Three hundred nuclear missiles are screaming at the US. This is likely a pre-emptive strike by Russia to destroy all land-based ICBM silos in the country. Missile defenses cannot destroy many of the incoming missiles, meaning 2 million Americans will die.
After being sworn in as President of the United States a few minutes ago, I am sitting in the Oval Office watching television reports of the escalating fighting in Europe. A Secret Service agent bursts into the room and tells me to leave immediately. I take the elevator down to the White House crisis center known as the Situation Room, where I am joined by my top national security officials who brief me on the impending attack. I have 15 minutes to answer. As the clock ticks down, I am presented with three options, all of which involve retaliatory strikes against Russia expected to kill between 5 million and 45 million people. What to do?
Fortunately, I’m watching all of this through a clunky virtual reality headset strapped to my face. The polygonal avatars in front of me are rough enough that I will never mistake this exercise for reality. Even so, my head is spinning and my heart is pounding as the drama unfolds amid pulsating alarms and raised voices. For a few minutes I was forced to think about the most difficult decision any person will ever have to make in the history of mankind. The sense of responsibility is overwhelming. And the words of my national security adviser echo in my ears: “If you don’t fight back and the attack is real, what will you tell the American people next?”
This immersive experience was created by Sharon Weiner and Moritz Küth, two national security experts at Princeton University, who tested it on dozens of people to see how they reacted. The experience underscores the agony of making life-and-death decisions based on imperfect information under extreme pressure. It is based on current US nuclear launch protocols, which have changed little since the height of the Cold War. In a controlled experiment with 79 participants, 90 percent chose to launch a nuclear counterstrike.
Weiner admits that the exact details of the exercise are not entirely accurate. (The fact that in my case it crashes after a few minutes means we have to restart VR as well.) “But we were true to what was likely,” she says. “True authenticity is the stress and complexity that comes from having multiple decision makers in the room.” Each one of those participants is trying to do their job as well as possible. But they have conflicting priorities. Everyone has emotional baggage; everyone reacts to stress differently. So ultimately the system is up to the president to approve the agency and make the decision. “If the president doesn’t lead all of this,” Weiner says, “then the crisis is handled badly.”
It’s the end of 2022, and this chilling simulation is taking place at the Carnegie International Conference on Nuclear Policy near the Capitol in Washington. NukeCon, as it’s called, is packed with many of the world’s top national security experts who have just become relevant. The war in Ukraine added an air of danger to the proceedings and dark humor prevailed as speakers joked about the desirability of holding the event in an underground bunker. The coffee stand is labeled Baristas of Armageddon.
Editor’s note: This is a metaphor. In reality, there is no big red button. The president was reading a code aloud. © Saratta Chuengsatiansup
Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who led the World War II Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the atomic bomb, once compared two major nuclear powers to “scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at their own risk.” own life”. The conflict in Ukraine has once again shaken these bottled scorpions with two powers, Russia and the US, indirectly locked in a proxy war on Russia’s border.
At NukeCon, one speaker claimed that Ukraine was almost certain to win the war and drive Russian forces out of the entire country, including Crimea. Another spokesman added that if such a scenario were to play out, President Vladimir Putin would see this humiliating defeat as an existential threat to his regime, if not to Russia itself. Under such circumstances, it is easy to believe that Russia will resort to nuclear weapons. Putin holds military exercises, warning NATO he is not bluffing. The US has just reaffirmed its own commitment to nuclear deterrence to counter any aggression by rival powers, including Russia and China.
Which is to say, the eerie psychological dance of nuclear deterrence has begun again. It will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Cold War. But I came to Washington to meet with an activist to modernize a decision-making process that could potentially end all life on earth.
After shedding my presidential responsibilities, I take a quick 30-minute walk across town to a very different conference. Poptech, which boasts an R&B yoga floor and air-freshening Himalayan salt lamps, attracts a crowd with much more colorful clothes and more facial hair. Speakers here discuss everything from using data from the James Webb Space Telescope to building communication apps for sex workers. One of Poptech’s hosts is Moran Cerf, a 45-year-old Israeli neuroscientist and professor at Northwestern University who is leading a session on rethinking national security policy. He wears faded jeans and a plaid vest and sports three-day stubble. As a decision-making expert, Cerf became increasingly concerned about the gaps in the nuclear launch protocols of the world’s nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea). He is campaigning to rewrite those nuclear launch rules. Over the past 18 months, Cerf has interviewed dozens of nuclear weapons experts, military leaders and politicians from around the world about how to reduce the risks of a nuclear disaster. Mutually Assured Destruction, his documentary on the subject, is due to air this year.
Cerf’s interest in the nuclear threat was sparked by a discussion at a 2018 Poptech conference in which two Nobel laureates—Beatrice Finn, a Swedish peace prize-winning lawyer, and Barry Barisch, who won a physics prize— – they talked about the urgency of the problem. Cerf argues that humans are very bad at dealing with extreme risks, such as nuclear war. Every now and then we may experience a flash of concern about a problem, but we will quickly move on to day-to-day concerns. “Our brains are good at living here and now. But it’s hard for our brains to consider catastrophe or high-risk, low-probability events,” he says.
After Poptech is over, I sit down with Cerf in the dimly lit hotel lounge. In heavily accented English, he tells the story of his life: born in Paris and raised in Israel, he studied physics at Tel Aviv University and worked in military intelligence during his national service, guarding Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant . He then built his career as a white hat hacker at the cyber security company Imperva, where he performed penetration tests on banks and government institutions.
Cerf’s life changed direction after a chance meeting with Francis Crick, the English biologist who helped decipher the structure of DNA. In his later career, Crick focused on the mystery of consciousness. He encouraged Cerf to do the same by trying to “hack” the most interesting repository in the universe: the human brain. “Quit your job and go do real things,” Crick advised him.
Cerf studied for a doctorate in neurology at Caltech and later conducted research at UCLA’s Department of Neurosurgery. UCLA operated one of the few hospitals where surgeons opened the skull and implanted electrodes in the brain to diagnose various conditions. Seizing this opportunity, Cerf convinces patients to allow him to probe their brain circuits. For example, he would show patients pictures of their relatives, show them videos or play simple games with them and observe which neurons fire. His research helped explain why the brain responds to certain stimuli but ignores others, perhaps one of the first signs of consciousness. “Within neuroscience, I’m part of a niche that’s small in terms of resources, but very sexy,” he says. “We had access to golden data. You can ask a patient a question and see how the electrodes react.
One of the conclusions Cerf says he drew from his research is that we live in a world that is now too complex for our brains to process. Our gray matter worked well when our ancestors lived on the savannah and only had to recognize 100 people and five plants. But now that we live in an infinitely more complex world, it’s no wonder our brains struggle to make the necessary connections or identify meaningful patterns.
This is especially true when it comes to issues as abstract and distant as climate change or nuclear war. Cerf explains that if the brain estimates the probability of something happening as very, very small, say 0.0000-something, it doesn’t know how to deal with such a low-probability event. “So it just assigns it a value of zero,” he says. “The only way to deal with it is to trick the brain.”
Although it sounds alarming, Cerf gives an example of how this can be done to good effect. With colleagues at Northwestern University, Cerf is working with the US Transportation Security Administration to help airport screening teams detect explosives in passenger luggage. The majority of airport security personnel around the world will never see a bomb in their entire career. So their brains tend to ignore…
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