Stephen Dubner: Political Tribalism and the Nuclear Bomb

Oh, particulate pollution has gotten so much better. In fact, one wrinkle of climate change and global warming is that the particulates, the soot in the atmosphere in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was apparently what kept things a little bit cooler because it refracted sunlight and heat. That's hilarious. So the irony is you clean up the air and you allow more heating. Global warming. Yeah, exactly. Oh, Christ. Anyway, global warming is a very complicated issue. This is another example where when people reduce it to the headlines and then divide people into tribes, it's exactly the opposite of what you want. Perfect example because it's clearly a right versus left thing too in some people's circles. If you're on the right, you're supposed to say it's exaggerated, it's a hoax, it's a this, it's a that, it's not my concern. My concern is jobs. My concern is that you repeat the talking points and if it's on the left, it's how dare you. It's Greta Thurnberg. I think the biggest, that was not the best credit to America. How dare you. That was actually, now that I know it's her, it was not a bad invitation. I think one of Obama's biggest mistakes, he plainly wanted to address climate change, global warming, but he did it in a kind of standard left Democrat way by calling it global warming, by saying that there were bad actors, which is true. The thing that astonishes me that Democrats haven't done is talk about it in a language that every Republican, every conservative, every hunter, fisher would respond to, which is pollution, which is what it is by the way. Why it became a conversation about a much bigger, much more abstract, much more difficult to understand and act on problem is strange to me because humankind comes together. We came to, look, polio vaccine. It wasn't like everybody was working on it, but there were enough people concerned about it. Then you had a president who said, hey, March of Dimes, let's have everybody raise money, come up with a vaccine. Then interestingly, Salk with the vaccine, this is just interesting about the way medicine works today. He basically said, no, no, no, I don't want to patent. I don't want to own this patent. He could have become a billionaire. This is the way we have thought in our past as humans about solving big problems. We seem to have gotten away from that a little bit. I think that's where, to me, the tribalism is the most dangerous. It's not about the political charades. I don't care about that. I don't think that's particularly damaging. Where I think it's damaging is by dividing yourself into these tribes that are so exclusive and they have these purity tests, what we're doing is we're actually diminishing our collective ability to come together to solve problems. The good news is there's a million people out there at academic institutions and garages, groups of one in two people who are working on solutions that keep coming. Humans are a cool species is what I'm trying to say. We really are. I think it's interesting, but Jonas Salk, when he did create that vaccine, the world was a different place. There wasn't this pharmaceutical industry that we have today that has such a strong ability to influence the way people look at things through advertisements and just through the way they influence politicians. It's a different world. So to compare the bounty that was awaiting Jonas Salk for coming up with the polio vaccine, it's just a different world. The world's different. Wasn't there some controversy that he didn't give credit to the other people that helped him with the vaccine? Yes, there was. And I don't... So he's okay with money, but not good with giving people credit. I haven't read this in a long time, so I can't speak to it. But even like, do you like Richard Feynman? You know Richard Feynman. So when he talks about... I love hearing him talk about when he was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project and you think about it, America was... It was an existential fear. Legitimate, right? Sure. I mean, we wound up using it. They could have used it on us. We did, indeed. And when you hear Feynman talk about all the complication of that, we have an enormous scientific challenge. We have an enormous competition against the Germans who are trying to do the same thing. And then even if we win, then we have another whole challenge, which is the moral challenge. But there's a way of thinking about those things. And again, measuring the costs and benefits that people who might disagree aggressively, and they did about the Manhattan Project, can sit down and say, okay, here's what we're going to do. What's the lesser of the two evils? And I feel like right now, I don't know, as much progress as we've had, I feel we've gotten worse at looking at the lesser of two evil paths, at looking at weighing costs and benefits. Well, what is the lesser of two evils in that regard? Is it drop the bombs and stop the war? Or is the lesser of two evils never drop the bomb and stop the war later? Yeah. I mean, look, there's a million books been written about this. I could make an argument in either case. I mean, Japan, we were very, very scared of Japan. Japan had shown a lot of ability to punish the United States. Even though Germany was out, America still felt very fragile. So I totally get the argument that it was meant to be, I get it too. Yeah. On the other hand, you're picking some pretty big cities to drop it on, and you're picking two. And you're killing mostly civilians. Yeah. So it's hard to imagine that decision would be made today, but as you just said about polio vaccine, different case, but roughly same time you're at, it's very hard to project your morals onto, 50 years from now, we may have a very different