Perhaps the most original, incandescent and 'fertile' philosopher of the last quarter of the 20th Century, David Lewis, delivered a lecture in the same year he died, 2001, (http://www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/How_Many_Lives.pdf) in which he argues, among other things, that if you accept the Everettian, 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics, then it is plausible to believe that you, along with all conscious agents in the universe will experience eternal, conscious life, most of which is taken up by horrible suffering and misery. Basically, the idea is that if at every moment, an infinity of parallel realities are branching off, then there will be some realities where 'you' are still conscious and alive, and so there will always be an experiencer experiencing conscious existence, and as all of the 'yous' in the infinitely branching realities age things are guaranteed to get uglier and uglier on the suffering front, because most likely 'you' will experience everyone dying around you, and eventually 'you' may be the only human in 'your' reality, 'miraculously' persisting with conscious experience even though you may be racked with pain at every moment, ravaged by diseases, etc, etc. And there will always be some branch of reality involving an experiencer until/if reality ends altogether, because that's how infinity works, so this torment will undoubtedly be eternal.`
Was he right about this? Well, the issue is that it is not clear whether it makes sense to talk about consciousness surviving through branches as we have done here. If we do actually live in an Everettian world, it's clear that we only experience reality along the particular set of branches we have moved along. Why can't our worldline end and our consciousness - a property of the functional organisation of the brain - with it? I don't know. This shit is confusing. My brain didn't evolve for this.
Anyway, I now want to quote some
stuff from Chomsky's Who Rules the World?, which I read in 2016 I
think, the year of its publication. Hopefully, you will see the
connection.
The following is the start of Chapter 8: "The Week the World Stood
Still":
"The world stood still some fifty years ago during the last week of
October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed
nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended – though,
unknown to the public, only officially.
The image of the
world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian
at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative
version of the tapes of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National
Security Council (ExCom) in which Kennedy and a close circle of advisers
debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by
the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the
recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to those of other
participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history.
Stern has now
published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important
documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that
version here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human
civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,”
culminating in “the week the world stood still.”[footnote(see text for
references]
There was good reason
for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent, a war that might “destroy
the Northern Hemisphere,” as President Dwight Eisenhower had warned.[footnote]
Kennedy’s own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high
as 50 percent.[f] Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak
and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival o the government was put into
effect” in Washington, as described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his
well-researched best seller on the crisis (though he doesn’t explain why there
would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war).[f]
Dobbs quotes Dino
Brugioni, “a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup,”
who saw no way out except “war and complete destruction” as the clock moved to “one
minute to midnight,” the title of Dobb’s book.[f] Kennedy’s close associate the
historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. described the events as “the most dangerous
moment in human history.”[f] Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud
whether “he would live to see another Saturday” and later recognized that “we
lucked out” – barely.[f]
A closer look at what took place
adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present
moment.
There are several candidates
for “the most dangerous moment.” One is October 27, 1962, when U.S. destroyers
enforcing a quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines.
According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive,
submarine commanders were “rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear
torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that
devastated Hiroshima in August 1945.”[f]
In one case, a reported
decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the
last minute by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who may have saved the world
from nuclear disaster.[f] There is little doubt what the U.S. reaction would
have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as
their country was going up in smoke.
Kennedy had already
declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch, DEFCON 2, which authorized “NATO
aircraft with Turkish pilots…[or others]… to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop
a bomb,” according to the well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst
Graham Allison, writing in Foreign
Affairs.[f]
Another candidate
is October 26. That day has been selected as “the most dangerous moment” by
B-52 pilot Major Don Clawson, who piloted one of those NATO aircraft and
provides a hair-raising description of details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions
during the crisis – “B-52s on airborne alert” with nuclear weapons “on board
and ready to use.”
October 26 was the
day when “the nation was closest to nuclear war,” he writes in his “irreverent
anecdotes of an air force pilot.” On that day, Clawson himself was in a good
position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He concludes, “We were damned
lucky we didn’t blow up the world – and no thanks to the political or military
leadership of this country.”
