The Caveman and The Bomb: Does Trump Grasp the Horror of His Threa... about:reader?url=https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-...

blogs.scientificamerican.com

The Caveman and The Bomb: Does

Trump Grasp the Horror of His Threat
to "Totally Destroy" North Korea?
Andrew Quist,Paul Slovic,Scott Slovic
7-9 minutos

Our minds are not evolved to casually comprehend the reality of

millions dying in a nuclear war, but we can make a difference in
how we use our minds

Anti-war activists Seoul, South Korea Credit: Jung Yeon Getty Images

I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and would risk my

life for him. Then I talk impersonally about the possible

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pulverization of our big cities, with a hundred million dead. I am

unable to multiply one mans suffering by a hundred million.
Albert Szent-Gyrgyi

The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations just concluded a

historic hearing today on the executives authority to use nuclear
weapons. This puts a spotlight on Pres. Donald Trumps recent
threat to totally destroy North Korea and calls attention to the fact
that we have created weapons whose vast destructive power is
beyond our easy comprehension. Due to a cognitive tendency
called psychic numbing, Mr. Trump fails to acknowledge, let alone
appreciate, the consequences of exterminating 25 million people.

Observing the survivors of the atomic bomb detonation in

Hiroshima, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton found they shared a
diminished capacity or inclination to feel. The survivors described to
him how they had become insensitive to human death and
temporarily without feeling. Dr. Lifton called this state psychic
numbing and described it as a useful defense mechanism that
prevents the mind from being overwhelmed and perhaps
destroyed by the dreadful and unmanageable images confronting
it. But psychic numbing isnt exclusive to the A-bomb survivors,
and it isnt always helpful. Recent research shows it to be
widespread and often destructive.

It is well recognized that two modes of thinking guide our behavior,

fast and slow, and President Trumps threat reflects the former. Fast
thinking, relying on gut feelings honed by direct experience, was
effective enough to enable our species to survive a long and
dangerous journey from the cave to the modern world. Slow
thinking is more recent in origin. Our brains evolved the capacity to
think symbolically and apply logic and reason to guide our decision-

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making. Slow thinking enables us to imagine and critically evaluate

consequences beyond those right in front of our eyes. But the
human mind is lazy, and fast, intuitive thinking is easier to rely on as
our default mode. When the potential consequences of our
decisions are extreme and outside the realm of our direct
experience we have to recognize the need to think more carefully
and make the effort to do so.

Fast thinking enables us to feel strongly about and act vigorously to

protect one identified person. But this sensitivity to the value of a
life is limited. The feeling system is incapable of escalating in
proportion to the death and misery of many victims. It cant multiply,
as Albert Szent-Gyrgyi insightfully observed. The single life that
feels so important to protect loses its value against the backdrop of
a larger tragedy. Quickly contemplating the suffering of countless
unidentified people leaves us numb and indifferent and thus lacking
an adequate understanding of their plight. No wonder we allow
genocides and other mass atrocities to occur again and again, in
addition to other human and environmental crises such as mass
incarcerations, chronic but curable diseases, and extinction of
endangered species.

This makes President Trumps declaration at the UN General

Assembly that, if threatened, the U.S. would totally destroy North
Korea, abhorrent. The idea of 25 million individuals dying on the
other side of the world is an abstraction that neither he nor any of
us can comprehend without reflection. But a head of state overtly
threatening the total destruction of another society is not abstract; it
is a careless, impulsive utterance, unchecked by the rational
faculties of slow thinking.

An intuitive thinker and communicator, the president likely knows

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that people are moved by the suffering of individuals. He criticizes

North Korea for crimes against an innocent American college
student and a sweet 13-year-old Japanese girl, sympathetic
victims and, important for persuasion, single identified individuals.
But the president seems blind to his own bias toward caring more
about the lives of the few than about the lives of millions. In his UN
address in September, he also bemoaned the Syrian dictator
Bashar al-Assads use of chemical weapons on innocent children.
He claimed to be greatly moved by the suffering of innocent Syrians
in the April 2017 sarin gas attack, particularly when shown two
images: young, listless children being splashed with water in a
frantic attempt to cleanse them of the nerve agent; and an
anguished father holding his dead twin babies, swathed in soft
white fabric. But now he threatens to annihilate millions of North
Koreans.

A way to counteract numbing when contemplating the deaths of

large numbers of people might be to remember that each individual
has a life, a story, and a family. As the Holocaust survivor Abel
Herzberg said, there were not six million Jews murdered; there
was one murder, six million times. By humanizing the numbers and
imagining some of the individuals they represent, we may less
easily succumb to the numbing that normally accompanies large
losses of life, and we might understand President Trumps threat as
not one to destroy a country but rather to kill a North Korean child,
mother, or father 25 million times. An even better way to counteract
psychic numbing would be to employ analytic and deliberative
procedures that lend meaning to the dreadful reality beneath the
surface of the numbers and force careful weighing of the pros and
cons for a menu of possible actions, i.e., slow thinking.

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Former Secretary of State George Schultz recently commented on

the presidents authority to use nuclear weapons: The important
moment is when you put your hand on the nuclear trigger. Youre
not president then, youre God. Where is it written that a man
should be able to press a button and kill a million people? To
prevent fast-thinking from resulting in catastrophe Congress should
bar the president from impulsively launching a nuclear first strike on
his own, for example, by requiring that any order to issue a nuclear
strike must go through multiple decision-makers such as the
secretaries of Defense and of State.

Fortunately, nuclear bombs have not been unleashed on civilian

populations since 1945. But it is nave to believe that this restraint
will continue indefinitely as these weapons proliferate and
diplomatic negotiations between hostile nations are undercut by
social media messages, fast-moving, unvetted, and possibly
intended to deceive or to trigger anger and aggression.

We must employ the best quality of our slow thinking to create

policies and procedures that ensure nuclear weapons will never be
used again.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not
necessarily those of Scientific American.

Andrew Quist

Andrew Quist is a research associate at Decision Research.

Paul Slovic

Paul Slovic is president of Decision Research and a professor of

psychology at the University of Oregon. He has researched and
published extensively on psychic numbing.

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Scott Slovic

Scott Slovic is a professor of literature and the environment and

chair of the English department at the University of Idaho. In 2015,
Scott and Paul Slovic co-edited a book on psychic numbing and
related cognitive phenomena titled "Numbers and Nerves:
Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data." The three
authors maintain a website devoted to raising awareness of psychic
numbing and its impact on our
world: www.arithmeticofcompassion.org.

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