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

Power: Tell us about your risk analysis project? What are you attempting with it?

Hellman: "I am on the advisory board of a start-up company. I met the CFO at a holiday party, and said, 'Let me put it this way, if I told you that there was an uninsurable risk that your company faced, and there was a roughly 10% chance of it destroying your company in the next 10 years, and you could do something to reduce that risk, would you be interested?' Unless something becomes socially acceptable, it is very hard for organizations to do anything about it. To change policy, we have to get to 50% penetration. On nuclear weapons, we are probably at one-tenth of 1% in terms of really recognizing the risk. The most critical part is getting to somewhere around 5%. Getting half the population seems impossible, half the population is so entrenched in the current way of doing things. But five percent is much more do-able, it is not a magic number, it could be two percent or maybe as much as ten percent. But somewhere around five percent, the average person comes in contact with one or two people a week and talks about the issue. The first time they hear it they will ask, 'Why we should we be involved?' And underneath that is the unstated belief that if it were really a major problem everybody would be talking about it."

Power: So it isn't denial?

Hellman: "It is denial, but it is mass denial. We are much more herd creatures than we would like to belief, myself included. I used to think that I was not susceptible fashion. Bell bottoms were really cool in the 1970s, and now they look ridiculous. There is the same mentality with respect to what issues we pay attention to. Evolutionarily, it probably made sense. But the world is changing so fast now, that we need to find ways to speed up the propagation of more ideas that are needed. The web can really help do that. In the 1980s, when I worked on nuclear weapons, and I tried to get the public's attention, it took about two months from the time a new person became interested until the time that person could begin to propagate the idea. That person had to be educated and become comfortable talking about it. There were books, but getting someone to buy a book is a huge threshold, versus being able to talk about it to someone. Today, if a person comes to my web site, or another one, and likes what they see, even if they do not understand it all, if they have not yet integrated it, they can send an e-mail with that link, no one has to buy a book, and they can send that e-mail to a hundred people in a matter of minutes, and the time it takes to get to those people is a day or less in terms of when they look at their e-mail. The propagation, both the numbers you can reach and the speed at which you can reach them, has increased, literally, by orders of magnitude."

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