In Depth

Cyber Security, the Nuclear Threat and You: Cassandra's Guide to the 21st Century

Richard Power interviews Martin Hellman and mulls nuclear risk

By Richard Power

Page 3

In a CSO Magazine piece last year, I offered "A Corporate Security Strategy for Coping with the Climate Crisis," because I feel strongly that no security, intelligence or military professional can properly assess risks and threats unless not only adding climate change at or near the top of the list of risks and threats, but also factoring in its impact on all the other risks and threats spread out along the high-end of the spectrum. Likewise, I cannot, in good conscience, write about risks and threats to organizations, communities, nations or the planet as a whole, without addressing nuclear war in the same way.

Reasonable people might ask, "What is the point, what could any of us do?"

"This issue has nothing to do with my professional life," you might say.

Well, there is something that anyone anywhere can do, and it is both meaningful, and powerful; and I argue that it is something that risk, security and intelligence professionals can do with much more persuasiveness and gravitas than others—and that is speak out, educate, raise awareness within the Board Room and throughout the work-force. When the populace itself moves forcefully on an issue, government and industry fall into line.

There is a great secret in such profound change: it begins one on one, from mind to mind and hand to hand. As with many other risk and security challenges, awareness and education are more than simply vital elements to any real solution, they are the magic ingredients.

I wanted to talk to Hellman, you see, because he is swinging for another fool's home run.

"My wife started studying Tarot, because she was afraid of it. The church of course likened Tarot to witchcraft. And even though we are modern people, she had picked up those prejudices. She said, 'I had a fear of it, so I felt I had to learn what it was.' So she did a reading for me, and I ended up being the 'Fool.' And my first reaction was 'I am a Stanford professor, I am a smart guy, I have won all of these awards.' But then she pointed to me the positive aspects of the 'Fool,' he goes where no one else has gone, with one foot on the ground, and the other stepping off the cliff. My whole life I have been fundamentally a fool, which is often very wise, because you go against conventional wisdom, which is often wrong, and yet because as a kid, I suffered from that, at a consciousness level I denied it, but at an unconscious level I had actually reveled in it. It made me who I am today."