I. The choice posed by the atom--on the first and
most familiar way of looking at it--is that between using it for
civilian or military ends, for the benefit of mankind or its destruction.
It has been variously phrased as the choice between the benign
atom, or the malign one, between one world or none, between a
hope and a peril, the quick and the dead, a world of light and
the dark chamber of horrors.
Such contrasts have suggested first of all that civilian
nuclear energy would open a new world--a rapid increase in standards
of living and a closing of the gap between rich and poor countries,
and second that civilian nuclear energy would displace the military
atom and so make the holocaust less likely. The alternative of
continued nuclear arms on the other hand, it was felt at the start,
would mean an increase in fear, the transformation of democracies
into garrison states, a deterioration in standards of living as
populations were dispersed or sheltered, the rapid spread of nuclear
weapons and the inevitable holocaust. We like our choices simple.
This one sometimes appeared to be black and white.
This turning toward the good atom from the bad reveals
the pressure to find some hopeful side to an enormous technological
advance whose grim face is all too evident. Dag Hammarskjöld,
for example, felt that the civilian use of the atom would expiate
the nearly universal feeling of guilt that "man in his folly
should have thought of no better use of a great discovery than
to manufacture with its help the deadliest instruments of annihilation."
Fermi put it more dryly. "It would be nice," he said,
"if it could cure the common cold."
Fermi said that in the week of Hiroshima. The dangers
of nuclear war are very real. The skull beneath the nuclear cloud
in Henry Moore's magnificent sculpture is a memento mori.
The church-like domed interior of his atom piece expresses some
of the awe that the atom inspires even in unreligious men. Sacred
texts come easily in talking of the atom: For Rabi "suddenly
the day of judgment was the next day and has been ever since."
For Robert Oppenheimer, a knowledge of sin. Armageddon, fragments
of the apocalyptic books, "The shatterer of worlds."
And inevitably the lines of Isaiah about beating swords into
plowshares.
But what makes decisions on nuclear energy hard is
that they do not call for one final apocalyptic choice between
the obviously good civilian uses that lead to peace and the obviously
bad military alternatives that lead to war. Some of these civilian
uses have a large war potential. And while some military alternatives
plainly increase the danger of war, others can and do impart a
measure of stability to peace and are essential as at least implicit
support for formal treaties to inhibit the further spread of nuclear
weapons. We are forced to make a great many decisions about which
civilian technologies to support and which to restrict, about
what forms of treaties will have a net useful effect and what
military alternatives will increase responsible control.
Our problems are many, complex, durable, and present
themselves for thoughtful decision piecemeal. Our choices are
not a single one between black and white. For the indefinite
future they will involve many decisions among shades of gray.
II. The military implications of civilian nuclear
programs illustrate the first of two reasons why our choices in
the nuclear energy field are not simple ones between good and
evil. The civilian and military uses are interdependent and the
interdependence is not favorable for our purposes. Though from
the start, in the hope of moving inert governments to act, we
liked to put the choice in its simple form, it was also understood
at the very start that there is a massive overlap between the
technology of civilian nuclear energy and that of weapons production.
The good military atom therefore doesn't displace the bad military
one. Expanding civilian use in general makes it easier, quicker
and cheaper to get bombs. The Indian civilian nuclear energy
program made it possible some years ago for Prime Minister Nehru
to announce that with its help the Indians could detonate a nuclear
weapon at a modest extra cost in 18 months. The time lag has
undoubtedly gone down since. I would stress that on my view a
viable strategic nuclear force including delivery systems and
responsible control would by no means be cheap for India, given
its other urgent demands. But Indian civilian programs reduce
the extra costs of getting bombs.
An essential trouble with nuclear plowshares, therefore,
is that they can be beaten into nuclear swords. In some extreme
instances of overlap, in fact, they don't need much beating:
the civilian nuclear explosive hopefully called "plowshare"
is, with only minor adjustments, a pretty good "terrible
swift sword." The first reason, then, that our choice in
the nuclear field is not a simple one between good and evil is
that the military and civilian uses are inseparably mixed.
