Tag Archives: nuclear war

February 2024 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The war on terror continues, and the propaganda umbrella has expanded to cover attacks on any group labeled as “Iran-backed”. Fentanyl gets an honorable mention, but affects mostly the poor and miserable whereas the war on terror threatens to immolate us all.

Most hopeful story: The people who are in charge of the USA’s nuclear weapons still believe in the ideals behind the founding of the country, at least more than the rest of us. Okay, this is lean times for hope, but seriously this at least buys us time to figure some stuff out.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I am not a great chef by any means, but all hail recipe websites, however pesky they may be, for helping me make edible food.

boomers

Leave a reply

Vanity Fair (why them out of all possible publications? I don’t know) got “unprecedented access” onboard a U.S. strategic nuclear submarine. There are plenty of attention-catching quotes.

As the ominous backstop to America’s national security, the Department of Defense relies on a triad: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range bombers, and submarines. The latter are considered the triad’s least vulnerable leg and carry 70 percent of all deployed nuclear warheads in the inventory. Boomers are officially known as Ohio-class SSBNs—Navy-speak for “submersible ship, ballistic, nuclear”—and were built, as even the juniormost sailor will tell you (without a hint of irony), to “preserve the peace” and, in the event of strategic attack, to inflict unimaginable destruction. “We are prepared to unleash hell,” Admiral William Houston told me, adding that, of course, “We never want to do it. Those sailors know if their weapon system is ever used, they are probably not coming home to their families. And so they take their business very, very seriously. It’s what we refer to as a no-fail mission. You are working directly for the president when you’re out there.”

Um, I’m supposed to be comforted that the missiles are under civilian control, i.e. the military will not launch the missiles themselves. There is some comfort in this I suppose in that only the person who got a majority of electoral votes (many disproportionately representing empty land rather than human voters) can annihilate the planet. The military’s senior officers seems to have more faith in the mythical constitution and presidency than most of us civilians do.

On 9/11, Packer, then a lieutenant commander, was the engineer officer on the USS Ohio, an SSBN that was in the Pacific for a worldwide war game… The United States is under attack.” Over the next few hours, the Ohio received fragmentary reports: The twin towers had been hit; the Pentagon had been struck (true) and destroyed (not true). They also understood that the president was airborne—another portentous sign to those who wait on orders from the National Command Authority, which the president directs. The Ohio, Packer recalled, began the march from DEFCON five. To four. To three. “You take actions to make the platform more ready to complete its mission. You open safes and look at and access war plans that are normally not known or accessible.” When I asked how unusual those actions were, he replied, “I’d never seen those things. Ever.” Sailors on the Ohio began to speculate about who was behind the attacks. “The consensus on the boat was that it was Iran. And, as far as we were concerned, they were going to be radioactive glass…

Chilling – why do we jump to the conclusion that there is an Iranian boogeyman behind everything, evidence be damned…

Packer, like so many others interviewed for this story, told me he is bracing for a very different battle than the ones fought in the aftermath of 9/11. “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said they need to be ready to go to war,” … “In the Taiwan fight,” Packer maintained, “we’re prepared to go into the jaws of the Chinese undersea forces and take them all out.” All the surface ships as well.

So a U.S. China war is not only a foregone conclusion, it is on the calendar…

Over the second half of the last century, Western national security officials were preoccupied with trying to keep one adversary (the USSR) in check, even as the dueling nuclear powers ratified landmark arms control treaties. With those efforts now in eclipse and nuclear proliferation a chilling reality, America and its allies are currently contending with two near-peer opponents, Russia and China, as well as their own set of allies with nuclear aspirations, including North Korea, Iran, and, by extension, the Axis of Resistance—a term that encompasses armed groups like the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq.

Axis of resistance to what? being dominated by the threat of nuclear attack?

Don’t get me wrong. I am comforted that these people take their jobs deadly seriously. because their jobs are so deadly. I just don’t really buy into the idea that the United States needs a nuclear “deterrent” of thousands of warheads to outweigh the risk of accidental or intentional use of nuclear weapons. And I don’t like the idea that arms control treaties have fallen by the wayside and we cynically assume no further progress is possible.

“plutonium pits”

Leave a reply

A “plutonium pit” is the actual core of a thermonuclear bomb. According the Scientific American, the U.S. plans to spend $1.5 trillion dollars on new plutonium pits and new intercontinental ballistic missiles to put them on (actually, it’s not even clear from the article if the $1.5 trillion includes the missiles. This is all while people are sleeping the streets, life expectancies are falling, violence is raging, educational attainment is falling, and the list goes on. I don’t even hear politicians talking about peace or even proposing negotiations to limit the pace of this new arms race. Real, courageous leaders would do this, and they seem to be in short supply. With all the risks our global civilization is facing (food security, floods, fires, drought, pandemics and biological weapons to name just a few very bad ones not really being addressed), we can’t let nuclear proliferation and nuclear war rear its ugly head again. To our politicians I say, somebody step up and lead, you cowards!

2022 in Review

Leave a reply

First, my heart goes out to anyone who suffered hardship or lost a loved one in 2022. People still died from Covid-19 of course, not to mention other diseases, violence, and accidents. People are living, dying, and suffering horribly in war zones from Ukraine to the Middle East to Myanmar. Having said all that, for those of us living relatively sheltered lives in relatively sheltered locations like the United States, 2022 does not seem like it will rank among the best or worst of years in history.