view about MMA, for instance. It's very hard to project it. Well, I think that's far more intense and extreme than MMA. I mean, we're talking about nuking people literally out of existence. But I think that just the fact that these brilliant scientists were forced into that moral dilemma. Like one of my favorite videos online is Oppenheimer, when he's discussing what he said when the first atomic bomb was detonated, and he quoted the Bhagavad Gita, and he said, I am become death destroyer of worlds. And is this to say that, to see, have you seen it? The video? Oh, please. Let me play this for you. Play Oppenheimer right after when describing what it was like, because it's so eerie. Because here you have one of the most brilliant scientists ever who completed this fantastic project. The Manhattan Project created bombs that literally were nuclear weapons, never happened before in all of human history, as far as we know. And here the guy that did it that knew that knew that that was going to be the death of untold amounts of people. Listen to this. Listen to what he says. He knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty. And to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. Dude. Imagine being that guy. I mean, here's a guy, first of all, was quoting the Bhagavad Gita in 1945. Yeah. Little ahead of his time. It's pretty incredible. Or 46? When did they first detonate? The tests were, I think, 44 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki 45, correct? Somewhere in that range. Being this guy who, you know, he's just a brilliant scientist. He's not supposed to be the guy who destroys a half a million people in one moment. One brief flash of light and vaporizes a half a million people. He went to this school in New York City called the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which is where my kids went. So Oppenheimer is kind of a patron saint for having the brains to do something almost unimaginable and having the ethics encouraged to know that what he'd done was unacceptable on some levels. On the other hand, but look, if we're talking about costs and benefits, let's think about nuclear power, nuclear bombs as a deterrent against others down the road, right? So you have to say, killed a lot of people. How many lives did it save? Impossible to say. Sound like a Republican, sir. I know. I know, but I mean, no. That's the argument, right? Then you also have to talk about, then let's also talk about nuclear power, which was the byproduct of this, right? And there are those who could argue, and I would probably aid this argument to say that if the US had continued on the path of nuclear power in the 70s rather than totally flipping out after, well, after Three Mile Island, then later Chernobyl, which was a much worse accident than Three Mile Island, if that had continued, what we'd have now is probably much, much, much cleaner, cheaper, safer nuclear fuel. And instead what happened, because we basically stopped building nuclear plants, instead for the next 40 years, we burnt a crap load of coal. That's been terrible for the environment for lives. A lot of lives lost in mining coal, but then the pollution and so on. So, you know, actions have consequences, what seems to be all benefit often has a lot of costs and life is complicated, but I think the more that we can measure and weigh things sensibly, the less screaming there is. I just, you know, I love changing my mind. I love hearing somebody make an argument that makes me say, oh, you know, the way I thought about that before, I see why I thought it. I don't feel like a fool for having thought it, but wow, now that you've laid out some facts and laid out some counterfactuals, I appreciate the opportunity to change my mind. I enjoy that. I don't know why. I do too. Well, I think we're so often married to our ideas, like our ideas are a part of us and we're losing if our ideas that we've been discussing are incorrect. If our assumptions were incorrect, it's a value judgment against us. Right. You know, I think the nuclear thing is interesting because I think one of the problems with what happened was the shitty design of like Fukushima where they can't shut it off. It's freaked people out rightly so. And it's in the, it's built in a bad spot. It's terrible spot. Yeah. And the backup plan sucked. Everything's wrong. And now they have this nuclear hotspot that they're, you know, it's going to be like that for a hundred thousand years. Right. There's a better way and they never had a chance to find that better way because they've had a better way for everything else. And the later ones, the ones that they're operational now are far better than the Fukushima one. And they could have gotten way, way, way, way, way, way better. And that is, it's one of those things that doesn't seem like it makes sense. Like, wait a minute, nuclear is clean. Right. It's fucking really clean. It's really clean if it's done right. And if they allowed them to innovate over those 40 years, we would have got to some place where it's like super efficient, just like everything else. If you look at a 1970 car, right? And then you look at a car from 2020, how about a Tesla? Yeah. Zero emissions. Right. Like maybe they would figure out how to really knock it down to something. There are still a lot of people working on next, next, next, next generation nuclear power, including Bill Gates is involved in and including some that are working with using as fuel, what's called spent fuel in a traditional nuclear act, which takes care of two big problems at once. Right. Right. Right. So look, yeah, the reason is to be cheerful. Bunkers filled with shit that's eventually going to crack through the bunker and toxify everything around it. Maybe, or you could also theoretically use that as literally as fuel. So