disadvantages of weapons essay

17 Advantages and Disadvantages of Nuclear Weapons

Nuclear weapons are explosive devices that create a destructive force due to the fission or fusion reactions it creates upon detonation. There are several names for this technology, including atom bombs, nukes, a-bombs, and nuclear warheads, but it all works to describe the same technology.

There have only been two times when nuclear weapons were deployed in war. Both of the incidents were initiated by the United States against Japan near the end of World War II. On August 6, 1945, the Army Air Forces detonated a fission bomb that was nicknamed Little Boy over the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, the implosion-type Fat Man was detonated over the city of Nagasaki. These two incidents caused injuries that resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 civilians and military personnel, along with several Americans and Allied troops in the area.

Since these two wartime incidents, there have been over 2,000 detonations of nuclear weapons for demonstration and testing purposes. Despite this high number, only a few countries possess these weapons or are suspected of seeking them. South Africa is the only country on the planet to have independently developed this technology and then renounced and dismantled what they created.

List of the Advantages of Nuclear Weapons

1. It reinforces the idea of nationalism from a border-based perspective. The reality of human existence is that people tend to go toward the areas of the planet where the most resources are available. This pattern of behavior dates all of the way back to the Roman Empire and Ancient Egypt. When governments take action to defend their borders, then they are creating a method of organization that allows for the effective distribution of needed items to their citizens and the world beyond.

Even though a borderless world seems like it could be an excellent idea, borders create an environment where cooperation between cultures becomes a requirement for survival. It forces us to develop an approach that seeks diplomacy first instead of launching missiles whenever someone does something that isn’t liked.

2. Nuclear weapons do serve as a deterrent to a global conflict. One of the primary reasons why there hasn’t been another global war since the 1940s is because of the presence of nuclear weapons. Only a handful of countries possess or share this technology with others, and most nations that do have access to this technology have fewer than 100 weapons. The destructive capabilities in the hands of the military were put on full display over Japan at the end of World War II, and no one wants to go through something like that again. The threat of being over-powered or having mutually-assured destruction is enough to prevent the world’s superpowers from escalating a conflict to the point that a military confrontation becomes necessary.

3. This technology creates a bargaining chip for countries that need it. Israel is believed to be in possession of nuclear weapons, but their government does not officially report this status. North Korea has independently developed this technology since then end of the Korean War, giving it a seat at the negotiation table to the point that President Donald Trump has visited with the leadership of the country on multiple occasions. The threat of devastation from this tech is so great that it forces other nations to listen to what the other has to say. Since there is a desire to avoid the outcomes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is not unusual for concessions to be made to those with the greatest power.

4. Nuclear weapons reduce the threat to a country’s military forces. Today’s nuclear weapons have the ability to fly over 1,000 miles to strike a target with precision. Even the nations with “subpar” technology in this area, such as North Korea, can fly their missiles are enough to impact the sovereignty of another nation. The Skyfall project in Russia presents the idea of equipping a small nuclear reactor to a missile so that it can operate almost indefinitely. Because the deployment of these weapons can occur remotely, there is less of a threat of casualties or loss if an order comes through to launch. It’s not like the 1940s when bombers carried the weapons with an entire flight crew.

5. Governments can position nuclear weapons to a variety of launch locations. Portable launch vehicles make it possible to locate nuclear weapons at almost any point on land. Government installations allow for underground storage and launch capabilities at numerous development sites across their country. Naval tech, including submarines, can support this firepower as well.

Nuclear weapons provide just as much flexibility as their conventional counterparts with this support technology. One can even drop them from a bomber as they did in the 1940s if that is preferred or issue a remote command. This versatility is a definite advantage when considering the overall scope of what this tech can do.

6. Nuclear weapons helped us to create new technologies in other sectors. Even though the destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, the concepts of fission and fusion have helped us to develop a variety of technologies over the year in several different industries. Approximately 10% of the electricity the world uses every year comes from nuclear reactors. Medical practices that use nuclear techniques can help to diagnose and treat diseases when conventional options may not be available or useful. We use nuclear engines on naval craft, and we are exploring this option for space travel as well.

Many people around the world are using the power of nuclear technology to read this content right now. The idea of using it as a weapon may be incomprehensible, but it at least allows us to do good things for the human race too.

7. The reliability of nuclear weapons is one of its greatest attributes. Nuclear fission can operate for up to three years without disruption, which is why it is such a useful option for power generation. When we use the refinement processes with nuclear weapons, this advantage presents itself as well. You can install a missile on a delivery platform, and then have it ready to launch for years on standby mode with a minimum amount of maintenance. It is a technology that increases the readiness factor of a government and its protective capacity while still reducing the threat of war because of the principles of mutually assured destruction.

List of the Disadvantages of Nuclear Weapons

1. There will always be moral and ethical debates about the use of nuclear weapons. We can point to the two cities in Japan that experienced a direct detonation to speak to this advantage. The mass loss of civilian life from nuclear weapons would go far beyond what any mass shooter in the United States would create.

We must also look at the more than 2,000 test explosions that researchers generated in their quest to develop this technology. The primary human-made contribution to the exposure of the world’s population to radiation has come from testing these weapons in the atmosphere from 145-1980. Each test resulted in the unrestrained release into the environment of radioactive materials that dispersed and deposited everywhere on the planet.

2. Nuclear weapon detonations are directly connected to cancer development. Ionizing radiation is a scientifically-proven carcinogen in humans. It is directly linked to most forms of leukemia, thyroid cancer, and cancers in the breast and lungs. The time that can elapse between the exposure to the radiation and the development of a malignancy can be anywhere between 10-40 years. When we look at the degrees of exposure that scientists thought were tolerable in the 1950s, it is clear to see that they were unsafe – and that position is now backed by international recognition of what nuclear weapons can cause.

3. There are direct costs attributed to a government’s nuclear weapons program. The United States spends about $35 billion every year to build, upgrade, operate, and maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile it owns. Figures from Russia where there are a similar number of weapons are about equal. Even third-party estimates of the expense to maintain an entire portfolio of these explosive devices place the expense at $25 billion or higher. That means we could take the money that we spend on these destructive devices, switch it to food development, and cure global hunger overnight with that amount of money.

The figures in this disadvantage don’t include the potential medical costs of over 2.7 million people who may develop cancer over the years because of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

4. Nuclear weapons devastate the environment. The United States tested a massive hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in 1954. It’s more than 65 years later, but this location in the Marshall Islands chain is still not livable. Some of the exiled families say that they are too fearful ever to go back. The U.S. government declared that it was safe to resettle some residents in the 1970s, but they were removed in 1978 after officials discovered that the foods grown on the island contained high levels of radiation. The Nuclear Claims Tribunal has awarded more than $2 billion in land damage and personal injury claims over the years, but it has stopped paying since its compensation fund is entirely exhausted.

There was a total of 67 tests conducted on the Marshall Islands, with the last one occurring in 1958. A 2012 report from the United Nations found that the conditions there are still not livable. This devastation means that the land around a test site or detonation event remains unusable unless there is a targeted and expensive cleanup effort that takes place.

5. The use of nuclear weapons creates a significant threat of terrorism. The Nuclear Threat Initiative works to create a better world from Washington, D.C. by working to prevent terrorism with these harmful weapons. The number of countries that are storing the dangerous materials that could lead to atomic weaponization has decreased from 52 in 1992 to a little over 30 today. Terrorist organizations now have easier access to the materials and knowledge needed to build these weapons as well. Some have even declared their intent to seek the necessary materials to create mass destruction.

If we have nuclear weapons, then we will always have the threat of loss that terrorism could provide. In February 2003 in Tennessee, the final testing of a new saltless uranium processing method created a small explosion and fire. Several incidents that date to the 1940s involve missiles exploding, bombs being accidentally dropped, and similar incidents where it would be possible for a terrorist organization to get their hands on this material if they were to act quickly enough.

6. The development of nuclear weapons creates hazardous waste. There are more than 14,000 metric tons of nuclear waste managed in the United States because of the presence of nuclear weapons. Washington State, at the Hanford Site, once at five plutonium processors and nine nuclear reactors operating simultaneously to produce over 60,000 weapons for the American arsenal. The hazardous waste from these activities is still in storage there in almost 200 tanks, where the threat of a leak can still create health problems for workers more than 50 years later.

The United States does not have a nuclear waste repository where the materials can be safely stored. That means that local storage takes place, requiring extensive management techniques that can create its own set of problems in the future.

7. Degraded delivery systems can cause a nuclear weapon to fail. The storage time for a nuclear weapon may not cause it to degrade as much as conventional devices, but the delivery systems for them to not contain the same advantages. It is possible for the detonation to fail in a variety of ways because the supportive tech does not have the same lifespan benefits. The American stock of intercontinental ballistic missiles is expected to remain in service until at least the year 2032, while naval-based installations on submarines have an additional decade of protective support. Once those deadlines are reached, then the deterrent power of the tech will not have the same impact that it does today.

8. We create nuclear weapons from non-renewable resources. We typically create nuclear weapons from uranium or plutonium, which are both radioactive elements that we harvest from the planet. A third option, called thorium, can come from the waste of nuclear reactors. If we were to transition all of the energy potentials from these destructive devices to provide an emissions-free result, there would still be the risk of a meltdown or reactor explosion that could adversely impact the planet in a variety of ways.

Since the half-life of the radiation produced by some of these technologies can be as much as 5,000 years, the problems that we create today are going to be an issue for future generations long after anyone who reads this content is forgotten.

9. It requires a specific skill set to develop or maintain nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have the capability of remote use, but it requires a skilled workforce to pull the trigger on this advantage. Engineers and scientists are necessary to ensure the viability of this technology throughout its lifetime. Military personnel can be trained to launch, operate, or direct the explosives, but they are not typically responsible for the upkeep work that they require. If the people who know how to manage this tech were to disappear for any reason, in any country, then there would be a significant increase in risk for that region and the rest of the world.

10. We are still dealing with the after-effects of nuclear weapons testing. The United States is responsible for over 50% of the total nuclear weapons tests that have taken place since the 1940s. This fact persists even though the American government last tested this technology in 1992. One example from this disadvantage comes from Project Rulison, which was an underground 40-kiloton nuclear test project that took place between the small towns of Rifle and Parachute in Colorado.

This project is unique because the goal was to study the impact of a nuclear weapon for the release of energy resources. The work found that it could liberate high levels of natural gas, but it also contaminated the fuel so that it was unsuitable for heating homes or cooking with it. A bugger zone is still in place around the site.

The issue with mutually-assured destruction is that it always leaves a lingering threat to the general population. If two superpowers decide to trade launches, such as Russia and the United States, then there would be global consequences to that decision. The life of a single human is more valuable than all of the nuclear weapons in stockpiles around the globe right now.

When we look at the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear weapons, the idea of a threat deterrent is not genuine peace. It is a race to create something bigger or more defensive in an arms battle that never seems to end. The use of significant conventional weapons without the threat of radiation exposure and the severe loss of civilian life could accomplish a similar goal.

Nuclear weapons are here to stay as a threat. We might not think about the idea of a missile falling from the sky every day, but history does teach us that we must continue to be vigilant about protecting ourselves and our families from the dangers these weapons create.

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Publishing Disclaimer: In all of its publications and products, Military Review presents professional information. However, the views expressed therein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Army University, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.

Pros and Cons of Autonomous Weapons Systems

Amitai etzioni, phd, oren etzioni, phd.

As autonomous weapons systems move from concept to reality, military planners, roboticists, and ethicists debate the advantages, disadvantages, and morality of their use in current and future operating environments. (Image by Peggy Frierson)

Autonomous weapons systems and military robots are progressing from science fiction movies to designers’ drawing boards, to engineering laboratories, and to the battlefield. These machines have prompted a debate among military planners, roboticists, and ethicists about the development and deployment of weapons that can perform increasingly advanced functions, including targeting and application of force, with little or no human oversight.

Some military experts hold that autonomous weapons systems not only confer significant strategic and tactical advantages in the battleground but also that they are preferable on moral grounds to the use of human combatants. In contrast, critics hold that these weapons should be curbed, if not banned altogether, for a variety of moral and legal reasons. This article first reviews arguments by those who favor autonomous weapons systems and then by those who oppose them. Next, it discusses challenges to limiting and defining autonomous weapons. Finally, it closes with a policy recommendation.

Arguments in Support of Autonomous Weapons Systems

Support for autonomous weapons systems falls into two general categories. Some members of the defense community advocate autonomous weapons because of military advantages. Other supporters emphasize moral justifications for using them.

Military advantages. Those who call for further development and deployment of autonomous weapons systems generally point to several military advantages. First, autonomous weapons systems act as a force multiplier. That is, fewer warfighters are needed for a given mission, and the efficacy of each warfighter is greater. Next, advocates credit autonomous weapons systems with expanding the battlefield, allowing combat to reach into areas that were previously inaccessible. Finally, autonomous weapons systems can reduce casualties by removing human warfighters from dangerous missions. 1

The Department of Defense’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap: 2007-2032 provides additional reasons for pursuing autonomous weapons systems. These include that robots are better suited than humans for “‘dull, dirty, or dangerous’ missions.” 2 An example of a dull mission is long-duration sorties. An example of a dirty mission is one that exposes humans to potentially harmful radiological material. An example of a dangerous mission is explosive ordnance disposal. Maj. Jeffrey S. Thurnher, U.S. Army, adds, “[lethal autonomous robots] have the unique potential to operate at a tempo faster than humans can possibly achieve and to lethally strike even when communications links have been severed.” 3

In addition, the long-term savings that could be achieved through fielding an army of military robots have been highlighted. In a 2013 article published in The Fiscal Times , David Francis cites Department of Defense figures showing that “each soldier in Afghanistan costs the Pentagon roughly $850,000 per year.” 4 Some estimate the cost per year to be even higher. Conversely, according to Francis, “the TALON robot—a small rover that can be outfitted with weapons, costs $230,000.” 5 According to Defense News, Gen. Robert Cone, former commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, suggested at the 2014 Army Aviation Symposium that by relying more on “support robots,” the Army eventually could reduce the size of a brigade from four thousand to three thousand soldiers without a concomitant reduction in effectiveness. 6

Air Force Maj. Jason S. DeSon, writing in the Air Force Law Review , notes the potential advantages of autonomous aerial weapons systems. 7 According to DeSon, the physical strain of high-G maneuvers and the intense mental concentration and situational awareness required of fighter pilots make them very prone to fatigue and exhaustion; robot pilots, on the other hand would not be subject to these physiological and mental constraints. Moreover, fully autonomous planes could be programmed to take genuinely random and unpredictable action that could confuse an opponent. More striking still, Air Force Capt. Michael Byrnes predicts that a single unmanned aerial vehicle with machine-controlled maneuvering and accuracy could, “with a few hundred rounds of ammunition and sufficient fuel reserves,” take out an entire fleet of aircraft, presumably one with human pilots. 8

In 2012, a report by the Defense Science Board, in support of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, identified “six key areas in which advances in autonomy would have significant benefit to [an] unmanned system: perception, planning, learning, human-robot interaction, natural language understanding, and multiagent coordination.” 9 Perception , or perceptual processing, refers to sensors and sensing. Sensors include hardware, and sensing includes software. 10

Next, according to the Defense Science Board, planning refers to “computing a sequence or partial order of actions that … [achieve] a desired state.” 11 The process relies on effective processes and “algorithms needed to make decisions about action (provide autonomy) in situations in which humans are not in the environment (e.g., space, the ocean).” 12 Then, learning refers to how machines can collect and process large amounts of data into knowledge. The report asserts that research has shown machines process data into knowledge more effectively than people do. 13 It gives the example of machine learning for autonomous navigation in land vehicles and robots. 14

Human-robot interaction refers to “how people work or play with robots.” 15 Robots are quite different from other computers or tools because they are “physically situated agents,” and human users interact with them in distinct ways. 16 Research on interaction needs to span a number of domains well beyond engineering, including psychology, cognitive science, and communications, among others.

“ Natural language processing concerns … systems that can communicate with people using ordinary human languages.” 17 Moreover, “natural language is the most normal and intuitive way for humans to instruct autonomous systems; it allows them to provide diverse, high-level goals and strategies rather than detailed teleoperation.” 18 Hence, further development of the ability of autonomous weapons systems to respond to commands in a natural language is necessary.

Finally, the Defense Science Board uses the term multiagent coordination for circumstances in which a task is distributed among “multiple robots, software agents, or humans.” 19 Tasks could be centrally planned or coordinated through interactions of the agents. This sort of coordination goes beyond mere cooperation because “it assumes that the agents have a cognitive understanding of each other’s capabilities, can monitor progress towards the goal, and engage in more human-like teamwork.” 20

Moral justifications. Several military experts and roboticists have argued that autonomous weapons systems should not only be regarded as morally acceptable but also that they would in fact be ethically preferable to human fighters. For example, roboticist Ronald C. Arkin believes autonomous robots in the future will be able to act more “humanely” on the battlefield for a number of reasons, including that they do not need to be programmed with a self-preservation instinct, potentially eliminating the need for a “shoot-first, ask questions later” attitude. 21 The judgments of autonomous weapons systems will not be clouded by emotions such as fear or hysteria, and the systems will be able to process much more incoming sensory information than humans without discarding or distorting it to fit preconceived notions. Finally, per Arkin, in teams comprised of human and robot soldiers, the robots could be more relied upon to report ethical infractions they observed than would a team of humans who might close ranks. 22

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, asserts there might be ethical advantages to removing humans from high-stress combat zones in favor of robots. He points to neuroscience research that suggests the neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control can shut down when overloaded with stress, leading to sexual assaults and other crimes that soldiers would otherwise be less likely to commit. However, Pryer sets aside the question of whether or not waging war via robots is ethical in the abstract. Instead, he suggests that because it sparks so much moral outrage among the populations from whom the United States most needs support, robot warfare has serious strategic disadvantages, and it fuels the cycle of perpetual warfare. 23

Arguments Opposed to Autonomous Weapons Systems

While some support autonomous weapons systems with moral arguments, others base their opposition on moral grounds. Still others assert that moral arguments against autonomous weapons systems are misguided.

