Breakthrough Emerging New Thinking EDITORS - IN - CHIEF Anatoly Gromyko • Martin Hellman EXECUTIVE EDITORS Craig Barnes • Alexander Nikitin SENIOR EDITORS Donald Fitton • Sergei Kapitza Elena Loshchenkova • William McGlashan Andrei Melville • Harold Sandler ONLINE EDITOR Olivia Simantob Breakthrough Emerging New Thinking Soviet and Western Scholars Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War Walker and Company 720 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019 Breakthrough/Poriv Copyright © 1988 by Beyond War Foundation A note about the online version of Breakthrough: the publisher grants permission for any or all of the book to be used for non-profit, educational purposes only. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocyping, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in the United States of America in 1988 by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc. Published simultaneousely in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son, Canada, Limited, Markham, Ontario. Published online in 2001. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking Includes references. 1. Nuclear arms control. 2. Security, International. 3. International relations. I. Gromyko, Anatolii Andreevich. II. Hellman, Martin E. JX 1974.7.B678 1988 327.1-74 87-23009 Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking ISBN 0-8027-1026-3 ISBN 0-8027-1015-8 Printed in the United States of America 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Published simultaneousely in the Soviet Union by Progress Publishing Company, Moscow. Dedication To our children and grandchildren Contents Acknowledgements x Preface: A Messgae to the Scientific Community xi Sergei P. Kapitza and Martin E. Hellman The Challenge to Change 1 Editors Inevitability: Collision Course with Disaster Overview 17 Instabilities in the Control of Nuclear Forces 21 Paul Bracken Computer System Reliability and Nuclear War 31 Alan Borning Overlapping False Alarms: Reason for Concern? 39 Linn I. Sennott Computer War 45 Boris V. Raushenbakh To Err Is Human: Nuclear War by Mistake? 53 Marianne Fankenhaeuser The Myth of Rationality in Situations of Crisis 61 Einar Kringlen vii Young People and Nuclear War 65 Stanislav K. Roshchin and Tatiana S. Kabachenko Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 74 Theodore B. Taylor Nuclear War: Inevitable or Preventable? 80 Martin E. Hellman Global Thinking: Visions for the Future Overview 87 Beyond War: A New Way of Thinking 91 Edited for the Beyond War Foundation by Richard T. Roney Messages from Global Models about an Interdependent World 100 John M. Richardson, Jr. Security for All in the Nuclear Age 111 Anatoly A. Gromyko Problems with the New Way of Thinking 121 Ales Adamovich Realism and Morality in Politics 135 Andrei V. Kortunov Process of Change: Individual Action and Collective Transformation Overview 151 I. Survival as the Superordinate Goal Moving from Unstable to Stable Peace 157 Kenneth E. Boulding The Concept of Universal Secuirty: A Revolution of Thinking and Policy in the Nuclear Age 168 Alexander I. Nitkin Nuclear Revolution and the New Way of Thinking 176 Andrei Y. Melville viii The Evolution of Cooperation 185 Robert Axelrod II. Resistance to Change Dangers and Opportunities for Change from a Physiologist's Point of View 193 Natalia P. Bekhtereva The Image of the Enemy and the Process of Change 199 Jerome D. Frank and Andrei Y. Melville Nuclear Disarmament: Ideal and Reality 209 Yuri A. Zamoshkin Nuclear Reality: Reistance and Adaptation 214 Steven Kull III. Bringing New Thinking to Life: Building Public Support The Impact of a US Public Constituency on Arms Control 223 Sidney Drell Restructuring of Soviet Society 229 Alexander I. Blechuk Diffusion of the Idea of Beyond War 240 Everett M. Rogers Similarity or Diversity? 249 Vladimir S. Ageev New Thinking about Socialism 256 Fyodor M. Burlatsky Writing This Book 269 Elena Loshchenkova and Craig S. Barnes References 273 ix Acknowledgements PROJECT DIRECTORS William Busse, Elena Loshchenkova Without those endless hours of dedicated assistance and direction this project could neveer have happened. WESTERN TEAM SOVIET TEAM Daniel Beswick Olga Chuprina Lyn Gardiner Vladlen Kachanov Ruth Hodos Galina Nickolopoulos Grace Kietzmann Natalia Yampolskaya Richard Lagerstrom Leonid Zhurnya Jackie Mathes Joan Sandler Wayne Smith EDITING STAFF Eleanor Anderson Gennady Gubanov Carolyn Said Samuel Anderson Fred Hall Alexander Shkolnik Ginger Ashworth David Hibbard Jim Stanley Donald Barnett Miachael Hodos Len Traubman Valentina Batassova Lena Jakobson Jerald Volpe Winston Boone Mikhail Kobrine Amy Vossbrink Diji Christian Olga Kurlandskaya Riley Willcox Roger Colvin Heather Leitch Jeffery Zelickson William Copeland Sergei Levitin Natalia Zykova Anna German Susan Levy Roy Gordon Alexandra Malig ONLINE EDITION PROJECT DIRECTOR & DESIGNER Olivia Simantob x PREFACE The Online Edition Martin E. Hellman Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. Dr. Hellman is best known as the inventor of the “public key” and “trap door” cryptographic techniques. