Shortly after the conference, I spoke with one of the attendees, Herb Lin, a scholar of technology and national security at Stanford. Lin is seventy-three. He has a doctorate in physics from M.I.T., earned under Philip Morrison—a onetime student of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s—who worked on the Manhattan Project. Morrison rode out to the Trinity test site in a sedan with the plutonium core of the bomb in a case next to him; he later became a prominent activist for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. Morrison’s career echoes the arc of many Manhattan Project scientists, who went from believing that only a nuclear weapon could bring peace to believing that only disarmament could bring peace. In 1979, the year Lin finished his Ph.D., a large anti-nuclear protest followed the partial meltdown of one of the reactors at Three Mile Island, and, a few years later, a million people walked from Central Park to the United Nations complex calling for an end to nuclear weapons. Harry Belafonte, Bruce Springsteen, and Joan Baez were among the marchers for what was, back then, a widely held concern. Though the capacity to destroy life as we know it several times over remains, the issue is less present in the public mind now; it was scarcely mentioned in the run-up to the 2024 election.
I asked Lin why he believes that is the case. “I think the biggest difference between then and now is that we’ve normalized nuclear competition,” he said. A 2017 study led by the political scientist Scott Sagan, of Stanford, and Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth, asked Americans if they would support the use of an atomic weapon that would kill two million Iranians if twenty thousand American troops were at risk—and the majority said yes. “You will hear people talk about nuclear war saying, ‘In this option, only two million people die,’ ” Lin said. “Think about that. I’m not saying thirty million isn’t worse than two million, but ‘only two million,’ when what follows is ‘die,’ is a completely insane statement.”
It has been eighty years since the first—and last—time nuclear weapons were used in war. The Nuclear Matters Handbook of the D.O.D. notes that the policy of deterrence “has done its job,” but there’s also the matter of dumb luck. “One of the most interesting developments in psychology has been coming to understand that people are systematically irrational,” Lin said. “Yet most theories of nuclear deterrence”—they won’t attack us because they know we can attack them—“are premised on rational actors.” The roll call of people across the decades who have had access to nuclear weapons includes many who are considerably less rational than the irrational rest of us. “And so the whole edifice of deterrence is, from the beginning, in trouble,” Lin said.