it’s just that the interests of government decision-makers coincided a bit more with their conclusions.
Yeah I buy this. There’s a report from FHI on nuclear arms control [pdf, section 4.8] that concludes that the effort for international control in 1945⁄46 was doomed from the start, because of the political atmosphere at the time:
Improving processes, with clearer, more transparent, and more informed policymaking would not likely have led to successful international control in 1945⁄46. This is only likely to have been achieved under radically different historical circumstances.
On the other hand, I have to disclose that I sometimes (e.g., when I think about Schelling Nobel Lecture) consider a “dismal hypothesis”: given human nature, if the world hadn’t seen what happened to Hiroshima, it’s quite possible that people wouldn’t have developed the same level of aversion to nukes, and we might have had something like a nuclear WW III.
I guess people often need a concrete “proof of concept” to take risks seriously—so they can regard them as imminent . Possibly that’s an additional factor in the explanation of why we succeeded with smallpox and CFCs, and why biosecurity gained more track after covid-19.
Good points!
Yeah I buy this. There’s a report from FHI on nuclear arms control [pdf, section 4.8] that concludes that the effort for international control in 1945⁄46 was doomed from the start, because of the political atmosphere at the time:
On the other hand, I have to disclose that I sometimes (e.g., when I think about Schelling Nobel Lecture) consider a “dismal hypothesis”: given human nature, if the world hadn’t seen what happened to Hiroshima, it’s quite possible that people wouldn’t have developed the same level of aversion to nukes, and we might have had something like a nuclear WW III.
I guess people often need a concrete “proof of concept” to take risks seriously—so they can regard them as imminent . Possibly that’s an additional factor in the explanation of why we succeeded with smallpox and CFCs, and why biosecurity gained more track after covid-19.