Opposition on moral grounds. In July 2015, an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons was released at an international joint conference on artificial intelligence. The letter warns, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is—practically if not legally—feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.” 24 The letter also notes that AI has the potential to benefit humanity, but that if a military AI arms race ensues, AI’s reputation could be tarnished, and a public backlash might curtail future benefits of AI. The letter has an impressive list of signatories, including Elon Musk (inventor and founder of Tesla), Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple), physicist Stephen Hawking (University of Cambridge), and Noam Chomsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), among others. Over three thousand AI and robotics researchers have also signed the letter. The open letter simply calls for “a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.” 25

We note in passing that it is often unclear whether a weapon is offensive or defensive. Thus, many assume that an effective missile defense shield is strictly defensive, but it can be extremely destabilizing if it allows one nation to launch a nuclear strike against another without fear of retaliation.

In April 2013, the United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council. The report recommended that member states should declare and implement moratoria on the testing, production, transfer, and deployment of lethal autonomous robotics (LARs) until an internationally agreed upon framework for LARs has been established. 26

That same year, a group of engineers, AI and robotics experts, and other scientists and researchers from thirty-seven countries issued the “Scientists’ Call to Ban Autonomous Lethal Robots.” The statement notes the lack of scientific evidence that robots could, in the future, have “the functionality required for accurate target identification, situational awareness, or decisions regarding the proportional use of force.” 27 Hence, they may cause a high level of collateral damage. The statement ends by insisting that “decisions about the application of violent force must not be delegated to machines.” 28

Indeed, the delegation of life-or-death decision making to nonhuman agents is a recurring concern of those who oppose autonomous weapons systems. The most obvious manifestation of this concern relates to systems that are capable of choosing their own targets. Thus, highly regarded computer scientist Noel Sharkey has called for a ban on “lethal autonomous targeting” because it violates the Principle of Distinction, considered one of the most important rules of armed conflict—autonomous weapons systems will find it very hard to determine who is a civilian and who is a combatant, which is difficult even for humans. 29 Allowing AI to make decisions about targeting will most likely result in civilian casualties and unacceptable collateral damage.

Another major concern is the problem of accountability when autonomous weapons systems are deployed. Ethicist Robert Sparrow highlights this ethical issue by noting that a fundamental condition of international humanitarian law, or jus in bello , requires that some person must be held responsible for civilian deaths. Any weapon or other means of war that makes it impossible to identify responsibility for the casualties it causes does not meet the requirements of jus in bello , and, therefore, should not be employed in war. 30

This issue arises because AI-equipped machines make decisions on their own, so it is difficult to determine whether a flawed decision is due to flaws in the program or in the autonomous deliberations of the AI-equipped (so-called smart) machines. The nature of this problem was highlighted when a driverless car violated the speed limits by moving too slowly on a highway, and it was unclear to whom the ticket should be issued. 31 In situations where a human being makes the decision to use force against a target, there is a clear chain of accountability, stretching from whoever actually “pulled the trigger” to the commander who gave the order. In the case of autonomous weapons systems, no such clarity exists. It is unclear who or what are to be blamed or held liable.

What Sharkey, Sparrow and the signatories of the open letter propose could be labeled “upstream regulation,” that is, a proposal for setting limits on the development of autonomous weapons systems technology and drawing red lines that future technological developments should not be allowed to cross. This kind of upstream approach tries to foresee the direction of technological development and preempt the dangers such developments would pose. Others prefer “downstream regulation,” which takes a wait-and-see approach by developing regulations as new advances occur. Legal scholars Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman, who advocate this approach, argue that regulation will have to emerge along with the technology because they believe that morality will coevolve with technological development. 32

Thus, arguments about the irreplaceability of human conscience and moral judgment may have to be revisited. 33 In addition, they suggest that as humans become more accustomed to machines performing functions with life-or-death implications or consequences (such as driving cars or performing surgeries), humans will most likely become more comfortable with AI technology’s incorporation into weaponry. Thus, Anderson and Waxman propose what might be considered a communitarian solution by suggesting that the United States should work on developing norms and principles (rather than binding legal rules) guiding and constraining research and development—and eventual deployment—of autonomous weapons systems. Those norms could help establish expectations about legally or ethically appropriate conduct. Anderson and Waxman write,

To be successful, the United States government would have to resist two extreme instincts. It would have to resist its own instincts to hunker down behind secrecy and avoid discussing and defending even guiding principles. It would also have to refuse to cede the moral high ground to critics of autonomous lethal systems, opponents demanding some grand international treaty or multilateral regime to regulate or even prohibit them. 34

Counterarguments. In response, some argue against any attempt to apply to robots the language of morality that applies to human agents. Military ethicist George Lucas Jr. points out, for example, that robots cannot feel anger or a desire to “get even” by seeking retaliation for harm done to their compatriots. 35 Lucas holds that the debate thus far has been obfuscated by the confusion of machine autonomy with moral autonomy. The Roomba vacuum cleaner and Patriot missile “are both ‘autonomous’ in that they perform their assigned missions, including encountering and responding to obstacles, problems, and unforeseen circumstances with minimal human oversight,” but not in the sense that they can change or abort their mission if they have “moral objections.” 36 Lucas thus holds that the primary concern of engineers and designers developing autonomous weapons systems should not be ethics but rather safety and reliability , which means taking due care to address the possible risks of malfunctions, mistakes, or misuse that autonomous weapons systems will present. We note, though, that safety is of course a moral value as well.

Lt. Col. Shane R. Reeves and Maj. William J. Johnson, judge advocates in the U.S. Army, note that there are battlefields absent of civilians, such as underwater and space, where autonomous weapons could reduce the possibility of suffering and death by eliminating the need for combatants. 37 We note that this valid observation does not agitate against a ban in other, in effect most, battlefields.

Michael N. Schmitt of the Naval War College makes a distinction between weapons that are illegal per se and the unlawful use of otherwise legal weapons. For example, a rifle is not prohibited under international law, but using it to shoot civilians would constitute an unlawful use. On the other hand, some weapons (e.g., biological weapons) are unlawful per se, even when used only against combatants. Thus, Schmitt grants that some autonomous weapons systems might contravene international law, but “it is categorically not the case that all such systems will do so.” 38 Thus, even an autonomous system that is incapable of distinguishing between civilians and combatants should not necessarily be unlawful per se, as autonomous weapons systems could be used in situations where no civilians were present, such as against tank formations in the desert or against warships. Such a system could be used unlawfully, though, if it were employed in contexts where civilians were present. We assert that some limitations on such weapons should be called for.

In their review of the debate, legal scholars Gregory Noone and Diana Noone conclude that everyone is in agreement that any autonomous weapons system would have to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), and thus be able to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. They write, “No academic or practitioner is stating anything to the contrary; therefore, this part of any argument from either side must be ignored as a red herring. Simply put, no one would agree to any weapon that ignores LOAC obligations.” 39

Soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, move forward toward simulated opposing forces with a multipurpose unmanned tactical transport 22 July 2016 during the Pacific Manned-Unmanned Initiative at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, Hawaii. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Christopher Hubenthal, U.S. Air Force)

Limits on Autonomous Weapons Systems and Definitions of Autonomy

The international community has agreed to limits on mines and chemical and biological weapons, but an agreement on limiting autonomous weapons systems would meet numerous challenges. One challenge is the lack of consensus on how to define the autonomy of weapons systems, even among members of the Department of Defense. A standard definition that accounts for levels of autonomy could help guide an incremental approach to proposing limits.

Limits on autonomous weapons systems. We take it for granted that no nation would agree to forswear the use of autonomous weapons systems unless its adversaries would do the same. At first blush, it may seem that it is not beyond the realm of possibility to obtain an international agreement to ban autonomous weapons systems or at least some kinds of them.

Many bans exist in one category or another of weapons, and they have been quite well honored and enforced. These include the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (known as the Ottawa Treaty, which became international law in 1999); the Chemical Weapons Convention (ratified in 1997); and the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (known as the Biological Weapons Convention, adopted in 1975). The record of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (adopted in 1970) is more complicated, but it is credited with having stopped several nations from developing nuclear arms and causing at least one to give them up.

The U.S. Army Robotic and Autonomous Systems Strategy , published March 2017 by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, describes how the Army intends to integrate new technologies into future organizations to help ensure overmatch against increasingly capable enemies. Five capability objectives are to increase situational awareness, lighten soldiers’ workloads, sustain the force, facilitate movement and maneuver, and protect the force. To view the strategy, visit https://www.tradoc.army.mil/FrontPageContent/Docs/ RAS_Strategy.pdf .

Some advocates of a ban on autonomous weapons systems seek to ban not merely production and deployment but also research, development, and testing of these machines. This may well be impossible as autonomous weapons systems can be developed and tested in small workshops and do not leave a trail. Nor could one rely on satellites for inspection data for the same reasons. We hence assume that if such a ban were possible, it would mainly focus on deployment and mass production.

Even so, such a ban would face considerable difficulties. While it is possible to determine what is a chemical weapon and what is not (despite some disagreements at the margin, for example, about law enforcement use of irritant chemical weapons), and to clearly define nuclear arms or land mines, autonomous weapons systems come with very different levels of autonomy. 40 A ban on all autonomous weapons would require foregoing many modern weapons already mass produced and deployed.

Definitions of autonomy. Different definitions have been attached to the word “autonomy” in different Department of Defense documents, and the resulting concepts suggest rather different views on the future of robotic warfare. One definition, used by the Defense Science Board, views autonomy merely as high-end automation: “a capability (or a set of capabilities) that enables a particular action of a system to be automatic or, within programmed boundaries, ‘self-governing.’” 41 According to this definition, already existing capabilities, such as autopilot used in aircraft, could qualify as autonomous.

Another definition, used in the Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011–2036 , suggests a qualitatively different view of autonomy: “an autonomous system is able to make a decision based on a set of rules and/or limitations. It is able to determine what information is important in making a decision.” 42 In this view, autonomous systems are less predictable than merely automated ones, as the AI not only is performing a specified action but also is making decisions and thus potentially taking an action that a human did not order. A human is still responsible for programming the behavior of the autonomous system, and the actions the system takes would have to be consistent with the laws and strategies provided by humans. However, no individual action would be completely predictable or preprogrammed.

It is easy to find still other definitions of autonomy. The International Committee of the Red Cross defines autonomous weapons as those able to “independently select and attack targets, i.e., with autonomy in the ‘critical functions’ of acquiring, tracking, selecting and attacking targets.” 43

A 2012 Human Rights Watch report by Bonnie Docherty, Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots , defines three categories of autonomy. Based on the kind of human involvement, the categories are human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, and human-out-of-the-loop weapons. 44

“Human- in-the- loop weapons [are] robots that can select targets and deliver force only with a human command.” 45 Numerous examples of the first type already are in use. For example, Israel’s Iron Dome system detects incoming rockets, predicts their trajectory, and then sends this information to a human soldier who decides whether to launch an interceptor rocket. 46

“Human- on-the -loop weapons [are] robots that can select targets and deliver force under the oversight of a human operator who can override the robots’ actions.” 47 An example mentioned by Docherty includes the SGR-A1 built by Samsung, a sentry robot used along the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It uses a low-light camera and pattern-recognition software to detect intruders and then issues a verbal warning. If the intruder does not surrender, the robot has a machine gun that can be fired remotely by a soldier the robot has alerted, or by the robot itself if it is in fully automatic mode. 48

The United States also deploys human-on-the-loop weapons systems. For example, the MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System has been used on Navy ships since the 1980s, and it is capable of detecting, evaluating, tracking, engaging, and using force against antiship missiles and high-speed aircraft threats without any human commands. 49 The Center for a New American Security published a white paper that estimated as of 2015 at least thirty countries have deployed or are developing human-supervised systems. 50

“Human- out-of -the-loop weapons [are] robots capable of selecting targets and delivering force without any human input or interaction.” 51 This kind of autonomous weapons system is the source of much concern about “killing machines.” Military strategist Thomas K. Adams warned that, in the future, humans would be reduced to making only initial policy decisions about war, and they would have mere symbolic authority over automated systems. 52 In the Human Rights Watch report, Docherty warns, “By eliminating human involvement in the decision to use lethal force in armed conflict, fully autonomous weapons would undermine other, nonlegal protections for civilians.” 53 For example, a repressive dictator could deploy emotionless robots to kill and instill fear among a population without having to worry about soldiers who might empathize with their victims (who might be neighbors, acquaintances, or even family members) and then turn against the dictator.

For the purposes of this paper, we take autonomy to mean a machine has the ability to make decisions based on information gathered by the machine and to act on the basis of its own deliberations, beyond the instructions and parameters its producers, programmers, and users provided to the machine.

A Way to Initiate an International Agreement Limiting Autonomous Weapons

We find it hard to imagine nations agreeing to return to a world in which weapons had no measure of autonomy. On the contrary, development in AI leads one to expect that more and more machines and instruments of all kinds will become more autonomous. Bombers and fighter aircraft having no human pilot seem inevitable. Although it is true that any level of autonomy entails, by definition, some loss of human control, this genie has left the bottle and we see no way to put it back again.

Where to begin. The most promising way to proceed is to determine whether one can obtain an international agreement to ban fully autonomous weapons with missions that cannot be aborted and that cannot be recalled once they are launched. If they malfunction and target civilian centers, there is no way to stop them. Like unexploded landmines placed without marks, these weapons will continue to kill even after the sides settle their difference and sue for peace.

One may argue that gaining such an agreement should not be arduous because no rational policy maker will favor such a weapon. Indeed, the Pentagon has directed that “autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” 5 4

Why to begin. However, one should note that human-out-of-the-loop arms are very effective in reinforcing a red line. Declaration by representatives of one nation that if another nation engages in a certain kind of hostile behavior, swift and severe retaliation will follow, are open to misinterpretation by the other side, even if backed up with deployment of troops or other military assets.

Leaders, drawing on considerable historical experience, may bet that they be able to cross the red line and be spared because of one reason or another. Hence, arms without a human in the loop make for much more credible red lines. (This is a form of the “precommitment strategy” discussed by Thomas Schelling in Arms and Influence , in which one party limits its own options by obligating itself to retaliate, thus making its deterrence more credible.) 55

We suggest that nations might be willing to forgo this advantage of fully autonomous arms in order to gain the assurance that once hostilities ceased, they could avoid becoming entangled in new rounds of fighting because some bombers were still running loose and attacking the other side, or because some bombers might malfunction and attack civilian centers. Finally, if a ban on fully autonomous weapons were agreed upon and means of verification were developed, one could aspire to move toward limiting weapons with a high but not full measure of autonomy.

The authors are indebted to David Kroeker Maus for substantial research on this article.

• Gary E. Marchant et al., “International Governance of Autonomous Military Robots,” Columbia Science and Technology Law Review 12 (June 2011): 272–76, accessed 27 March 2017, http://stlr.org/download/volumes/volume12/marchant.pdf .
• James R. Clapper Jr. et al., Unmanned Systems Roadmap: 2007-2032 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense [DOD], 2007), 19, accessed 28 March 2017, http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/2007/dod-unmanned-systems-roadmap_2007-2032.pdf .
• Jeffrey S. Thurnher, “Legal Implications of Fully Autonomous Targeting,” Joint Force Quarterly 67 (4th Quarter, October 2012): 83, accessed 8 March 2017, http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-67/JFQ-67_77-84_Thurnher.pdf .
• David Francis, “How a New Army of Robots Can Cut the Defense Budget,” Fiscal Times, 2 April 2013, accessed 8 March 2017, http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/04/02/How-a-New-Army-of-Robots-Can-Cut-the-Defense-Budget . Francis attributes the $850,000 cost estimate to an unnamed DOD source, presumed from 2012 or 2013.
• Quoted in Evan Ackerman, “U.S. Army Considers Replacing Thousands of Soldiers with Robots,” IEEE Spectrum , 22 January 2014, accessed 28 March 2016, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/army-considers-replacing-thousands-of-soldiers-with-robots .
• Jason S. DeSon, “Automating the Right Stuff? The Hidden Ramifications of Ensuring Autonomous Aerial Weapon Systems Comply with International Humanitarian Law,” Air Force Law Review 72 (2015): 85–122, accessed 27 March 2017, http://www.afjag.af.mil/Portals/77/documents/AFD-150721-006.pdf .
• Michael Byrnes, “Nightfall: Machine Autonomy in Air-to-Air Combat,” Air & Space Power Journal 23, no. 3 (May-June 2014): 54, accessed 8 March 2017, http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-May-Jun/F-Byrnes.pdf?source=GovD .
• Defense Science Board, Task Force Report: The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems (Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, July 2012), 31.
• Ibid., 38–39.
• Ronald C. Arkin, “The Case for Ethical Autonomy in Unmanned Systems,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010): 332–41.
• Douglas A. Pryer, “The Rise of the Machines: Why Increasingly ‘Perfect’ Weapons Help Perpetuate Our Wars and Endanger Our Nation,” Military Review 93, no. 2 (2013): 14–24.
• “Autonomous Weapons: An Open Letter from AI [Artificial Intelligence] & Robotics Researchers,” Future of Life Institute website, 28 July 2015, accessed 8 March 2017, http://futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous-weapons/ .
• Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Christof Heyns , September 2013, United Nations Human Rights Council, 23rd Session, Agenda Item 3, United Nations Document A/HRC/23/47.
• International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), “Scientists’ Call to Ban Autonomous Lethal Robots,” ICRAC website, October 2013, accessed 24 March 2017, icrac.net .
• Noel Sharkey, “Saying ‘No!’ to Lethal Autonomous Targeting,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010): 369–83, accessed 28 March 2017, doi:10.1080/15027570.2010.537903 . For more on this subject, see Peter Asaro, “On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems: Human Rights, Automation, and the Dehumanization of Lethal Decision-making,” International Review of the Red Cross 94, no. 886 (2012): 687–709.
• Robert Sparrow, “Killer Robots,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2007): 62–77.
• For more discussion on this topic, see Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni, “Keeping AI Legal,” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 19, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 133–46, accessed 8 March 2017, http://www.jetlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Etzioni_Final.pdf .
• Kenneth Anderson and Matthew C. Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Autonomous Weapon Systems: Why a Ban Won’t Work and How the Laws of War Can,” Stanford University, Hoover Institution Press, Jean Perkins Task Force on National Security and Law Essay Series, 9 April 2013.
• Anderson and Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers,” Policy Review 176 (December 2012): 46.
• George Lucas Jr., “Engineering, Ethics & Industry: the Moral Challenges of Lethal Autonomy,” in Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military , ed. Bradley Jay Strawser (New York: Oxford, 2013).
• Ibid., 218.
• Shane Reeves and William Johnson, “Autonomous Weapons: Are You Sure these Are Killer Robots? Can We Talk About It?,” in Department of the Army Pamphlet 27-50-491, The Army Lawyer (Charlottesville, VA: Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, April 2014), 25–31.
• Michael N. Schmitt, “Autonomous Weapon Systems and International Humanitarian Law: a Reply to the Critics,” Harvard National Security Journal , 5 February 2013 , accessed 28 March 2017, http://harvardnsj.org/2013/02/autonomous-weapon-systems-and-international-humanitarian-law-a-reply-to-the-critics/ .
• Gregory P. Noone and Diana C. Noone, “The Debate over Autonomous Weapons Systems,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 47, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 29, accessed 27 March 2017, http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/jil/vol47/iss1/6/ .
• Neil Davison, ed., ‘Non-lethal’ Weapons (Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
• DOD Defense Science Board, Task Force Report: The Role of Autonomy in DOD Systems , 1.
• DOD, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office [GPO], 2011), 43.
• International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Expert Meeting 26–28 March 2014 report, “Autonomous Weapon Systems: Technical, Military, Legal and Humanitarian Aspects” (Geneva: ICRC, November 2014), 5.
• Bonnie Docherty, Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots (Cambridge, MA: Human Rights Watch, 19 November 2012), 2, accessed 10 March 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/11/19/losing-humanity/case-against-killer-robots .
• Paul Marks, “Iron Dome Rocket Smasher Set to Change Gaza Conflict,” New Scientist Daily News online, 20 November 2012, accessed 24 March 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22518-iron-dome-rocket-smasher-set-to-change-gaza-conflict/ .
• Docherty, Losing Humanity, 2.
• Ibid.; Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design (Arlington, VA: Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, 20 December 2008), accessed 24 March 2017, http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=phil_fac .
• “MK 15—Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS)” Navy Fact Sheet , 25 January 2017, accessed 10 March 2017, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_print.asp?cid=2100&tid=487&ct=2&page=1 .
• Paul Scharre and Michael Horowitz, “An Introduction to Autonomy in Weapons Systems” (working paper, Center for a New American Security, February 2015), 18, accessed 24 March 2017, http://www.cnas.org/ .
• Docherty, Losing Humanity , 2.
• Thomas K. Adams, “Future Warfare and the Decline of Human Decisionmaking,” Parameters 31, no. 4 (Winter 2001–2002): 57–71.
• Docherty, Losing Humanity , 4.
• DOD Directive 3000.09, Autonomy in Weapon Systems (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 21 November 2012), 2, accessed 10 March 2017, http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/300009p.pdf .
• Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence  ( New Haven: Yale University, 1966).

