Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

71. Doomsday Clock: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “A Timeline of Conflict, Culture, and Change,” Nov. 13, 2013, http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/timeline-conflict-culture-and-change.

72. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 98.

73. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 271, note 2.

74. Snow 1961, p. 259.

75. Address to the incoming graduate students, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, September 1976.

76. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 271, note 2.

77. Close call lists: Future of Life Institute 2017; Schlosser 2013; Union of Concerned Scientists 2015a.

78. Union of Concerned Scientists, “To Russia with Love,” http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/close-calls#.WGQC1lMrJEY.

79. Skepticism on close-call lists: Mueller 2010a; J. Mueller, “Fire, Fire (Review of E. Schlosser’s ‘Command and Control’),” Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 2014.

80. The Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams) indicates that in 2008 (the most recent year displayed) mentions of nuclear war in published books were outnumbered by mentions of racism, terrorism, and inequality tenfold to twentyfold. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) indicates that in American newspapers in 2015, nuclear war appeared 0.65 times per million words of text, compared with 13.13 times for inequality, 19.5/million for racism, and 30.93/million for terrorism.

81. Quotes taken from Morton 2015, p. 324.

82. Letter dated 17 April 2003 to the Security Council, written when he was the US representative to the UN, quoted in Mueller 2012.

83. Collection of terror predictions: Mueller 2012.

84. Warren B. Rudman, Stephen E. Flynn, Leslie H. Gelb, and Gary Hart, Dec. 16, 2004, reproduced in Mueller 2012.

85. Quoted in Boyer 1985/2005, p. 72.

86. Scare tactics backfiring: Boyer 1986.

87. From a 1951 editorial in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, quoted in Boyer 1986.

88. What motivates activism: Sandman & Valenti 1986. See chapter 10, note 55, for similar observations on climate change.

89. Quoted in Mueller 2016.

90. Quoted in Mueller 2016. The term nuclear metaphysics comes from the political scientist Robert Johnson.

91. Disarmament without treaties: Kristensen & Norris 2016a; Mueller 2010a.

92. Odds next to zero: Welch & Blight 1987–88, p. 27; see also Blight, Nye, & Welch 1987, p. 184; Frankel 2004; Mueller 2010a, pp. 38–40, p. 248, notes 31–33.

93. Nuclear safety features prevent accidents: Mueller 2010a, pp. 100–102; Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014, p. 56; J. Mueller, “Fire, Fire (Review of E. Schlosser’s ‘Command and Control’),” Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 2014. Note that the common claim that the Soviet navy officer Vasili Arkhipov “saved the world” during the Cuban Missile Crisis by overruling an embattled submarine captain who was about to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at American ships is cast in doubt by Aleksandr Mozgovoi’s 2002 book Kubinskaya Samba Kvarteta Fokstrotov (Cuban Samba of the Quartet of Foxtrots), in which Vadim Pavlovich Orlov, a communications officer who took part in the events, reports that the captain had spontaneously backed off from his impulse: Mozgovoi 2002. Note as well that a single tactical weapon detonated at sea would not necessarily have escalated into all-out war; see Mueller 2010a, pp. 100–102.

94. Union of Concerned Scientists 2015a.

95. The history of chemical weapons after they were banned following World War I suggests that accidental and one-time uses don’t automatically lead to mutual escalation; see Pinker 2011, pp. 273–74.

96. Predictions of nuclear proliferation: Mueller 2010a, p. 90; T. Graham, “Avoiding the Tipping Point,” Arms Control Today, 2004, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_11/BookReview. Lack of proliferation: Bluth 2011; Sagan 2009b, 2010.

97. States that gave up nukes: Sagan 2009b, 2010, and personal communication, Dec. 30, 2016; see Pinker 2011, pp. 272–73.

98. Evans 2015b.

99. Quoted in Pinker 2013a.

100. Poison gas from airplanes: Mueller 1989. Geophysical warfare: Morton 2015, p. 136.

101. The USSR, not Hiroshima, made Japan surrender: Berry et al. 2010; Hasegawa 2006; Mueller 2010a; Wilson 2007.

102. Nobel to the nukes: Suggested by Elspeth Rostow, quoted in Pinker 2011, p. 268. Nuclear weapons are poor deterrents: Pinker 2011, p. 269; Berry et al. 2010; Mueller 2010a; Ray 1989.

103. Nuclear taboo: Mueller 1989; Sechser & Fuhrmann 2017; Tannenwald 2005; Ray 1989, pp. 429–31; Pinker 2011, chap. 5, “Is the Long Peace a Nuclear Peace?” pp. 268–78.

104. Effectiveness of conventional deterrence: Mueller 1989, 2010a.

105. Nuclear states and armed burglars: Schelling 1960.

106. Berry et al. 2010, pp. 7–8.