‘Nous ne voulons pas une guerre globalEmmanuel Macron tweeted Wednesday evening. „We don’t want a World War”, he added on Thursday for clarity. What this means in concrete terms, he already said in a TV interview on Wednesday: in the event of a Russian nuclear attack in Ukraine, France will not retaliate with nuclear weapons. The stupidest thing to say, experts grumbled: This is how you invite Russia to continue its nuclear blackmail.
I get very nervous at times like this. Of all the words spoken every day, only a small fraction has major consequences, and an even smaller fraction can determine the course of history. What if then ECB president Mario Draghi in 2012 “whatever it takes” with which he saved the euro? What if FBI boss James Comey hadn’t brought up Hillary Clinton’s emails just before the 2016 election, after which she tumbled in the polls?
Situations like this are unpredictable, and that also applies to the war in Ukraine: there are many involved, all of whom can give a tug at the wheel. You can speculate about the outcome, but the margin of uncertainty is large.
Still, some people stubbornly try to channel the uncertainties into models and percentages. Every day I read somewhere what according to some expert the chance is that Putin uses a nuclear weapon. Former CIA chief Leon Panetta wrote in Monday Politico that according to “some analysts” that chance has increased from 1-5 percent to 20-25 percent. On Twitter many people shared a inimitable flowchart by physicist Max Tegmark, which he said clearly showed that the chance of a nuclear war is one in six. The professional forecasters of Samotsvety Forecasting were even more precise. They estimate the probability that a nuclear weapon will be deployed in Ukraine in the next month at 5.3 percent, but once they are used outside, there is a 14 percent chance that London will be hit in the following month, according to Samotsvety.
The easy thing about making these kinds of predictions is that they can never be falsified. After all, unless a probability is 0 or 100 percent, you don’t rule out a scenario. As a result, nuclear experts generally don’t venture to quantify risk, said Seth Baum, director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, last week on twitter. Nuclear weapons expert Nicholas Miller put it even more strongly: “Anyone who puts a precise probability on the probability of nuclear deployment is more or less taking it out of their you-know-what,” he tweeted on Thursday. “I think we can make reasonable estimates about whether the odds are going up or down, but that’s about it.”
The fiery modeling reminds me of the corona crisis, when public debate was paved with graphs of future infection rates. Anyone who wanted to participate in the corona debate had to immerse themselves in the number world. But a war is different from a pandemic. The course of a pandemic is the product of human behavior and virus behavior. The second was closely monitored, and the first was reasonably predictable: it makes sense that people would go out less if they can’t shop, and keep their distance if they’re afraid of being infected. The course of a war is more erratic. The behavior of one person, the man who pushes the button or not, is less predictable than that of the masses – especially if that person is influenced by, and makes assumptions about, the behavior of his opponent.
In addition, there have been many pandemics, and no nuclear war. All we think we know about nuclear wars is theory, which has yet to prove itself in practice. “We have exactly zero experience managing nuclear escalation against a nuclear power,” tweeted James Acton of the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program last week.
It is precisely this uncertainty that increases the demand among nervous citizens (like me) for experts who mention percentages. But whoever thinks for a moment (including me) knows: those figures give false accuracy, and apart from that they offer ordinary citizens no guideline for their own actions. Rising corona figures could be another reason to wear a mask or to avoid crowded places, but what should you do with a rising risk of a nuclear war? Have you ever wanted to sit in an air-raid shelter? Are you going to scream in fear? Neither makes sense, and neither do I.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 15, 2022