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University. He served as a senior advisor at the Carter White House and taught at Columbia University, Harvard Business School, and the University of California at Berkeley. A study by Richard Posner ranked him among the top one hundred American intellectuals. His most recent book is Foreign Policy: Thinking Outside the Box (2016).

Oren Etzioni is chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He received a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from Harvard University. He has been a professor at the University of Washington’s computer science department since 1991. He was the founder or cofounder of several companies, including Farecast (later sold to Microsoft) and Decide (later sold to eBay), and the author of over one hundred technical papers that have garnered over twenty-five thousand citations.

Office of the Secretary of Defense Logistics Program fellows visit the bridge of the USNS Gilliland 28 October 2015 during a tour of the Military Sealift Command (MSC) ship. Shown from left to right are Stanley McMillian, Lt. Col. Ed Hogan ( kneeling ), Bryan Jerkatis, Donald Gillespie, Art Clark (MSC Surge Sealift Program Readiness Officer), USNS Gilliland’s Master Keith Finnerty, and Renee Hubbard. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Navy)

The Office of the Secretary of Defense Logistics Fellows Program

The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Logistics Fellows Program is open to field-grade officer (O4 to O5) and Department of Defense (DOD) civilian logisticians (GS-13 to GS-14). According to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness, which administers the program, the one-year fellowship is a developmental assignment that fosters learning, growth, and experiential opportunities.

Fellows participate in policy formulation and department-wide oversight responsibilities. They tour public- and private-sector logistics organizations to learn how they conduct operations and to observe industry best practices. They gain insight into legislative processes through visits to Congress, and they attend national-level forums and engage in collaborative efforts with industry partners. Fellows can observe and interact with appointed and career senior executives and flag officers, including one-on-one meetings with senior logistics leaders in the military departments, joint staff, OSD, and other agencies. They can gain a deeper understanding of the OSD perspective and how it affects the DOD enterprise. More information about the program and how to apply can be found at http://www.acq.osd.mil/log/lmr/fellows_program.html .

May-June 2017

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16 Pros and Cons of Nuclear Weapons

How does one keep a society safe at a national level?

In the past, city-states would build walls to protect the population. As technologies advanced, nations rushed to develop deadlier weapons than their enemies so that the threat of loss was greater than the reward of taking territory.

Those technologies have now developed into nuclear weapons. The destructive power of a nuclear weapon is just one threat to consider. The radioactive fallout from such a weapon can cause long-term consequences for a population that was close to the explosion. Radiated soil, weapon debris, and radioactive particles falling from the sky are all threats that must be taken seriously, which means a nation with nuclear weapons provides a great threat to a potential invader.

If enough nuclear weapons are launched and allowed to detonate, however, then life as we know it on our planet will cease to exist. Any survivors would be forced to endure unthinkable conditions.

Here are the essential pros and cons of nuclear weapons to consider.

The Pros of Nuclear Weapons

1. It is a deterrent for starting a major conflict. Only a handful of nations are armed with nuclear weapons. The US and Russia have the most weapons, but France, China, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan all have more than 100 weapons. The presence of these weapons and their immense destructive capabilities is a major deterrent for starting a major conflict, like the two world wars that are fought in the first half of the 20th century. Even when both nations have nuclear weapons, their mutually assured destruction is enough to cause diplomacy to rule the day.

2. It reinforces national borders. Our society is becoming ever-more global. Because of the internet, communications improvements, and other technological advances, we can talk with anyone, anywhere, with a simple data connection. New transportation technologies are in development that can provide long-distance transportation at speeds which were unthinkable just a generation ago. By reinforcing national borders, a global society of cooperation can be built through negotiation and diplomacy instead of warfare.

3. It changes the power and status of a nation. Countries with nuclear weapons are treated different on the global stage than countries without those weapons. North Korea may only have a dozen or so nuclear weapons at best estimate, but their demands are taken with an extra level of seriousness and scrutiny because they have developed rudimentary nuclear weapon technology. Because there is a desire to avoid such a devastating conflict, most nations with nuclear weapons can generally get what they want on-demand.

4. They can be fired without a direct threat to personnel. The nuclear weapons dropped in Japan were carried by bombers, staffed with a flight crew. Rockets can be fired remotely from stations and intercontinental ballistic technologies can let someone manage the weapon from thousands of miles away. Nuclear weapons do not require a battlefield presence in the same way a conventional weapon may require.

5. Nuclear weapons can be positioned in a variety of locations. Submarines and naval craft can be outfitted with nuclear weapons so that they can be fired from any ocean-based location on the planet. Storage silos, buried underground, can fire ICBM-outfitted nuclear weapons. They can be fired from remote trucks, put into aircraft missiles, or still be dropped by bombers like they were in the 1940s. The versatility of positioning that a nuclear weapon offers is quite profound.

6. They provide the foundations for other technologies. The technologies that have helped to create nuclear weapons have fostered other technologies that have benefited society in many ways. Nuclear power provides a relatively clean source of energy that is used to power hundreds of thousands of homes around the world. Nuclear reactors have been used to build naval vessels. Many types of nuclear-powered propulsion have been proposed for future spacecraft.

7. It is a highly reliable technology. As a power source, nuclear energy can run uninterrupted for more than a year without disruption, even during difficult weather conditions. The refinement of a nuclear weapon is similar to this advantage. Once installed, the delivery platform reliability of the weapon is strong. Even if the warheads are not modernized, the surety of the weapon and its readiness make it a consistent threat that cannot be ignored.

The Cons of Nuclear Weapons

1. They have added development and maintenance costs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the United States spends an estimated $34.8 billion per year to maintain, operate, and upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal. Estimates from Nuclear Threat Initiative suggest the figures may be a little lower, but still costing the US up to $25 billion per year. To put that in perspective, an investment into food products at that level would provide up to 75 billion meals for those living in poverty.

2. Detonation has a major ethical impact. Only two cities have ever been directly affected by nuclear weapons in history. Both were in Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just two bombs caused the death of over 129,000 people, with many of them being civilians. Acute effects from the bombs may have contributed to the deaths of over 250,000 additional people in the following decades. Even if military complexes are struck with a nuclear weapon, there will be civilian casualties.

3. There are environmental concerns which must be considered with a detonation. Since 1945, the testing of nuclear weapons has caused more than 2,100 detonations that have happened around the globe. Some have occurred underwater, while others have occurred underground. Every detonation creates radiation that, if someone were exposed to it, could create grave consequences. The threat of multiple simultaneous nuclear detonations could create a prolonged winter that would ravage the planet and potentially cause all life to cease.

4. It provides a major terror threat. The size of a nuclear weapon is relatively small. With terrorism on the rise around the world, the threat of a “dirty bomb” cannot be ignored. A terrorist group with a nuclear weapon could cause immense and immediate damage that could change the path of an entire society. The Patriot Act of 2001 was in response to airplanes being flown into buildings. Imagine would the aftermath of a nuclear explosion could be.

5. Waste from the development of nuclear weapons must be stored somewhere. The challenges of storing nuclear waste are evident at the Hanford Site in Washington State. It was the location of the world’s first plutonium production reactor. Up to 9 nuclear reactors and 5 plutonium processors were operating at once, creating 60,000 weapons for the US nuclear arsenal. Now the radioactive waste is stored in 177 storage tanks. Breaches and leaks are still a very real threat, despite the lack of production that occurs there today.

6. It is a non-renewable resource. Nuclear fuels are plutonium and uranium, which are radioactive metals. This means it is a resource that is non-renewable. Even if the all the nuclear energy from weapons was transitioned into usable energy that wouldn’t produce carbon dioxide, any accident could create a threat to human health that could potentially last for thousands of years. In many ways, nuclear technologies are much like fossil fuels, but with a different threat to the environment.

7. A nuclear weapon can fail because of a degraded delivery system. Even if the nuclear weapon is viable, the delivery system for the weapon may not be viable. Many nuclear weapons are being maintained with delivery systems that have not been modernized. In the US, the current stock of ICBM nuclear weapons is expected to remain in service until 2032. Submarine-based nuclear weapons are expected to remain in service until 2042. Unless delivery systems are upgraded and maintained in the same way as their weapon counterparts, they may not be an effective deterrent.

8. They require a skilled workforce to operate. Although nuclear weapons can be operated from a distance, a skilled workforce is required to make them a useful tool. Scientists, engineers, and operators are critical to the viability of any nuclear weapon. Without a skilled workforce in support, the safety and security of the nuclear weapons becomes doubtful and that doubt can be enough to make the weapons less of a deterrent.

9. Testing must require a detonation at some point. Computer simulations can show the effects of a nuclear weapon and what an expected fallout happens to be. To determine if the technology is viable, however, an actual detonation must take place. Since July 1945, the United States has fired over 1,100 nuclear weapon as part of the testing process. No tests have been conducted, however, since September 1992.

The pros and cons of nuclear weapons show that they can serve as a deterrent and support “positive” technologies. There is just one question that continues to remain unanswered: what will happen if someone finally calls the bluff and attacks a nation with nuclear capabilities? It is the potential answer to that questions which should cause everyone to pause and consider the continued need for these weapons.

Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation

The consequences of nuclear war would be devastating. much more should – and can – be done to reduce the risk that humanity will ever fight such a war..

The shockwave and heat that the detonation of a single nuclear weapon creates can end the lives of millions of people immediately.

But even larger is the devastation that would follow a nuclear war.

The first reason for this is nuclear fallout. Radioactive dust from the detonating bombs rises up into the atmosphere and spreads out over large areas of the world from where it falls down and causes deadly levels of radiation.

The second reason is less widely known. But this consequence – 'nuclear winter' and the worldwide famine that would follow – is now believed to be the most serious consequence of nuclear war.

Cities that are attacked by nuclear missiles burn at such an intensity that they create their own wind system, a firestorm: hot air above the burning city ascends and is replaced by air that rushes in from all directions. The storm-force winds fan the flames and create immense heat.

From this firestorm, large columns of smoke and soot rise up above the burning cities and travel all the way up to the stratosphere. There it spreads around the planet and blocks the sun’s light. At that great height – far above the clouds – it cannot be rained out, meaning that it will remain there for years, darkening the sky and thereby drying and chilling the planet.

The nuclear winter that would follow a large-scale nuclear war is expected to lead to temperature declines of 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius (60–86° F) in many of the world’s agricultural regions – including much of Eurasia and North America. Nuclear winter would cause a 'nuclear famine'. The world’s food production would fail and billions of people would starve. 1

These consequences – nuclear fallout and nuclear winter leading to famine – mean that the destruction caused by nuclear weapons is not contained to the battlefield. It would not just harm the attacked country. Nuclear war would devastate all countries, including the attacker.

The possibility of global devastation is what makes the prospect of nuclear war so very terrifying. And it is also why nuclear weapons are so unattractive for warfare. A weapon that can lead to self-destruction is not a weapon that can be used strategically.

US President Reagan put it in clear words at the height of the Cold War: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” 2

Nuclear stockpiles have been reduced, but the risk remains high

40 years after Reagan’s words, the Cold War is over and nuclear stockpiles have been reduced considerably, as the chart shows.

The world has learned that nuclear armament is not the one-way street that it was once believed to be. Disarmament is possible.

But the chart also shows that there are still almost ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries on our planet, at least. 3 Each of these weapons can cause enormous destruction; many are much larger than the ones that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 4

Collectively these weapons are immensely destructive. The nuclear winter scenario outlined above would kill billions of people— billions— in the years that follow a large-scale nuclear war, even if it was fought “only” with today’s reduced stockpiles. 5

It is unclear whether humanity as a species could possibly survive a full-scale nuclear war with the current stockpiles. 6 A nuclear war might well be humanity’s final war.

Close Calls: Instances that threatened to push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war

The ‘balance of terror’ is the idea that all involved political leaders are so scared of nuclear war that they never launch a nuclear attack.

If this is achievable at all, it can only be achieved if all nuclear powers keep their weapons in check. This is because the balance is vulnerable to accidents: a nuclear bomb that detonates accidentally – or even just a false alarm, with no weapons even involved – can trigger nuclear retaliation because several countries keep their nuclear weapons on ‘launch on warning’; in response to a warning, their leaders can decide within minutes whether they want to launch a retaliatory strike.

For the balance of terror to be a balance, all parties need to be in control at all times. This however is not the case.

In the timeline, you can read through some of the close calls during the past decades.

The risk of nuclear war might well be low – because neither side would want to fight such a war that would have such awful consequences for everyone on the planet. But there is a risk that the kinds of technical errors and accidents listed here could lead accidentally to the use of nuclear weapons, as a nuclear power can incorrectly come to believe that they are under attack.

This is why false alarms, errors, and close calls are so crucial to monitor: they are the incidents that can push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war.

Accidents and errors are of course not the only possible path that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. There is the risk of a terribly irresponsible person leading a country possessing nuclear weapons. There is the risk of nuclear terrorism, possibly after a terrorist organization steals weapons. There is the possibility that hackers can take control of the nuclear chain of command. And there is the possibility that several of these factors play a role at the same time.

A timeline of nuclear weapons ‘close calls’ 7

Below this post, you find additional lists of close calls, where you find much more information on each of these incidents.

How to reduce the risk of nuclear war?

An escalating conflict between nuclear powers – but also an accident, a hacker, a terrorist, or an irresponsible leader – could lead to the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Those risks only go to zero if all nuclear weapons are removed from the world. I believe this is what humanity should work towards, but it is exceedingly hard to achieve, at least in the short term. It is therefore important to see that there are additional ways that can reduce the chance of the world suffering the horrors of nuclear war. 8

A more peaceful world : Many world regions in which our ancestors fought merciless wars over countless generations are extraordinarily peaceful in our times. The rise of democracy, international trade, diplomacy, and a cultural attitude shift against the glorification of war are some of the drivers credited for this development. 9

Making the world a more peaceful place will reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation. Efforts that reduce the chance of any war reduce the chance of nuclear war.

Nuclear treaties : Several non-proliferation treaties have been key in achieving the large reduction of nuclear stockpiles. However, key treaties – like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the US and Russia – have been suspended and additional agreements could be reached.

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which became effective in 2021, is a recent development in this direction.

Smaller nuclear stockpiles : Reducing the stockpiles further is seen as an important and achievable goal by experts.

It is considered achievable because smaller stockpiles would still provide the deterrence benefits from nuclear weapons. And it is important as it reduces the risk of accidents and the chance that a possible nuclear war would end civilization.

Better monitoring, better control: The risk can be further reduced by efforts to better control nuclear weapons – so that close calls occur less frequently. Similarly better monitoring systems would reduce the chance of false alarms.

Taking nuclear weapons off ‘hair-trigger alert’ would reduce the risk that any accident that does occur can rapidly spiral out of control. And a well-resourced International Atomic Energy Agency can verify that the agreements in the treaties are met.

Better public understanding, global relations, and culture : Finally I also believe that it will help to see clearly that billions of us share the same goal. None of us wants to live through a nuclear war, none of us wants to die in one. As Reagan said, a nuclear war cannot be won and it would be better to do away with these weapons entirely.

A generation ago a broad and highly visible societal movement pursued the goal of nuclear disarmament. These efforts were to a good extent successful. But since then, this goal has unfortunately lost much of the attention it once received – and this is despite the fact that things have not fundamentally changed: the world still possesses weapons that could kill billions. 10 I wish it was a more prominent concern in our generation so that more young people would set themselves the goal to make the world safe from nuclear weapons.

Below this post you find resources on where you can get engaged or donate, to help reduce the danger from nuclear weapons.

I believe some dangers are exaggerated – for example, I believe that the fear of terrorist attacks is often wildly out of proportion with the actual risk. But when it comes to nuclear weapons I believe the opposite is true.

There are many today who hardly give nuclear conflict a thought and I think this is a big mistake.

For eight decades, people have been producing nuclear weapons. Several countries have dedicated vast sums of money to their construction. And now we live in a world in which these weapons endanger our entire civilization and our future.

These destructive weapons are perhaps the clearest example that technology and innovation are not only forces for good, they can also enable catastrophic destruction.

