If you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, chances are you spent a fair amount of time thinking about, or at least being (excuse the expression) bombarded with information and rhetoric about nuclear weapons. I am old enough to (barely) remember the duck-and-cover drills of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and like many of my friends and their older siblings, nuclear angst pervaded my childhood and adolescence.

My most lucid memory of that era is the following: about a year after the missile crisis, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was in second grade, and the news was given to us by the teacher, who was very shaken. At the time, there was a power outage in the area, and the school was already sort of dim. We were sent home, and about a block away from school, I looked up in the sky and saw... a giant atom bomb hovering over downtown Los Angeles!!! (Yeah. It was the Goodyear blimp, but I didn't know the difference.) So: the president had been murdered, the electricity was off, and there was an atom bomb poised to fall on our heads. This was too much for my 7-year-old brain to hold, and I ran home screaming hysterically, and it took my mother a couple of hours to calm me down. I don't think I've been the same since.

Since then, I've refined my thinking about nuclear weapons many times, and underneath everything is a very odd conundrum: nuclear weapons are terrible beyond imagination (I've read the literature, seen the films, and read the survivors' memoirs) yet the existence of nuclear weapons may have prevented a further world war in the years since World War II and saved thousands or millions of lives. And now that the Cold War is over, it's impossible to go back and replay history to see who was right -- all we know is that either by careful design or blind luck, nuclear war didn't happen.

In 1984 I went to work as a consultant at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is where most U.S. postwar nuclear weapons were designed. I wasn't working directly on a weapons program, but over the 6 years I was there I had the chance to meet a number of people that did, and though our politics and social theories differed in a number of ways, I was extremely impressed with their sincerity and the fact that everyone I talked to had gone through a moral analysis and had an ethical, almost religious conviction that what they were doing was directed toward preventing war, not waging war. And it appears that it worked, at least for now.

In 1985 on a trip to Japan I visited Nagasaki, and spent a full day at the A-Bomb Museum and on a tour of the city showing some of the places affected by the bomb. Nagasaki is a pretty hillside port city, one of the nicest in Japan, and you would never suspect that 40 years before my visit it had been reduced to ashes and rubble by a nuclear weapon. But the museum preserves the story, and it is compelling: I urge everyone who visits Japan to spend some time at the Nagasaki museum or the Peace Park and museum in Hiroshima.

In May 1986 I received a security clearance that would permit me, in theory, to work on nuclear weapons projects at LLNL. (The group I consulted for was only working on unclassified information science and networking research, but we all got clearances in the hope of getting some SDI ["Star Wars"] funding, much of which involved classified projects.) And I realized, while driving to work one day, that I had become one of the people that I would have demonstrated against as a college student. This was a sobering thought, especially in the region of my 30th birthday, though I had long since come to the conclusion that bland, muzzy-headed leftism was not a winning ideology. But I still respected the moral stance and the committment of the anti-nuclear demonstrators. And the moral stance and committment of the laboratory employees working on weapons projects inside the fence. You see, we're back to the conundrum again.

At this point I'm just glad it's mostly over. The handful of people (e.g., General Curtis LeMay) from the early Cold War era who conceived of nuclear war as something you could "win" are mostly all dead, or at least are doddering old men in their 90s. So the all-consuming, global thermonuclear war that was the ultimate nightmare of the '50s through the '70s, and spawned an entire genre of end-of-the-world literature, might finally have receded from the foreground. But it's not gone entirely; if you really want something to worry about, try to imagine a retro-Soviet (or right-wing nationalist) putsch in Russia or a paranoid and xenophobic hardline faction taking over in Beijing.

Realistically, though, the most serious threat is from terrorism, and given the amount of weapons-grade nuclear material in the world, reports of lax security in some of the ex-Soviet stockpiles and processing plants, the single-minded dedication of ideological and religious terrorists, the eventual "leakage" of weapons design and implementation knowledge from the secret world to the public world (and the fact that historical design information is easily available)... well, it's a pretty fair chance that someone will detonate a nuclear weapon against a civilian target in the next decade or two. Whether this comes before or after a similarly lethal terrorist chemical or biological attack is anyone's guess. Cheery thought, eh? (If you are interested in "betting" on propositions like this, in the form of a simulated stock market, check out the Foresight Exchange page (formerly known as "Idea Futures").

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