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Where It Came From The book Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking had the good fortune to be published late in 1987, during that amazing time when the Cold War went from almost hot to almost over. In a miraculous transformation of confrontation into cooperation, the book simultaneously came off two printing presses, literally a world apart. The English version, available on this web site, was printed in New York, while the exact same content streamed off a Moscow press in Russian. Each version found people hungry for evidence that the threat of global annihilation, which had become all too clear in the preceding decade, really could recede and be replaced by the vision of a world beyond war. The project was supported in the West by the Beyond War Foundation, a predecessor to the Foundation for Global Community, whose web site you are now viewing. Support in the East came from the prestigious Committee of Soviet Scientists In Defense of Peace Against the Nuclear Threat, chaired by Gorbachev’s science advisor, Evgeni Velikhov. Even before Gorbachev came to power, this committee was active in laying the foundation for what later became known as perestroika and glasnost. Those of us who participated in this project had the privilege of seeing a preview of the miraculous events that were soon to transform Soviet society and the world. xi xii / Preface What It Is Breakthrough was more than evidence that peace was possible. It was also a road map into that previously inaccessible promised land. Drawing on some of the freshest thinking in the international scientific community, the book made three key points: • Either humanity would end war or war would end humanity. The threat of nuclear war and conventional war are inextricably linked. • The solution lay not in new technology, but a new mode of thinking. Global thinking recognizes that, in the nuclear age, self-interest and global-interest are no longer opposed, but rather inextricably intertwined. • Seemingly impossible changes do not happen in the environment where they appear impossible, but via a step-by-step process of change that transforms that environment. Learning from prior societal tectonic shifts (e.g., ending slavery, women’s suffrage) can accelerate the process of ending war, thereby increasing humanity’s chance of survival. Organized into three corresponding sections, the book consists of essays by leading scientists that provide flesh on the above skeleton. In reading these essays, feel free to skip around. With contributions from two very different cultures and many different individuals, there is a variety that will often tantalize, but sometimes frustrate one or another reader. In the latter event, we encourage you to skip to a more palatable entry. Skipping an essay will not prevent you from understanding later ones or the overall thrust of the book. Why Now? While the threat of global annihilation and the concomitant need for a new, global mode of thinking, has become less clear, this is largely a problem of perception. The fundamental change in thinking that Breakthrough argued was needed for survival has not happened. As explained in the first section of the book, Inevitability, every small war, even every threat of war, carries with it some probability of escalation, much as the Cuban Missile Crisis can be traced to seemingly minor actions (the Bay of Pigs invasion and the introduction of American IRBM’s in Turkey). Violence in the Mideast, which twice before has brought the world to the brink of disaster, is again almost daily front-page news. The former Soviet Union is in economic and political turmoil. Unemployed or underemployed nuclear and rocket scientists have a strong motivation to sell their expertise to any bidder, adding many new, unknown The Online Edition / xiii variables to the nuclear equation. While the United States has made some effort to provide aid to reduce this threat, old thinking has led many Americans to favor “defanging the Soviet bear,” not realizing that the fangs are likely to find a new home in a much less rational adversary. While alleviating the problem in many ways, the improvements in Russo-American relations have added a new dimension to the threat, complacency. When even one failure can be globally fatal, complacency is perhaps our greatest enemy. On the positive side, the advent of the Internet has provided a fantastic new opportunity for disseminating these still very current ideas. Given the Foundation’s educational, non-profit goal, it not only allows, but encourages, free use of this on-line version for educational purposes. When this project was started in 1984, our first means of communication with the Soviet participants was telegrams at US$0.25 per word. That today the thousands of words in this book are available almost anywhere in the world, virtually for free, says much of the possibility for communicating needed truths.