Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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Economic, G20, Government, Politics, Society, United Nations

The ‘inequality emergency’

ECONOMIC

Intro: Rising economic division is destabilising nations and eroding accountability. Joseph Stiglitz’s G20 blueprint proposes a way toward global economic renewal. For the first time the G20 has declared a global inequality emergency

WAS it a diplomatic nicety when Swiss tycoons and business magnates handed Donald Trump a gold bar and a Rolex watch, gifts that were reciprocated by a cut in US tariffs? No. It was a reminder of how concentrated wealth seems to buy access and bend policy. Alarmingly, this might just become the norm if the global “inequality emergency” continues. That’s the clear message being sent out in the most recent work by the Nobel laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz. The economist sees the widening gap between rich and poor as a human-made crisis which is destroying politics, society, and the planet. He’s not wrong.

The problem is no longer confined to a few fragile states. It is a global harm, with 90% of the world’s population living under the World Bank’s definition of “high income inequality”. The US sits just below that threshold and is the most unequal country in the G7, followed by the UK. Prof. Stiglitz’s insight is that the current system’s defenders can no longer explain its mounting anomalies. Hence he wants a new framework to replace it. His blueprint for change is contained within the G20’s first-ever inequality report, endorsed by key European, African, and middle-income nations.

It warns that the richest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth since 2000, while the bottom half gained just 1%. On average, someone in the global top 1% became $1.3m richer; a person in the poorest half gained $585. Meanwhile, 2.3 billion people are now moderately or severely food insecure – 335 million more than in 2019. Wealth concentration far outstrips income concentration, with the total assets of billionaires’ worth one-sixth of global GDP. Shockingly, billionaire wealth is rising almost in lockstep with global food insecurity.

The report argues that extreme inequality is a policy choice – produced by specific economic, political and legal decisions rather than by “globalisation” or technology. Financial deregulation, weakening labour protections, and privatisation all aid rising inequality. As does cutting corporate and top income tax rates. The report stresses that the most dangerous consequences are political, with highly unequal countries seven times more likely to experience democratic backsliding or authoritarian drift. Stiglitz points out that the super-rich account for a disproportionate share of carbon emissions, worsening climate risks borne by the poor. He rejects the pro-market argument that inequality is good for growth.

The G20 inequality report lays out a comprehensive redesign of global economic governance reminiscent of 1944’s Bretton Woods accord. What led to that overhaul is being identified again today: global rules and institutions that are generating crises, instability, and inequality. Prof. Stiglitz wants structural change – suggesting a rewrite of intellectual property rules as well as trade and investment treaties, a reform of global lenders, and an update of tax systems as well as sovereign debt arrangements.

A fairer global order must start where every paradigm shift begins: with knowledge, scrutiny, and shared facts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN-backed body assessing scientific opinion – was created in 1988 to give global authority to that knowledge. It reshaped climate politics. Prof. Stiglitz argues that the time has come for an International Panel on Inequality. Hundreds of experts agree. Endorsing it is by no means radical; it is simply the first step towards a saner world. Without it, the gold-bar diplomacy circling Trump will surely proliferate.

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