Entropy

Richard Fernandez writes at PJ Media,

...President Obama got it exactly wrong when he argued in a Washington Post op-ed that "as the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, the United States has a moral obligation to continue to lead the way in eliminating them." What he should have written instead was "as the only nation ever to refrain from using nuclear weapons gratuitously when it had the monopoly on such weapons, the United States has the moral authority to lead the way in regulating them."

What gives the US moral authority is bias, the improbability of it using nuclear weapons in time of peace. You can be sure the USAF won't nuke Chicago, or Brussels or Kampala tomorrow, even if it physically could, because of civilizational bias. The reason why Obama's unilateral reductions in the American nuclear arsenal as gestures to nuclear disarmament are meaningless is because he's not actually reducing any of the risk. All the danger is on the other side, where the bias goes the other way for aggression, conquest and world domination. That is what he seems unable to reduce.

Despite the large number of combatants involved, the Syrian civil war is quite predictable. (See the chart below showing the perpetrators of civilian deaths in Syria). What drives the system are not the "things" operated by the USAF or the Russian air force but the bias of the Syrian regime for killing people. Bias tells you Assad will kill people tomorrow just as surely as that the USAF won't bomb Paris.



As a practical matter Assad and Saddam, rather than the aluminum tubes, were the WMD programs. If one wants to control the WMD danger, the only chance is to control bias, not things. It is the toxic regimes of MENA and the proliferation of toxic ideologies which most menace the world.

The reason why statements like "Islam is the religion of peace" or "we will never be at war with Islam" are so dangerous is because they ignore bias and reduce the problem to the mere monitoring of things. They put the most important factor of all into the error term. The result is a world of runaway entropy that is more dangerous to everybody, especially to Muslims.

The problem with trying to control WMDs through things is that even backward countries can now access technology superior to anything available to the Manhattan Project. Department store items are now viable weapons components and one scenario discussed at the nuclear summit supposed the use of hobby drones to spray radioactive material over Western cities.

...In 2016, there are many more powers and WMD technologies and uncertainty has grown. It must be represented by a string of bits so much larger than at the dawn of the nuclear age that checking on any single party no longer reduces uncertainty to zero, only decreases it by some amount. Technology is increasing entropy -- our potential ignorance about the situation -- faster than verification and/or smart diplomacy can reduce it. The fact that North Korea, Iran and Russia skipped Obama's summit means they are outside of his entropy reduction system.

The challenge will only get harder. As Rosa Brooks wrote in Foreign Policy, even modern medicine has become a prime source of lethal technology. "The same breakthroughs that enable personalized cures will also enable personalized afflictions. Picture a rogue scientist crafting a bio-engineered virus that disabled or killed only when it encountered a specific DNA signature — or the DNA signatures of all the close blood relatives of a political leader."

...If humanity is to survive the new nuclear age he must rediscover what is worth fighting for and fight for it or else entropy will take it.

Read more here.