Without the Second World War and the Cold War, the world might have never developed these weapons and we might find the idea that anyone could possibly build such weapons unimaginable. But this is not the world we live in. We live in a world with weapons of enormous destructiveness and we have to see the risks that they pose to all of us and find ways to reduce them.

I hope that there are many in the world today who take on the challenge to make the world more peaceful and to reduce the risk from nuclear weapons. The goal has to be that humanity never ends up using this most destructive technology that we ever developed.

Resources to continue reading and finding ways to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons

• Hiroshima : John Hersey’s report for the New Yorker about the bombing of Hiroshima, published in August 1946.
• ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security : an article focusing on the question of how to choose a career that makes the world safer from nuclear weapons.
• The ‘Future of Life Institute’ on Nuclear Weapons : this page includes an extensive list of additional references – including videos, research papers, and many organizations that are dedicated to reducing the risk from nuclear weapons.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Charlie Giattino, Hannah Ritchie, and Edouard Mathieu for reading drafts of this and for their very helpful comments and ideas.

Additional lists of close calls with nuclear weapons

* Future of Life Institute – Accidental nuclear war: A timeline of close calls .

* Alan F. Philips, M.D. – 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War , published on Nuclear Files

* Josh Harkinson (2014) – That Time We Almost Nuked North Carolina

* Union of Concerned Scientists (2015) – Close Calls with Nuclear Weapons

* Chatham House Report (2014) – Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy authored by Patricia Lewis, Heather Williams, Benoît Pelopidas, and Sasan Aghlani

* Wikipedia – List of Nuclear Close Calls

On Nuclear Winter see:

* Jägermeyr, Jonas, Alan Robock, Joshua Elliott, Christoph Müller, Lili Xia, Nikolay Khabarov, Christian Folberth, et al. (2020) – ‘ A Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Compromise Global Food Security’ . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 13 (31 March 2020): 7071–81.

* Robock, A., L. Oman, and G. L. Stenchikov (2007) – Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences , J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13107, doi:10.1029/2006JD008235.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2012) – Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war . In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 68, 66–74.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2016) – Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter , In the New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016.

Some additional points:

* The risk of nuclear winter (initially termed ‘nuclear twilight’) was only discovered in the early 1980s, more than 3 decades after the bombs were first used.

* The main mechanism by which a nuclear winter is expected to cause a decline in global food production is by reducing the growing season, the days in a row without frost. See Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007).

* Robock estimates that the smoke and soot would rise as high as 40 kilometers (25 miles) into the atmosphere. See Robock and Toon (2016).

* Before the nuclear famine kills people from hunger, many will die from hypothermia.

* In addition to the impact on the climate, the ozone layer is expected to get depleted in such a scenario. This would allow more ultraviolet radiation to reach our planet’s surface, harming plant and animal life.

* In general there is only relatively little scientific work that focuses on nuclear winter and additional, good research could be useful to provide a better understanding. Due to the lack of research there remains uncertainty about how devastating a nuclear winter would be. In particular there is disagreement on how likely it is that all of humanity would die in a nuclear winter.

* The paper by Jägermeyr et al (2020) shows that among the countries with the largest food production losses would be the US and Russia, those countries that have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

For anyone who interested in the impact of nuclear winter on food production and famine, Ord (2020) cites the following:

* Cropper, W. P., and Harwell, M. A. (1986) – “Food Availability after Nuclear War,” in M. A. Harwell and T. C. Hutchinson (eds.), The Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War (SCOPE 28), vol. 2: Ecological, Agricultural, and Human Effects. John Wiley and Sons.

* Helfand, I. (2013) – Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? Physicians for Social Responsibility.

* Xia, L., Robock, A., Mills, M., Stenke, A., and Helfand, I. (2015) – Decadal Reduction of Chinese Agriculture after a Regional Nuclear War . Earth’s Future, 3(2), 37–48.

Reagan in his State of the Union address in 1984, quoted in the New York Times: Bernard Gwertzman (1984) – Reagan reassures Russians on war . In the New York Times January 26, 1984.

There are nine countries that are known to possess nuclear weapons: Russia, United States, France, China, United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. South Africa once possessed nuclear weapons and is the first state to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.

The explosive power of a nuclear weapon is called the yield of a nuclear weapon. It is the amount of energy released when that weapon is detonated. It is usually measured in ‘TNT equivalents’.

The bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13–18 kilotons of TNT. (one kiloton are 1000 tonnes)

The largest bomb that was ever detonated is the ‘Tsar Bomba’ built by the USSR and detonated in October 1961. Its yield was about 50 megatons of TNT. That’s 50,000 kilotons of TNT or about 3,333-times the yield of the bomb in Hiroshima.

The scenario in Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007) is based on the nuclear stockpiles after the large reduction that was achieved after the end of the Cold War. It shows that the world still retains enough weapons to produce “a large, long-lasting, unprecedented global climate change,” as the authors put it. Since the publication of this study, the stockpiles have been reduced further, as the chart shows, but not very strongly so.

For a recent discussion of this question see Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

This list is largely based on Toby Ord’s 2020 book The Precipice . His list can be found in Chapter 4 and Appendix C of his book.

Ord in turn relies mostly on a document from the US Department of Defense from 1981: Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving US Nuclear Weapons (1950–1980) .

This list is mostly based on the ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security and Toby Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

For big overviews of this literature see the forthcoming book Christopher Blattman (2022) – Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace and Steven Pinker (2011) – The Better Angels of our Nature for a big overview

Lawrence S. Wittner – Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement . Stanford University Press.

One indication for the declining interest in the last generation: Mentions of “nuclear war” in books and newspapers peaked in 1985 and declined strongly since then (see Google Ngram for ‘nuclear war’ ).

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Nuclear weapons - an intolerable threat to humanity

The most terrifying weapon ever invented.

Nuclear weapons are the most terrifying weapon ever invented: no weapon is more destructive; no weapon causes such unspeakable human suffering; and there is no way to control how far the radioactive fallout will spread or how long the effects will last.

A nuclear bomb detonated in a city would immediately kill tens of thousands of people, and tens of thousands more would suffer horrific injuries and later die from radiation exposure.

In addition to the immense short-term loss of life, a nuclear war could cause long-term damage to our planet. It could severely disrupt the earth's ecosystem and reduce global temperatures, resulting in food shortages around the world.

Learn more:

What effects do nuclear weapons have on health, the environment and our ability to provide humanitarian assistance? And what does international humanitarian law say? Our factsheets address these important issues.

Think nuclear weapons will never be used again? Think again.

The very existence of nuclear weapons is a threat to future generations, and indeed to the survival of humanity.

What's more, given the current regional and international tensions, the risk of nuclear weapons being used is the highest it's been since the Cold War. Nuclear-armed States are modernizing their arsenals, and their command and control systems are becoming more vulnerable to cyber attacks. There is plenty of cause for alarm about the danger we all face.

The ICRC's director-general, Yves Daccord, spoke in April last year about the heightened risk that nuclear weapons will be used and the need to abolish them, at the Nuclear Weapon Risks Symposium organized by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

No adequate humanitarian response

What would humanitarian organizations do in the event of a nuclear attack? The hard truth is that no State or organization could deal with the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear bomb.

The Red Cross' first-hand experience

In August 1945, in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Red Cross, supported by the ICRC, attempted to bring relief to the many thousands of dying and injured. The magnitude of the needs made us feel helpless and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has been a strong advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons ever since.

Thousands of human beings in the streets and gardens in the town centre, struck by a wave of intense heat, died like flies. Others lay writhing like worms, atrociously burned. All private houses, warehouses, etc., disappeared as if swept away by a supernatural power. Trains were flung off the rails (...). Every living thing was petrified in an attitude of acute pain.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       - Dr Marcel Junod, an ICRC delegate and the first foreign doctor in Hiroshima in 1945 to assess the effects of the atomic bombing and to assist its victims.

Legal response to the nuclear threat

Since these atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the ICRC has been calling for a ban on nuclear weapons to ensure that these dark events are never repeated. For decades, States have committed to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and achieving nuclear disarmament through a number of international agreements, including the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty . Yet it was only in July 2017 that a treaty banning nuclear weapons was adopted. It was a historic and long-awaited step towards their elimination.

The world today needs the promise of this Treaty: the hope for a future without nuclear weapons. Humanity simply cannot live under the dark shadow of nuclear warfare, and the immense suffering which we all know would result.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      - ICRC President Peter Maurer, September 2017  

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• Published: 10 December 2019

The psychology of guns: risk, fear, and motivated reasoning

• Joseph M. Pierre 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  5 , Article number:  159 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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The gun debate in America is often framed as a stand-off between two immutable positions with little potential to move ahead with meaningful legislative reform. Attempts to resolve this impasse have been thwarted by thinking about gun ownership attitudes as based on rational choice economics instead of considering the broader socio-cultural meanings of guns. In this essay, an additional psychological perspective is offered that highlights how concerns about victimization and mass shootings within a shared culture of fear can drive cognitive bias and motivated reasoning on both sides of the gun debate. Despite common fears, differences in attitudes and feelings about guns themselves manifest in variable degrees of support for or opposition to gun control legislation that are often exaggerated within caricatured depictions of polarization. A psychological perspective suggests that consensus on gun legislation reform can be achieved through understanding differences and diversity on both sides of the debate, working within a common middle ground, and more research to resolve ambiguities about how best to minimize fear while maximizing personal and public safety.

Discounting risk

Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Answers to that riddle draw a bright line between two sides of a caricatured debate about guns in polarized America. One side believes that guns are a menace to public safety, while the other believes that they are an essential tool of self-preservation. One side cannot fathom why more gun control legislation has not been passed in the wake of a disturbing rise in mass shootings in the US and eyes Australia’s 1996 sweeping gun reform and New Zealand’s more recent restrictions with envy. The other, backed by the Constitutional right to bear arms and the powerful lobby of the National Rifle Association (NRA), fears the slippery slope of legislative change and refuses to yield an inch while threatening, “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands”. With the nation at an impasse, meaningful federal gun legislation aimed at reducing firearm violence remains elusive.

Despite the 1996 Dickey Amendment’s restriction of federal funding for research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Rostron, 2018 ), more than 30 years of public health research supports thinking of guns as statistically more of a personal hazard than a benefit. Case-control studies have repeatedly found that gun ownership is associated with an increased risk of gun-related homicide or suicide occurring in the home (Kellermann and Reay, 1986 ; Kellermann et al., 1993 ; Cummings and Koepsell, 1998 ; Wiebe, 2003 ; Dahlberg et al., 2004 ; Hemenway, 2011 ; Anglemeyer et al., 2014 ). For homicides, the association is largely driven by gun-related violence committed by family members and other acquaintances, not strangers (Kellermann et al., 1993 , 1998 ; Wiebe, 2003 ).

If having a gun increases the risk of gun-related violent death in the home, why do people choose to own guns? To date, the prevailing answer from the public health literature has been seemingly based on a knowledge deficit model that assumes that gun owners are unaware of risks and that repeated warnings about “overwhelming evidence” of “the health risk of a gun in the home [being] greater than the benefit” (Hemenway, 2011 ) should therefore decrease gun ownership and increase support for gun legislation reform. And yet, the rate of US households with guns has held steady for two decades (Smith and Son, 2015 ) with owners amassing an increasing number of guns such that the total civilian stock has risen to some 265 million firearms (Azrael et al., 2017 ). This disparity suggests that the knowledge deficit model is inadequate to explain or modify gun ownership.

In contrast to the premise that people weigh the risks and benefits of their behavior based on “rational choice economics” (Kahan and Braman, 2003 ), nearly 50 years of psychology and behavioral economics research has instead painted a picture of human decision-making as a less than rational process based on cognitive short-cuts (“availability heuristics”) and other error-prone cognitive biases (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974 ; Kunda, 1990 ; Haselton and Nettle, 2006 ; Hibert, 2012 ). As a result, “consequentialist” approaches to promoting healthier choices are often ineffective. Following this perspective, recent public health efforts have moved beyond educational campaigns to apply an understanding of the psychology of risky behavior to strike a balance between regulation and behavioral “nudges” aimed at reducing harmful practices like smoking, unhealthy eating, texting while driving, and vaccine refusal (Atchley et al., 2011 ; Hansen et al., 2016 ; Matjasko et al., 2016 ; Pluviano et al., 2017 ).

A similar public health approach aimed at reducing gun violence should take into account how gun owners discount the risks of ownership according to cognitive biases and motivated reasoning. For example, cognitive dissonance may lead those who already own guns to turn a blind eye to research findings about the dangers of ownership. Optimism bias, the general tendency of individuals to overestimate good outcomes and underestimate bad outcomes, can likewise make it easy to disregard dangers by externalizing them to others. The risk of suicide can therefore be dismissed out of hand based on the rationale that “it will never happen to me,” while the risk of homicide can be discounted based on demographic factors. Kleck and Gertz ( 1998 ) noted that membership in street gangs and drug dealing might be important confounds of risk in case control studies, just as unsafe storage practices such as keeping a firearm loaded and unlocked may be another (Kellerman et al., 1993 ). Other studies have found that the homicide risk associated with guns in the home is greater for women compared to men and for non-whites compared to whites (Wiebe, 2003 ). Consequently, white men—by far the largest demographic that owns guns—might be especially likely to think of themselves as immune to the risks of gun ownership and, through confirmation bias, cherry-pick the data to support pre-existing intuitions and fuel motivated disbelief about guns. These testable hypotheses warrant examination in future research aimed at understanding the psychology of gun ownership and crafting public health approaches to curbing gun violence.

Still, while the role of cognitive biases should be integrated into a psychological understanding of attitudes towards gun ownership, cognitive biases are universal liabilities that fall short of explaining why some people might “employ” them as a part of motivated reasoning to support ownership or to oppose gun reform. To understand the underlying motivation that drives cognitive bias, a deeper analysis of why people own guns is required. In the introductory essay to this journal’s series on “What Guns Mean,” Metzl ( 2019 ) noted that public health efforts to reduce firearm ownership have failed to “address beliefs about guns among people who own them”. In a follow-up piece, Galea and Abdalla ( 2019 ) likewise suggested that the gun debate is complicated by the fact that “knowledge and values do not align” and that “these values create an impasse, one where knowing is not enough” (Galea and Abdalla, 2019 ). Indeed, these and other authors (Kahan and Braman, 2003 ; Braman and Kahan, 2006 ; Pierre, 2015 ; Kalesan et al., 2016 ) have enumerated myriad beliefs and values, related to the different “symbolic lives” and “social meanings” of firearms both within and outside of “gun culture” that drive polarized attitudes towards gun ownership in the US. This essay attempts to further explore the meaning of guns from a psychological perspective.

Fear and gun ownership

Modern psychological understanding of human decision-making has moved beyond availability heuristics and cognitive biases to integrate the role of emotion and affect. Several related models including the “risk-as-feelings hypothesis” (Loewenstein et al., 2001 ), the “affect heuristic” (Slovic et al., 2007 ); and the “appraisal-tendency framework” (Lerner et al., 2015 ) illustrate how emotions can hijack rational-decision-making processes to the point of being the dominant influence on risk assessments. Research has shown that “perceived risk judgments”—estimates of the likelihood that something bad will happen—are especially hampered by emotion (Pachur et al., 2012 ) and that different types of affect can bias such judgments in different ways (Lerner et al., 2015 ). For example, fear can in particular bias assessments away from rational analysis to overestimate risks, as well as to perceive negative events as unpredictable (Lerner et al., 2015 ).

Although gun ownership is associated with positive feelings about firearms within “gun culture” (Pierre, 2015 ; Kalesan et al., 2016 ; Metzl, 2019 ), most research comparing gun owners to non-gun owners suggests that ownership is rooted in fear. While long guns have historically been owned primarily for hunting and other recreational purposes, US surveys dating back to the 1990s have revealed that the most frequent reason for gun ownership and more specifically handgun ownership is self-protection (Cook and Ludwig, 1997 ; Azrael et al., 2017 ; Pew Research Center, 2017 ). Research has likewise shown that the decision to obtain a firearm is largely motivated by past victimization and/or fears of future victimization (Kleck et al., 2011 ; Hauser and Kleck, 2013 ).

A few studies have reported that handgun ownership is associated with past victimization, perceived risk of crime, and perceived ineffectiveness of police protection within low-income communities where these concerns may be congruent with real risks (Vacha and McLaughlin, 2000 , 2004 ). However, gun ownership tends to be lower in urban settings and in low-income families where there might be higher rates of violence and crime (Vacha and McLaughlin, 2000 ). Instead, the largest demographic of gun owners in the US are white men living in rural communities who are earning more than $100K/year (Azrael et al., 2017 ). Mencken and Froese ( 2019 ) likewise reported that gun owners tend to have higher incomes and greater ratings of life happiness than non-owners. These findings suggest a mismatch between subjective fear and objective reality.

Stroebe and colleagues ( 2017 ) reported that the specific perceived risk of victimization and more “diffuse” fears that the world is a dangerous place are both independent predictors of handgun ownership, with perceived risk of assault associated with having been or knowing a victim of violent crime and belief in a dangerous world associated with political conservatism. These findings hint at the likelihood that perceived risk of victimization can be based on vicarious sources with a potential for bias, whether through actual known acquaintances or watching the nightly news, conducting a Google search or scanning one’s social media feed, or reading “The Armed Citizen” column in the NRA newsletter The American Rifleman . It also suggests that a general fear of crime, independent of actual or even perceived individual risk, may be a powerful motivator for gun ownership for some that might track with race and political ideology.

Several authors have drawn a connection between gun ownership and racial tensions by examining the cultural symbolism and socio-political meaning of guns. Bhatia ( 2019 ) detailed how the NRA’s “disinformation campaign reliant on fearmongering” is constructed around a narrative of “fear and identity politics” that exploits current xenophobic sentiments related to immigrants. Metzl ( 2019 ) noted that during the 1960s, conservatives were uncharacteristically in favor of gun control when armed resistance was promoted by Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and others involved in the Black Power Movement. Today, Metzl argues, “mainstream society reflexively codes white men carrying weapons in public as patriots, while marking armed black men as threats or criminals.” In support of this view, a 2013 study found that having a gun in the home was significantly associated with racism against black people as measured by the Symbolic Racism Scale, noting that “for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism, there was a 50% greater odds of having a gun in the home and a 28% increase in the odds of supporting permits to carry concealed handguns” (O’Brien et al., 2013 ). Hypothesizing that guns are a symbol of hegemonic masculinity that serves to “shore up white male privilege in society,” Stroud ( 2012 ) interviewed a non-random sample of 20 predominantly white men in Texas who had licenses for concealed handgun carry. The men described how guns help to fulfill their identities as protectors of their families, while characterizing imagined dangers with rhetoric suggesting specific fears about black criminals. These findings suggest that gun ownership among white men may be related to a collective identity as “good guys” protecting themselves against “bad guys” who are people of color, a premise echoed in the lay press with headlines like, “Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?” (Smith, 2018 ), “Report: White Men Stockpile Guns Because They’re Afraid of Black People” (Harriott, 2018 ), and “Gun Rights Are About Keeping White Men on Top” (Wuertenberg, 2018 ).

