Chance of nuclear war is greater than we think
calculate the probability of such a catastrophe based on events focused around the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. According to Hellman’s numbers, the risk of a person not living out his or her natural life because of nuclear war is at least 10 percent.
Hellman gives another analogy: “The risk that each one of us dies as a result of failed deterrence is thousands of times greater than the risk you would bear if a nuclear power plant were built right next to your home.”
Determining such a risk seems a little like predicting the future, but Hellman is confident about his numbers. He justifies his probability by breaking down a catastrophe into a sequence of smaller failures, incorporating expert opinions, examining history and estimating within a range of numbers.
Hellman’s path to risk assessment
Before returning to Stanford from his volunteer leave, Hellman started a project with the Soviet Academy of Sciences through a committee led by Evgeny Velikhov, who later became Mikhail Gorbachev’s science advisor. In 1984, Hellman and his wife traveled to the Soviet Union to create dialog and build relationships with the Soviet scientists. Soviet restrictions on free speech prevented totally open discussion, but by 1986, Gorbachev lifted censorship, and the project became possible, Hellman explained.
The fruit of their labor came a year later in the form of a book called Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking. It had the radical thesis that either humanity would end war or war would end humanity.
The cold war faded, however, along with public support, and Hellman focused his work on easing ethnic tension on campus (for which he won three awards) before retiring in 1995. After a few years of attending to family responsibilities, he returned to his work on risk assessment.
Hellman’s method
Hellman used a risk analysis approach, which breaks down a catastrophic event into a sequence of smaller failures. He further simplified the analysis by only considering failures triggered by a crisis involving Cuba. He began by evaluating three events that could have initiated a conflict: deploying American missiles in Turkey (which began in 1961), re-imposing a naval blockade around Cuba (which was threatened in the 1980s) and installing a missile defense system in eastern Europe, a current project that has drawn objections from Russia.
Based on the outcomes of these events, Hellman estimated these numbers:
- Rate of initiating events: 6 percent per year
- Probability that an initiating event leads to a major crisis: 33 percent
- Probability
