A compulsive read of a time in history when a lot of us either turned our backs on the situation, not wanting to know, or buried ourselves so heavily in the TV coverage that our anger sometimes got the better of us, Avoiding Apocalypse: How Science and Scientists Ended the Cold War is a historical read that reveals how the decade long stand-off between superpowers came to a calming conclusion, what went into it, just who were the overall soothsayer’s of the peace, and sadly, maybe how things have not changed all that much since those days of human-intervened diffusion.
Avoiding Apocalypse is essentially a political history book. Its subject is how the Cold War – between the Soviet Union and Western allies led by the United States – ended. However, its conclusion is one that goes against the popular narrative of that history. It instead delivers an alternative view of the key factors that ended a decades-long standoff between superpowers, each with enough nuclear firepower to cause a mass extinction event on this planet. Anything that challenges accepted versions of events should rightfully trigger scepticism. Anyone wishing to swim against such currents must bring with them sufficient aids. Often those who take up such challenges will appeal to preconceptions, emotions, tribalism and use every rhetorical device in their arsenal. Unfortunately, reason and evidence can often be less persuasive at least in the short term. The popular narrative of how the Cold War ended is that it was achieved by America vigorously outspending the Soviet Union in military defence. This is mostly the interpretation of the American political Right who consequently claim the Cold War did not ‘end’ but was ‘won’ by America. Alternatively, the political Left see the end of the Cold War as a triumph of their favoured strategy – bilateralism. But, bilateral agreements are meaningless without verification which cannot be achieved without a free and open society. In Avoiding Apocalypse, author Jeff Colvin argues that both of these interpretations of events are deeply flawed and presents an alternative cause for the end of the Cold War – the Scientist’s Boycott. Colvin is a scientist. He spent much of his career at the US’s two nuclear weapons design laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. As well as co-authoring more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers he is also co-author of Extreme Physics; a standard graduate-level textbook of physics which grew out Cold War era nuclear weapons development. And while the subject of Avoiding Apocalypse is political history, Colvin takes on the subject as a scientist. By which I mean, he is careful with words and what he means by them; he supports his arguments clearly with evidence; he considers alternative explanations and uses reason to measure their strengths and weaknesses and similarly reaches his conclusions based on the weight and strength of evidence. That is not to say that Colvin does not also make use of metaphor and analogy to explain his ideas. The Scientist’s Boycott grew spontaneously and organically out of Western scientist’s reaction to appalling treatment of scientists in the Soviet Union. In the West, scientific organisations formed committees and subgroups for human rights to support the refuseniks and dissidents targeted by the Soviet regime, to draw public attention to the interference by the Soviet government and to promote scientific freedom. Boycotts of smaller conferences eventually leads to calls for a complete moratorium on scientific cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1980 dependent on the outcome of the Conference in Madrid to monitor the Helsinki Accords. From this Colvin outlines a chain of events ultimately leading to the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. He argues persuasively that ending the Scientist’s Boycott was a greater motivating force in the decisions that ended the Cold War than any effect imagined by the Right and Left. Key to Colvin’s theory is the concept of what he terms “Linkage”. Science cannot function in a vacuum. It requires the foundational aspects of a democracy, such as free expression, in order to thrive. Democracy in turn, functions best with a vigorous scientific ethos and output. The third corner of this triangle would be economic performance which also thrives when science and democracy are both functioning healthily. Linkage implied that arms control policy must also consider peace, democratisation and human rights. According to Colvin, the Soviet scientists were so ill-treated because they were outspoken advocates for Linkage. The Western scientists who boycotted the Soviet Union were also acting on this principle. The same cannot be said for the majority on the political Right and Left in the West. The Right, for example, looked past the human rights abuses of third world dictators in making agreements. But Colvin argues the main opposition to Linkage in the West came from the Left who saw the inclusion of human rights demands as an unnecessary obstacle to creating the types of arms agreements they favoured. The Cold War ended in Colvin’s view when those in the Soviet Union understood the importance of Linkage and took steps to bring it about. Colvin details the lives of a few of the prominent Soviet dissident scientists but the hero of his story is Andrei Sakharov. Colvin devotes an entire chapter to Sakharov’s life story. As a physicist appointed to work on Soviet nuclear capability during Stalin’s reign, Sakharov’s radical ideas led to the development of the thermonuclear bomb. In later years, when in exile, his ideas gained international attention for its insights into quark theory and the matter-antimatter symmetry problem. But his work on nuclear weapons also directed his thinking on how nuclear arms control could be realistically achieved. His thinking convinced him of the need for Linkage between arms control, democratisation and human rights. The Soviet government punished Sakharov in several ways for being outspoken on his ideals before eventually internally exiling him for speaking against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 and, as Colvin tells it, Sakharov’s release from exile and the support given to his ideas by the Gorbachev regime was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Avoiding Apocalypse contains much else besides. As well as some general history of science and its Linkage, Colvin analyses various arms agreements since the Second World War, critiquing their strengths and failings. As Colvin argues, the best were the ones that used the idea of Linkage as an underlying principle. Colvin also details how new developments in nuclear science have made arms agreements more plausible. Safe and novel experiments removed the need for nuclear testing, for building new weapons to replace aging ones and to keep aging ones safe. This is Colvin’s forte; he specialised in the behaviour of matter at extreme conditions. He also shares his own experiences of attending conferences during the Boycott period and petitioning attendees to their cause. My quibbles about this book are relatively minor. For example, Colvin provides notes explaining fission and fusion, at least to a high-school level understanding, once they come up, but he uses terms like ‘Perestroika’ early in the book without explaining them until much later. The book’s examples – of historical science and efforts at nuclear treaties – are American-centric and the book does read at times like it is meant for an American audience. But otherwise it is a book difficult to fault. It is a short easy read; Colvin writes very succinctly; his arguments are well-made and I believe his conclusions could only be discredited with considerable difficulty and nuance. Avoiding Apocalypse will be published this week but was written in 2020. It is near enough our time to include how arms limitation went backwards during the Trump Administration, threatened to be further regressed had he been re-elected, some of which has been avoided by his 2020 electoral defeat. And yet matters have evolved and escalated so significantly in recent years I can’t help but wonder what Colvin would have to say about them and how he would use his ideas to explain them. For example, it has recently been reported that the BRIC economies have overtaken the G7 in GDP. Given that the BRIC countries comprise non-democracies and questionably functioning democracies, while the G7 are generally considered to be well-functioning mature democracies, what does this mean for the health status of the Linkage between science, democracy and economic growth? What are the nuances that account for this? Alternatively, is it a meaningless statistic between two arbitrarily chosen groups that can be discounted by a more insightful one? Also, even conceding Colvin’s main ideas that a major contributor to the end of the Cold War was the Scientist’s Boycott and that lessons from this have not been absorbed; it does not necessarily follow that such an approach could work again. The Cold War period divided the world into very black-and-white terms, but the world is far more integrated today. As evidence, witness how difficult it has been for Europe to boycott Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Investigations into whether Apple and other large Western corporations can decouple themselves from reliance on China has also raised a lot of concerns and highlighted previously underappreciated issues. Or perhaps I am not comparing apples with apples. These questions arise because Avoiding Apocalypse does more than just offer an alternative narrative of the end of the Cold War. In its last few chapters, Colvin considers how things have not necessarily improved since then. The Soviet Union may have ended but, since democracy did not eventuate in Russia, it could be argued that the Cold War is still with us. Colvin reflects on how the lessons of Linkage have not been absorbed if they were ever properly learned. It ends with a rigorous defence of science and an urgent plea to not forget the efforts of those who have succeeded in avoiding disaster so far.
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