This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: President Vladimir Putin of Russia approved a new nuclear weapons doctrine, lowering the threshold for a strike against Ukraine.
It is no coincidence that common myths and religions across cultures share the belief that humans are bound together. This belief has survived for thousands of years for a reason: It has value. Whether you use a rational scientific outlook, philosophy or religion, the human prophecy has been written: Unity is our path to survival.
But right now, it seems the world is headed toward increased conflict and war — an untenable proposition with nuclear-armed states. The threat of nuclear weapons being used in Ukraine and escalating violence in the Middle East support that, as well as a tripolar power struggle among the United States, Russia and China.
Despite this, I predict we will look back on this era of humanity not as a transition into a new world war, but as one toward global cooperation. I predict we will not have total war — the kind of conflict where every bit of technology is used to defeat the enemy for a conclusive victory — because it would end society. Total war has been impossible since 1945, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a momentous turning point the world is still coming to terms with.
I look back to the words of my grandfather J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known to many as the “father of the atomic bomb,” when he resigned as the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory two months after the bombings in Japan: “The peoples of the world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer so clearly saw humanity crossing the line that left the world with one choice going forward: Do we choose to cooperate and live as a species, or fight and die?
As head of the Oppenheimer Project, I deal directly with the science that my grandfather ushered into the world. That science isn’t fundamentally bad or good; it is our human choice what we do with it. Fission — the foundation of the nuclear bomb — will be with us forever. We can use it for unlimited carbon-free energy, or we can use it to make bombs. We can work together and use it to save the world — or to destroy it.
Calling for more dialogue between potential enemies does not mean we need to achieve a perfect peace or a utopian dream. There will always be conflict. Conflict is a very human attribute derived from fear. We fear other people, other tribes, because we should. Wariness is an evolutionary advantage, bred into humans over millenniums. Everyone alive today is a survivor of war, both the victors and the descendants. With that comes a fear and distrust of other human groups.
But cooperation is an equally prevalent evolutionary trend in human society. Science is one of the most advanced examples of that — it has allowed us to create technology so powerful that it can end all of society. But we now see that no one group can monopolize a new technology and achieve safety from being the first to create it. The atomic bomb has written these words.
We have miraculously survived the nuclear arms race, so far, with a peak of 70,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War era down to about 12,000 today. Human cooperation in all forms, even in the middle of conflict, is higher than ever, with communication, goods, services — and even uranium — flowing between supposed enemies.
Today’s world is smaller and more interdependent than it was in the past. Our food supply, transportation and economies are intertwined. The reality is that we are connected to and depend upon others, even our enemies, as part of a global system. We are “Doomed to Cooperate,” as Dr. Siegfried Hecker, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and adviser to the Oppenheimer Project, titled his 2016 book on post-Cold War nuclear dangers.
Cooperation doesn’t require removing conflict and disagreement. It also doesn’t require accepting the philosophies or economic systems of others. It just means that despite our differences, we work toward certain areas of agreement that are too important for politics.
There would be no winners in a nuclear war. The world as we know it would end in a preprogrammed mutually assured destruction policy. But the threat of escalation is always with us while we have thermonuclear weapons pointed at each other, as is the risk of a single irrational leader starting such a world-ending conflict. Diplomacy and allocating our resources toward actual shared threats that we have in common, such as global poverty, climate change and exponential technology growth, would be much more productive.
We each have some agency to try to shape the future and move toward a safer world. For me, this means leaning into the past and into my family name. I’m not afraid to be the voice calling for increased unity in the world, even though my grandfather was eventually attacked for this. He was called naïve and found guilty of insufficient enthusiasm for hydrogen bombs, but he survived.
The security hearing of 1954, which brought into question my grandfather’s patriotic loyalty and resulted in the Atomic Energy Commission revoking his security clearance, effectively told scientists that they had no place in policy. Taking down a literal war hero who promoted peace and unity was a conspiracy that worked.
In December 2022, the Department of Energy vacated this revocation and apologized — a hopeful sign that the world is ready for a different path.
War doesn’t work anymore, and it won’t solve the global threats that result from our continued cooperative traits, science and technology. The Oppenheimer Project has a goal of convening world scientific leaders to discuss policy in this light.
My grandfather shared this in his advice and policy work, but he was unable to change our course and avoid the arms race he warned of. Yet the principles he outlined are still with us, still valid. We might not be able to transcend our evolutionary tendency toward fear and conflict, but we can channel it into sports teams, economics and healthy competition. We can fight intrinsic existential risk together by supporting more dialogue with rational arguments backed by historical lessons.
Our survival as a species is dependent on our ability to achieve some levels of cooperation with those in other tribes, those we consider our enemies. We will find a way to work together, not because it is politically convenient to do so, but because we have no choice. We are doomed to cooperate.
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