By Max Tegmark OUR MATHEMATICAL UNIVERSE (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1914)
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Re: the nuclear threat
Paddy, yesterday I was introduced to a book by a major research scientist, Max Tegmark, from which I'm excerpting the following quotes from pages.376-378:
"In summary, we humans face many existential risks involving astronomical or geological events. I've summarized only those which I personally take most seriously. When I think about all such risks, the conclusion I draw is actually somewhat optimistic: "
1. It's likely that future technologies can help life flourish for billions of years to come.
2.We and our descendants should be able to develop these technologies in time if we have our act together.
"By first eliminating the most urgent problems, on the left side of Figure 13.3**, we'll buy ourselves time to tackle the remaining ones.
"Ironically, these most urgent problems are mostly self-inflicted......By transforming water, land, and air with fishing, agriculture, and industry, we're driving about 30,000 species into extinction each year, in what some biologists are calling "The Sixth Extinction".
"Let me tell you a bit more about the two human-caused risks that concern me the most -- accidental nuclear war and unfriendly artificial intelligence............
"During the half-century that we humans have been tooled up for nuclear Armageddon, there has been a steady stream of false alarms that could have triggered all-out war, with causes ranging from computer malfunction, power failure, and faulty intelligence to navigsational error, bomber crash, and satellite explosion.......Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of these nuclear incidents carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For example, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beagle had depth-charged an unidentified submarine that was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.
"Despite the end of the Cold War, the risk has arguably grown over recent years...... On January 25, 2005, Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of launching a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. Concern has been raised over a U.S. project to replace two of the twenty-four D-5 ICBMs carried by Trident submarines with conventional warheads, for possible use against Iran or North Korea. Russian early-warning systems would be unable to distinguish them from nuclear missiles, expanding the possible for possible misunderstandings. Other worrisome scenarios include deliberate malfeasance by military commanders triggered by mental instability and/or fringe political/religious agendas.
"But why worry? If push came to shove, surely reasonable people would step in and do the right thing, just as they have in the past? Nuclear nations do indeed have elaborate counter-measures in place, just as our body does against cancer. Our body can normally deal with isolated deleterious mutations, and it appears that fluke coincidences of as many as four mutations may be required to trigger certain cancers. But if we roll the dice too many times, shit happens -- Stanley Kubrick's dark nuclear war comedy Dr. Strangelove illustrates this with a triple coincidence.
"Accidental nuclear war may or may not happen in my lifetime, but if it does, it will obviously change everything. The climate change that we're currently worrying about pales in comparison with nuclear winter, where a global dust cloud blocks sunlight for years, much like when an asteroid or supervolcano caused a mass extinction in the past. The 2008 economic failure was of course nothing compared to the resulting crop failures, infrastructure collapse, and mass starvation, with survivors succumbing to hungry armed gangs, systematically pillaging from house to house. Do I expect to see this in my lifetime? I'd give it about 30%, putting it roughly on par with my getting cancer. Yet we devote far less attention and resources to reducing the risk of nuclear disaster than we do for cancer. And whereas humanity as a whole survives even if 30% get cancer, it's less obvious to what extent our civilization would survive a nuclear Armageddon. There are concrete and straightforward steps that can be taken to slash this risk, as spelled out in numerous reports by scientific organizations,but these never become election issues and tend to get largely ignored."
I hope that Max Tegmark's authority would be recognized by your trial judge,. Anyway, the title of the book is OUR MATHEMATICAL UNIVERSE (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1914). ISBN 978-0-307-59980-3 (hardback)
----- Original Message -----
From: pmtoneill@aol.com
To: kearneyd@erols.com, jillstatonbullard@gmail.com, cinnamonsarver@gmail.com, eileenkl@yahoo.com, cindy easterday <cindy.easterday@gmail.com>, valerie biesack <valerie.biesack@mindspring.
Sent: Tue, 02 Oct 2018 12:14:21 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Fwd: AJC op-ed submission from Patrick O'Neill (919) 624-5245
From: pmtoneill@aol.com
To: kearneyd@erols.com, jillstatonbullard@gmail.com, cinnamonsarver@gmail.com, eileenkl@yahoo.com, cindy easterday <cindy.easterday@gmail.com>, valerie biesack <valerie.biesack@mindspring.
