Michael Shermer's Blog, page 8

Conspiracy Central

Who believes in conspiracy theories—and why

President Barack Obama has been a busy man while in office: he concocted a fake birth certificate to hide his true identity as a foreigner, created “death panels” to determine who would live and who would die under his health care plan, conspired to destroy religious liberty by mandating contraceptives for religious institutions, blew up the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig to garner support for his environmental agenda, masterminded Syrian gas attacks as a pretext to war, orchestrated the shooting of a tsa agent to strengthen that agency’s powers, ordered the Sandy Hook school massacre to push through gun-control legislation, and built concentration camps in which to place Americans who resist.

Do people really believe such conspiracy theories? They do, and in disturbingly high numbers, according to recent empirical research collected by University of Miami political scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent and presented in their 2014 book American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press). About a third of Americans, for example, believe the “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama is a foreigner. About as many believe that 9/11 was an “inside job” by the Bush administration.

The idea that such beliefs are held only by a bunch of nerdy white guys living in their parents’ basements is a myth. Surveys by Uscinski and Parent show that believers in conspiracies “cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” People on both the political left and right, for example, believe in conspiracies roughly equally, although each finds different cabals. Liberals are more likely to suspect that media sources and political parties are pawns of rich capitalists and corporations, whereas conservatives tend to believe that academics and liberal elites control these same institutions. GMO conspiracy theories are embraced primarily by those on the left (who accuse, for example, Monsanto of conspiring to destroy small farmers), whereas climate change conspiracy theories are endorsed primarily by those on the right (who inculpate, for example, academic climate scientists for manipulating data to destroy the American economy).

Group identity is also a factor. African-Americans are more likely to believe that the cia planted crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods. White Americans are more likely to believe that the government is conspiring to tax the rich to support welfare queens and turn the country into a socialist utopia.

Encouragingly, Uscinski and Parent found that education makes a difference in reducing conspiratorial thinking: 42 percent of those without a high school diploma are high in conspiratorial predispositions, compared with 23 percent with postgraduate degrees. Even so, that means more than one in five Americans with postgraduate degrees show a high predisposition for conspiratorial belief. As an educator, I find this disturbing.

Other factors are at work in creating a conspiratorial mind. Uscinski and Parent note that in laboratory experiments “researchers have found that inducing anxiety or loss of control triggers respondents to see nonexistent patterns and evoke conspiratorial explanations” and that in the real world “there is evidence that disasters (e.g., earthquakes) and other high-stress situations (e.g., job uncertainty) prompt people to concoct, embrace, and repeat conspiracy theories.”

A conspiracy theory, Uscinski and Parent explain, is defined by four characteristics: “(1) a group (2) acting in secret (3) to alter institutions, usurp power, hide truth, or gain utility (4) at the expense of the common good.” A content analysis of more than 100,000 letters to the New York Times in 121 years turned up three pages’ worth of such conspirators, from Adolf Hitler and the African National Congress to the World Health Organization and Zionist villagers, catalogued into eight types: Left, Right, Communist, Capitalist, Government, Media, Foreign and Other (Freemasons, the AMA and even scientists). The common theme throughout is power—who has it and who wants it—and so the authors conclude their inquiry with an observation translated by Parent from Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (a conspiracy manual of sorts), for “the strong desire to rule, and the weak desire not to be ruled.”

To those who so conspire, recall the motto of revolutionaries everywhere: sic semper tyrannis —thus always to tyrants.

A Science of War

Do democracies make better lovers?

From Ukraine, Syria and Gaza to the centenary of the First World War in 2014, news junkies and students of history cannot help but wonder if war is a perpetual feature of civilization. German philosopher Immanuel Kant wondered as much in a 1795 essay entitled Perpetual Peace, concluding that citizens of a democratic republic are less likely to support their government in a war because “this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war.” Ever since, the “democratic peace theory” has had its supporters. Rutgers University political scientist Jack Levy, in a 1989 essay on “The Causes of War,” reasoned that the “absence of war between democratic states comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” Skeptics point out such exceptions as the Greek and Punic wars, the War of 1812, the U.S. Civil War, the India-Pakistan wars and the Israel-Lebanon War. Who is right? Can science answer the question?