Highlights of the Year’s Posts

These are the posts I picked each month as most frightening and/or depressing, most hopeful, and most interesting.

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
  • FEBRUARY: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
  • MARCH: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
  • APRIL:  The use of small nuclear weapons is becoming more thinkable. Just a reminder that nuclear war is truly insane. Assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war, food insecurity might be our biggest near- to medium-term issue. One lesson of World War II is worries about food security played a role in the diseased minds of both Hitler and Stalin. And food prices right now are experiencing a “giant leap” unprecedented over the last couple decades. Food security, natural disasters, sea level rise, migration, and geopolitical stability all can form ugly feedback loops. And no, I couldn’t limit myself to just one depressing story this month!
  • MAY: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
  • JUNE: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
  • JULY:  One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.
  • AUGUST: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.
  • SEPTEMBER: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.
  • OCTOBER: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
  • NOVEMBER:  Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
  • DECEMBER: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
  • FEBRUARY: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
  • MARCH: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
  • APRIL: While we are experiencing a disturbing homicide wave in U.S. cities, violent and overall crime are not necessarily at historical highs and are more or less flat. And yes, this was the most uplifting story I could come up with this month. Brave politicians could use the Ukraine emergency to talk about arms control, but if anybody is talking about that I am missing it.
  • MAY: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
  • JUNE: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
  • JULY: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.
  • AUGUST: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).
  • SEPTEMBER: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.
  • OCTOBER: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
  • NOVEMBER: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
  • DECEMBER: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Brilliant Synthesis

Technology

The last couple years, I led off with other things and came around to a technology roundup towards the end. This year, I’ll just shake things up (yes, I’m wild and crazy like that) and lead off with technology developments during the year.

Solar energy has been a long time coming, but 2022 was a year when it really started to be at the forefront of the energy conversation and hard for the skeptics to ignore. We keep hearing that it is now the cheapest form of energy to build and put into operation. That means it is now limited by the materials needed to produce the panels, by the space needed to deploy the panels, and by the transmission and temporary storage infrastructure. Building rooftops take up a lot of space and are mostly not used for other things, so this seems like an obvious place to put the panels. The oceans of pavement we use to operate and park vehicles make up another somewhat obvious place – we can toughen the panels and drive on them, or we can put cheap roofs over the pavement and cover them with panels. Materials can be an issue because many of them are mined and sold by unsavory characters and governments, and there is clearly an environmental impact. But remember that we are trading this off against today’s coal, oil, and natural gas industry, not against some socially and ecologically blameless party. This industry intentionally lied to the public for decades and in the process did immeasurable damage to a planetary biophysical system.

Metals and minerals are also just limited. But even in hard-nosed economic terms, if solar panels are the lowest-cost option as we are hearing, they are holding their own with the costs of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. We could tax social and environmental impacts at international borders if we had the courage to do so, but even without that it is hard to imagine a system more damaging and irresponsible than the one we have been dealing with for the past century or so.

People will also say we haven’t kept the distribution infrastructure up to date, and this is true. In the United States at least, we don’t keep public infrastructure in a state of good repair. But we do create infrastructure when big business demands it, and they will demand an electric grid that can support their products when it comes to electric vehicles, devices and facilities. There may be a period of pain between when big business demands it and when the U.S. government provides it, and other countries will almost certainly outdistance us.

Longer term, as Fully Automated Luxury Communism tells it, space for solar panels will not be a problem because we will put them in, well, space. And this is not a far-future fantasy. The technology to gather the energy in space and beam it to the Earth pretty much exists now and governments and companies are seriously working on practical implementation. They swear it is safe, and even if it is not totally risk-free remember again all the death, pollution, and permanent planetary destruction the fossil fuel sociopaths have wrought.

Now, what about nuclear power? If we had really focused on it decades ago, we might not be in the climate change mess we find ourselves in now. It could still be a solution to the climate change mess in the future. But given how long it takes to bring new nuclear technology online at a large scale, and how fast solar energy appears to be scaling up and how reliable it appears to be, is it time to stop working on nuclear? I’m talking about known fission technology here. As for fusion, given that it is “always 20 years away” (no matter the year we are actually in), is it time to stop working on it and just throw all our research efforts at solar?

And materials will not be a problem either because we will produce them from asteroids and bring them to Earth, ending material shortages forever. I say, good but better to just use them to build things in space because we are running out of capacity to absorb the byproducts of the materials we already have down here. Just digging things up that were already in the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere and oceans has caused enough trouble.

By the way, once we are in space and messing around with asteroids, government and private actors will be able to divert their trajectories. It is easy to imagine scenarios where this is a great thing that actually saves all life on the planet. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where industrial accidents or intentional government actions threaten life on the planet. An international treaty and some oversight of this seems like a good idea as the messing-with-asteroids industry really starts to get going.

I don’t have my pet mini-mammoth yet, but biotechnology is continuing to gain steam. The idea of treating aging as a disease to be cured seems almost too obvious, but it seems to remove some bureaucratic obstacles that have been holding science and medicine back. Covid-19 was probably, maybe, perhaps not a lab leak. But it could have been, because the technology to make something like it, or much worse, exists in labs right now. It could be made if it has not already, and it could be leaked accidentally or intentionally, if it has not been already. And like nuclear technology, it will proliferate. Compared to nuclear technology, I think it will proliferate much faster and be much easier to hide. I have trouble envisioning any solution to this that does not involve heavy-handed surveillance.