Connecting the dots, the available evidence therefore suggests that for many gun owners, fears about victimization can result in confirmation, myside, and optimism biases that not only discount the risks of ownership, but also elevate the salience of perceived benefit, however remote, as it does when one buys a lottery ticket (Rogers and Webley, 2001 ). Indeed, among gun owners there is widespread belief that having a gun makes one safer, supported by published claims that where there are “more guns”, there is “less crime” (Lott, 1998 , 1999 ) as well as statistics and anecdotes about successful defensive gun use (DGU) (Kleck and Gertz, 1995 , 1998 ; Tark and Kleck, 2004 ; Cramer and Burnett, 2012 ). Suffice it to say that there have been numerous debates about how to best interpret this body of evidence, with critics claiming that “more guns, less crime” is a myth (Ayres and Donohue, 2003 ; Moyer, 2017 ) that has been “discredited” (Wintemute, 2008 ) and that the incidence of DGU has been grossly overestimated and pales in comparison to the risk of being threatened or harmed by a gun in the home (Hemenway, 1997 , 2011 ; Cook and Ludwig, 1998 ; Azrael and Hemenway, 2000 ; Hemenway et al., 2000 ). Attempts at objective analysis have concluded that surveys to date have defined and measured DGU inconsistently with unclear numbers of false positives and false negatives (Smith, 1997 ; McDowall et al., 2000 ; National Research Council, 2005 ; RAND, 2018 ), that the causal effects of DGU on reducing injury are “inconclusive” (RAND, 2018 ), and that “neither side seems to be willing to give ground or see their opponent’s point of view” (Smith, 1997 ). With the scientific debate about DGU mirrored in the lay press (Defilippis and Hughes, 2015 ; Kleck, 2015 ; Doherty, 2015 ), a rational assessment of whether guns make owners safer is hampered by a lack of “settled science”. With no apparent consensus, motivated reasoning can pave the way to the nullification of opposing arguments in favor of personal opinions and ideological stances.

For gun owners, even if it is acknowledged that on average successful DGU is much less likely than a homicide or suicide in the home, not having a gun at all translates to zero chance of self-preservation, which are intolerable odds. The bottom line is that when gun owners believe that owning a gun will make them feel safer, little else may matter. Curiously however, there is conflicting evidence that gun ownership actually decreases fears of victimization (Hauser and Kleck, 2013 ; Dowd-Arrow et al., 2019 ). That gun ownership may not mitigate such fears could help to account for why some individuals go on to acquire multiple guns beyond their initial purchase with US gun owners possessing an average of 5 firearms and 8% of owners having 10 or more (Azrael et al., 2017 ).

Gun owner diversity

A psychological model of the polarized gun debate in America would ideally compare those for or against gun control legislation. However, research to date has instead focused mainly on differences between gun owners and non-gun owners, which has several limitations. For example, of the nearly 70% of Americans who do not own a gun, 36% report that they can see themselves owning one in the future (Pew Research Center, 2017 ) with 11.5% of all gun owners in 2015 having newly acquired one in the previous 5 years (Wertz et al., 2018 ). Gun ownership and non-ownership are therefore dynamic states that may not reflect static ideology. Personal accounts such as Willis’ ( 2010 ) article, “I Was Anti-gun, Until I Got Stalked,” illustrate this point well.

With existing research heavily reliant on comparing gun owners to non-gun owners, a psychological model of gun attitudes in the US will have limited utility if it relies solely on gun owner stereotypes based on their most frequent demographic characteristics. On the contrary, Hauser and Kleck ( 2013 ) have argued that “a more complete understanding of the relationship between fear of crime and gun ownership at the individual level is crucial”. Just so, looking more closely at the diversity of gun owners can reveal important details beyond the kinds of stereotypes that are often used to frame political debates.

Foremost, it must be recognized that not all gun owners are conservative white men with racist attitudes. Over the past several decades, women have comprised 9–14% of US gun owners with the “gender gap” narrowing due to decreasing male ownership (Smith and Son, 2015 ). A 2017 Pew Survey reported that 22% of women in the US own a gun and that female gun owners are just as likely as men to belong to the NRA (Pew Research Center, 2017 ). Although the 36% rate of gun ownership among US whites is the highest for any racial demographic, 25% of blacks and 15% of Hispanics report owning guns with these racial groups being significantly more concerned than whites about gun violence in their communities and the US as a whole (Pew Research Center, 2017 ). Providing a striking counterpoint to Stroud’s ( 2012 ) interviews of white gun owners in Texas, Craven ( 2017 ) interviewed 11 black gun owners across the country who offered diverse views on guns and the question of whether owning them makes them feel safer, including if confronted by police during a traffic stop. Kelly ( 2019 ) has similarly offered a self-portrait as a female “left-wing anarchist” against the stereotype of guns owners as “Republicans, racist libertarians, and other generally Constitution-obsessed weirdos”. She reminds us that, “there is also a long history of armed community self-defense among the radical left that is often glossed over or forgotten entirely in favor of the Fox News-friendly narrative that all liberals hate guns… when the cops and other fascists see that they’re not the only ones packing, the balance of power shifts, and they tend to reconsider their tactics”.

Although Mencken and Froese ( 2019 ) concluded that “white men in economic distress find comfort in guns as a means to reestablish a sense of individual power and moral certitude,” their study results actually demonstrated that gun owners fall into distinguishable groups based on different levels of “moral and emotional empowerment” imparted by guns. For example, those with low levels of gun empowerment were more likely to be female and to own long guns for recreational purposes such as hunting and collecting. Other research has shown that the motivations to own a gun, and the degree to which gun ownership is related to fear and the desire for self-protection, also varies according to the type of gun (Stroebe et al., 2017 ). Owning guns, owning specific types of guns (e.g. handguns, long guns, and so-called “military style” semi-automatic rifles like AR-15s), carrying a gun in public, and keeping a loaded gun on one’s nightstand all have different psychological implications. A 2015 study reported that new gun owners were younger and more likely to identify as liberal than long-standing gun owners (Wertz et al., 2018 ). Although Kalesan et al. ( 2016 ) found that gun ownership is more likely among those living within a “gun culture” where ownership is prevalent, encouraged, and part of social life, it would therefore be a mistake to characterize gun culture as a monolith.

It would also be a mistake to equate gun ownership with opposition to gun legislation reform or vice-versa. Although some evidence supports a strong association (Wolpert and Gimpel, 1998 ), more recent studies suggest important exceptions to the rule. While only about 30% of the US population owns a gun, over 70% believes that most citizens should be able to legally own them (Pew Research Center, 2017 ). Women tend to be more likely than men to support gun control, even when they are gun owners themselves (Kahan and Braman, 2003 ; Mencken and Froese, 2019 ). Older (age 70–79) Americans likewise have some of the highest rates of gun ownership, but also the highest rates of support for gun control (Pederson et al., 2015 ). In Mencken and Froese’s study ( 2019 ), most gun owners reporting lower levels of gun empowerment favored bans on semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines and opposed arming teachers in schools. Kahan and Braman ( 2003 ) theorized that attitudes towards gun control are best understood according to a “cultural theory of risk”. In their study sample, those with “hierarchical” and “individualist” cultural orientations were more likely than those with “egalitarian” views to oppose gun control and these perspectives were more predictive than other variables including political affiliation and fear of crime.

In fact, both gun owners and non-owners report high degrees of support for universal background checks; laws mandating safe gun storage in households with children; and “red flag” laws restricting access to firearms for those hospitalized for mental illness or those otherwise at risk of harming themselves or others, those convicted of certain crimes including public display of a gun in a threatening manner, those subject to temporary domestic violence restraining orders, and those on “no-fly” or other watch lists (Pew Research Center, 2017 ; Barry et al., 2018 ). According to a 2015 survey, the majority of the US public also opposes carrying firearms in public spaces with most gun owners opposing public carry in schools, college campuses, places of worship, bars, and sports stadiums (Wolfson et al., 2017 ). Despite broad public support for gun legislation reform however, it is important to recognize that the threat of gun restrictions is an important driver of gun acquisition (Wallace, 2015 ; Aisch and Keller, 2016 ). As a result, proposals to restrict gun ownership boosted gun sales considerably under the Obama administration (Depetris-Chauvin, 2015 ), whereas gun companies like Remington and United Sporting Companies have since filed for bankruptcy under the Trump administration.

A shared culture of fear

Developing a psychological understanding of attitudes towards guns and gun control legislation in the US that accounts for underlying emotions, motivated reasoning, and individual variation must avoid the easy trap of pathologizing gun owners and dismissing their fears as irrational. Instead, it should consider the likelihood that motivated reasoning underlies opinion on both sides of the gun debate, with good reason to conclude that fear is a prominent source of both “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” attitudes. Although the research on fear and gun ownership summarized above implies that non-gun owners are unconcerned about victimization, a closer look at individual study data reveals both small between-group differences and significant within-group heterogeneity. For example, Stroebe et al.’s ( 2017 ) findings that gun owners had greater mean ratings of belief in a dangerous world, perceived risk of victimization, and the perceived effectiveness of owning a gun for self-defense were based on inter-group differences of <1 point on a 7-point Likert scale. Fear of victimization is therefore a universal fear for gun owners and non-gun owners alike, with important differences in both quantitative and qualitative aspects of those fears. Kahan and Braham ( 2003 ) noted that the gun debate is not so much a debate about the personal risks of gun ownership, as it is a one about which of two potential fears is most salient—that of “firearm casualties in a world with insufficient gun control or that of personal defenselessness in a world with excessive control”.

Although this “shared fear” hypothesis has not been thoroughly tested in existing research, there is general support for it based on evidence that fear is an especially potent influence on risk assessment and decision-making when considering low-frequency catastrophic events (Chanel et al., 2009 ). In addition, biased risk assessments have been linked to individual feelings about a specific activity. Whereas many activities in the real world have both high risk and high benefit, positive attitudes about an activity are associated with biased judgments of low risk and high benefit while negative attitudes are associated with biased judgments of high risk and low benefit (Slovic et al., 2007 ). These findings match those of the gun debate, whereby catastrophic events like mass shootings can result in “probability neglect,” over-estimating the likelihood of risk (Sunstein, 2003 ; Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011 ) with polarized differences regarding guns as a root cause and gun control as a viable solution. For those that have positive feelings about guns and their perceived benefit, the risk of gun ownership is minimized as discussed above. However, based on findings from psychological research on fear (Loewenstein et al., 2001 ; Slovic et al., 2007 ), the reverse is also likely to be true—those with negative feelings about guns who perceive little benefit to ownership may tend to over-estimate risks. Consistent with this dichotomy, both calls for legislative gun reform, as well as gun purchases increase in the wake of mass shootings (Wallace, 2015 ; Wozniak, 2017 ), with differences primarily predicted by the relative self-serving attributional biases of gun ownership and non-ownership alike (Joslyn and Haider-Markel, 2017 ).

Psychological research has shown that fear is associated with loss of control, with risks that are unfamiliar and uncontrollable perceived as disproportionately dangerous (Lerner et al., 2015 ; Sunstein, 2003 ). Although mass shootings have increased in recent years, they remain extremely rare events and represent a miniscule proportion of overall gun violence. And yet, as acts of terrorism, they occur in places like schools that are otherwise thought of as a suburban “safe spaces,” unlike inner cities where violence is more mundane, and are often given sensationalist coverage in the media. A 2019 Harris Poll found that 79% of Americans endorse stress as a result of the possibility of a mass shooting, with about a third reporting that they “cannot go anywhere without worrying about being a victim” (American Psychological Association, 2019 ). While some evidence suggests that gun owners may be more concerned about mass shootings than non-gun owners (Dowd-Arrow et al., 2019 ), this is again a quantitative difference as with fear of victimization more generally. There is little doubt that parental fears about children being victims of gun violence were particularly heightened in the wake of Columbine (Altheide, 2019 ) and it is likely that subsequent school shootings at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary, and Stoneman Douglas High have been especially impactful in the minds of those calling for increasing restrictions on gun ownership. For those privileged to be accustomed to community safety who are less worried about home invasion and have faith in the police to provide protection, fantasizing about “gun free zones” may reflect a desire to recreate safe spaces in the wake of mass shootings that invoke feelings of loss of control.

Altheide ( 2019 ) has argued that mass shootings in the US post-Columbine have been embedding within a larger cultural narrative of terrorism, with “expanded social control and policies that helped legitimate the war on terror”. Sunstein and Zeckhauser ( 2011 ) have similarly noted that following terrorist attacks, the public tends to demand responses from government, favoring precautionary measures that are “not justified by any plausible analysis of expected utility” and over-estimating potential benefits. However, such responses may not only be ineffective, but potentially damaging. For example, although collective anxieties in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks resulted in the rapid implementation of new screening procedures for boarding airplanes, it has been argued that the “theater” of response may have done well to decrease fear without any evidence of actual effectiveness in reducing danger (Graham, 2019 ) while perhaps even increasing overall mortality by avoiding air travel in favor of driving (Sunstein, 2003 ; Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011 ).

As with the literature on DGU, the available evidence supporting the effectiveness of specific gun laws in reducing gun violence is less than definitive (Koper et al., 2004 ; Hahn et al., 2005 ; Lee et al., 2017 ; Webster and Wintemute, 2015 ), leaving the utility of gun reform legislation open to debate and motivated reasoning. Several authors have argued that even if proposed gun control measures are unlikely to deter mass shooters, “doing something is better than nothing” (Fox and DeLateur, 2014 ) and that ineffective counter-terrorism responses are worthwhile if they reduce public fear (Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011 ). Crucially however, this perspective fails to consider the impact of gun control legislation on the fears of those who value guns for self-protection. For them, removing guns from law-abiding “good guys” while doing nothing to deter access to the “bad guys” who commit crimes is illogical anathema. Gun owners and gun advocates likewise reject the concept of “safe spaces” and regard the notion of “gun free zones” as a liability that invites rather than prevents acts of terrorism. In other words, gun control proposals designed to decrease fear have the opposite of their intended effect on those who view guns as symbols of personal safety, increasing rather than decreasing their fears independently of any actual effects on gun violence. Such policies are therefore non-starters, and will remain non-starters, for the sizeable proportion of Americans who regard guns as essential for self-preservation.

In 2006, Braman and Kahan noted that “the Great American Gun Debate… has convulsed the national polity for the better part of four decades without producing results satisfactory to either side” and argued that consequentialist arguments about public health risks based on cost–benefit analysis are trumped by the cultural meanings of guns to the point of being “politically inert” (Braman and Kahan, 2006 ). More than a decade later, that argument is iterated in this series on “What Guns Mean”. In this essay, it is further argued that persisting debates about the effectiveness of DGU and gun control legislation are at their heart trumped by shared concerns about personal safety, victimization, and mass shootings within a larger culture of fear, with polarized opinions about how to best mitigate those fears that are determined by the symbolic, cultural, and personal meanings of guns and gun ownership.

Coming full circle to the riddle, “Do guns kill people or do people kill people?”, a psychologically informed perspective rejects the question as a false dichotomy that can be resolved by the statement, “people kill people… with guns”. It likewise suggests a way forward by acknowledging both common fears and individual differences beyond the limited, binary caricature of the gun debate that is mired in endless arguments over disputed facts. For meaningful legislative change to occur, the debate must be steered away from its portrayal as two immutable sides caught between not doing anything on the one hand and enacting sweeping bans or repealing the 2nd Amendment on the other. In reality, public attitudes towards gun control are more nuanced than that, with support or opposition to specific gun control proposals predicted by distinct psychological and cultural factors (Wozniak, 2017 ) such that achieving consensus may prove less elusive than is generally assumed. Accordingly, gun reform proposals should focus on “low hanging fruit” where there is broad support such as requiring and enforcing universal background checks, enacting “red flag” laws balanced by guaranteeing gun ownership rights to law-abiding citizens, and implementing public safety campaigns that promote safe firearm handling and storage. Finally, the Dickey Amendment should be repealed so that research can inform public health interventions aimed at reducing gun violence and so that individuals can replace motivated reasoning with evidence-based decision-making about personal gun ownership and guns in society.

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Risks and Benefits of Autonomous Weapon Systems: Perceptions among Future Australian Defence Force Officers

• Published Nov. 24, 2020
• By Drs. Jai Galliott & Austin Wyatt

The prospect of increasingly autonomous systems has seized the military imagination and rapidly generated an international debate surrounding the merits of a potential preemptive ban under international law. What has been missing to this point has been an in-depth consideration of how artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and unmanned platforms would be perceived by the junior officers who will play a core role in their integration into future militaries. Drawing on a broad survey of officer cadets and midshipmen at the Australian Defence Force Academy conducted in 2019, this article provides an analysis of how perceived risks and benefits of autonomous weapon systems are influencing the willingness of these future defense leaders to deploy alongside them.

Introduction

The prospect of increasingly autonomous weapons systems (AWS) has seized the military imagination and featured prominently in strategic guidance, not just in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) but also from our allies, 1 competitors, 2 and nonstate actors. 3 It is also becoming increasingly apparent that artificial intelligence (AI), trusted autonomous systems, and unmanned platforms will play a crucial role in the ADF’s capacity to maintain a credible deterrent capability edge over potential challengers in the region. However, there have been no concentrated, published efforts to determine how military end users would perceive such systems.

Existing studies examining public opinion toward lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) have been limited in scope and focused primarily on civilians in the United States. At the time of writing, the only publicly available Australian research is also civilian-focused. Over the past two years, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has conducted two surveys of Australian civilians and identified that more than half of respondents opposed autonomous weapons. 4 Overall, while these papers provide a useful baseline understanding, they remain focused on civilians rather than the ADF.

Indeed, the literature generally seems to assume that military personnel would be more likely to support the use of LAWS than the civilian population. While trust has been raised as an essential factor, 5 overall, this has not been reflected in the context of an empirical public opinion study. Therefore, the purpose of this article, and the underlying study, was to test this assumption among officer cadets and midshipmen at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) to identify which perceived risks and benefits of AWS are most influential on the willingness of these future defense leaders to deploy as part of manned-unmanned teams (MUM-T).