III. The second reason is that the civilian uses
are not so immediately, massively, and directly good, but mainly
long-range; and the military alternatives are not unrelieved blackness
and certain death. Both call for discriminate and responsible
choice.
Immediate bright hopes for civilian nuclear energy
have been an emotional counterweight to the immensity of possible
nuclear destruction. Also an inducement for countries to accept
international controls. But from the start there were sober estimates
by both technologists and economists. Some of these early estimates
of the potential for power reactors were conservative. But variations
in our hopes on this subject can be measured by changes in the
official forecasts for the nuclear generation of electricity.
They varied from a low prediction in 1954 to a high in 1957 to
another low in 1962, and now the estimate for 1980 stands at 150,000
megawatts. This is not quite back up to the staff estimate of
1957, but nonetheless 150,000 megawatts would represent a great
achievement. Nuclear power would then make up more than a quarter
of forecast American electrical generating capacity. Large reactors
in sizes over 500 and 600 megawatts on order now will be producing
electricity in the early 1970's at costs that can compete in much
of the country with electricity from fossil fuels. This is most
impressive.
Nonetheless it has been clear that such important
benefits fall short of ushering in the golden age. They will
not abolish want and are unlikely to reduce the great inequalities
between rich and poor countries. These points are suggested by
the fact that 1) fuel is not the major element in the cost of
electric power; 2) electric power is still only 1/5 of the energy
used in the U.S., and energy costs in turn make up a very small
percentage of the gross national product and a very small percent
of the value added by all except a few selected industries; 3)
cheap energy can help, but is not the key to economic progress.
This can be shown by analyses of regional differences in U.S.
fuel costs versus fuel use and income, but much more dramatically
when looked at world-wide. For example, in the Middle East energy
from oil and natural gas is at its cheapest. If we neglect government
royalties and other rents, it might cost as little as 2 or 3 cents
per MBTU (Millions of British Thermal Units) - perhaps an order
of magnitude less than the average delivered price in the U.S.
Yet in the Middle East industrialization and the amount of energy
used per capita are among the lowest.
The abundance of cheap energy in the Middle East
is one of several reasons for caution about introducing huge nuclear
energy plants there - like coals to Newcastle - to desalt water
for all the antagonists in the area. (More important, it would
also insert large quantities of plutonium in one of the most volatile
parts of the world and so place a great burden on inspection and
require enormous faith in the durability of agreements where they
have been far from lasting.) But for other parts, too, of the
less developed world, power reactors seem unlikely to reduce the
disparity between rich and poor countries. Poor countries are
generally short of capital, but have great need for it - for schools,
houses, roads, communications and a great many other things.
Therefore their real, that is unsubsidized, rates of interest
tend to be very high. Their power facilities are not highly interconnected,
load factors are low and the demand for power comes in relatively
small concentrations. Power reactors on the other hand are:
--derive much of their benefit from being used a
very high proportion of the time over a long economic life - 80%
and even 90% load factors have been assumed.
--and finally involve very large economies of scale.
It is the very large economy sizes ranging from 500 to over 1,000
megawatts that have become competitive in the U.S. These call
for great concentrations of industrial demand.
The fact that power reactors do not make an immediate
large difference in per capita GNP does not mean that the prospects
for the peaceful atom are not outstanding. They are. In perspective
we must remember that few, if any, individual innovations have
had such dramatic effects on GNP. Robert Fogel's careful, theoretically
informed, empirical measurement of the total social savings attributable
to the railroad, that great innovation of the 19th century, showed
that its contribution in the United States came to less than 5%
of the gross national product in the year 1890, or roughly the
amount of growth that would have occurred without it in two years.
I believe civilian nuclear energy will yield very
great future benefits. Power reactors are the major single application
so far. But others, like those described yesterday, in biological
research, in agriculture and in industry, have already had large
effects. The greatest benefits, I suspect, will be in the performance
of new functions, the joint results of nuclear energy and other
new technologies. These benefits are likely to be indirect and
long-term.