On the positive side, biotechnology may be able to feed us when there are a lot more of us. With cellular agriculture, we can theoretically make meat or just about any kind of plant or animal tissue, and then we can eat it. We may finally be on the verge of modifying plants so they can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy, which is both exciting and scary. With a combination of abundant cheap electricity (from solar energy), abundant cheap materials, and highly efficient lighting though, we might be able to grow all the food we need in high rises without needing frankenplants.

And finally, the idea of controlling the weather with windmills is pretty fascinating. If we figure this one out, we might be able to end damage from floods, droughts, and hurricanes. But obvious Bond villain Elon Musk will also be able to use this to hold the world hostage for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS. That doesn’t really matter though because he is probably already planning to crash an asteroid into us anyway.

Propaganda, Social Media, and Truth

Social media is being blamed for a lot of our social ills at the moment. When we hear “social media” discussed, it seems to mean first and foremost interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where anyone can post a short snippet of any information they want and make it available to anybody else on the platform. Youtube also seems to fit this mold to some extent, although Youtube is a mix of personal and professionally-produced content. Then, underlying all this are Google search and other algorithms or “search” engines which are searching both for content to show individuals and individuals to show content. There are bloggers using WordPress and a million other tools and sites trying to get their content out, usually not all that widely if my personal experience is any indication (to the 5 or 6 people worldwide who read this blog regularly?) Then there is the huge ecosystem of Amazon and all the other sites trying to sell us stuff. Then there is professional journalistic media and traditional publishing companies trying to have their say (and sell us stuff), and finally there is some sense of the broader internet underlying all this.

Beyond trying to sell us stuff, corporations and non-profit entities are trying to manipulate all these communication channels to get their messages into our heads. This is propaganda, with the main goal being to sell us stuff and a secondary goal being to create awareness and positive images of their brands so they can keep selling us stuff. Also so people won’t complain to politicians about whatever the corporations are doing and risk those politicians meddling in the system in ways that are averse to corporate profits. At the same time, these companies and special interest groups are paying off the politicians to support their interests behind the scenes. This works out well for them (the corporations, special interests and politicians).

Finally we have the U.S. government and governments around the world trying to influence public opinion, occasionally by providing accurate information, sometimes outright lies, and often something in between.

All this is competing for our “attention”. Personally, I strongly prefer having more information to less, and I do not want to see regulation aimed at reducing the amount of information available to me. I believe, perhaps naively, that I have some ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, and objective/honest communication from dishonest attempts to influence me. Regulation to protect children might be an exception to this – if social media sites are facilitating bullying and leading to mental health problems and even suicides, that is worth dealing with.

“Great Power Competition”, the “International Order”, and the United Nations

A major world leader of our time died in 2022. Okay, two world leaders if you really want to count Queen Victoria, but I am talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. To me, he represents a moment when optimism and visionary leadership had a chance to flower to the benefit of our civilization. He had a vision of long-term peace and stability, with powerful nation-states ceding some of their power to some form of world government. The basic vision was that no nation-state, no matter how powerful, would be able to succeed through violent means if it was opposed by all other nation-states acting together. With the threat of catastrophic war mostly behind us, humanity could have focused on solving all the other thorny problems, from food to energy to pollution to inequality. This was a beautiful vision, but unfortunately its moment passed us by, and we are back to the old cynical idea of coalitions of “great powers” arrayed against each other.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we are not focused on solving those other problems. The United Nations was supposed to at least be the seed of that new order that would usher in long-term peace and prosperity for our species. To be sure, the United Nations has accomplished a lot when it comes to human rights, science, agriculture, refugees, and other areas. It has also been a place where all the not-so-great powers of the world can band together and make their voices somewhat heard. But the Security Council was supposed to be the One Ring to Rule Them All and make “great power competition” obsolete. This has failed utterly, with the Security Council considered all but irrelevant at this point. Not only is “great power competition” ascendant, we seem to be proud of ourselves for bringing it back. If there is a devil, he must truly love “great power competition”.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we have failed utterly to solve other existential problems such as food security, global warming, sea level rise, ever-growing concentration of wealth, and the specter of a Captain Trips extinction plague whether of natural or manmade origin.

Resilience. Despite taking a gut punch, at the end of 2022 it feels as though our planetary civilization weathered the storm of Covid-19 and has more or less rebounded to something like the trend it would have been on. This is the textbook definition of resilience, and something to feel good about. If we get some time in between gut punches, we at least have an opportunity to work on our other problems while also preparing for the next gut punch. If we don’t make progress, maybe we can at least reach a state of stagnation rather than a self-actuated collapse. Can a civilization be resilient and stagnant at the same time? Maybe this is where we find ourselves, at least in the near term.

Happy 2023!

March 2022 in Review

Leave a reply

The Ukraine war grinds on as I write on April 7, with the Russian military seemingly pulling back from some areas while slaughtering civilians (hostages?) farther east and south. I proffered some limited views on the situation and media coverage of the war during the month, but I won’t go into it below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.