In their 2001 book Triangulating Peace, political scientists Bruce Russett and John Oneal employed a multiple logistic regression model on data from the Correlates of War Project that recorded 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001. They assigned each country a democracy score between 1 and 10, based on the Polity Project, which measures how competitive its political process is, as well as the fairness of its elections, checks and balances of power, transparency, and so on. The researchers found that when two countries score high on the Polity scale, disputes between them decrease by 50 percent, but when one country was either a low-scoring democracy or an autocracy, it doubled the chance of a quarrel between them.

Kant also suggested that international trade (economic interdependency) and membership in international communities (transparency and accountability) reduce the likelihood of conflict. So Russett and Oneal included in their model data on the amount of trade between nations and found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year. They also counted the number of International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) that every pair of nations jointly belonged to and ran a regression analysis with democracy and trade scores. Overall, democracy, trade and membership in IGOs (the “triangle” of their title) all favor peace, and if a pair of countries are in the top 10th of the scale on all three variables, they are 83 percent less likely than an average pair of countries to have a militarized dispute in a given year.

How has the democratic peace theory held up since 2001? With all the conflict around the world, it seems like peace is on the rocks. But anecdotes are not data. In a 2014 special issue of the Journal of Peace Research, Uppsala University political scientist Håvard Hegre reassessed all the evidence on “Democracy and Armed Conflict.” He stated that “the empirical finding that pairs of democratic states have a lower risk of interstate conflict than other pairs holds up, as does the conclusion that consolidated democracies have less conflict than semi-democracies.” Hegre is skeptical that economic interdependence alone can keep countries from going to war—the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” popularized by Thomas Friedman’s observation that no two countries with McDonald’s fight—unless their economies are in democratic nations. He wonders, reasonably, if there might be some other underlying factor that explains both democracy and peace but does not suggest what that might be. I propose human nature itself and our propensity to prefer the elements of democracy. Peace is a pleasant by-product.

Whatever the deeper cause may be the long-term trends are encouraging. According to Freedom House, there were no electoral democracies (with universal suffrage) in 1900, 69 in 1990, and 122 in 2014—63 percent of the 195 countries in the world. That’s moral progress. The other 38 percent—particularly the theocratic autocracies desirous of thermonuclear weapons and bent on bringing about Armageddon—means we must remain vigilant. Otherwise we run the risk that Kant’s perpetual peace will dissolve into the source of his essay title inspiration: an innkeeper’s sign featuring a cemetery. This is not the type of perpetual peace toward which most sentient beings strive.

Infrequencies

I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism

Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain. What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have.

The event took place on June 25, 2014. On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany. She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged and several precious heirlooms lost, including her grandfather’s binoculars. His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.

Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings. Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don’t have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering— absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven’t seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist; startled audiences. “That can’t be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather’s transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I’m not alone.”

Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter’s radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since. What does this mean? Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there’s bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning. In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.

Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

Surviving Statistics

How the survivor bias distorts reality

When I purchased my latest vehicle, I was astonished to get the license plate 6NWL485. What are the chances that I would get that particular configuration? Before I received it, the odds would have been one in 175,760,000. (The total number of letters to the power of the number of letters on the plate times the total number of digits to the power of the number of digits on the plate: 263 x 104). After the fact, however, the probability is one.

This is what Pomona College economist Gary Smith calls the “survivor bias,” which he highlights as one of many statistically related cognitive biases in his deeply insightful book Standard Deviations (Overlook, 2014). Smith illustrates the effect with a playing card hand of three of clubs, eights of clubs, eight of diamonds, queen of hearts and ace of spades. The odds of that particular configuration are about three million to one, but Smith says, “After I look at the cards, the probability of having these five cards is 1, not 1 in 3 million.”

The conclusion seems obvious once you think about it, but most of us are regularly fooled by the survivor bias. Consider the plethora of business books readily available in airport bookstalls that feature the most successful companies. Smith analyzes two of the best sellers in the genre. In his 2001 book Good to Great (more than four million copies sold), Jim Collins culled 11 companies out of 1,435 whose stock beat the market average over a 40-year time span and then searched for shared characteristics among them that he believed accounted for their success. Instead, Smith says, Collins should have started with a list of companies at the beginning of the test period and then used “plausible criteria to select eleven companies predicted to do better than the rest. These criteria must be applied in an objective way, without peeking at how the companies did over the next forty years. It is not fair or meaningful to predict which companies will do well after looking at which companies did well! Those are not predictions, just history.” In fact, Smith notes, from 2001 through 2012 the stock of six of Collins’s 11 “great” companies did worse than the overall stock market, meaning that this system of post hoc analysis is fundamentally flawed.

