Seth Baum, an expert in global catastrophic risk, makes waves when he suggests a solution to the threat of nuclear winter.

Seth Baum is Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a nonprofit think tank that Baum co-founded in 2011. His research focuses on risk and policy analysis of catastrophes that could destroy human civilization, such as global warming, nuclear war, and infectious disease outbreaks. Baum received a Ph.D. in Geography from Pennsylvania State University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Columbia University Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. His writing has appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Guardian, Scientific American, and a wide range of peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Follow him on Twitter @SethBaum and Facebook @sdbaum.

This story originally aired on Feb. 3, 2017.

Story Transcript

About five years ago I co-founded a nonprofit think tank called the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. We work on… global catastrophic risk, which is the risk of anything that could destroy global human civilization like climate change, pandemics or nuclear war. I did this so that I could dedicate my career full time to making the world a better place in the best way I knew how, which was by keeping humanity intact.

See, I’m very much a do-gooder at heart and also very analytical. When you take the idea of doing good and then use your calculus to maximize the integral of good across space and time, you end up with reducing global catastrophic risk.

But reducing the risk is not easy. These are thorny contentious issues. For example, for decades there’s been a heated disagreement over nuclear weapons between the United States military establishment and a group of scientists who are outsiders to international security.

The scientists are worried about something called nuclear winter. When you nuke a city—and please, try not to nuke any cities—it creates a massive fire full of smoke from burning buildings, and human bodies, and pets, and everything else in our cities. The fire is so intense that some of it goes high up into the sky, past the clouds, into the stratosphere, which is the second layer of the atmosphere.

At that altitude, it stays up there for years and spreads all around the world, blocking the incoming sunlight, which makes the surface cold, hence the name “nuclear winter.” Worst case scenario, for a large nuclear war, agriculture fails and everyone starves to death.

The scientists called for nuclear disarmament so that nuclear winter can’t happen. And, in theory that could work, but that’s not how the military establishment sees it. They say that, if anything, nuclear winter is actually a reason to keep nuclear weapons because it strengthens deterrence. Deterrence, you might recall, is the threat of something so bad that the other side won’t attack in the first place. The threat of nuclear destruction is widely believed to have prevented the Cold War from turning hot and becoming World War III. Nuclear winter makes nuclear weapons even scarier, which should make them more effective at preventing war.

This is where I came in. I thought that by listening to both sides of the debate and understanding their perspectives I might be able to come up with a creative solution that responds to both of their concerns. The military establishment wants scary weapons to prevent war from happening, and the scientists want to make sure that if war does happen, it wouldn’t destroy the world.

So I asked, is it possible to have scary enough weapons that don’t destroy the world? I looked at a lot of different types of weapons, poring over journal articles, and manuscripts and anything I could find that gave some indication of what might work. I looked at having just a few nuclear weapons, too few to cause nuclear winter. I looked at advanced conventional weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, cyber weapons, electromagnetic weapons, and neutron bombs. Turns out there are a lot of ways to cause massive amounts of harm.

What I found is that some of these weapons don’t work so well for deterrence, but some maybe do, especially the electromagnetic weapons, the neutron bombs and certain biological weapons. So I wrote it up and got it peer-reviewed and published in a research journal called Contemporary Security Policy. That means other experts in international security read my work and thought that it was good.

That meant a lot to me, because most research on nuclear winter is published in science journals. Getting this into an international security journal was a big step towards bridging the divide between the scientists and the military establishment. Then, in order to help to get the research some extra attention, I published a summary of it in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And that is when things went horribly wrong.

The day after the Bulletin article came out, I was traveling down to Washington, D.C., for a multi-day workshop on biosecurity. On the train ride down, I caught the first reactions to the article. They were nice enough, nothing out of the ordinary. Then, when I got to my hotel room, I saw a disarmament activist writing on Twitter—I paraphrase: “Excuse me, did @sethbaum just suggest biological weapons is a way to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons? #wtf”

I sent a quick reply talking about how dangerous nuclear weapons are and then went off to sleep. Overnight, a group of biological weapons researchers and activists from Europe saw it and started tweeting about it over and over again, criticizing my treatment of biological weapons. I saw this when I woke up the next morning.