Most hopeful story: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ready.gov has posted helpful information on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion.

the 1962 Single Integrated Operational Plan

Leave a reply

This is just chilling.

A full nuclear SIOP strike launched on a preemptive basis would have delivered over 3200 nuclear weapons to 1060 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied countries in Asia and Europe;

A full nuclear strike by SIOP forces on high alert, launched in retaliation to a Soviet strike, would have delivered 1706 nuclear weapons against a total of 725 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied states;

Targets would have included nuclear weapons, government and military control centers, and at least 130 cities in the Soviet Union, China, and allies;

The National Security Archive

That is clearly insane. What secret plans to destroy everything human civilization has achieved in the last 10,000 years are on the books today?

tactical nuclear weapons

Leave a reply

Center for Public Integrity has an article explaining how a war involving tactical nuclear weapons could play out. The problem, beyond the obvious horrible human and environmental toll they would take, is that they would likely be the link in escalation from conventional war to civilization-annihilating total thermonuclear war. Please no.

Had such an invasion ever come, the commanders in the field, given authorization to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat, would retreat after deployment. (Soviet plans for war were to specifically attack tactical nuclear sites.) The war would then either end in hours with an exchange of ICBMs, or with a ceasefire negotiated to prevent armageddon.

Defense intellectuals describe the steps between peace and thermonuclear oblivion through an “escalation ladder,” with the leadership of both countries at war taking actions that invite the other country to either escalate, by increasing the stakes and tensions, or de-escalate, by backing away from further conflict. Tactical nuclear weapons are the rung separating conventional battle from a nuclear war.

Soviet leaders developed their nuclear weapons and doctrine as a response to U.S. nuclear war planning, and awareness of U.S. nuclear deployments to Europe. Both the U.S. and USSR assumed that once tactical nuclear weapons were used, it was more likely that thermonuclear exchange, not deescalation, would follow.

Center for Public Integrity

So the strategy was to out-crazy the other side. We rolled the dice on that risky strategy and won, but roll the dice enough times and everyone on both sides will lose.

The best thing that could possibly come out of this horrible Ukraine war, once the dust settles, would be renewed arms control negotiations. I am not too hopeful for that because the world seems to be in a very cynical place right now.

what would a practical modern arms control framework look like?

Leave a reply

I am concerned that nuclear war is becoming more scary and thinkable all the time, and politicians are focused elsewhere. One thing the U.S. can do is just be less scary. We need to put ourselves in others’ shoes and realize that they find us threatening, don’t fully trust us, and feel they have to be prepared to defend themselves against us. Being less threatening does not have to make us appear weak – we can let people know we are strong and ready to defend ourselves and our allies if attacked, while reassuring others that they are in no danger if they don’t threaten us. This seems like a basic playground philosophy, but I don’t see our warmongering politicians talking this way.

War on the Rocks has a wonky article on what a modern arms control framework could look like. Let’s pull back a little bit and work on peace and risk reduction.

In my book, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control, I propose that we embrace an ambitious goal of extending the three norms of no use, no testing, and no new proliferation to the 100th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine, if you can, a world in which nuclear weapons have not been used on battlefields for 100 years, and a world in which nuclear weapons have not been tested by major and regional powers for almost five decades. Imagine, too, that North Korea remains the last nuclear-armed state. Now imagine the perceived utility of nuclear weapons in 2045. How many potential mushroom clouds would be required for deterrence? How high would the barriers be against use and testing? …

A seven-nation forum consisting of the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Britain, and France would be hard to steer, but the nuclear dangers we now face are interconnected and unwieldy. When the nature of a problem seems intractably complex, the wisest course might just be to expand the scope of the problem. Even as the four pairs compete, they have the most to lose if key norms are broken and the most to gain if they are extended. Existing bilateral conversations on nuclear risk reduction would, of course, continue, but there are no effective channels of communication and substantive exchanges between India and China and between India and Pakistan, where border clashes are becoming more intense. A non-hierarchical, seven-nation approach to norm building might just succeed. All seven have significant concerns about the intentions and capabilities of states with the most dynamic nuclear modernization programs. Each state has its own reasons to engage, as well as to be wary. If other states are willing to sit at the table, it becomes harder for anyone to hold out.

War on the Rocks

The article gets much more specific from there, and is worth a read. Joe Biden should read it. If his major legislative accomplishments are likely to be behind him by the end of 2022 as we expect, he could try to leave the world a legacy on nuclear arms control, climate change, pandemic preparedness and biological weapons control in his remaining 2-6 years in office. He wouldn’t need direct support from the U.S. Congress, although we have learned that without the executive and legislative branches moving in lockstep, international agreements are not always durable and other countries will conclude they can’t rely on us. Still, any forward progress on any of these issues would be a significant contribution to the future of our nation and our global civilization.

New Start extended for five years

Leave a reply

Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have just done a very good thing in extending the New Start treaty for five years.

The treaty, signed in 2010 by the US president Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, who was president of Russia at the time, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.