This article is divided across four sections that outline the results of the underlying study and highlight the main takeaways for discussion. The first substantive section of this article establishes a baseline understanding of the extent to which the respondents were willing to deploy into a combat environment as part of a MUM-T that included potentially lethal robots with varying levels of autonomous functionality. The next two sections consider a range of potential benefits and risks respectively and outline which were considered important to the respondent group, which informs an alternate, end user–based view of the key challenges to the effective integration of unmanned, AI-enabled or autonomous systems into the future ADF. Finally, this article will discuss three core conclusions that can be drawn from this study before concluding with policy and doctrinal recommendations.

Regardless of whether a preemptive development ban is imposed on lethal variants under international law, the impact of increasingly autonomous unmanned systems will be felt most keenly by the junior officers charged with leading MUM-Ts in combat. However, there is currently a dearth of published research that engages directly with active military personnel or questions how the emerging generation of officers perceive increasingly autonomous platforms and systems. In response to this gap, the Values in Defence and Security Technology Group conducted a survey of more than 800 officer cadets and midshipmen at the ADFA, Australia’s premier tertiary military education institution. This article utilizes that dataset to inform an analysis of how the perceived risks and benefits of autonomous systems are influencing the willingness of these future defense leaders to deploy alongside them.

Prior Surveys of Perceptions toward Autonomous Weapon Systems

This study is believed to be the largest survey examining perceptions toward autonomous military technology among serving military personnel, at the time of writing. It was also the first survey of its kind to focus almost exclusively on Australian military respondents, as prior published studies have been primarily focused on the United States.

Chronologically, Charli Carpenter conducted the first study of US public opinion toward AWS in 2013. More than half the respondents in this study said that they opposed autonomous weapon systems (with 39 percent expressing a strong opposition). 6 Unfortunately, this initial study utilized leading and highly emotive terminology in its questions. This is a topic that the general public still has little knowledge or understanding of beyond their immediate association of robotic weapons with the Terminator movie franchise (although some may prefer Transformers ). As Michael Horowitz’s subsequent study confirmed, the influence of contextualized questioning is particularly important with this topic. Despite this concern, Carpenter’s paper was an important first step in building our understanding of public attitudes toward this technology and is still widely referenced in academic literature and working papers produced as part of the ongoing High Contracting Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) meetings of the International Group of Experts on LAWS in Geneva.

A subsequent online survey, conducted by the Open Roboethics Institute in November 2015, was the first to include respondents outside of the United States. The results of this survey were fairly clear, with 85 percent of respondents saying that LAWS should not be used offensively and 67 percent supporting a ban. 7 The most common reason for opposing LAWS was that only humans should be allowed to make the decision to end life. 8

Interestingly, in a 2016 study, Horowitz found that the baseline level of opposition to autonomous weapons dropped from 48 percent to 27 percent if autonomous weapons protected US soldiers and were more effective than remote-operated weapons. 9 While Horowitz has not published a follow-on from this admittedly US-focused study, the key implication was that the manner in which autonomous systems are presented to the public is an important factor in whether they would be negatively received.

Most recently, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots commissioned two large-scale but limited surveys, the first in 2017 10 and the second in 2019. 11 These surveys found opposition to autonomous weapons rising, hitting 61 percent in the second survey. 12 The most common reasoning among those who opposed killer robots was that “machines should not be allowed to kill” and a concern that AWS would be unaccountable. 13 Of the 1,000 Australian respondents in 2019 (out of 18,795 total respondents), 16 percent were supportive or strongly supportive and 59 percent were opposed or strongly opposed. Interestingly 25 percent of Australian respondents stated that they were unsure, the same rate as Canada and the United States and 8 percent higher than the survey average. 14 This data was an important contribution, given the argument that LAWS violate the principle of humanity, offend the public, and should thus be banned under the Martens Clause. 15 However, the underlying surveys were quite limited in scope, with only those who indicated opposition being asked the survey’s second question. Furthermore, their value for informing policy beyond supporting a general call for a ban is questionable, given Horowitz’s findings that the composition of the question was influential when measuring public reaction to LAWS. 16

The underlying survey for this article accounted for these shortcomings by adopting a neutral language and utilizing a research design that questioned why the respondents held the expressed views. Among the core purposes of this article, therefore, is to submit into the literature a detailed exploration of how a series of risk-benefit factors affect perceptions toward autonomous systems among the next generation of ADF leaders.

Research Design

Reviewing the steadily growing discourse surrounding the development of increasingly autonomous weapon systems would support the generation of three hypotheses for how these future military leaders would perceive the risks and benefits associated with deploying alongside “killer robots,” each of which will be tested in this article. Firstly, we could expect, based on the above surveys, to see a majority of respondents to either oppose of strongly oppose the use of machines that are “allowed to kill” without direct human control. Secondly, given the results that Horowitz found, this cohort’s perception of autonomous weapon systems should skew dramatically toward opposition between scenarios based on how the system’s level of meaningful human control is described. Finally, given the clear focus in publicly published doctrine documents from the Five Eyes states, we hypothesized that military respondents would place the highest value on potential risks and benefits of autonomous systems that relate to improving force protection, reducing procurement costs, and replacing humans in dull, dirty, or dangerous tasks. Interrogating this hypothesis was a key factor in developing the questions on importance of perceived risks and benefits.

The authors also acknowledge that this research design has two major limitations that must be noted. The first is that, as this is the largest survey of military officers to date, we cannot draw on extant literature to inform an expectation of the level of difference between this data and public opinion among the civilian population. However, extant research on attitudes toward the use of armed remote unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) would suggest that junior military leaders would have a greater level of understanding than the general public, but that this would not necessarily translate into a significantly higher level of support. In response to this gap in the literature, the underlying research instrument included a comparative scenario that presented respondents with hypothetical systems with varying levels of human control.

The second limitation is this article’s focus on respondents from the ADF could raise legitimate questions about its generalizability. While acknowledging this concern, the authors make two contentions. The first is that, as the largest military-focused survey of its kind at the time of writing, the data itself offers a valuable insight upon which future studies of fellow militaries could be based. Second, the ADF is regarded as among the most capable and well-equipped militaries in the region, especially on a per capita basis. Furthermore, while a justifiable argument can be made that the ADF has sometimes proven a slow or inconsistent adopter of new innovations, it also has a history of successfully leveraging military technology to generate a sufficient competitive edge to maintain credible deterrence. Therefore, the attitudes expressed by these respondents could feasibly be used as a comparative basis for estimating servicemember perceptions in operationally and doctrinally similar militaries, both within the Five Eyes network and more generally among technologically advanced middle-power states.

Demographics

Before moving on to the substantive analysis and discussion, it is useful first to outline key features of the underlying dataset. This survey was conducted in early 2019 and, at the time of writing, is the most extensive study of military attitudes toward autonomous systems in terms of scale and detail. Reflecting their status as officer cadets and midshipmen, the respondents were almost exclusively young people (97.6 percent were between the ages of 18 and 24). Among the respondents, there was only limited female representation (26.8 percent), and more than 87 percent were born in Australia. Furthermore, while there was a roughly even distribution based on their year of study, a significant majority of respondents were from the Army (45 percent), with Royal Australian Air Force officer cadets and Royal Australian Navy Midshipmen accounting for the remaining 33 percent and 22 percent respectively.

The demographic breakdown of respondents has two important implications for this article. The first, and most obvious, is this data focuses the analysis on military personnel rather than the broader civilian population. This is admittedly a limitation of the scope; however, focusing on the end users separates this article from existing research of attitudes toward autonomous systems, which have been almost exclusively focused on the civilian population. Secondly, the authors are cognizant that their focus on junior officers arguably limits the applicability of its results to current defense policy and procurement. The authors would instead argue that the emerging nature of autonomous systems (and AI more broadly) means that it is critical that we understand how the decision makers of tomorrow understand the ethical, legal, practical, and operational potential, risks, and constraints of increasingly autonomous systems.

Willingness to Deploy Alongside Unmanned or Autonomous Systems

The first important takeaway from this study is a baseline understanding of the extent to which these young defense leaders would be comfortable, or not, to deploy into a conflict zone as part of a MUM-T, also known as a human-machine team. The MUM-T concept has become prominent in the public and policy discourse surrounding autonomous and unmanned systems. 17 The underlying assumption with MUM-Ts centers on the contention that keeping humans in or on the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop somewhat mitigates the ethical and legal issues with killer robots, as well as reducing the technological and financial barriers to deploying potentially lethal autonomous systems. 18 This study aimed to interrogate the assumption that military officers would be comfortable deploying into MUM-Ts with autonomous systems. Therefore, respondents were asked about their willingness to deploy in a team “involving robots to achieve a combat mission,” where the system was given varying levels of autonomous operation capacity. 19 The response data is illustrated in figure 1.

Figure 1. Willingness to deploy alongside autonomous systems

There are three main conclusions regarding military perceptions of autonomous systems that can be drawn from these initial data points. The first is that this data illustrated that a significant relationship exists between the perceived level of independence of the “robot” and a willingness to deploy across each of the three MUM-T scenarios. Where the autonomous systems were either entirely under human control or were limited to preprogramed functions, the vast majority of respondents were willing or somewhat willing to deploy alongside autonomous systems. This would cover a variety of currently deployed systems that, for example, provide landing assistance to human pilots. However, when the autonomous system could exercise “preprogramed decision making” in the use of force in predefined areas (which correlates with semi-autonomous weapon systems), there was a significant negative shift, although the level of willing and somewhat willing respondents retained a slim majority (51.7 percent). Scenario three also marked a significant increase in the rate of uncertainty in responses, which rose 16.6 percent from 6.8 percent in scenario two. In the case of scenario four, where the system would meet commonly used definitions for a LAWS, there was a considerable increase in respondents that would be unwilling to deploy alongside such systems, cementing this as the only scenario in which a majority of respondents would not deploy. However, it is also important to note that the number of respondents that were “willing” remained similar and above 10 percent in both scenarios (15.8 percent and 13.2 percent respectively). Opposition to this level of autonomy is unsurprising given the findings of prior research, which admittedly focused on civilians; however, it does support a conclusion that, while a minority would be currently willing, the majority of this cohort harbors a discomfort with deploying alongside autonomous systems with the independent capability to apply force.

Secondly, this data supports the assertion that questions construction and discursive practice is particularly influential with autonomous systems, even for military officers. Note that 3.3 percent (27 respondents) would be either unwilling (7 respondents) or somewhat unwilling to deploy alongside a system that “need[s] a human operator [to] control every function” and an additional 24 were uncertain. Where the system was under human control but could “independently perform some preprogramed functions,” twice as many were unwilling (2.1 percent, or 17 respondents) or somewhat unwilling (3.9 percent, or 32 respondents) to deploy in the MUM-T, and a further 55 respondents were uncertain. While a statistically minor segment of the cohort, these results provide an interesting illustration of the discursive effect in the case of autonomous systems and the existence of an additional wariness toward machines utilizing potentially lethal force. Consider that, from a purely function-based perspective, these descriptions could apply to a variety of systems that are already in use with the ADF. It is unlikely that this cohort would be unwilling to deploy in a combat unit that utilized remote turrets (such as the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle), automatic target identification (such as the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System) or autonomous navigation with human-controlled strike capability (such as MQ-9 Reaper unmanned combat aerial vehicle [UCAV]). This further reinforces the need for detailed, fact-based training for military personnel to dispel remaining myths and address concerns among junior leaders regarding autonomy in military systems.

Finally, while this pattern of responses remained consistent, there was some interesting variation apparent when the data was analyzed on the basis of parent service branch. For example, Navy midshipmen were notably more willing to deploy alongside autonomous systems in scenario two yet were more uncertain in scenarios three and four. Indeed, 41.9 percent of naval respondents were unwilling or somewhat unwilling in scenario four, compared to 48.2 percent (Army) and 50 percent (Air Force). Contrastingly, the Army respondents had the highest levels of opposition across all four scenarios; for example, 14 percent of Army respondents were unwilling to deploy in scenario three compared to only 7.8 percent of Navy midshipmen and 9.3 percent of Air Force officer cadets. The Air Force respondents were broadly consistent with their Army colleagues yet displayed less uncertainty in scenarios three and four. This variance, while interesting, cannot be explained solely by differences in organizational culture between the services, because this cohort consisted of trainee-officers whose military experience had been chiefly tri-service at the time of the survey. Therefore, their distinct responses to these scenarios suggest that there must also be other factors at play beyond the natural biases generated by their service branch’s weapon systems and mission. The logical next step in this research was, therefore, to explore what potential benefits and risks of autonomous systems are most influential in building these perceptions among the next generation of defense leaders.

Perceived Benefits of Autonomous Systems

The second component of this study engaged directly with this question, questioning what level of importance these junior officers placed on a range of identified risks and benefits associated with autonomous systems. In this section of the survey, respondents were asked to rank how influential each of a list of benefits (fig. 2) was to their views on deploying alongside autonomous systems along a Likert scale. The results of this component provide valuable insights for future training and familiarization practices, as increasingly autonomous systems, as well as distinct platforms, are progressively integrated into the future ADF. While most respondents listed each of the 10 benefits as “somewhat important” or “important,” when one looks closer at the data, there are three takeaways worth highlighting.

Figure 2. Importance of perceived benefits of AWS

First, it is worth noting that the one significant exception to this pattern was when respondents were asked about the potential of autonomous systems to reduce harm or injury to enemy combatants. This factor was a notable outlier, with less than 12 percent listing it as a significant influence on their view of autonomous systems. This is particularly telling when it is contrasted against the other three harm reduction factors (which focused on the ADF, allied personnel, and civilians), which were clearly the most influential factors, being listed as important by 83–89 percent of respondents. The authors acknowledge that this data point could be interpreted with some skepticism, given the cohort’s status as young, inexperienced officer cadets and midshipmen; however, this same argument also highlights the core importance of identifying this discrepancy. These are soldiers, sailors, and airmen who will have command authority and oversight over increasingly autonomous systems in a future combat zone. The fact that the reduction of harm and injury to enemy combatants was so widely dismissed is a warning sign, especially when considering the expected importance of counterinsurgency and urban operations in the future operating environment, and this should prompt the provision of further targeted ethics training for these officer cadets and midshipmen.

Second, this data suggests that several of the benefits traditionally touted in favor of adopting autonomous systems are of less importance to the end user than expected. Aside from the risk of harm to enemy personnel, the least important potential benefits were reduced costs and new jobs and skill sets. These two factors were the only others that a significant number of respondents considered somewhat unimportant (15.5 percent and 11.7 percent respectively) and were only considered important by 26.5 percent and 33.6 percent of respondents. Interestingly, these factors also had the highest rate of being selected as somewhat important. The results for the remaining variables were similar, while each was listed as unimportant by less than 7 percent of respondents, they were only listed as important at an average rate of 40 percent. This suggests that training and messaging around autonomous systems should focus on the potential to protect host-nation and partner forces, as well as to improve the accuracy and reliability of targeting to protect civilians more effectively from unintentional engagement.

Finally, the data from this question displayed a more significant service branch variation than was seen in the previous question. Unsurprisingly, given their greater willingness to deploy alongside autonomous systems, Naval midshipmen were overall more likely to describe a benefit as important, while Air Force officer cadets had the least “important” results yet the most “somewhat important.” Interestingly, Air Force respondents were half as likely to list harm to enemy combatants as unimportant and were more likely to list this factor as somewhat important than either other service. Contrastingly, overall Army officers assigned significantly less importance to each benefit, with the notable exceptions being the harm reductions to ADF, allied, and civilians. For example, Army respondents were twice as likely to regard harm reduction to enemy combatants as unimportant than Air Force and 10.2 percent higher than Navy midshipmen. A similar difference can be seen with reduced costs, which twice as many Army officer cadets viewed as unimportant compared to their peers. Overall, the benefits data reinforces the need for individual service branches to supplement central efforts to integrate autonomous systems with training and exercises that reflect the specific platforms and domains they operate within.

Perceived Risks of Autonomous Systems

The final survey question to discuss in this article focused on determining the influence of a series of 13 potential risks on the willingness of the respondents to deploy in MUM-Ts. This question provided a valuable insight into which risks that this cohort of future defense leaders considered to be the most important—a perception that can guide future efforts to build trust among defense personnel as well as focus attention, within the military context, rather than considering the full range of concerns raised by prior civilian-focused studies. Overall, this data (figs. 3A and 3B) illustrated that respondents placed greater importance of operational risks—such as safety, accuracy, and loss of human control—than on the procurement and maintenance costs of autonomous systems or their potential to be organizationally disruptive within the ADF.

Figure 3A. Importance of perceived risks of AWS

Figure 3B. Importance of perceived risks of AWS

The risk perception data supported a hypothesis that respondents would place greater importance on the potential consequences of removing a weapon system from their direct control. While all identified risks were considered important or somewhat important by most respondents, potential safety and accuracy concerns were immediate outliers. Less than 2 percent of respondents considered these two variables as unimportant or somewhat important, and the number that were unsure was also negligible. Instead, we see that 83 percent of respondents placed high importance on safety, and over 86 percent did so for the accuracy of targeting and identification. Breaking down these figures by service branch reveals that Army officer cadets were more likely to deem both factors as important than their colleagues, who rated them as “somewhat important” at a compensatory rate. The rationale for these allocations is immediately apparent when we consider that these officer cadets would be asked to deploy alongside autonomous systems in complex land-based battlespaces, potentially in a counterinsurgency or hybrid warfare context, and that they would already be cognizant of their responsibility to ensure the safety of their soldiers while abiding by the Laws of Armed Conflict.

Building on that thought, as future officers, these respondents were preparing for their first command, for example, an infantry platoon, air defense unit, or an artillery battery in the case of Army officer cadets. It, therefore, makes sense that these respondents would also be concerned by potential accountability issues and loss of human control. However, the distinction between these risks is also worth noting, while 75.5 percent listed the latter as important and 13 percent as somewhat important, only 59.4 percent considered accountability issues as important, with 29.1 percent only considering this risk as somewhat important. Interestingly, 7.5 percent of Air Force officer cadets deemed accountability issues as somewhat unimportant, compared to 2.8 percent of Navy midshipmen and 5.2 percent of Army officer cadets. Determining why more respondents deemed accountability issues as less important as the loss of human control would be a valuable avenue for future research; however, on this data it is possible to contend that more respondents were concerned by the potential for autonomous systems to go rogue, so to speak, than by questions of military accountability (which as officers they must already consider).