The assurance of massive, long-term benefits should
make us less compulsive about offering nuclear technology as the
solution to all our ills. It isn't necessary for it to cure the
common cold. And civilian nuclear technology has political and
military dangers that call for caution especially in the short
run.
A recognition of the inseparability of military and
civilian energy qualified the earliest internal and public government
statements of support for civilian nuclear energy. without effective
international control, to spread civilian nuclear energy would
worsen the military dangers, according to the Truman-Attlee-King
declaration of November, 1945, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report,
and the Baruch Proposal to the United Nations. Moreover, by international
control, the Acheson-Lilienthal and Baruch proposals did not mean
merely international inspection. Few then thought international
inspection was enough. They meant ownership or management by
an international authority of a wide spectrum of dangerous civilian
nuclear processes from mining through the operation of many reactors,
and the licensing control and inspection of the rest.
Recalling this history can help us see the narrow
frame of the present debates about international control in connection
with the non-proliferation treaty as well as agreements for economic
and technical aid in propagating civilian uses of nuclear energy.
We talk today at most of inspection, and even here our strongest
hopes are weak indeed by comparison with our early ones. The
dangers, however, of the civilian activity are not less evident.
If breeder-reactors come into operation as rapidly and as widely
as our Atomic Energy Commission expects, sometime shortly after
the year 2000, there may be a million bombs worth of civilian
plutonium in the world, doubling every ten years. Early doubts
about the adequacy of inspection have lost none of their relevance.
No inspection can insure against the diversion of a small percent
of material for weapons and a small percentage of a large volume
may be enough to cause quite a lot of trouble in volatile parts
of the world.
Second, facilities and materials obtained under bilateral
or International Atomic Energy Agency control arrangements can
make it easier to get facilities and materials that are not subject
to such arrangements. The Indians, for example, hope to construct
on their own a reactor using natural uranium at Madras. It would
not be subject to the control arrangements that go with an international
aid program, but plainly it will have been greatly helped by Indian
experience with the Canadian and American reactors which are subject
to inspection.
A non-proliferation treaty may extend inspection
to further civilian facilities. Some of the opposition to such
a treaty stems overtly from a concern about the commercial disabilities
such inspection might bring in increased costs and losses of industrial
secrets to competitors. This resistance might narrow inspection.
Finally, and most important, sovereign nations that
are strongly moved by considerations of national safety or other
powerful motives like irredentism are not likely to be permanently
restrained by treaty arrangements signed years before. And indeed
non-proliferation treaty drafts explicitly allow any party to
exercise its sovereign national right to withdraw, if it itself
determines that "extraordinary events" have jeopardized
its "supreme interests."
This suggests that the crucial question will continue
to be how to reduce the chance that countries will feel their
supreme interests are jeopardized if they do not get nuclear weapons.
IV. Which brings us back to the military atom.
There can be little doubt that the experiment at Stagg Field was
the most momentous event in the history of war. The first fission
devices it presaged multiplied the explosive force of previous
weapons a thousand times. Fusion devices a few years later made
it more than a million times. Such compact destructive power
makes it possible to reach any part of the world from any other
with enormous destructive effect. Just a few years have transformed
the nature of war. Avoiding rather than winning a world war or
any mutual nuclear war has become primary.
This does not mean that no one will threaten or risk
nuclear war and it has not made war, even nuclear war, impossible.
The close new military interdependence of remote parts of the
world did not assure world cooperation for peace or world government,
as many hoped. On the other hand it did not - as many feared
- mean that without world government, nuclear war was inevitable.
In the last decade, a great many quasi-mathematical
arguments, fortunately all faulty, have tried to show that the
laws of probability make an accidental nuclear war inevitable.
And a good many individuals have given their personal estimate
of the probability of war in some specified interval. These vary
from an early 1963 estimate that gave us a less than even chance
of surviving the following two years to a very few that number
our safe years in the relatively comfortable hundreds. There
is, I think, no substance in any of these estimates. Like the
prophecies of final disaster by medieval chiliasts, these predictions
aim at an early drastic change of heart in the world. But they
have not had that effect. They tend in fact to discourage patient
acts of intelligence aimed at getting more responsible controls
to reduce the dangers. Prophets of imminent disaster tend to
run short of wind. When the disaster doesn't come, they often
drift off to attach themselves to some other disaster. The rot
in our cities, the spreading use of pot.