The Guardian

The numbers seem somewhat underwhelming to me (as in, a modest reduction in an enormous nuclear arsenal), but the important thing is the willingness to cooperate to reduce risk, and the message that sends to the rest of the world. The world has gone from believing a nuclear free world might be possible, to trying to avoid proliferation while modestly reducing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to trying to slow the rate of proliferation while “modernizing” or increasing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to teetering on the brink of an all-out arms race. Now we have gone back to the “maintain what we have”, which is still incredibly cynical, but the trend has turned back in the right direction. Accidents, proliferation, unstable nuclear-armed states (I’m talking to you Pakistan), and terrorism are all still very frightening, and there is no margin for error even with one relatively small event one time. The ocean liner captain has seen the iceberg, let up on the steam, and turned the wheel an inch to the left. Is it in time to avoid collision?

2020 in Review

Leave a reply

2020 has been quite a year for the U.S. and the world, but you don’t need me to tell you that! My work and family life was disrupted, but I have been lucky enough not to lose any family members or close friends to Covid-19 so far. If anyone reading this has lost someone, I want to express my condolences.

Now I’ll get right down to some highlights of my 2020 posts.

Monthly Highlights from 2020

Most frightening or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Open cyberwarfare became a thing in the 2010s. We read the individual headlines but didn’t connect the dots. When you do connect the dots, it’s a little shocking what’s going on.
  • FEBRUARY: The Amazon rain forest may reach a tipping point and turn into a dry savanna ecosystem, and some scientists think this point could be reached in years rather than decades. Meanwhile, Africa is dealing with a biblical locust plague. Also, bumble bees are just disappearing because it is too hot.
  • MARCH: Hmm…could it be…THE CORONAVIRUS??? The way the CDC dropped the ball on testing and tracking, after preparing for this for years, might be the single most maddening thing of all. There are big mistakes, there are enormously unfathomable mistakes, and then there are mistakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people (at least) and cost tens of trillions of dollars. I got over-excited about Coronavirus dashboards and simulations towards the beginning of month, and kind of tired of looking at them by the end of the month.
  • APRIL: The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?
  • MAY: Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!
  • JUNE: The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
  • JULY: Here’s the elevator pitch for why even the most hardened skeptic should care about climate change. We are on a path to (1) lose both polar ice caps, (2) lose the Amazon rain forest, (3) lose our productive farmland, and (4) lose our coastal population centers. If all this comes to pass it will lead to mass starvation, mass refugee flows, and possibly warfare. Unlike even major crises like wars and pandemics, by the time it is obvious to everyone that something needs to be done, there will be very little that can be done.
  • AUGUST: We just had the 15-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a major regional crisis that federal, state, and local governments failed to competently prepare for or respond to. People died, and decades later the recovery is incomplete. Coronavirus proves we learned nothing, as it is unfolding in a similar way on a much larger and longer scale. There are many potential crises ahead that we need to prepare for today, not least the inundation of major cities. I had a look at the Democratic and (absence of a) Republican platforms, and there is not enough substance in either when it comes to identifying and preparing for the risks ahead.
  • SEPTEMBER: The Covid recession in the U.S. is pretty bad and may be settling in for the long term. Demand for the capital goods we normally export (airplanes, weapons, airplanes that unleash weapons, etc.) is down, demand for oil and cars is down, and the service industry is on life support. Unpaid bills and debts are mounting, and eventually creditors will have to come to terms with this (nobody feels sorry for “creditors”, but what this could mean is we get a full-blown financial panic to go along with the recession in the real economy.
  • OCTOBER: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.
  • NOVEMBER:  It seems likely the Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump U.S. foreign wars may just grind on endlessly under Biden. Prove us wrong, Joe! (I give Trump a few points for trying to bring troops home over the objections of the military-industrial complex. But in terms of war and peace, this is completely negated and then some by slippage on nuclear proliferation and weapons on his watch.)
  • DECEMBER: The “Map of Doom” identifies risks that should get the most attention, including antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology (also see below), and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Democratic socialism actually does produce a high quality of life for citizens in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the hard evidence shows that the United States is slipping behind its peer group in many measures of economic vibrancy and quality of life. The response of our leaders is to tell us we are great again because that is what we want to hear, but not do anything that would help us to actually be great again or even keep up with the middle of the pack. This is in the hopeful category because solutions exist and we can choose to pursue them.
  • FEBRUARY: A proven technology exists called high speed rail.
  • MARCH: Some diabetics are hacking their own insulin pumps. Okay, I don’t know if this is a good thing. But if medical device companies are not meeting their patient/customers’ needs, and some of those customers are savvy enough to write software that meets their needs, maybe the medical device companies could learn something.
  • APRIL: Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.
  • MAY: E.O. Wilson is alive and kicking somewhere in Massachusetts. He says if we want to save our fellow species and ourselves, we should just let half the Earth revert to a natural state. Somewhat related to this, and not implying my intellect or accomplishments are on par with E.O. Wilson, I have been giving some thought to “supporting” ecosystem services in cities. When I need a break from intellectual anything, I have been gardening in Pennsylvania with native plants.
  • JUNE: Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
  • JULY: In the U.S. every week since schools and businesses shut down in March, about 85 children lived who would otherwise have died. Most of these would have died in and around motor vehicles.
  • AUGUST: Automatic stabilizers might be boring but they could have helped the economy in the coronavirus crisis. Congress, you failed us again but you can get this done before the next crisis.
  • SEPTEMBER: The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis had the courage to take aim at campaign finance corruption as a central reason for why the world is in its current mess. I hate to be partisan, folks, but right now our government is divided into responsible adults and children. The responsible adults who authored this report are the potential leaders who can lead us forward.
  • OCTOBER: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.
  • NOVEMBER: The massive investment in Covid-19 vaccine development may have major spillover effects to cures for other diseases. This could even be the big acceleration in biotechnology that seems to have been on the horizon for awhile. These technologies also have potential negative and frivolous applications, of course.
  • DECEMBER: The Covid-19 vaccines are a modern “moonshot” – a massive government investment driving scientific and technological progress on a particular issue in a short time frame. Only unlike nuclear weapons and the actual original moonshot, this one is not military in nature. (We should be concerned about biological weapons, but let’s allow ourselves to enjoy this victory and take a quick trip to Disney Land before we start practicing for next season…) What should be our next moonshot, maybe fusion power?

