The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,229

terrorist band, thereby giving up control over how they would be used while being on the hook for the consequences.286

In the case of Iran, before it decided to bomb Israel (or license Hezbollah to do so in an incriminating coincidence), with no conceivable benefit to itself, its leaders would have to anticipate a nuclear reprisal by Israeli commanders, who could match them hothead for hothead, together with an invasion by a coalition of powers enraged by the violation of the nuclear taboo. Though the regime is detestable and in many ways irrational, one wonders whether its principals are so indifferent to continuing their hold on power as to choose to annihilate themselves in pursuit of perfect justice in a radioactive Palestine or the arrival of the Twelfth Imam, with or without Jesus at his side. As Thomas Schelling asked in his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, “What else can Iran accomplish, except possibly the destruction of its own system, with a few nuclear warheads? Nuclear weapons should be too precious to give away or to sell, too precious to waste killing people when they could, held in reserve, make the United States, or Russia, or any other nation, hesitant to consider military action.”287

Though it may seem dangerous to consider alternatives to the worst-case scenario, the dangers go both ways. In the fall of 2002 George W. Bush warned the nation, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The “clear evidence” led to a war that has cost more than a hundred thousand lives and almost a trillion dollars and has left the world no safer. A cocksure certainty that Iran will use nuclear weapons, in defiance of sixty-five years of history in which authoritative predictions of inevitable catastrophes were repeatedly proven wrong, could lead to adventures with even greater costs.

These days one other gloomy scenario is on people’s minds. Global temperatures are increasing, which in the decades ahead could lead to a rising sea level, desertification, droughts in some regions, and floods and hurricanes in others. Economies will be disrupted, leading to a competition for resources, and populations will migrate out of distressed regions, leading to friction with their unwelcoming hosts. A 2007 New York Times op-ed warned, “Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous—and more intractable—than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.”288 That same year Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their call to action against global warming because, according to the citation, climate change is a threat to international security. A rising fear lifts all the boats. Calling global warming “a force multiplier for instability,” a group of military officers wrote that “climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror.”289

Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification,