Creators and Destroyers of Worlds
Despite the dangers, we must seize the gifts bequeathed by world-altering technologies, since these amount to life in unprecedented abundance. By Ian Nieves.
Progress inevitably creates Inescapable Existential Dangers (IEDs): technological developments that yield huge benefits with high extinction risks. The acceptance of long-term disaster as the cost of immediate success is an ancient Devil’s Bargain. While the Romans celebrated Carthage’s destruction, Scipio Africanus the Younger brooded over Rome’s fate, since war inevitably breaks the empires that it builds. Innumerable other societies have mortgaged themselves for prompt prosperity or power. What has changed are the sizes of the initial payout and final debt.
Nuclear War, the Inaugural IED
The first modern IED debuted by ending a global war that had destroyed fifty million lives and was poised to claim as many as another million. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced the surrender of a ferocious aggressor that habitually fought to the death to seize even the smallest victories. Thermonuclear weapons subsequently made the global community realise that great-power war was now suicidal, which brought an end to the repetitive slaughters that had killed tens of millions of people since the Napoleonic Wars. Such a conflict could now destroy billions of lives and trillions in wealth while poisoning vast stretches of the Earth without yielding meaningful victory. The prospect of mutually assured destruction (MAD) made a critical contribution to the long peace post-1945.
This peace enabled decades of unprecedented prosperity—between 1950 and 2024, the global population ballooned by approximately six billion. The labours of these new arrivals skyrocketed the global gross domestic product by US$162 trillion (adjusted for inflation) during the same period while international trade surged by approximately 4500 percent. This growth also owed to the advances that flowed from wealth freed from war spending. From the late 1940s through the 2020s, computers, the internet, space travel, and an explosion of biological and medical discoveries created vastly more knowledge and wealth and saved or enabled billions of lives, while opening the universe to humanity. This was in addition to the many millions of lives saved from war-fallout events like Great Depressions, influenza pandemics, and famines. Paradoxically, humanity’s most devastating weapons turned out to be givers of life, alleviators of suffering, and creators of prosperity.
The nuclear peace has lasted so long that many people have forgotten its underlying risk. Periodically, this amnesia is broken when nuclear powers threaten war to coerce concessions. Some showdowns—like the Yom Kippur War—slightly elevate the risk of nuclear war; others—like the Cuban Missile Crisis—skyrocket it. In all cases to date, the danger briefly surfaces, exposing the intricate apparatus that has prevented catastrophe, and then subsides. Yet the threat of apocalyptic conflict persists, during fleeting crises and long stretches with minimal discord alike. Since nothing is perfect, we live with the constant danger of apparatus failure, as when automated surveillance falsely warned that the USSR faced impending nuclear attack in 1983. Similarly, Russian warning systems mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a nuclear launch in 1995. Alternatively, a standoff could escalate to nuclear war if no compromise can be found. Every second that nuclear weapons exist entails the risk of nuclear war.