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: Custom-grown human organs and gene editing and micro-satellites, oh my!
  • FEBRUARY: Corporate jargon really is funny. I still don’t know what “dropping a pin” in something means, but I think it might be like sticking a fork in it.
  • MARCH: I studied up a little on the emergency powers available to local, state, and the U.S. federal government in a health crisis. Local jurisdictions are generally subordinate to the state, and that is more or less the way it has played out in Pennsylvania. For the most part, the state governor made the policy decisions and Philadelphia added a few details and implemented them. The article I read said that states could choose to put their personnel under CDC direction, but that hasn’t happened. In fact, the CDC seems somewhat absent in all this other than as a provider of public service announcements. The federal government officials we see on TV are from the “Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases”, which most people never heard of, and to a certain extent the surgeon general. I suppose my expectations on this were created mostly by Hollywood, and if this were a movie the CDC would be swooping in with white suits and saving us, or possibly incinerating the few to save the many. If this were a movie, the coronavirus would also be mutating into a fog that would seep into my living room and turn me inside out, so at least there’s that.
  • APRIL: There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month. [Update: It wasn’t. Thanks, 2020.]
  • MAY: There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.
  • JUNE: Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost.
  • JULY: The world seems to be experiencing a major drop in the fertility rate. This will lead to a decrease in the rate of population growth, changes to the size of the work force relative to the population, and eventually a decrease in the population itself.
  • AUGUST: Vehicle miles traveled have crashed during the coronavirus crisis. Vehicle-related deaths have decreased, but deaths per mile driven have increased, most likely because people drive faster when there is less traffic, absent safe street designs which we don’t do in the U.S. Vehicle miles will rebound, but an interesting question is whether they will rebound short of where they were. One study predicts about 10% lower. This accounts for all the commuting and shopping trips that won’t be taken, but also the increase in deliveries and truck traffic you might expect as a result. It makes sense – people worry about delivery vehicles, but if each parcel in the vehicle is a car trip to the store not taken, overall traffic should decrease. Even if every 5 parcels are a trip not taken, traffic should decrease. I don’t know the correct number, but you get the idea. Now, how long until people realize it is not worth paying and sacrificing space to have a car sitting there that they seldom use. How long before U.S. planners and engineers adopt best practices on street design that are proven to save lives elsewhere in the world?
  • SEPTEMBER: If the universe is a simulation, and you wanted to crash it on purpose, you could try to create a lot of nested simulations of universes within universes until your overload whatever the operating system is. Just hope it’s backed up.
  • OCTOBER: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.
  • NOVEMBER: States representing 196 electoral votes have agreed to support the National Popular Vote Compact, in which they would always award their state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Colorado has now voted to do this twice. Unfortunately, the movement has a tough road to get to 270 votes, because of a few big states that would be giving up a lot of power if they agreed to it.
  • DECEMBER: Lists of some key technologies that came to the fore in 2020 include (you guessed it) mRNA vaccines, genetically modified crops, a variety of new computer chips and machine learning algorithms, which seem to go hand in hand (and we are hearing more about “machine learning” than “artificial intelligence” these days), brain-computer interfaces, private rockets and moon landings and missions to Mars and mysterious signals and micro-satellites and UFOs, virtual and mixed reality, social media disinformation and work-from-home technologies. The wave of self-driving car hype seems to have peaked and receded, which probably means self-driving cars will probably arrive quietly in the next decade or so. I was surprised not to see cheap renewable energy on any lists that I came across, and I think it belongs there. At least one economist thinks we are on the cusp of a big technology-driven productivity pickup that has been gestating for a few decades.

That’s a lot to unpack, and I’m not sure I can offer a truly brilliant synthesis, but below are a few things that are on my mind as I think through all this.

We Americans affirmed that we care about our parents and grandparents (then failed to fully protect them).

One thing I think we learned is that we still value human lives more than a cold, purely economic calculation might suggest, including the lives of our elderly parents and grandparents. (Though we had significant failures of execution when it came to actually protecting people – more on that later.) We have had this debate before in the U.S., for example when thinking about how much to invest in environmental and safety regulations as I was reminded of by this Planet Money podcast. At one point, politicians (can you guess from which party) proposed valuing the lives of senior citizens at lower rates than everyone else. The backlash was fierce and instant, and the proposal was withdrawn. This year, we did not really have that debate – it was simply accepted, for the most part, that we would be willing to endure significant economy-wide pain to try to protect our parents and grandparents.

