Can we really change that much?

Creating a world in which the risk posed by nuclear weapons is reduced to an acceptable level may sound utopian and infeasible. But, with over 25,000 nuclear weapons in existence today and the ability to build many times that number, our choice is between creating such a world and having no world at all. We are being challenged to adapt to a sudden change in our environment and, fortunately, adaptability is our hallmark characteristic. Through adaptations of clothing and shelter, our species has extended its range from a small tropical region to the entire globe and even to the Moon. Through other adaptations, we have learned to fly far higher and faster than birds, and navigate the seas much better than fish.

We have also adapted our social structures in ways initially thought to be impossible. Abolishing slavery, a laughable idea just 200 years ago, became the law of the land 60 years later. Women’s suffrage, which initially was seen as even more unthinkable, also came to pass. Many of the arguments that people make today about the impossibility of changing our approach to nuclear weapons ("You can't change human nature.") were also used as supposed proofs that those earlier changes could never occur. But occur they did.

When we look back on those monumental changes from today's vantage point, we tend to wonder how people could ever have been so inhuman. But, in viewing those changes through that negative prism, we miss the miracle that individuals wrought in bringing about those positive societal upheavals. We need to reframe that "glass half empty" view and see those changes for what they were – astounding miracles in which ordinary citizens played the key role. In contrast the "half empty" view reinforces a belief system in which humanity is deficient and therefore incapable of change. As described in Section 5 of this primer, Prof. Carol Dweck of Stanford's Psychology Department has demonstrated how important it is to emphasize our capacity for change when approaching people with a challenge like this.

One of my favorite views of how humanity could overcome what many see as insurmountable odds was poetically described twenty years ago by Prof. Yuri Zamoshkin, a man with whom I had the great honor of working and who made important intellectual contributions to the Soviet reform movement of the 1980’s:

In the philosophy of twentieth-century German and French existentialists (notably K. Jaspers), the term grenzsituation (border situation) has been used to designate an experience in which an individual comes face-to-face with the real possibility of death. Death is no longer merely an abstract thought, but a distinct possibility. Life and death hang in the balance.

Different human beings respond to the grenzsituation in different ways. Some become passive and put their heads on the chopping block, so to speak. Others experience something akin to a revelation and find themselves capable of feats they never before would have thought possible. In a grenzsituation, some timid individuals have become heroes; some selfish individuals have become Schweitzers. And sometimes, in so transcending their normal personalities, they cheat the grim reaper and survive where normally they would not.

Until now, this notion has been applied only to individuals. But I am convinced that today it can be purposefully applied to the world as a whole. The present day global grenzsituation resides in the possibility for global death and global life.

This situation, for the first time in history, directly, practically, and not purely speculatively, confronts human thought with the possibility of death for the entire human race. The continuity of history, which earlier had seemed to be a given, suddenly becomes highly questionable.

As with the individual, this global grenzsituation may contribute to a "revelation" in human thinking and to a positive change of character previously thought impossible for our species. …

Of course there is also the possibility that, faced with a grenzsituation, mankind will go passive and put its collective head on the nuclear chopping block. But before we can learn our true mettle, we must bring the global grenzsituation into clear focus for all humanity. Society must see that it has but two possibilities, global life or global death.

Reprinted with permission from Yuri A. Zamoshkin, "Nuclear Disarmament: Ideal and Reality," in Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, Anatoly Gromyko and Martin Hellman, Editors, Walker and Company, New York, 1988, pages 209-213. Copyright 1988, Beyond War Foundation. The full essay is accessible online.

In the twenty years since Zamoshkin wrote those prophetic words, there has been a critical change that adds even more hope to his already positive message. In 1946, soon after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein wrote "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Recently I have been paraphrasing that famous quote as "The unleashed power of the Internet has changed everything, and presented us with an unparalleled opportunity." Here's why:

As explained earlier, the first key step is to change conventional wisdom about our nuclear weapons policy. And, in this early stage of that process, that is done primarily person-to-person, one individual at a time. Aside from making this web-based approach possible, as described in the next section of this primer, the Internet has created spectacular new possibilities for speeding up the process of change that so far seem to have been overlooked for this issue. As discussed there, if a class of Stanford students can reach 16 million people in 10 weeks using the Internet, just think what we can do!