Finally, on this aspect of their role as future defense leaders, it is interesting to note that the potential for autonomous systems to deteriorate command authority and impact on unit cohesion were only deemed important by 53.8 percent and 45.4 percent of respondents respectively, and just more than 9 percent were uncertain in both cases. Given the prevalence of concepts for incorporating AI into command-and-control processes across multiple militaries, this suggests that the future generation of ADF officers (who will be charged with incorporating and operating alongside such systems within operational command environments) would benefit from additional training, simulation, and war-gaming exercises to improve their understanding of the potential impacts and risks of integrating autonomous systems in the operational command cycle.

As with the benefits question, this data illustrates that these respondents placed less importance on the cost to build and maintain autonomous systems and job displacement, what is distinct about this risk evaluation is that less importance, particularly among Air Force officer cadets, was placed on potential challenges to ADF/service values and psychological impacts. There is a great deal of literature about moral and psychological injury from serving in conflict and an emerging body examining why there is such a high prevalence among drone pilots. It is, therefore, concerning that these risks were considered unimportant or somewhat important by 18.4 percent and 11.8 percent of respondents respectively. In fact, the impact of autonomous systems on service values was considered unimportant at the highest rate of any identified risk and second-highest as somewhat unimportant (behind job displacement). Furthermore, approximately 13 percent of respondents indicated that they were uncertain how to classify these risks in relation to autonomous systems. This is indicative of a potential lack of understanding of the ethical, moral, and psychological aspects of deploying in MUM-Ts among these future defense leaders that would need to be addressed prior to widespread integration of these technologies into the future force.

Although prior literature has engaged directly with the importance of many of these perceived risks and benefits, these studies have generally been conceptual. At the time of writing, this is the only study to present the risks and benefits of potentially lethal robots to the officers and midshipmen who will be responsible for the safe and effective operation of MUM-Ts. Considering this list of perceived factors, both positive and negative, through the lens of the intended end user revealed three core takeaways that could inform future defense doctrinal development and procurement.

The first core takeaway from this study was that there is a clear difference between the perceptions of this cohort and ADF leadership in terms of how vital the reduced development, procurement, and maintenance costs of autonomous systems are as a potential benefit over low-mass manned platforms. Reduced operational costs are regularly touted as a core factor in favor of pursuing increasingly autonomous systems. 20 One would, therefore, expect that this would be reflected in the views of the officer cadets and midshipmen. Instead, this study found that comparatively few respondents considered either cost or the potential for autonomous systems to disrupt traditional job roles as important factors in determining whether they would be willing to deploy as part of a MUM-T. Therefore, while the resource requirements to develop, procure, and deploy increasingly autonomous unmanned systems is important for defense planners, it is unlikely to be a useful focus for internal efforts to acclimatize soldiers to battlefield robots.

Second, this cohort indicated that the most influential factors in determining willingness to deploy with autonomous systems are their perceived safety, accuracy, and reliability. While the importance of trust in autonomous systems is well-documented, 21 this study suggests that the ADF should integrate trust-building and autonomous system acclimatization exercises directly into the Academy Military Education and Training curriculum. Given the noted response variance based on parent service branch, an alternative could be to integrate such training into the Single Service Training components. This would have the added benefit of also accommodating non-ADFA officer cadets and midshipmen. Beyond the impact of such training on the junior officers themselves, it is also worth considering the importance of addressing the concerns highlighted in this study for the integration of autonomous systems into the core combat units of the ADF.

Prevailing wisdom holds that small-unit combat teams only work when the soldiers, sailors, or airmen trust their comrades and leaders, understand their role intimately, and are able to react to changing battlefield conditions in a consistent manner even under intense stress. 22 The results of this study reflect that effective trust building and acclimatization at the small unit-level prior to combat deployment is vital and highlights the issue of junior enlisted soldiers being influenced by the views of their leaders (principally these officers, although also noncommissioned officers) toward unmanned platforms. If, for example, the lieutenant commanding an Australian Army rifle platoon is unwilling to deploy alongside a potentially lethal unmanned system that can use force based on preprogramed criteria, 23 it is unlikely that their enlisted soldiers are going to be disposed to trust that platform in combat. Without that trust, the unit is, quite understandably, likely to ignore, minimize, or leave behind that piece of equipment regardless of doctrinal guidance.

Taking a step back from the tactical level, addressing the concerns raised by these officer cadets would also be a useful step toward improving the capacity of the ADF to build and maintain a capability edge in autonomous systems through a more effective, bottom-up innovation and diffusion cycle. Prior studies have demonstrated that bottom-up participation is a vital component of successful military innovation. 24 The development of the Innovation and eXperimentation Group (IXG) is an apparent attempt to jump-start bottom-up innovation and experimentation in the Australian Army. 25 While current officers commanding at the company and battalion levels are influential supporters of such efforts, for the IXG to be truly useful, it will require that junior officers take the initiative to experiment with the unmanned or autonomous systems under their command. The most effective way to equip junior officers for success in this endeavor would be to incorporate tailored war games and exercises into their initial training to both acclimatize emerging leaders to autonomous systems and to encourage tactical and operational experimentation once they reach their first command.

Finally, from an ethical standpoint, this study raises both positive and concerning implications for how junior military leaders perceive the impacts of autonomous systems on the battlespace. Beginning with the positive results, reduction of harm to civilians, ADF personnel and allied contingents were almost universally considered to be important factors affecting the respondent’s willingness to deploy alongside autonomous systems. There is also an immediately clear link here to the importance that was placed on the safety, accuracy, and reliability of autonomous systems. The argument that autonomous systems could reduce the potential of harm to friendly forces and civilians is similar to the justifications for the use of prior military technologies such as precision-guided munitions and armed remote-operated UAVs. Furthermore, these results also reflect the Australian Army’s Robotic and Autonomous Systems Strategy , the goals of which included using increasingly autonomous systems to enhance the capabilities of the soldier and reduce their physical and cognitive load, to augment their decision making, and to replace manned platforms in specific roles. 26 Overall, these results suggest that future defense leaders will be amenable to arguments that autonomous and AI-enabled systems will allow for far more accurate targeting; remove ADF personnel from dull, dirty, or dangerous roles; and limit their exposure to combat.

It is, however, concerning that respondents placed a lower importance on adverse outcomes, such as the potential for autonomous systems to affect unit cohesion, to inflict additional stress or psychological damage, or to conflict with the values of the ADF. Given the emerging research on the rate of psychological injury among drone operators in the United States, 27 it would be valuable for the ADF to consider how the use of potentially lethal robots interacts with its values and how officers are taught ethical and lawful battlefield operations. While the advent of AWS may yet remove human soldiers from elements of warfare, we must be careful that the reduction in physical risk is not attendant with exposing soldiers, sailors, and airmen to additional risk of moral or psychological injury.

Recommendations for Further Research

This article raises four interesting avenues for additional research. The first is to conduct a follow-on study focused on noncommissioned officers (NCO) and long-term enlisted soldiers. This data would be a valuable analytical companion to this piece because it is these experienced soldiers who would advise junior officers in combat. Understanding how NCOs perceive the risks and benefits of autonomous systems would also be valuable from the perspective of norm generation and training because, as the senior soldiers in a given unit, they would have a significant socializing influence upon the tactical use of autonomous systems.

Similarly, the second line of future research would be to conduct a qualitative follow-up study with a representative sample of the original respondents to contextualize and further explore the implications raised in this article. Companion interviews or focus groups would inform a more detailed understanding of the link between these risk-benefit perceptions and willingness to deploy alongside autonomous systems in a manner that could inform the creation of targeted training or identify design factors that should be prioritized in first-generation autonomous systems. Finally, this would allow the researchers to undertake a more direct comparative analysis of each potential risk or benefit, which could inform far more specific recommendations for the ADF.

The third avenue for future research would be to refine its focus by both segregating the respondents on the basis of service branch and referring directly to capabilities and platforms that have been identified by their respective services as priorities for integrating autonomy. This would more clearly indicate the extent to which the equipment, culture, and battlefield function of the respondent’s service branches influence their perception of the risks and benefits of autonomous systems and whether this explains the level of service branch difference that we saw in this study.

Finally, consider that this cohort will be increasingly unlikely to directly employ physical platforms on the frontlines as their careers progress and autonomous systems proliferate and diffuse. Therefore, the fourth avenue for future research would be to analyze whether these perceptions among junior military officers change when the autonomous system is integrated into their command-and-control processes, such as with an AI-enabled digital assistant for collating and prioritizing incoming signals intelligence for a battalion command post.

In conclusion, this article has challenged the assumption that junior leaders are inherently open to the use of autonomous systems and instead demonstrated that a significant majority would be unwilling to deploy alongside fully autonomous LAWS. This article has demonstrated that comparative willingness to deploy in MUM-Ts among this cohort is influenced by a range of concerns and incentives; however, it has also demonstrated that allowing a robot to use lethal force retains a discursive weight that influences a significant minority to claim that they would be uncomfortable deploying alongside robots that have comparable operational independence to systems that are already in use by the ADF.

This article identified that the most important factors influencing a respondent’s willingness to deploy in a MUM-T are the perceived safety, accuracy, and reliability of the autonomous system and that the potential to reduce harm to civilians, allied forces, and ADF personnel are the most persuasive benefits. Contrastingly, this data suggests that the resource efficiencies of autonomous systems and their potential to disrupt the defense workforce are significantly less influential upon their position than it is for strategic planners. Finally, this study highlighted a concerning lack of emphasis on the part of these respondents toward the potential negative emotional and psychological impacts of deploying a robotic weapon system under their responsibility, if not control.

Overall, this article makes two core recommendations based on the underlying data. The first is that autonomous system acclimatization training should be incorporated at all levels of the officer training process and that small-unit leadership tactics training should incorporate robotic units. This leads into the second recommendation, which is that units at the company level and lower would be well served by undertaking war games and exercises with the purpose of encouraging Army’s soldiers, NCOs, and officers to experiment and innovate with autonomous systems. Where suitable platforms do not exist or are not readily available, units should be encouraged to run tabletop or proxied exercises for this purpose.

The ADF will only be able to secure and maintain a capability edge in the future if we encourage all elements of the military to experiment and become comfortable with autonomous and AI-enabled systems because it is this bottom-up, constant experimentation that will keep the military innovating with sufficient speed and agility to regularly reestablish its regional, comparative dominance in the deployment of autonomous systems.

Dr. Jai Galliott

Dr. Galliott is director of the Values in Defence and Security Technology Group, School of Engineering and Information Technology, within the University of New South Wales at Australian Defence Force Academy, where he also sits on the Faculty and University Boards. He also holds appointments as a fellow of the Modern War Institute at the West Point and the Centre for Technology & Global Affairs in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Austin Wyatt

Dr. Wyatt is a research associate in the Values in Defence and Security Technology group at The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. His research concerns autonomous weapons, with a particular emphasis on their disruptive effects in Southeast Asia.

1 Acknowledgments and Funding : The authors of this paper have received support from the Australian Government through the Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence Cooperative Research Centre; the Australian Department of Defence; US Air Force Office of Scientific Research; and the Spitfire Foundation. The views expressed within this paper are those of the author/s and do not necessarily represent those of any other party.

Ethics Clearance : Ethical clearance for the original study was provided by the Departments of Defence and Veterans Affairs Human Research Ethics Committee.

1 Austin Wyatt, “Charting Great Power Progress toward a Lethal Autonomous Weapon System Demonstration Point,” Defence Studies 20, no. 1 (2020): 1–20.

2 Robert O. Work and Greg Grant, Beating the Americans at Their Own Game: An Offset Strategy with Chinese Characteristics (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2019).

3 Michael C. Horowitz, “When Speed Kills: Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, Deterrence and Stability,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42, no. 6 (2019): 764–88.

4 Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, “Global Poll Shows 61% Oppose Killer Robots,” 2019, https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ .

5 Heather M. Roff and David Danks, “‘Trust but Verify’: The Difficulty of Trusting Autonomous Weapons Systems,” Journal of Military Ethics 17, no. 1 (2018): 2–20.

6 Charli Carpenter, “US Public Opinion on Autonomous Weapons,” Duck of Minerva Blog , 19 June 2013, https://web.archive.org/ .

7 Open Roboethics Initiative, “The Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems: An International Public Opinion Poll” (Vancouver, Canada: Open Roboethics Initiative 9 November 2015), http://www.openroboethics.org/ .

8 Open Roboethics Initiative, “The Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.”

9 Michael C. Horowitz, “Public Opinion and the Politics of the Killer Robots Debate,” Research and Politics 3, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 1–8, https://journals.sagepub.com/ .

10 IPSOS, “Data for 2017 Campaign to Stop Killer Robots Survey,” (2017).

11 IPSOS, “Six in Ten (61%) Respondents across 26 Countries Oppose the Use of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems” (news release, 22 January 2019), https://www.ipsos.com/ .

12 IPSOS, “Six in Ten (61%) Respondents.”

13 Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, “Global Poll Shows 61% Oppose Killer Robots.”

14 IPSOS, “Six in Ten (61%) Respondents.”

15 This Hague Convention clause aims to offer some protection to individuals caught up in armed conflict even when there is no specific applicable rule of international humanitarian law.

16 Horowitz, “Public Opinion and the Politics of the Killer Robots Debate.”

17 Richard Lim, “These Are the Drones You Are Looking For: Manned–Unmanned Teaming and the U.S. Army,” National Security Watch 15, no. 4 (21 December 2015), https://www.ausa.org/ .

18 Mick Ryan, Human-Machine Teaming for Future Ground Forces (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2018), https://csbaonline.org/ .

19 These four scenarios centered on “potentially lethal robots” that

1. need a human operator to control every function of the system;

2. human operators control, but which can independently perform some preprogramed functions;

3. can exercise preprogramed “decision making” in determining how to employ force in predefined areas without the need for direct human oversight; and

4. can imitate human-level decision making ability to create and complete its own tasks in any environment without the need for any human input, learning from its mistakes.

20 Austin Wyatt and Jai Galliott, “Closing the Capability Gap: Asean Military Modernization During the Dawn of Autonomous Weapon Systems,” Asian Security 16, no. 1 (2020): 53–72.

21 Roff and Danks, “‘Trust but Verify’.”

22 Roff and Danks, “‘Trust but Verify’.”

23 Such a system was covered under Scenario Three, in which 21.4 percent of Army Officer Cadets were somewhat unwilling, 14 percent were unwilling, and 16.4 percent were unsure. This means that 189 of 365 (almost 52 percent) of these future Army officers expressed discomfort at the prospect of deploying as part of a MUM-T that included such a system.

24 Adam Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies,” Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 5 (2006): 905–34.

25 Chief of Army, Army in Motion: Aide for Army’s Teams (Canberra: Australian Army, 2019), https://www.army.gov.au/ .

26 Robin Smith, Robotic & Autonomous Systems Strategy (Canberra: Australian Army, October 2018), https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/ .

27 Robert Sparrow, “Drones, Courage, and Military Culture,” in Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics , ed. George Lucas (Oxon: Routledge, 2015).

The views and opinions expressed or implied in JIPA are those of the authors and should not be construed as carrying the official sanction of the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, Air Education and Training Command, Air University, or other agencies or departments of the US government or their international equivalents. See our Publication Ethics Statement .

Pros and Cons of Autonomous Weapons Systems (with Oren Etzioni)

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• First Online: 09 January 2018

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• Amitai Etzioni 3  

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As technology progresses and autonomous weapons increasingly become a reality rather than mere science fiction, an ethical debate has developed surrounding the use of such weapons, which operate with little or no human oversight. Some view the use of autonomous weapons as morally preferable (not to mention strategically advantageous), as they can be used in place of human combatants. Others oppose their use for moral and legal reasons. This chapter analyzes arguments on both sides of the question and discusses challenges to limiting and defining autonomous weapons. The chapter acknowledges that some form of autonomy in weapon systems is here to stay, but seeks to limit potential catastrophes by recommending the adoption of an international agreement to ban fully autonomous weapons—those which cannot be recalled—as a first step toward addressing the issues raised.

This chapter draws on “Pros and Cons of Autonomous Weapons Systems” in Military Review , (May-June 2017): 72–80.

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Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and military robots are progressing from science fiction movies to designer’s drawing boards, to engineering laboratories, and to the battlefield. These machines have prompted a debate among military planners, roboticists, and ethicists about the development and deployment of weapons that are able to perform increasingly advanced functions, including targeting and application of force, with little or no human oversight. Some military experts hold that these autonomous weapons systems not only confer significant strategic and tactical advantages in the battleground, but that they are also are preferable to the use of human combatants, on moral grounds. In contrast, critics hold that these weapons should be curbed, if not banned altogether, for a variety of moral and legal reasons. The chapter reviews first the arguments by those who favor AWS, then those who oppose them, and closes with a policy suggestion.

1 In Support of AWS

1.1 military advantages.

Those who call for further development and deployment of autonomous weapons systems generally point to several advantages. (a) Autonomous weapons systems act as a “force multiplier;” that is, fewer soldiers are needed for a given mission, and the efficacy of each soldier is greater. (b) Autonomous weapons systems expand the battlefield, allowing combat to reach into areas that were previously inaccessible. And (c) Autonomous weapons systems reduce casualties by removing human soldiers from dangerous missions (Marchant et al. 2011 , pp. 272–276).

The Pentagon’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007–2032 provides additional motivations for pursuing AWS. These include that robots are better suited than humans for “dull,” “dangerous,” and “dirty” missions. Examples given for each respective category of mission include long sorties, bomb disposal, and operating in nuclear clouds or areas with high radioactivity (Clapper et al. 2007 ). Jeffrey S. Thurnher of the US Naval War College adds that “LARs [Lethal Autonomous Robots] have the unique potential to operate at a tempo faster than humans can possibly achieve and to lethally strike even when communications links have been severed” (Thurnher 2012 , p. 83).

The long-term savings that could be achieved through fielding an army of military robots have also been highlighted. The Fiscal Times notes that each US soldier in Afghanistan costs the Pentagon roughly $850,000 per year (some estimate the cost to be over $1 million per soldier per year), which does not include the long-term costs of providing health care to veterans. Conversely, the TALON robot—a small, armed robot—can be built for only $230,000 and is relatively cheap to maintain (Francis 2013 ). Gen. Robert Cone, head of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, suggested in 2014 that by relying more on “support robots,” the Army could reduce the size of a brigade from 4000 to 3000 soldiers without a concomitant reduction in effectiveness (Ackerman 2014 ).