Now, I know that when you work is getting talked about like this, you’re supposed to be on hand to reply to people and correct any misconceptions, but I had a workshop I had to get to. So I sent a few quick replies, then I closed my computer, crossed my fingers, and set out for my biosecurity workshop, which, go figure, was attended by a bunch of biological weapons people.

When I get there, sure enough, some of them are talking about how I was dominating their Twitter feed that morning. Oh great, here we go. And, indeed, they did not like my idea either. For the next few days, I was a rather awkward and uncomfortable center of attention. I will say, though, the people there were quite nice about it.

But when I get back home and online, the biological weapons corner of Twitter and the blogosphere is still blowing up at me. Person after person is chiming in saying how bad they thought my idea was; a researcher from a British think tank, an arms control negotiator from Geneva, a staff member of the Biological Weapons Convention, which is the treaty that governs these weapons. My research and I were called, among other things, politically and morally unacceptable, flawed, nonsense, silly, sad, shocking, shameful, dangerous, ignorant, a fiasco, an outrage, the work of a contortionist mind, and a douche.

I felt terrible. I mean, with everyone saying that I did something so wrong, they must all be right, right? I felt like a total failure from this. I’m supposed to be the person who listens to everyone’s perspectives and understands how to fit it all in, and here we have a big group of people saying that I came up way short. I felt like I did something wrong—not just wrong intellectually, like there was a mistake in my analysis, but wrong morally, like I was actually hurting the world.

I got the sense that just by floating this idea that I was making it more likely that biological weapons would be used to hurt people. That’s not what I wanted, but still I felt like the bad guy. And I’m really not used to that. I’m used to being the good guy. This is why I work on reducing global catastrophic risk in the first place—to help make the world a better place. To have all these people saying I messed up on this, I felt like I was damaged goods, like my career was over.

I remember sitting on the couch for hours on end, day after day, just trying to keep my composure over the whole thing and not always succeeding. I just wanted it all to go away, to make the world disappear. And the tweets… the tweets kept coming in, reinforcing how bad of a person I was.

Around that time I happened upon a video of Monica Lewinsky talking about cyber bullying. She described her experience as perhaps the first high-profile victim. It was really unpleasant for her in a way that felt kind of familiar. To be clear, her case was much, much worse than mine. But the thing about my case was this was within a professional community. These were people who I might see at conferences. If it can happen in groups like this, it can happen anywhere. I’m not saying that they were wrong to criticize my ideas, but I do think that in some cases it could have been more polite, more sympathetic to the human being on the other end.

Still, ideas do need criticism in order to get better. All this attention that my idea was getting was an opportunity for progress with the research. So I talked to the editors at Contemporary Security Policy and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We arranged written discussion forums in which other experts would write commentaries on my work and I wrote replies. And you know what? When I looked at the details, what they had to say, I actually disagreed with some of it, especially them talking about how bad the biological weapons are. Well, yeah, but nuclear winter could be even worse.

But I did learn a thing or two. In particular, I learned that, for some technical reasons that I had previously missed, the biological weapons actually wouldn’t work that well for deterrence. For deterrence to work, you need to be able to threaten massive retaliation if the other side hits you first. If the other side attacks first and they’re expecting to be hit with biological weapons, then they can actually protect their population from it.

So now, I actually don’t call for the use of any biological weapons to reduce the risk of nuclear winter. This is good, this is progress, and it’s what we get when we listen to each other and understand different perspectives. Still, I really felt horrible from the whole experience, just shell-shocked. I just wanted to curl up and hide in a corner and stay there forever, but I knew I couldn’t.

Right now, there are sixteen thousand nuclear weapons in the world, which is more than enough for some extreme nuclear winter. And that’s not the only global catastrophic risk that we face. In order to reduce these risks, we need people out there listening to each other, understanding different perspectives and working creatively on solutions.

So now, one year after this crazy incident nearly derailed my career, I am proud to be standing here, speaking with you about it. Ready to accept more criticism, hoping it will be polite, but understanding if sometimes it’s not. But always pushing ahead to help keep the world safe. Thank you.