Ganadores del Premio Nobel y muchos de los principales expertos mundiales en armas nucleares se pronunciaron sobre un tema siniestro: la alta y aparentemente creciente posibilidad de una guerra nuclear. La Asamblea de Premios Nobel para la Prevenci\u00f3n de la Guerra Nuclear emiti\u00f3 una declaraci\u00f3n el mi\u00e9rcoles, coincidiendo con el 80\u00ba aniversario de la primera explosi\u00f3n de armas nucleares en Nuevo M\u00e9xico, conocida como la Prueba Trinity.<\/p>\n
After two-and-a-half days of meetings in a mostly sunny midsummer Chicago, concerned Nobel Prize laureates and many of the world\u2019s top experts on nuclear weapons spoke out on a dark subject: the high and seemingly rising prospect of nuclear war. The Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War issued a declaration Wednesday\u2014keyed to the 80th<\/sup>\u00a0anniversary of the first nuclear weapons explosion in New Mexico, known as the Trinity Test\u2014that presented a series of practical recommendations to world leaders for reducing the nuclear threat.<\/p>\n The\u00a0impetus for the assembly came from Nobel laureates<\/a>\u00a0who, after issuing their own declaration on nuclear danger in 2024, felt public attention was not commensurate to the threat. Brian Schmidt, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, said the idea of the assembly initially arose last year at a meeting in Lindau, Germany, when Nobel laureates from more than 10 countries signed the \u201cMainau Declaration 2024 on Nuclear Weapons<\/a>,\u201d an echo of a Nobel laureates declaration on the same subject in 1955.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were discussing at this meeting of laureates, how this seemed to have gone off the radar of the world. And yet we were saying it\u2019s, to our mind,\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0existential risk,\u201d Schmidt said.<\/p>\n Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago astrophysicist and chair of the Bulletin<\/em>\u2019s Science and Security Board, was a co-organizer of the three-day assembly, held at the university\u2019s David Rubenstein Forum this week. \u201cNeedless to say, it\u2019s a uniquely dangerous time, and there\u2019s been a growing awareness that that\u2019s the case,\u201d Holz said. \u201cAnd one of the main issues is, as the dangers have been increasing, I think the world\u2019s attention has been distracted by other things\u2026. After talking with David Gross (winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Brian Schmidt, we thought having a conference that would bring the world\u2019s experts and many the Nobel laureates who care about these issues and want to address them\u2014that that would be effective.<\/p>\n \u201cSo that was the genesis of this meeting, and here we are, about a year later.\u201d<\/p>\n The assembly consisted of expert panel discussions on a series of nuclear-weapons related subjects, with most panels including a Nobel laureate. The off-the-record presentations spanned an interconnected array of concerns that make up the nuclear threat landscape, including the potentially civilization-ending prospect of nuclear winter\u2014a significant and lasting cooling of the Earth that could be caused by massive amounts of smoke that cities immolated by a nuclear attack inject into the stratosphere. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently issued a long-awaited report,\u00a0\u201cThe Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that points out the need for far more research into those effects, research that the US government has so far largely declined to fund, Rutgers University climatologist Alan Robock pointed out in an interview outside the assembly. One of the world\u2019s leading experts on\u00a0nuclear winter<\/a>, Robock said, \u201cWe\u2019re trying to quantify the amount of smoke you get [in various nuclear war scenarios]. It depends of course on the size of the weapons and the targets, but I think the evidence is clear that there\u2019d be a lot of smoke \u2026 and billions of people who die [from a collapse of agriculture in large parts of the world].\u201d<\/p>\n Other subjects covered were equally ominous: the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons systems; research into the psychology of decision-making related to nuclear crises; old and new proliferation risks; the revitalization of strategic stability talks among nuclear powers; nuclear testing; the history and future of nuclear close calls; and missile defense and the weaponization of space.<\/p>\n With his executive order that the United States pursue a comprehensive Golden Dome missile defense program, President Trump has put defense against nuclear attack at the top of the US security agenda. Bob Latiff, a retired Air Force major general and a\u00a0Bulletin<\/em>\u00a0Science and Security Board member, said his presentation to the assembly about missile defense centered on three primary points: that a completely effective missile defense system remains technically impossible (although a partially effective system could be built); that a comprehensive system of the sort the president\u2019s Golden Dome anticipates would be enormously expensive, requiring thousands of satellites and interceptors and costing far more than the $175 billion Trump has suggested; and that he believes \u201cmissile defenses are destabilizing and unnecessary and inspire arms races. Those were the points I was trying to make that we should be talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n In an interview after his presentation, which dealt in part with what many believe was the world\u2019s closest approach to nuclear war\u2014the Cuban Missile Crisis\u2014prominent nuclear historian\u00a0Alex Wellerstein<\/a>\u00a0noted that \u201cit\u2019s very clear that people\u2019s understandings of the risks in real time are often completely wrong. And so there\u2019s something disquieting about the idea that global leaders all the time choose to either create the context that could be a crisis, or to say, essentially, \u2018this is a crisis.\u2019 But they also have very poor track record of anticipating what risks they are getting into, and what they\u2019re willing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n The assembly\u2019s\u00a0declaration<\/a>\u2014addressed to leaders of the world\u2019s nuclear powers and the general public\u2014spans the nuclear threat landscape, recommending:<\/p>\n Organizers of the assembly said they were keenly aware that its declaration needed to spur widespread public support to effect actual improvement in the world\u2019s nuclear situation. To gain that support, the group was interested in innovative ways of reaching wider audiences, Gross said during a question-and-answer session after the declaration was presented. In one such effort,\u00a0Bulletin\u00a0<\/em>CEO Alex Bell noted, the assembly sponsored a performance by the Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet and\u00a0Allison Russell<\/a>\u00a0of Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s a-Gonna Fall\u201d at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago Wednesday evening. The Kronos Quartet has recorded two covers of the song with an array of prominent musical artists that range from Willie Nelson and Ringo Starr to Iggy Pop and Laurie Anderson and beyond.<\/p>\n Organizers of the assembly also made clear that the choice of its venue\u2014the University of Chicago\u2014was purposeful, because of the university\u2019s history as the site of the first controlled, sustained nuclear reaction and, subsequently, its role in supplying scientists who worked in the Manhattan Project and on the creation of the first nuclear weapons. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the university also was home to the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, a group that worked to warn the public and the country\u2019s leaders of the danger of nuclear weapons. That group founded the\u00a0Bulletin\u00a0<\/em>in December 1945.<\/p>\n\n