Transition is not about preparing for nuclear war.
Nuclear is definitely back in the news with potentially incalculable consequences. What you could call an existential threat. Ron Huisken discusses it in The Weekend Australian’s Defence supplement today.
When the Nuclear Clock was last at 5 minutes to midnight (it now is again) in the late 1970s and Helen Caldicott got the Ban the Bomb movement going there used to be a saying about what to do in the case of a nuclear war. Bend over. Put your head between your legs and kiss your a… goodbye.
Those of us who were around in the late 1970s paying attention and thinking about how to survive a nuclear war came to the conclusion that it was a no-survivor.
Australian author Neville Shute’s book “On The Beach” came to the same conclusion.
Dr Strangelove was the movie of the times.
I was always fascinated by the mathematics of it. There is a branch of mathematics called stochastic processes. Basically imagine you are walking back and forth along a line. Which way you go is only determined one step at a time by tossing a coin. Heads you take a step right. Tails you take a step left. Providing the walk goes on long enough and providing the probability of going either way is greater than zero even if incredably small you will eventually pass through every point on the line.
So lets translate this to nuclear war. The line is: Step right – no nuclear war. Step left – nuclear war. Probability of stepping right very very high (hopefully). Probability of stepping left very very low (hopefully). Every second we make the choice to step right or left and we keep making that choice second after second indefinitely. The probability of choosing to step left is not zero and the walk keeps going. Until we eventually choose to step left someone somewhere in the world. Then our stochastic walk is over. Forever.