Smith found a similar problem with the 1982 book In Search of Excellence (more three million copies sold), in which Tom Peters and Robert Waterman identified eight common attributes of 43 “excellent” companies. Since then, Smith points out, of the 35 companies with publicly traded stocks, 20 have done worse than the market average.

The survivor bias was evident in the reception of Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, as readers scrambled to understand what made the mercurial genius so successful. Want to be the next Steve Jobs and create the next Apple Computers? Drop out of college and start a business with your buddy in the garage of your parents’ home. How many people have followed the Jobs model and failed? Who knows? No one writes books about them and their unsuccessful companies. But venture capitalists (VCs) have data on the probability of a garage start-up becoming the Next Big Thing, and here the survivor bias is of a different sort.

David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif., told me in an e-mail: “For garage-dwelling entrepreneurs to crack the 1% wealth threshold in America, their path almost always involves raising venture capital and then getting their start-up to an initial public offering (IPO) or a large acquisition by another company. If their garage is situated in Silicon Valley, they might get to pitch as many as 15 VCs, but VCs hear 200 pitches for every one we fund, so perhaps 1 in 13 start-ups get VC, and still they face long odds from there. According to figures that the National Venture Capital Association diligently collects through primary research and publishes on their Web site, last year was somewhat typical in that 1,334 start-ups got funded, but only 13% as many achieved an IPO (81 last year) or an acquisition large enough to warrant a public disclosure of the price (95 last year). So for every wealthy start-up founder, there are 100 other entrepreneurs who end up with only a cluttered garage.”

Surviving those statistical odds is rare indeed.

ClimeApocalypse

Or just another line item in the budget?

In the year 2393 a historian in the Second People’s Republic of China penned a book about how scientists, economists and politicians living in the 21st century failed to act on the solid science they had that gave clear warnings of the climate catastrophe ahead. As a result, the world experienced the Great Collapse of 2093, bringing an end to Western civilization.

So speculate historians of science Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University and Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology in their book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (Columbia University Press, 2014), a short scientific- historical fantasy. During the second half of the 20th century— the “Period of the Penumbra”—a shadow of anti-intellectualism “fell over the once-Enlightened techno-scientific nations of the Western world…preventing them from acting on the scientific knowledge available at the time and condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.”

Why the failure to act? The authors’ future historian posits several causes: blind optimism; religion; reductionism that prevented scientists from understanding holistic systems; disciplinary narrowness that restricted cross-field communication between scientists; adherence to avoiding type I errors (believing a hypothesis is real when it isn’t) over type II errors (not believing a hypothesis is real when it is); and insistence on a 95 percent confidence limit for statistical significance that caused scientists to dismiss as unproved climate effects caused by warmer weather, such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Between 1751 and 2012 more than 365 billion metric tons of carbon was released into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to increase, the historian notes. Another century of warming devastated the populations of Australia and Africa, and those of Europe, Asia and North America had to move inland from flooded coastal regions.

This science-historical fantasy is thought-provoking, but is it prescient? Global warming is, of course, real and caused by human activity. But predicting how much warmer it is going to get and what the consequences will be is extremely difficult because estimates include error bars that grow wider the further out the models run. The precautionary principle states that we should act, just in case. But act on what? Climate change is not our only problem, and we do not have unlimited resources. Which problem should we tackle and how much should we spend?

In the second edition (2014) of his book How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, Bjørn Lomborg reports the findings of a study sponsored by his Copenhagen Consensus Center 2012 project in which more than 50 economists evaluated 39 proposals on how best to solve such problems as armed conflicts, natural disasters, hunger, disease, education and climate change. Climate change barely rated a mention in the top 10, which included, in order, malnutrition interventions, malaria treatment, childhood immunization, deworming of schoolchildren, tuberculosis treatment, research and development to increase crop yields, early-warning systems for natural disasters, hepatitis B immunization, and low-cost drugs for acute heart attack. Number 12 was R&D for geoengineering solutions to climate change, and number 17 was R&D for green energy technologies. The rest of the top 30 were related to disease, water and sanitation, biodiversity, hunger, education, population growth and natural disasters.

