to see the briefing books there, and the Big Board?

The bad news is: We don’t have an obvious answer — yet. There is no system of monitoring and confirming full nuclear disarmament that nations would be likely to accept for themselves and trust without reservation when applied to others. So, as has been the case for years, we remain in imminent grave danger. I’m not sure what’s worse: that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has never before set the hands of its iconic Doomsday Clock this close to “midnight” — or that if you act now, the Bulletin will sell you a coffee table book marking 75 years of the Doomsday Clock.

Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to end the world after a panicky 30-minute briefing in Washington or Moscow. That has been the case for decades, prompting former defense secretary Robert McNamara, among others, to note along the way that we have so far avoided planet-annihilating nuclear war basically thanks to “luck.” With the current Ukraine crisis ratcheting up nuclear tensions, we once again find ourselves with fingers crossed, hoping for continued good luck.

It calls to mind a formulation by the late biologist E.O. Wilson: We are a species endowed with Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions — and God-like technology.

The good news is: That God-like technology — the technology itself, but even more so, the way this technology is remodeling societal norms around the globe — may help get us out of this predicament.