Sent: Tue, 02 Oct 2018 12:14:21 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Fwd: AJC op-ed submission from Patrick O'Neill (919) 624-5245
No trial date yet for The Kings Bay Plowshares. We are still handling pre-trial motions.
Peace and God's Blessings, Patrick
Plowshares And The Kings Bay Trident Nuclear Submarine Station Action
By PATRICK O'NEILLST. MARY, GA -- Among the small cadre of peace activists living in Camden County, Georgia, few are willing to endure the scorn - or worse - of their
friends and neighbors should they publicly profess their support for the Kings Bay Plowshares, the group of seven Roman Catholic pacifists who on April 4, 2018 entered the Trident submarine base and hammered on a few idols. So it goes.In the three-plus decades since President Jimmy Carter brought Trident to southeast Georgia, the Navy base has been welcomed by the Camden County
community and beyond.We are so unpopular that my first cousin who lives in Jacksonville, FL told my wife that she was afraid to visit me in the Camden County jail
because the FBI might ask her questions if she did.So what gives? Why did the seven of us leave our friends and families behind to risk jail and prison? Since Trident is almost without opposition,
we were compelled by our Catholic faith to come to St. Marys on the 50th anniversary of Georgia native Martin Luther King Jr's assassination to warn the world about the dangers of Trident.One Trident submarine carries a payload of D-5 nuclear missiles that could end life as we know it. Trident is literally a diabolical doomsday
machine embraced by most Americans as virtuous and godly.Such unquestioning assent to these weapons of mass destruction is idolatry of the most dangerous kind. The D-5 is a weapon of mass idolatry.
Our action is a wake-up call to Georgians and to the nation that Trident is not proper to life and must be disarmed. Humanity is in a race against time. Either we abolish nuclear weapons or their eventual use will abolish us. The risk of nuclear weapons being
deployed - whether by accident, computer hacking or in war - has become an "acceptable risk" for our world.Disaster almost struck on Sept. 26, 1983, when a Soviet command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system erroneously reported a nuclear missile
had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. It was only the cautious response by Soviet Air Defense Forces Lieutenant Colonel StanislavYevgrafovich Petrov, who suspected a computer error was to blame, that prevented a "retaliatory"
nuclear attack on the United States. Petrov, who died May 19, 2017, became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war."This is madness. Nuclear weapons are risky death-dealing props disguised as deterrents. The U.S. deploys them and, like other nuclear powers,
we train our military personnel to launch them without question when ordered to do so.This is our peril every second of every day. Worse, our WMDs represent our willingness as a nation to inflict horror of an untold magnitude
on our fellow humans.So, Elizabeth McAlister, 78 - grandmother and widow of iconic peace prophet, Philip Berrigan - Martha Hennessy, 63; granddaughter of Dorothy
Day, a 20th century Catholic pacifist who will likely be canonized by the Catholic Church; Fr. Stephen Kelly, S.J., 69; who like Pope Francis, is a Jesuit priest, and Catholic Workers Clare Grady, 59; Carmen Trotta, 55; Mark Colville, 56; and myself, sit and
wait for our chance to put Trident on trial in federal court.Trident is illegal under international law because treaties, which the U.S. has signed, prohibit the manufacture and deployment of WMDs. Pope
Francis recently said, the "very possession" of nuclear weapons is to be "firmly condemned." Christians are called to love their enemies.Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists "Doomsday Clock" stands at two minutes, 30 seconds to midnight, the closest it's been to Armageddon
in more than 50 years.Like lemmings hurtling to the sea, we humans act as if "nuclear posing" is the only way to insure peace for our children and grandchildren. Distracted
by this presumption, we ignore the greatest threat to human survival: our world on nuclear hair-trigger alert.The Kings Bay Plowshares, acting on the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, decided to "beat swords into plowshares." (Is. 2:4) Our actions
were a minor transgression of the law, yet we are facing three felony charges, one misdemeanor and likely prison sentences.
The court is protecting Trident, and leaving us all dangerously vulnerable to nuclear attack.Let us recall the prescient words of King: "The choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence, it is either nonviolence or non-existence."(Patrick O'Neill, a father of eight children, is cofounder of the Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker House in Garner, NC. He is awaiting trial
in Brunswick, Ga.)
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