I kind of liked how Mr. Money Mustache put it back in April. He gave a “worst case scenario” with 3 million deaths and a “best case scenario” with 200,000 deaths, and the reality is on track to be somewhere in between.

In the worst case, our public officials would all downplay the risk of COVID-19, and we’d keep working and traveling and spreading it freely. We’d maximize our economic activity and let the disease run its course…

In the more compassionate case which we are currently following, we drastically reduce the amount of contact we have with each other for a few months, which cuts the number of deaths in the US down from 3-6 million, down to perhaps 200,000. In exchange, our economy shrinks by several trillion dollars (it was about 21 trillion in 2019) for a year or more.

Assuming we are preventing 3 million early deaths, this means our society is foregoing about one million dollars of economic activity for each person’s life that we extend and frankly, it makes me happy to know we are capable of that.

Mr. Money Mustache

The leaders of some countries like Russia, Brazil, and even Sweden seem to have chosen to accept the consequences of business as usual. Most other countries have chosen to try to save human lives at the expense of short-term economic activity, and some executed this strategy much more effectively than others. In the U.S. and UK, we seem to be bumbling idiots who feel some compassion for one another.

The United States has been slipping for awhile, and in 2020 we faltered.

The U.S. continues to slip below average among its developed country peers in many statistical categories like life expectancy, violence, incarceration, suicide, poverty, and public infrastructure. I picture us like a horse that used to be leading the race, then slipped into the middle of the leading pack, and has now drifted toward the back of the leading pack and is continuing to lose ground. Keep slipping and we would no longer be part of the leading pack.

But then came Covid-19, our horse faltered, and all the other horses went thundering past, leaving us in last place. With the possible exception of the UK, we had the least effective response in the world. Like I said, I think a few countries like Russia, Brazil, and Sweden basically chose to accept the consequences of a limited response, and that is different than a failed response (though not to the people who died or whose loved ones died). We tried to respond, and it turned out our government was unprepared and incompetent even compared to developing countries.

So what happened? Some particular failing of the Anglo-American countries doesn’t explain it, because Canada and Australia both did pretty well. Our lack of a public health system (or even universal access to private care) doesn’t explain it, because the UK, Canada, and Australia all have similar systems to each other and divergent outcomes.

The difference between the extraordinary low rates in Asia, and the higher rates in Europe and the Americas is particularly stark. There are a couple things that I think may explain it. First is good airport screening. I traveled in Asia during the swine flu pandemic, and the screening is robust. The U.S. obviously has to beef up its health infrastructure at international airports and other border crossings (yes, there is a certain irony here that is lost on anti-immigrant types.) Part of this is also beefing up the data systems that track who is coming in from where, where they are going and what their status is. It became obvious within weeks that the CDC’s databases were a complete failure.

I think beyond border screening and data management, the other big difference between East and West is that Asian countries were willing to restrict physical movement and enforce quarantine, whereas western countries mostly were not. Had I exhibited symptoms while I was traveling in Singapore or Thailand during the swine flu, either country would have detained me in a government facility (with three meals a day and wi-fi, one would hope) for 14 days. Asian countries have also been willing to shut down domestic airports, train systems, and highways at times. Most western countries are simply not willing to do this. In the U.S., I think it is partly a matter of law and politics, but also a stupid idea that it would be “too expensive” when quite obviously it would have saved trillions of dollars in the long run. We simply don’t have the political will, the institutional mechanisms, or the basic competence. Covid-19 was a borderline crisis – a lot of people will lose cherished parents and grandparents but it is not an existential threat to our country’s survival. The U.S. needs to plan now to quarantine effectively in an even worse pandemic or god forbid, an incident involving biological weapons.

A few words on government agencies. Hurricane Katrina came up a few times in the monthly picks above. That was a major failure of federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. to plan, respond, and rebuild after a disaster. Before that, I would have assumed FEMA was up to the task, as they seem to have been in the past. Most people’s faith in the CDC was similar or even greater, and they turned out to be bumbling fools. The U.S. will need to fund its public agencies, stock them with competent, well-trained technocrats, and appoint talented political leaders to integrate them with the rest of society if they are going to function competently in the future.

In a hurricane, FEMA basically rolls into your city and takes charge, for better or worse. Early on, there was speculation that the CDC might try to do something similar in a disease outbreak. That didn’t happen. We will also need to adequately fund and train state and local agencies, if we are going to continue to put the lion’s share of the burden on them in a decentralized disaster like this. We could just get rid of the states and have the federal government work directly with metro areas, but this seems like a pretty pie in the sky idea politically.

What other government agencies do we have faith in that might have turned into rotten hollow logs while we weren’t paying attention? The Treasury and Federal Reserve do in fact seem to know what they are doing, which has saved us a couple times now in the last couple decades. We assume the military can fight a war if they need to. We assume the Department of Agriculture can feed us. Are we sure?

The democratization of propaganda.

Governments in general, and the U.S. government in particular, are having trouble getting messages out to their citizens. We used to worry about governments and big business controlling the media to put out purely ideological or purely profit-driven messages. Now anyone in the world can pretty much say anything anytime. People have trouble telling which messages are truthful and which are more reliable than others. In the U.S., this is combined with low trust in government and low trust in experts, and the result is that people either didn’t receive important messages about public health, or received a variety of conflicting information and noise and didn’t reach reasonable conclusions reading to reasonable decisions.