The errors,
confusions, near accidents, and miscomprehension of the leadership that Clawson
reports are startling enough, but nothing like the operative
command-and-control rules – or lack of them. As Clawson recounts his
experiences during the fifteen twenty-four-hour CD missions he flew, the
maximum possible, the official commanders “did not possess the capability to
prevent a rogue crew or crew-member from arming and releasing their
thermonuclear weapons,” or even from broadcasting a mission that would have
sent off “the entire Airborne Alert force without possibility of recall.” Once
the crew was airborne carrying thermonuclear weapons, he writes, “it would have
been possible to arm and drop them all with no further input from the ground.
There was no inhibitor on any of the systems.”[f]
About one-third of
the total force was in the air, according to General David Burchinal, director
of plans on the air staff at air force headquarters. The Strategic Air Command
(SAC), technically in charge, appears to have had little control. And according
to Clawson’s account, the civilian National Command Authority was kept in the
dark by SAC, which means that the ExComm “deciders” pondering the fate of the
world knew even less. General Burchinal’s oral history is no less hair-raising,
and reveals even greater contempt for the civilian command. According to him,
Russian capitulation was never in doubt. The CD operations were designed to
make it crystal clear to the Russians that they were hardly even competing in
the military confrontation, and could quickly have been destroyed.[f]
From the ExComm
records, Sheldon Stern concludes that, on October 26, President Kennedy was “leaning
towards military action to eliminate the missiles” in Cuba, to be followed by
invasion, according to Pentagon plans.[f] It was evident then that the act
might have led to terminal war, a conclusion fortified by much later
revelations that tactical nuclear weapons had been deployed and that Russian forces
were far greater than U.S. intelligence had reported.
As the ExComm
meetings were drawing to a close at 6:00 pm on the 26th, a letter
arrived from Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev, sent directly to
President Kennedy. His “message seemed clear,” Stern writes. “The missiles
would be removed if the US promised not to invade Cuba.”[f]
The next day, at
10:00 a.m., the president again turned on the secret tape recorder. He read
aloud a wire service report that had just been handed to him: “Premier Khrushchev
told President Kennedy I a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons
from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey” – Jupiter
missiles with nuclear warheads.[f] The report was soon authenticated.
Though received by
the committee as an unexpected bolt from the blue, it had actually been anticipated:
“We’ve known this might be coming for a week,” Kennedy informed them. To refuse
public acquiescence would be difficult, he realized: these were obsolete
missiles, already slated for withdrawal, soon to be replaced by far more lethal
and effectively invulnerable submarine-based Polaris missiles. Kennedy recognized
that he would be in an “insupportable position
if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal,” both because the Turkish missiles
were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because to any man at the
United Nations or any other rational man,
it will look like a very fair trade.”[f]
The planners therefore faced a
serious dilemma. They had in hand two somewhat different proposals from Khrushchev
to end the threat of catastrophic war, and each would seem to any “rational man”
to be a fair trade. How then to react?
One possibility
would have been to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization could survive and
to eagerly accept both offers; to announce that the United States would adhere
to international law and remove any threat to invade Cuba; and to carry forward
the withdrawal of the obsolete missiles in Turkey, proceeding as planned to upgrade
the nuclear threat against the Soviet Union to a far greater one – only part,
of course, of the global encirclement of Russia. But that was unthinkable.
The basic reason
why no such thought could be contemplated was spelled out by National Security
Advisor McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean and reputedly the brightest star
in the Camelot firmament. The world, he insisted, must come to understand that “the
current threat to peace is not in
Turkey, it is in Cuba,” where missiles were directed
against the United States.[f] A vastly more powerful U.S. missile force trained
on the much weaker and more vulnerable Soviet enemy could not possibly be
regarded as a threat to peace, because we are Good, as a great many people in
the western hemisphere and beyond could testify – among numerous others, the
victims of the ongoing terrorist war that the United States was then waging against
Cuba, or those swept up in the “campaign of hatred” in the Arab world that so
puzzled Eisenhower, though not the National Security Council, which explained
it clearly.
In subsequent
colloquy, the president stressed that we would be “in a bad position” if we
chose to set off an international conflagration by rejecting proposals that
would seem quite reasonable to survivors (if any cared). This “pragmatic”
stance was about as far as moral considerations could reach.[f]
In a review of
recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Harvard University Latin
Americanist Jorge Dominguez observes, “Only once in these nearly thousand pages
of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint
moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the
National Security Council staff suggested that raids that are “haphazard and
kill innocents… might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.”[f]
The same attitudes
prevailed throughout the internal discussions during the missile crisis, as
when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an
awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.”[f]
And they prevail to the present, with only the rarest of exceptions, as easily
documented.
