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

107. George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, & Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2007; William Perry, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, & Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 15, 2008.

108. “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as Delivered,” White House, April 5, 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.

109. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (undated).

110. Public opinion on Global Zero: Council on Foreign Relations 2012.

111. Getting to zero: Global Zero Commission 2010.

112. Global Zero skeptics: H. Brown & J. Deutch, “The Nuclear Disarmament Fantasy,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 19, 2007; Schelling 2009.

113. The Pentagon has reported that in 2015 the US nuclear stockpile contained 4,571 weapons (United States Department of Defense 2016). The Federation of American Scientists (Kristensen & Norris 2016b, updated in Kristensen 2016) estimates that about 1,700 of the warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles and at bomber bases, 180 consist of tactical bombs deployed in Europe, and the remaining 2,700 are kept in storage. (The term stockpile usually embraces both deployed and stored missiles, though sometimes it refers just to the stored ones.) In addition, approximately 2,340 warheads are retired and awaiting dismantlement.

114. A. E. Kramer, “Power for U.S. from Russia’s Old Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 2009.

115. The Federation of American Scientists estimates the 2015 Russian stockpile at 4,500 warheads (Kristensen & Norris 2016b). New START: Woolf 2017.

116. Stockpile reductions will continue in tandem with modernization: Kristensen 2016.

117. Nuclear arsenals: Estimates from Kristensen 2016; they include warheads that are deployed or kept in storage and deployable; they exclude warheads that are retired, and bombs that cannot be deployed by the nation’s delivery platforms.

118. No imminent new nuclear states: Sagan 2009b, 2010, and personal communication, Dec. 30, 2016; see also Pinker 2011, pp. 272–73. Fewer states with fissile materials: “Sam Nunn Discusses Today’s Nuclear Risks,” Foreign Policy Association blogs, http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2016/04/06/sam-nunn-discusses-todays-nuclear-risks/.

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

120. GRIT: Osgood 1962.

121. Small arsenal, no nuclear winter: A. Robock & O. B. Toon, “Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016. The authors recommend that the United States reduce its arsenal to 1,000 warheads, but they don’t say whether this would rule out the possibility of nuclear winter. The number 200 comes from a presentation by Robock at MIT, April 2, 2016, “Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War,” http://futureoflife.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Alan_Robock_MIT_April2.pdf.

122. No hair trigger: Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014, p. 56.

123. Against launch on warning: Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014; J. E. Cartwright & V. Dvorkin, “How to Avert a Nuclear War,” New York Times, April 19, 2015; B. Blair, “How Obama Could Revolutionize Nuclear Weapons Strategy Before He Goes,” Politico, June 22, 2016; Long fuse: Brown & Lewis 2013.

124. Takes nukes off “hair trigger”: Union of Concerned Scientists 2015b.

125. No First Use: Sagan 2009a; J. E. Cartwright & B. G. Blair, “End the First-Use Policy for Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2016. Rebuttals of arguments against No First Use: Global Zero Commission 2016; B. Blair, “The Flimsy Case Against No-First-Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Politico, Sept. 28, 2016.

126. Incremental pledges: J. G. Lewis & S. D. Sagan, “The Common-Sense Fix That American Nuclear Policy Needs,” Washington Post, Aug. 24, 2016.

127. D. Sanger & W. J. Broad, “Obama Unlikely to Vow No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 2016.

CHAPTER 20: THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS

1. The data in these paragraphs come from chapters 5–19.

2. All declines calculated as a proportion of their 20th-century peaks.

3. For evidence that war in particular is not cyclical, see Pinker 2011, p. 207.

4. From the Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society, quoted in Ridley 2010, chap. 1.

5. See the references at the end of chapters 8 and 16; here and here of chapter 10; here of chapter 15; and the discussion of the Easterlin paradox in chapter 18.

6. Average of the years 1961 through 1973; World Bank 2016c.

7. Average of the years 1974 through 2015; World Bank 2016c. Rates for the United States for these two periods are 3.3 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively.

8. Estimates are of Total Factor Productivity, taken from Gordon 2014, fig. 1.