We hear a lot about “following the science” and “listening to scientists”, but this is really about policy communication not science communication. Scientists are trained to communicate uncertainty to each other. Often though, the uncertainty is low enough that it is clear one course of action has better odds of a good outcome than others. Media do not communicate this well – they tend to focus on the uncertainty statements scientists make, even when uncertainty is low and the best course of action is clear. The public is not prepared to process this information in a way that will lead to reasonable conclusions and decisions.

So we need to try to educate children to evaluate the source of information and think critically about whether it makes sense in the context of what they know. We need to educate them about uncertainty and decision making. We need to train journalists better to communicate scientific information but especially policy choices. Regulating social media companies might play some small role in this, but in the U.S. at least we don’t want to see a move toward censorship.

Back to the CDC. When Covid-19 hit, I was expecting the CDC to step in and dominate communications from the beginning on the issue. They needed to use all the tools modern advertising has to get messages across. I would have trusted what they said, and I think a lot of people would. If they had seized the initiative, it would have been hard for other voices to compete, and we might be in a better place now. Unfortunately, they have probably suffered a permanent loss of credibility both through poor communication and inadequate action, but better communication would definitely have helped. Make this one more U.S. institution that has lost credibility in my eyes as I have gotten older – Congress, the State Department, and the New York Times after weapons of mass destruction (I never trusted intelligence agencies), the military after the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq (I’m not saying I trusted them per se, but I thought they were good at fighting wars), FEMA after Hurricane Katrina (and more recently the horrific non-response in Puerto Rico), and now the CDC and federal public health establishment.

I have come to respect local public health authorities more through all of this. I actually work in the same building as my local public health agency, and know some people who work there, but I never really saw the connection to the larger health care system or my daily life before this. Part of the federal government’s communication strategy should be to package crystal clear messages for delivery by trusted local individuals like public health workers, family doctors, and school nurses.

Preparing for the big (and small) risks

Covid-19 has caused me to think even more about risk management. A major pandemic was something we knew was virtually certain to happen at some point, and we knew the consequences could be severe. And yet we still failed to adequately plan, prepare, and respond. There are a few other things in this category, like (obviously) another pandemic, a major earthquake, and sea level rise. Then there are risks where we are not sure of the probability, but the consequences could be catastrophic, like nuclear and biological war, ecological collapse, and major food shortages. (Alien invasion? No, I’m not really taking this seriously, but along with things like “gray goo” it should be on the list and discussed, providing a rational basis for taking action or not.) Then there are things that are certain to happen but are geographically limited (storms, fires, floods) or steadily kill a few people here and there adding up to a lot over time (car crashes, air pollution, poor nutrition). I am not sure where some risks fit in, for example cyberattacks or antibiotic resistance – but this is the point of gathering the information and having the discussions in a rational framework. In a rational world, a risk management framework provides a way to allocate finite resources (money, effort, expertise, research) to planning, preparing, mitigating, or simply choosing to accept each of these.

The state of scientific and technological progress (is the Singularity near yet?)

I had a decent technology list under “most interesting post” for December, so I won’t repeat it here.

Above, I find myself referring to the Covid vaccine as a “moon shot”. It is clearly an example of how a big government push can get a new technology over the finish line and bring it into widespread use quickly. I am wondering though if it is a true example of accelerating a scientific breakthrough, an example of accelerating application of a scientific breakthrough to new technology, or simple a case of government correcting a market failure. We had been hearing about mRNA vaccine technology for awhile, and we know a vaccine was developed for SARS but not widely deployed. We have also been hearing for awhile that drug companies were still growing basic childhood vaccines in chicken eggs, and not investing heavily in the mRNA technology, because the market demand and profit potential was not there in the rich countries to make it worth their while. So this was at least partially a case of the U.S. and other governments making that market failure go away by simply paying for everything and simply transferring the profits to those companies. I am not saying this is bad – we do it for arms manufacturers all the time, so why not vaccines?

Vaccines for HIV, dengue fever and other similar mosquito-borne diseases would be nice. One solution to antibiotic resistance might be bacteriophages – viruses tailored specifically to infect and kill specific bacteria. It seems like this technology could be applied to this. If antibiotic resistance is really the medium- to long-term emergency some say it is, maybe this should be a top priority.

This technology is also scary. It is the ability to create a custom organism that can go into a person’s body and have a specific desired effect. Vaccines are obviously a benign application, but somebody, somewhere, sometime will use this technology for evil. This seems like a near-existential risk on the horizon that needs to be dealt with.

I am going to say no, the Singularity is not imminent in 2021. Then again, the idea is that if at some point we hit the knee of the curve on technology and productivity, it will seem to accelerate all at once, because that is the nature of exponential change. If that happens, we will shrug and say we knew it all along. The trick is to find ways to drive innovation and progress while managing the risks that could temporarily but repeatedly set back or permanently derail that path, and without destroying our planetary ecosystem in the process. I am not ready to put odds on what outcome we are headed for, but I am hoping 2021 will at least bring a gradual return to the pre-Covid status quo, and allow us to set the stage for the future.

If anyone has actually read my ramblings all the way to this point, or just skipped to the end, Happy New Year!