In the same way, catastrophic predictions of the
rapid proliferation of nations getting nuclear weapons are neither
well-founded nor much help. They can actually encourage the spread.
A distinguished senator and a high official used almost the same
words a while ago to say that the Minute Man cost less than the
B-52, that nuclear weapons and delivery systems were cheap and
getting cheaper, and unless the international system was quickly
and drastically revised, they would spread rapidly, since they
were equalizers on the world scene. Some Asian friends of mine
who doubt such drastic early revision observed only that nuclear
weapons were said to be getting cheaper all the time and would
make their country the equal of the great powers; and they want
some. But in fact nuclear weapons are not equalizers. A small
fraction of a major strategic force can eliminate the costly French
force with high confidence. And substantial nuclear forces are
not getting cheaper. If the $3.3 billion in research and development
(R & D) for Minute Man I and II is counted, they cost much
more than the B-52. And R & D costs weigh especially heavily
on small forces.
Disseminating the complex truths about nuclear forces
is more likely to inhibit dissemination of the weapons themselves
than the simple scare slogans. The spread was rightly understood
at the beginning of the nuclear era as a problem of utmost gravity.
But it has gone more slowly than was initially expected, or than
was predicted as recently as 1960, when it was said that it would
include a dozen new countries by 1966. Four countries have exploded
nuclear weapons since our Trinity shot in 1945. And the reasons
the spread has not been more rapid suggests ways of inhibiting
further spread.
Some countries that could undertake a program have
not, because they do not feel threatened, or because they feel
that the nuclear threat is adequately checked by a third party,
or because they recognize that the problem of nuclear self-defense
is likely to be costly in terms of their resources and ineffective
against a major adversary, or for some mixture of these reasons.
We should fortify those reasons. We should not only make clear
the high costs and vulnerabilities of nuclear forces. Where possible
we should choose our civilian and military policies in ways that
are likely to keep the costs of new national nuclear forces high
and their effectiveness low. Moreover, since for the foreseeable
future an assured total nuclear disarmament is unlikely, we have
to guide our policies so that a country without nuclear weapons
will not feel that its safety is jeopardized. Though the word
"commitment" is at present traumatic, this means in
one way or another commitments to protect non-nuclear countries
against coercion or nuclear attack by some nuclear power. Such
commitments might be only tacit; they might be unilateral, or
in an alliance, or in the form of a potentially universal collective
security arrangement. But in any case these commitments require
maintaining defenses that make the risks of fulfilling the commitment
smaller than the risks in not doing so. It also means the patient
building of common interests to help make the commitment credible.
Without such policies treaties are covenants without swords.
This perspective on the dangers of destruction promises
no quick and final solution. It involves discriminating acts
of choice in both the military and civilian fields of nuclear
energy for the indefinite future. And it does not minimize the
dangers. The benefits of nuclear energy can be of immense importance,
even when they are not immediate and massive. The dangers are
very real, even though they are persistent and cannot be dealt
with quickly and finally. And we have always to weigh the benefits
and the dangers together. It is ironic that this tremendous achievement
won by a massive burst of effort in so short a time leaves us
as legacy the need for an unending sequence of small careful but
unheroic decisions. The genuine alternatives call for such continuing
acts of intelligence rather than one final apocalyptic choice.
--highly capital intensive and sensitive therefore
to the supply and cost of money.
* Delivered December 2, 1967, at the final
luncheon during the 25th anniversary
observance of the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction at
the University of Chicago. The lunch was attended by many of the scientists
who had taken part in that experiment. The Henry Moore sculpture, "Atomic
Energy," referred to in the talk was unveiled after the lunch. This printed
version of the talk is scheduled to appear in the April 1968 Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists.
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