The Last Children

"SB: I was going to recommend When the Wind Blows , a 1982 graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, but one of our colleagues recommended that we choose this one instead. LS: We chose it because of its unrelenting grimness. It’s apparently often assigned to school children in Germany, which I find very surprising, because it must be very hard for a teacher to talk about it to pupils. It’s the kind of book in which nothing nice happens – which makes it very realistic. Quite often in (post-)apocalyptic stories, you intermittently see some rays of hope, but not here. It’s also quite didactic, a sort of cautionary tale about the consequences of nuclear weapons. “We tend to forget just how many nuclear warheads the US and Russia used to have during the Cold War” SA: It’s extremely moralising. But in the epilogue, the author actually writes: “I have depicted the disaster and its consequences as less catastrophic than they presumably would be in reality, since I had to allow for a survivor who would later be in a position to talk about what had happened.” It’s also very interesting in how it brings us back to the Cold War. We tend to forget just how many nuclear warheads the US and Russia used to have. The threat of nuclear weapons was an everyday reality for people: if a nuclear war had broken out, every major population hub would have indeed been targeted. This is no longer the case, although a large-scale nuclear war would still wipe out everyone because of nuclear winter. SA: Yes. There is a much broader knowledge about nuclear winter being a plausible scenario, which wasn’t the case during the first three decades of the Cold War. Russia is broke, and China is not very interested in nuclear weapons. Nuclear terrorism is the thing that seems to scare people now, but we wouldn’t classify that as an existential threat because a detonation would likely be circumscribed to one geographical area. SA: It’s a tricky situation, and it’s difficult to admit, but once we’ve invented nuclear weapons, we really just need to govern them responsibly and prevent mutual destruction. But if we get one side to disarm without the other, we end up in a far less stable situation. When a government is being a responsible custodian of nuclear weapons, it is generally making the world a safer place. SB: When I came to CSER I was very much a unilateralist in terms of nuclear disarmament. I still think there’s a strong case to be made that Britain should disarm by itself, because the UK could set some useful precedent for developing nations, to break this link between being taken seriously and having nuclear weapons. The smaller countries could do that, and it would be valuable. But having been through these arguments and thought about the problem a lot, I don’t see any great value in the United States or Russia disarming unilaterally. As an alternative, some scientific papers have argued that we could relax the legislation on biological weapons – whose long term consequences may not be as bad as a nuclear winter – in order to keep the logic of deterrence while convincing all superpowers to renounce their nuclear weapons. Something we do worry about within existential risks is accidental triggering of nuclear weapons. SB: Exactly. There are between 15 and 20 reasonably well-documented historical examples of near-misses of that type. There were people who had the authority to press the button, and had orders to press it under certain circumstances, but decided not to. Of course we should all be very grateful to these people, and it’s interesting to realise that in all of these examples, they seemed to be able to use their critical faculties before pressing that button."