Cosmos - Carl Sagan [173]
But World War II was of magnitude 7.7: some fifty million military personnel and noncombatants were killed. The technology of death advanced ominously. Nuclear weapons were used for the first time. There is little indication that the motivations and propensities for warfare have diminished since, and both conventional and nuclear weaponry has become far more deadly. Thus, the top of the Richardson curve is shifting downward by an unknown amount. If its new position is somewhere in the shaded region of the figure, we may have only another few decades until Doomsday. A more detailed comparison of the incidence of wars before and after 1945 might help to clarify this question. It is of more than passing concern.
This is merely another way of saying what we have known for decades: the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems will, sooner or later, lead to global disaster. Many of the American and European émigré scientists who developed the first nuclear weapons were profoundly distressed about the demon they had let loose on the world. They pleaded for the global abolition of nuclear weapons. But their pleas went unheeded; the prospect of a national strategic advantage galvanized both the U.S.S.R. and the United States, and the nuclear arms race began.
In the same period, there was a burgeoning international trade in the devastating non-nuclear weapons coyly called “conventional.” In the past twenty-five years, in dollars corrected for inflation, the annual international arms trade has gone from $300 million to much more than $20 billion. In the years between 1950 and 1968, for which good statistics seem to be available, there were, on the average, worldwide several accidents involving nuclear weapons per year, although perhaps no more than one or two accidental nuclear explosions. The weapons establishments in the Soviet Union, the United States and other nations are large and powerful. In the United States they include major corporations famous for their homey domestic manufactures. According to one estimate, the corporate profits in military weapons procurement are 30 to 50 percent higher than in an equally technological but competitive civilian market. Cost overruns in military weapons systems are permitted on a scale that would be considered unacceptable in the civilian sphere. In the Soviet Union the resources, quality, attention and care given to military production is in striking contrast to the little left for consumer goods. According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters. Those engaged in the development and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction are given salaries, perquisites of power and, where possible, public honors at the highest levels available in their respective societies. The secrecy of weapons development, carried to especially extravagant lengths in the Soviet Union, implies that individuals so employed need almost never accept responsibility for their actions. They are protected and anonymous. Military secrecy makes the military the most difficult sector of any society for the citizens to monitor. If we do not know what they do, it is very hard for us to stop them. And with the rewards so substantial, with the hostile military establishments beholden to each other in some ghastly mutual embrace, the world discovers itself drifting toward the ultimate undoing of the human enterprise.
Every major power has some