We might have been “in
even a worse position” if the world had known more about what the United States
was doing at the time. Only recently was it learned that, six months earlier,
the United States had secretly deployed missiles in Okinawa virtually identical
to those the Russians would send to Cuba.[f] These were surely aimed at China at
a moment of elevated regional tensions. To this day, Okinawa remains a major
offensive U.S. military base over the bitter objections of its inhabitants.”
The following comes from Chapter
22: “The Doomsday Clock”.
“The last time the Doomsday Clock
reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer
exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on
the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives
reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were
preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned
more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was
to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who
was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at
the time. “In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed
the Kremlin,” Goodman writes, “the Reagan administration authorized unusually
aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases,
violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon’s risky measures included
sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval
exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously
not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on
Soviet targets.”[f]
We now know that
the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days
by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to
higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was
under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian
submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes
when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently
revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security
expert Bruce Blair reports that “the closest the US came to an inadvertent
strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early
warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike
inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the
US was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President
Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorize right away, when a
third call told him it was a false alarm.”[f]
This newly revealed
example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a
U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a
nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President
Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.”[f]
Blair adds other
examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle
East war, “a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order
instead of an exercise/training nuclear order.” A few years later, in the early
1970s, the Strategic Air Command, in Omaha, “retransmitted an exercise… launch
order as an actual real-world launch order.” In both cases code checks had
failed; human intervention prevented the launch. “But you get the drift here,”
Blair adds. “It just wasn’t that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur.”
Blair made these
comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne has only recently been
cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in
Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Criss and a moment of
serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised
to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately.
At the peak of the crisis, on October 28, a missile crew received authorization
to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely
nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided
to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed,
such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false
alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded
that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes
with appropriate words: “Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except
in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at
our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still
alive.”[f]
These reports, like
those of Eric Schlosser’s extensive review Command
and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems.[f] The Russian ones are doubltess
much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the
systems of others, notably Pakistan.
Sometimes the
threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The
most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of
disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner
in which it is commonly interpreted, as we have seen.
With this grim
record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One
chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study “Essentials of Post-Cold
War Deterrence.” The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even
against nonnuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly
used, in the sense that they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.” It
also urges a “national persona” of irrationality and vindictiveness to
intimidate the world.
Current doctrine is
explored in the lead article in the journal International
Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic
doctrine.[f] The authors explain that the United States is committed to “strategic
primacy” – that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic
behind Obama’s “new triad” (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and
the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike.
The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy
might induce China to react by abandoning its “no first use” policy and by expanding
its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect
remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted
region.
The same is true of
NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail
Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany
to become part of NATO – quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about
the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In
the following years, NATO expanded to Russia’s borders; there are now
substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia’s geostrategic heartland.[f]
One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still
alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were
applying for membership.
Aside from that,
Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter)
that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia’s borders are, in effect, a
first strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy – immunity from retaliation.
Perhaps their missions is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But
the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia’s militant reactions are
quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.
One prominent
British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a “fateful geographical paradox”:
that NATO “exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”[f]
The threats are
very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a
Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it
might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing
mission in Syria. It passed for a mere seventeen seconds through a fringe of
Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for
Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly
reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences. In reaction, Russia
announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and
that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia
also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva,
with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may
be “ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our
aircraft,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage
for confrontations that could be lethal.[f]
Tensions are also
constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides.
Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the
national press reported that “U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday
through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted
the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia
since the Cold War.”[f] Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds
of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid
mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and “both
believe a war is no longer unthinkable.”[f]
If that is so, both
sides are beyond insanity, since a war might well destroy everything. It has
been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy
the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear
winter.
But that is today’s
world. And not just today’s – that is what we have been living with for seventy
years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for
the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has
been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of
policy formation there were no efforts – apparently not even expressed thoughts
– to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might
have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just
briefly sampled.
That is the world
we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant
danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to
alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded)
by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat
of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term
and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not
entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme
the calamity.
Prospects for decent
long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course.
A large share of the responsibility is in our hands – the opportunities as well.”
Maybe in most worlds the world already ended..
or maybe there is one universe after all. cosmologists have no idea