The ranking is based on a cost-benefit analysis. For example, an investment of $300 million “would prevent the deaths of 300,000 children, if it were used to strengthen the Global Fund’s malaria-financing mechanism.” Another $300 million would deworm 300 million children, and $122 million would lead to total hepatitis B vaccine coverage and thereby prevent another 150,000 annual deaths. Low-cost drugs to treat acute heart disease would cost just $200 million and save 300,000 people.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more about climate change. But what? Both books posit technological solutions: Lomborg’s Copenhagen experts recommend spending $1 billion for research on planet-cooling geoengineering technologies; Oreskes and Conway have humanity saved by the creation in 2090 of a lichenized fungus that consumes atmospheric carbon dioxide. Whatever we do about climate, we should recognize that the world has many problems. If you are malnourished and diseased, what the climate will be like at the end of the century is not a high priority. Given limited resources, we should not let ourselves be swept away by the apocalyptic fear generated by any one threat.

Closer To Truth: Does the Cosmos Have a Reason?

What remarkable discoveries are being made in cosmology! Cosmologists now develop credible theories about the beginning and end of our universe and theory-based speculations about vast numbers of multiple universes. But does the cosmos have a reason? Could revolutionary ideas support some kind of ‘universal reason’? The bar is set high, and it is OK to say no. Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews Michael Shermer, for CloserToTruth.com.

Closer To Truth: Does Evil Refute God’s Existence?

Evil is a high hurdle for theists. Given the savagery of moral evil (what humans do to humans) and the horrors of natural evil (earthquakes, tsunamis, disease), how could an all-powerful and all-good God exist? Philosophers offer defenses (evil and God do not contradict) and theodicies (reasons why God allows evil). The problem is the sheer amount of evil. Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews Michael Shermer, for CloserToTruth.com.

Closer To Truth: Atheism’s Arguments Against God?

Let’s understand the arguments of atheism. Let’s examine both kinds of anti-God arguments: those that refute the existence of God and those that promote the veracity of atheism. There are many diverse arguments in both categories. Which are the best? What is the prosecution by atheists? What is the defense by theists? Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews Michael Shermer, for CloserToTruth.com.

The Myth of Income Inequality

The American dream is not dead yet

One of the best-selling books of 2014 is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty, a 696-page doorstop tome on economic history. Why is a data-heavy treatise from the “dismal science” so appealing? Because it is about income inequality and immobility, which in a December 2013 speech President Barack Obama called “the defining challenge of our time,” concluding that it poses “a fundamental threat to the American dream.” But does it? Maybe not.

The rich are getting richer, as Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless found by analyzing tax data from the Congressional Budget Office for after-tax income trends from 1979 through 2010 (including government assistance). The top-fifth income earners in the U.S. increased their share of the national income from 43 percent in 1979 to 48 percent in 2010, and the top 1 percent increased their share of the pie from 8 percent in 1979 to 13 percent in 2010. But note what has not happened: the rest have not gotten poorer. They’ve gotten richer: the income of the other quintiles increased by 49, 37, 36 and 45 percent, respectively.

The pie metaphor is deceptive because a pie is of a fixed size such that if your slice is larger, then someone else’s is smaller. But economies grow, and the pie gets larger such that you and I can both get a larger slice compared with the slices we got from last year’s pie, even if your slice increase is relatively larger than mine. A report released by the Federal Reserve in early 2014, for example, noted that the overall wealth of Americans hit the highest level ever, with the net worth of U.S. households rising 14 percent in 2013, which is an increase of almost $10 trillion to an almost unimaginable $80.7 trillion, the most ever recorded by the Fed. Of course, on a planet with finite resources such an expansion cannot continue indefinitely, but historically capital and wealth production shifts as industries change from, say, farming and agriculture to coal and steel to information and services.

What about income mobility, which President Obama also identified as a problem? Writing in the National Tax Journal, economists Gerald Auten and Geoffrey Gee analyzed individual income tax returns between 1987–1996 and 1996– 2005 and found that for individuals age 25 and up, “over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile and that roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom income quintile moved up to a higher income group by the end of each period” and that “those with the very highest incomes in the base year were more likely [than those in other quintiles] to drop to a lower income group.” In fact, they found that “60 percent of those in the top 1 percent in the beginning year of each period had dropped to a lower centile by the 10th year. Fewer than one fourth of the individuals in the top 1/100th percent in 1996 remained in that group in 2005.” In a follow-up study that included income data through 2010, the economists found that “approximately half of taxpayers in the first and fifth quintile remained in the same quintile 20 years later. About one-fourth of those in the bottom moved up one quintile, while 4.6 percent moved to the top quintile.”

