The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [141]
As I write, Edward Teller - still vigorous and retaining considerable intellectual powers into his late eighties - has mounted a campaign, with his counterpart in the former Soviet nuclear weapons establishment, to develop and explode new generations of high-yield thermonuclear weapons in space, in order to destroy or deflect asteroids that might be on collision trajectories with the Earth. I worry that premature experimentation with the orbits of nearby asteroids may involve extreme dangers for our species.
Dr Teller and I have met privately. We’ve debated at scientific meetings, in the national media, and in a closed rump session of Congress. We’ve had strong disagreements, especially on Star Wars, nuclear winter and asteroid defence. Perhaps all this has hopelessly coloured my view of him. Although he has always been a fervent anticommunist and technophile, as I look back over his life it seems to me I see something more in his desperate attempt to justify the hydrogen bomb: its effects aren’t as bad as you might think. It can be used to defend the world from other hydrogen bombs, for science, for civil engineering, to protect the population of the United States against an enemy’s thermonuclear weapons, to wage war humanely, to save the planet from random hazards from space. Somehow, somewhere, he wants to believe that thermonuclear weapons, and he, will be acknowledged by the human species as its saviour and not its destroyer.
When scientific research provides fallible nations and political leaders with formidable, indeed awesome powers, many dangers present themselves: one is that some of the scientists involved may lose all but a superficial semblance of objectivity. As always, power tends to corrupt. In this circumstance, the institution of secrecy is especially pernicious, and the checks and balances of a democracy become especially valuable. (Teller, who has flourished in the secrecy culture, has also repeatedly attacked it.) The CIA Inspector General commented in 1995 that ‘absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely’. The most open and vigorous debate is often the only protection against the most perilous misuse of technology. The critical piece of the counterargument may be something obvious that many scientists or even lay people could come up with provided there were no penalties for speaking out. Or it might be something more subtle, something that would be noted by an obscure graduate student in some locale remote from Washington, DC, who, if the arguments were closely held and highly secret, would never have the opportunity to address the issue.
What realm of human endeavour is not morally ambiguous? Even folk institutions that purport to give us advice on behaviour and ethics seem fraught with contradictions. Consider aphorisms -haste makes waste; yes, but a stitch in time saves nine. Better safe than sorry; but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire; but you can’t tell a book by its cover. A penny saved is a penny earned; but you can’t take it with you. He who hesitates is lost; but fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Two heads are better than one; but too many cooks spoil the broth. There was a time when people planned or justified their actions on the basis of such contradictory platitudes. What is the moral responsibility of the aphorist? Or the Sun-sign astrologer, the Tarot card reader, the tabloid prophet?
Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves; and in the Gospels we are urged to love our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations are embedded.
In Joshua and in the second half of Numbers is celebrated the mass murder of men, women, children, down to the domestic animals in city after city across the whole land of Canaan. Jericho is obliterated in a kherem, a ‘holy war’. The only justification