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The Survival Nexus
The Survival Nexus
Science, Technology, and World Affairs
C HA R L E S W E I S S
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190946265.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Edie
Contents
Author’s Preface xi
Acknowledgments 267
Notes 269
Bibliography 317
Index 347
Author’s Preface
Science and technology and have given us longer and healthier lives, opened new
intellectual horizons, put information and entertainment at our fingertips, lifted
hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, enabled us to buy products from
all over the world, and made it easy to spread ideas, to launch new businesses, to
travel all over the world, and to keep in touch with almost anyone anywhere.
At the same time, science and technology lie at the heart of some of the greatest
dangers to the survival of humanity and the sustainability of the Earth: climate
change, pandemics, and nuclear war. These dangers are real, affect everyone,
know no borders, and demand our attention. Science and technology are central
to issues of competitiveness, jobs, inequality, cyberconflict, and the freedom of
the Internet. All these issues involve a tangled mix of science and technology with
politics, economics, business, law, psychology, ethics, security, and culture—the
Survival Nexus that is the subject of this book.
The COVID-19 pandemic that began in December 2019 gave the world a taste of
the costs of neglect of the Survival Nexus. One government after another ignored
the warnings of scientific experts, downplayed the seriousness of the virus, and
squandered critical weeks that could have been used to limit its spread and to save
many of the millions of lives that were ultimately lost, in addition to the trillions
of dollars in economic losses. The exponential spread of COVID-19 forced polit-
ical leaders around the world to order belated lockdowns of businesses and people,
causing a global economic recession that hit low-income people the hardest.
Political leaders, some of whom had taken firm measures of control early in the pan-
demic, succumbed to political and social pressures to reopen too early, causing still
further disease and disruption.
Climate change will cause much more significant long-term damage if it is not
stopped, although the damage will take place at a slower pace. It will cause a rise
in sea levels that will flood coastal cities, beaches, and low-lying islands around
The Survival Nexus. Charles Weiss, Oxford University Press. © Charles Weiss 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190946265.003.0001
2 The Survival Nexus
the world. It will intensify droughts, storms, and hurricanes. It will spread
mosquito-borne diseases to areas from which they have long been eliminated.
It will dry out the Amazon Valley and reduce food production in many parts of
the world.
Climate change is better described as climate disruption, since its effects are
ubiquitous, vary from place to place, and will soon affect almost all aspects of
daily life. The offenders here are carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that
are emitted by all forms of human activity, but especially by industries, vehicles,
buildings, and electric utilities that still burn fossil fuels. To limit climate disrup-
tion will require a major reorganization of the world economy that will depend, in
turn, on a change in attitude, especially in the United States, where many people
still do not believe that human-caused climate change is real and dangerous. This
is an ethical as well as an environmental issue. Citizens of low-income countries
and future generations will suffer the most from climate change even though
they have contributed the least to it.
The risks of pandemics and climate disruption pale before yet a third danger,
that of nuclear war, which can wipe out millions of lives in just a few minutes and
possibly bring an end to human civilization. With no nuclear war in seventy-five
years, the prospect has receded from public consciousness. Yet hundreds of nu-
clear missiles, each capable of wiping out a major city, are on hair-trigger alert
in both the United States and Russia and could be fired, intentionally or by mis-
take, in a moment of crisis. Nuclear war between regional powers like India and
Pakistan could also have devastating consequences for everyone.
The world is playing fast and loose with technologies that are taking us into
uncharted and dangerous territory. We have come within a hair’s breadth of acci-
dental nuclear war several times in recent decades. Nevertheless, political leaders
have been increasingly willing to risk nuclear war in order to gain short-term
advantage. Countries are competing to be the first to develop and deploy hyper-
sonic missiles and autonomous weapons combined with artificial intelligence.
These weapons may be impossible to control and make accidental escalation or a
catastrophic accident even more likely. Meanwhile, the safeguards that political
leaders, diplomats, and scientists have erected over the decades to address these
and other global threats have gradually been undermined and eroded, and tech-
nologies like renewable energy that are badly needed face unnecessary obstacles
to their development and deployment.
it? How are decisions made when the facts are still unclear? How are new ideas
and new disciplines introduced and integrated into long-established “legacy”
institutions? Who gains and who loses from any given action? Who bears its
costs and risks? Who is to make the decisions? How and to whom are they to be
accountable? How are the public and civil society to be informed and involved?
International policymakers, business leaders, diplomats, military personnel,
and experts need to understand the scientific and technological dimensions of
the problems they are addressing. This requires disciplinary knowledge that is
not usually familiar to international affairs professionals and that often suffers
from neglect on their part. Those who do have this understanding have often
been hived off from the professional mainstream and relegated to the role of
specialists who devote themselves to subjects they find interesting, challenging,
and important, even at the risk of losing opportunities for professional advance-
ment. This disciplinary divide between the two cultures of science and tech-
nology, on the one hand, and world affairs, on the other, is anomalous and even
dangerous at a time when science and technology are a critical dimension in for-
eign policy and international business.
The public, too, needs a basic understanding of science and technology and
how they relate to the broader context of world affairs. There is, therefore, every
reason for people interested or expert in what is happening internationally, and
for people interested or expert in science and technology, to become familiar
with each other’s concerns and with the basic concepts of each other’s fields. This
has important implications for our high schools and colleges.
To be sure, there is no way for any one person, whatever their professional
qualifications, to become an expert in all of the many fields of science and engi-
neering that have important ramifications for international affairs: molecular bi-
ology, epidemiology, nuclear physics, geophysics, seismology, computer science,
climatology, stratospheric photochemistry, solid-state physics, aerodynamics,
and manufacturing engineering, to name only some of the fields touched on in
this book. But neither can they be expert in all the fields of social science and the
humanities that influence world affairs, a list that includes economics, politics,
law, business, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, ethics,
and religion—and that’s just to start. In natural as in social sciences, we can learn
enough to understand basic facts, to relate these facts to the general context of
world affairs, and to detect obvious falsehoods.
The meshing of science with world affairs involves not only collaboration
among people trained in different disciplines, but also a mutual understanding
on the part of people accustomed to very different roles, disciplines, and pro-
fessional cultures. Science is a search for truth about the world around us,
sometimes motivated by sheer curiosity and sometimes by the hope of prac-
tical application (applied science).2 In science, until an assertion is confirmed
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