One reason for the controversy is that people overestimate differences between the rich and poor. In a 2013 study published in Psychological Science entitled “Better Off Than We Know,” St. Louis University psychologist John R. Chambers and his colleagues found that most people estimate that the richest 20 percent make 31 times more than the poorest 20 percent (it is 15.5 times), and they believe that the average annual income of the richest 20 percent of Americans is $2 million, whereas in fact it is $169,000, a perceptual difference of nearly 12 times. “Almost all of our study participants,” the authors concluded, “grossly underestimated Americans’ average household incomes and overestimated the level of income inequality.”

So both income inequality and social mobility, though not as ideal as we would like them to be in the land of equal opportunity, are not as large and immobile as most of us perceive them.

Nuclear Nada

Does deterrence prohibit the total abolishment
of nuclear weapons?

When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, we were periodically put through “duck and cover” drills under the risibly ridiculous fantasy that our flimsy wooden desks would protect us from a thermonuclear detonation over Los Angeles. When I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University in 1974, the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, spoke at our campus about the effectiveness of mutual assured destruction (MAD) to deter war. He said that by stockpiling many weapons neither side has anything to gain by initiating a first strike because of the retaliatory capability of both to send the other back to the Paleolithic.

So far MAD has worked. But as Eric Schlosser reveals in his riveting 2013 book Command and Control, there have been dozens of close calls, from the Cuban missile crisis to the Titan II missile explosion in Damascus, Ark. And popular films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove have played out how it could all go terribly wrong, as when General Jack D. Ripper becomes unhinged at the thought of a “Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” and orders a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.

A deterrence strategy like MAD is not a long-term sustainable solution because of escalation, accidents and crazies, and efforts have been made over the past two decades to reduce the world’s stockpiles, from a peak of around 70,000 in 1986 to about 17,300 today, only 4,200 of which are operationally active nuclear warheads. Can we get to “nuclear zero”?

The original cold warrior himself, Ronald Reagan, thought we could. He considered nuclear weapons to be “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” Also calling for “a world free of nuclear weapons” are such cold warriors as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former secretary of defense William Perry and former senator Sam Nunn of Georgia in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal. The movement Global Zero has charted a path to reach that goal by 2030. General James E. Cartwright, formerly vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the U.S. and Russia could reduce their nuclear arsenals to 900 weapons each and still maintain a deterrence peace until, later, they reach zero through diplomatic means. It’s worth noting that 185 of the world’s 194 countries (95 percent) are doing just fine without nuclear weapons, and more nations have started and abandoned nuclear weapons programs than started and completed them. This is encouraging, but is it fail-safe?

To find out, I audited a class called Perspectives on War and Peace at Claremont Graduate University, taught by political scientist Jacek Kugler. His answer is no, for these reasons: One, some states that have nukes, such as North Korea, are unpredictable. Two, rogue states want nukes. Three, states waging conventional wars might escalate to using nukes. Four, if terrorists get nukes, they’ll use them. Five, the taboo against using nuclear weapons has not yet expanded into a taboo against owning them, and so the danger of accidents or unhinged leaders remains. And six, the nuclear genie of how to make an atomic bomb is out of the bottle, which means other nations or terrorists can obtain them and destabilize deterrence.

Kugler thinks we can have “regional zero”—nuclear-free zones such as Latin America and Australia—provided the largest nuclear powers (the U.S., Russia, China and the European Union) agree to provide a secure response, which none can veto, to any preemptive use of nuclear weapons by rogue states. Even then, nonstate entities such as terrorist groups may be able to purchase fissile material on the black market, and if they do there is nothing to deter them because many look forward to a martyr’s death.

With the ongoing terrorist threat and the lack of trust between nuclear nations (Russia comes to mind), nuclear zero is not yet in the cards. But if we continue to reduce the size of the global stockpile, reinforce the “no first use” policy, amp up the taboo against owning nukes, guard all fissile material, increase economic interdependency and spread democracy, we can inch our way to global security.