Major Jason DeSon, writing in the Air Force Law Review , notes the potential advantages of autonomous aerial weapons systems. The physical strain of high-g maneuvers and the intense mental concentration and situational awareness required of fighter pilots makes them very prone to fatigue and exhaustion; robot pilots, on the other hand, would not be subject to these physiological and mental constraints. Moreover, fully autonomous planes could be programmed to take genuinely random and unpredictable action, which could confuse an opponent (DeSon 2015 ). More striking still, US Air Force Captain Michael Byrnes predicts that a single Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with machine-controlled maneuvering and accuracy could, with a few hundred rounds of ammunition and sufficient fuel reserves, take out an entire fleet of aircraft with human pilots (Byrnes 2014 ).

In guiding future research in AWS, the Defense Science Board at the Pentagon has identified six areas where advances in autonomy would be of significant benefit to current systems:

Perception , which includes not just new hardware (the actual sensors) but also software (algorithms for sensing).

Planning , which includes “the algorithms needed to make decisions about action (provide autonomy) in situations in which humans are not in the environment (e.g. space, the ocean)” (DSB 2012 , p. 39).

Learning. The DSB report states the advantages of machine learning over manual software engineering, but notes that machine learning approaches to autonomous vehicles have thus far mostly been applied to ground vehicles and robots, and not yet air and marine vehicles.

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Robots are quite different from other computers or tools because they are physically situated agents, and thus elicit different responses from human users. Hence HRI research needs to span a number of domains well beyond engineering, including psychology, cognitive science, and communications, among others.

Natural language. The authors of the DSB report hold that “Natural language is the most normal and intuitive way for humans to instruct autonomous systems; it allows them to provide diverse, high-level goals and strategies rather than detailed teleoperation” (DSB 2012 , p. 49). Hence, further development of the ability of autonomous weapons systems to respond to commands in a natural language is necessary.

Multi-Agent Coordination refers to the distribution of tasks among multiple robots, with either centrally planned or directly negotiated synchronization. This sort of collaboration goes beyond mere cooperation because “it assumes that the agents have a cognitive understanding of each other’s capabilities, can monitor progress towards the goal, and engage in more human-like teamwork” (DSB 2012 , p. 50).

1.2 Moral Justifications

Several military experts and roboticists have argued that autonomous weapons systems should not only be regarded as morally acceptable, but that they would in fact be ethically preferable to human fighters. Roboticist Ronald Arkin believes that autonomous robots in the future will be able to act more “humanely” on the battlefield for a number of reasons: For one, they do not need to be programmed with a self-preservation instinct, thus potentially eliminating the need for a “shoot-first, ask questions later” attitude. The judgments of autonomous weapons systems will not be clouded by emotions like fear or hysteria, and they will be able to process much more incoming sensory information than humans, without discarding or distorting it to fit preconceived notions. Finally, in teams comprised of human and robot soldiers, the robots could be more relied upon to report ethical infractions that they observe than would a team of humans who might close ranks (Arkin 2010 ).

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer of the US Army adds that there might be ethical advantages to removing humans from high-stress combat zones in favor of robots. He points to neuroscience research which suggests that the neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control can shut down when overloaded with stress, leading to sexual assaults and other crimes that soldiers would otherwise be less likely to commit. But Pryer ( 2013 ) sets aside the question of whether or not waging war via robots is ethical in the abstract and suggests that because it sparks so much moral outrage among the populations from which the US most needs support, robot warfare has serious strategic disadvantages and is helping to fuel the cycle of perpetual warfare.

2 Opposition to AWS

2.1 opposition on moral grounds.

In July of 2015, an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons was released at an International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The letter warns: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is—practically if not legally—feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms” (Autonomous Weapons 2015 ). The letter also notes that AI has the potential to benefit humanity, but that if a military AI arms race ensues, its reputation could be tarnished and a public backlash might curtail future benefits of AI. The letter has an impressive list of signatories, including Elon Musk (inventor and founder of Tesla), Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple), physicist Stephen Hawking (University of Cambridge), and Noam Chomsky (MIT), among others. Over 3000 AI and Robotics researchers have also signed the letter. The open letter simply calls for “a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.” We note in passing that it is often unclear whether a weapon is offensive or defensive. Thus, many assume that an effective missile defense shield is defensive, but it can be extremely destabilizing, if it allows one nation to launch a nuclear strike against another without fear of retaliation.

Previously, in April of 2013, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, and arbitrary executions presented a report to the UN’s Human Rights Council recommending that member states should declare and implement moratoria on the testing, production, transfer, and deployment of Lethal Autonomous Robotics (LARs) until an internationally agreed upon framework for LARs has been established (Heyns 2013 ).

That same year, a group of engineers, AI and robotics experts, and other scientists and researchers from 37 countries issued the “Scientists’ Call to Ban Autonomous Lethal Robots.” The statement notes the lack of scientific evidence that robots could, in the foreseeable future, have “the functionality required for accurate target identification, situational awareness or decisions regarding the proportional use of force.” Hence they may cause a high level of collateral damage. The statement ends by insisting that “Decisions about the application of violent force must not be delegated to machines” (ICRAC 2013 ).

Indeed, the delegation of life-or-death decision-making to non-human agents is a recurring concern of AWS’ opponents. The most obvious manifestation of this concern relates to autonomous weapons systems that are capable of choosing their own targets. Thus, highly regarded computer scientist Noel Sharkey ( 2012 ) has called for a ban on “autonomous lethal targeting” because it violates the Principle of Distinction, considered one of the most important rules of armed conflict: autonomous weapons systems will find it very hard to determine who is a civilian and who is a combatant, which is difficult even for humans. Allowing AI to make decisions about targeting will most likely result in civilian casualties and unacceptable collateral damage.

Another major concern deals with the problem of accountability when autonomous weapons systems are deployed. Ethicist Robert Sparrow ( 2007 ) highlights this ethical issue by noting that a fundamental condition of international humanitarian law, or jus in bello , requires that someone must be able to be held responsible for civilian deaths. Any weapon or other means of war that makes it impossible to identify responsibility for the casualties it causes does not meet the requirements of jus in bello, and therefore should not be employed in war.

This issue arises because AI-equipped machines make decisions on their own, which makes it difficult to determine whether a flawed decision is due to flaws in the program or in the autonomous deliberations of the AI-equipped (so-called ‘smart’) machines. This problem was highlighted when a driverless car violated the speed limits by moving too slowly on a highway, and it was unclear to whom the ticket should be issued (For more, see Etzioni and Eztioni 2016 ). In situations where a human being makes the decision to use force against a target, there is a clear chain of accountability, stretching from whoever actually “pulled the trigger” to the commander who gave the orders. In the case of AWS, no such clarity exists. It is unclear who or what is to blame or bears liability.

What Sharkey, Sparrow, and the signatories of the open letter propose could be labelled “upstream regulation;” that is, a proposal for setting limits on the development of autonomous weapons systems technology and drawing red lines that future technological developments should not be allowed to cross. This kind of upstream approach tries to foresee the direction of technological development and pre-empt the dangers such developments would pose. Others prefer “downstream regulation,” which takes a wait-and-see approach by developing regulations as new advances occur. Legal scholars Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman, who advocate this approach, argue that regulation will have to emerge along with the technology because they believe that morality will co-evolve with technological development. Thus, arguments about the irreplaceability of human conscience and moral judgment may have to be revisited (Anderson and Waxman 2013a ). They suggest that, as humans become more accustomed to machines performing functions with life-or-death implications/consequences—such as driving cars or performing surgeries—humans will most likely become more comfortable with AI technology’s incorporation into weaponry. Thus, Anderson and Waxman propose what might be considered a communitarian solution, by suggesting that the United States should work on developing norms and principles (rather than binding legal rules) guiding and constraining research and development—and eventual deployment—of AWS. Those norms could help establish expectations about legally or ethically appropriate conduct. They write:

To be successful, the United States government would have to resist two extreme instincts. It would have to resist its own instincts to hunker down behind secrecy and avoid discussing and defending even guiding principles. It would also have to refuse to cede the moral high ground to critics of autonomous lethal systems, opponents demanding some grand international treaty or multilateral regime to regulate or even prohibit them. (Anderson and Waxman 2013b , p. 46)

2.2 Counter Arguments

In response, some argue against any attempt to apply the language of morality that is applied to human agents, to robots. Military ethicist George Lucas Jr. ( 2013 ) points out, for example, that robots cannot feel anger or a desire to “get even” by seeking retaliation for harm done to their compatriots. Lucas holds that the debate thus far has been obfuscated by the confusion of machine autonomy with moral autonomy. The Roomba vacuum cleaner and Patriot missile “are both ‘autonomous’ in that they perform their assigned missions, including encountering and responding to obstacles, problems, and unforeseen circumstances with minimal human oversight,” but not in the sense that they can change or abort their mission if they have “moral objections” (Lucas 2013 , p. 218). Lucas thus holds that the primary concern of engineers and designers developing autonomous weapons systems should not be ethics but rather safety and reliability , which means taking due care to address the possible risks of malfunctions, mistakes or misuse that autonomous weapons systems will present. We note, though, that safety is of course a moral value as well.

Lieutenant Colonel Shane R. Reeves & Major William J. Johnson, Judge Advocates in the US Army, note that there are battlefields absent of civilians, such as underwater and in space, where autonomous weapons could reduce the possibility of suffering and death by eliminating the need for combatants (Reeves and Johnson 2014 ). We note that this valid observation does not agitate against a ban in other, in effect most, battlefields.

Michael N. Schmitt of the Naval War College makes a distinction between weapons that are illegal per se and the unlawful use of otherwise legal weapons. For example, a rifle is not prohibited under international law, but using it to shoot civilians would constitute an unlawful use. On the other hand, some weapons (e.g. biological weapons) are unlawful per se , even when used only against combatants. Thus, Schmitt grants that some autonomous weapons systems might contravene international law, but “it is categorically not the case that all such systems will do so” (Schmitt 2013 , p. 8). Thus, even an autonomous system that is incapable of distinguishing between civilians and combatants should not necessarily be unlawful per se , as autonomous weapons systems could be used in situations where no civilians are present, such as against tank formations in the desert, or warships. Such a system could be used unlawfully though, if it were employed in contexts where civilians were present. We note that setting some limitations on such weapons should still be called for.

In their review of the debate, legal scholars Gregory Noone and Diana Noone conclude that everyone is in agreement that any autonomous weapons system would have to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), and thus be able to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. They write, “No academic or practitioner is stating anything to the contrary; therefore, this part of any argument from either side must be ignored as a red herring. Simply put, no one would agree to any weapon that ignores LOAC obligations” (Noone and Noone 2015 , p. 25).

2.3 Level of Autonomy

We take it for granted that no nation will agree to forswear the use of autonomous weapons systems unless its adversaries would do the same. At first blush, it may seem that it is not beyond the realm of possibility to obtain an international agreement to ban autonomous weapons systems or at least some kinds of them. One notes that a fair number of bans on one category or another of weapons exist and have been quite well honored and enforced. These include the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction; the Chemical Weapons Convention; and the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction. The record of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is more complicated, but it is credited with having stopped several nations from developing nuclear arms and causing at least one to give them up.

Some of the advocates of a ban on autonomous weapons systems seek to ban not merely production and deployment but also R&D and testing of these machines. This may well not be possible as autonomous weapons systems can be developed and tested in small workshops and do not leave a trail. Nor could one rely on satellites for inspection data, for the same reasons. We hence assume that if such a ban were possible, it would mainly focus on deployment and perhaps encompass mass production.

Even so, such a ban would face considerable difficulties. While it is possible to determine what is a chemical weapon and what is not (despite some disagreements at the margin, for example about law enforcement use of irritant chemical weapons Davidson 2009 ), and to clearly define nuclear arms or land mines, autonomous weapons systems come with very different levels of autonomy. A ban on all autonomous weapons would require foregoing many modern weapons, already mass produced and deployed.

2.4 Defining Autonomy

Different definitions have been attached to the word “autonomy” in different Department of Defense documents, and the resulting concepts suggest rather different views on the future of robotic warfare. One definition, used by the Defense Science Board Task Force views autonomy merely as high-end automation: “a capability (or a set of capabilities) that enables a particular action of a system to be automatic or, within programmed boundaries, ‘self-governing’” (DSB 2012 , p. 1). According to this definition, already existing capabilities, such as auto-pilot used in aircrafts, could qualify as “autonomous.”

Another definition, used in the DoD’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011–2036 , suggests a qualitatively different view of autonomy: “an autonomous system is able to make a decision based on a set of rules and/or limitations. It is able to determine what information is important in making a decision” (DOD 2011 , p. 43). In this view, autonomous systems are less predictable than merely automated ones, as the AI is not only performing a specified action, but also making decisions and thus potentially taking an action that a human did not order. A human is still responsible for programming the behavior of the autonomous system, and the actions the system takes would have to be consistent with the laws and strategies provided by humans, but no individual action would be completely predictable or preprogrammed. It is easy to find still other definitions of autonomy. The International Committee of the Red Cross defines autonomous weapons as those able to “independently select and attack targets, i.e. with autonomy in the ‘critical functions’ of acquiring, tracking, selecting and attacking targets” (ICRC 2014 , p. 7).

We take autonomy to mean an ability to make decisions based on information gathered by a machine and to act on the basis of its own deliberations, beyond the instructions and parameters provided to the machine by its producers, programmers, and users.

It seems useful to consider three kinds or levels of autonomy:

Human-in-the-Loop Weapons: Robots that can select targets and deliver force only with a human command. Numerous examples of this type already exist and are in use. For example, Israel’s Iron Dome system detects incoming rockets, predicts its trajectory and then sends this information to a human soldier who decides whether to launch an interceptor rocket (Marks 2012 ).

Human-on-the-Loop Weapons: Robots that can select targets and deliver force under the oversight of a human operator who can override the robots’ actions.

Examples of Human-on-the-Loop weapons are either in development or have already been deployed. The SGR-A1 built by Samsung is a sentry robot placed by South Korea along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). It uses a low-light camera and pattern recognition software to detect intruders, and then issues a verbal warning. If the intruder does not surrender, the robot has a machine gun which can either be fired remotely by a soldier, who the robot has alerted, or by the robot itself if it is in fully-automatic mode (Lin et al. 2008 ).

The US also deploys Human-on-the-Loop weapons systems. For example, the MK 15-Phalanx Close-In Weapons System has been used on US Navy ships since the 1980s and is capable of detecting, evaluating, tracking, engaging, and using force against Anti-Ship Missiles and high-speed aircraft threats without any human commands (MK 15 n.d. ). The Center for a New American Security estimates that at least 30 countries have deployed or are developing Human-on-the-Loop systems (Scharre and Horowitz 2015 ).

Human-out-of-the-Loop Weapons: Robots that are capable of selecting targets and delivering force without any human input or interaction (Docherty 2012 ). This kind of autonomous weapons system is the source of much concern about “killing machines.” Military strategist Thomas K. Adams ( 2002 ) warned that, in the future, humans would be reduced to making only initial policy decisions about war and have mere symbolic authority over automated systems. Human Rights Watch, in its much discussed report Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots, warned, “By eliminating human involvement in the decision to use lethal force in armed conflict, fully autonomous weapons would undermine other, non-legal protections for civilians” (Docherty 2012 ). The authors believe that a repressive dictator could deploy emotionless robots to kill and instill fear among the population without having to worry about soldiers empathizing with their victims (who might be neighbors, acquaintances, or even family members) and turning against the dictator.

As we see it, it is hard to imagine nations agreeing to return to a world in which weapons have no measure of autonomy. On the contrary, development in AI leads one to expect that more and more machines and instruments of all kinds will become more autonomous. Bombers and fighter aircraft with no human pilot seem inevitable. Although it is true that any degree of autonomy entails, by definition, some loss of human control, this genie has left the bottle and we see no way to put it back again.

The most promising way to proceed is to determine whether one can obtain international agreement to ban fully autonomous weapons, whose missions cannot be aborted and that cannot be recalled once they are launched. If they malfunction and target civilian centers, there is no way to stop them. Like unexploded landmines, placed without marks, these weapons will continue to kill even after the sides settle their difference and make peace.

One may argue that gaining such an agreement should not be arduous because no rational policymaker will favor such a weapon. Indeed, the Pentagon has directed that “Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” (DOD 2012 ). One should note though that such Human-out-of-the-Loop arms are very effective in reinforcing a red line. Declaration by representatives of one nation that if another nation engages in a certain kind of hostile behavior, swift and severe retaliation will follow, are open to misinterpretation by the other side, even if backed up with deployment of troops or other military assets. Leaders, drawing on considerable historical experience, may bet that they be able to cross the red line and be spared because of one reason or another. Arms without a human in the loop make for much more credible red lines. (This is a form of the “pre-commitment strategy” discussed by Thomas Schelling ( 1966 ) in Arms and Influence , in which one party limits its own options by obligating itself to retaliate, thus making its deterrence more credible.)

We suggest that nations might be willing to forgo this advantage of fully autonomous arms in order to gain the assurance that once hostilities cease, they could avoid becoming entangled in new rounds of fighting because some bombers are still running loose and attacking the other side, or will malfunction and bomb civilian centers. Finally, if and when a ban on fully autonomous weapons is agreed upon and means of verification is developed, one may aspire to move toward limiting weapons with a high, but not full, measure of autonomy.

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Etzioni, A. (2018). Pros and Cons of Autonomous Weapons Systems (with Oren Etzioni). In: Happiness is the Wrong Metric. Library of Public Policy and Public Administration, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69623-2_16

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IELTS Essay Band 7: Nuclear Threats and Benefits

The threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace. Nuclear power provides cheap and clean energy.

The benefits of nuclear technology far outweigh the disadvantages.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

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• Try to use more complex and less common words to further enhance your vocabulary range.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Nuclear Weapons

Science always starts out with an idea. Sometimes these ideas are created with a purpose and other times they are stumbled upon by accident. Although it only takes one person to come up with an idea, it takes hundreds more to prove it.This applies to a vast majority of things including the discovery of nuclear energy. It all began with the idea of the atom. Greek philosopher, Democritus of Abdera believed that all matter is composed of minuscule particles we know today as atoms; thus a chain reaction began, with scientists all over the world researching the simplest form of matter, leading to the creation of the periodic table and the discovery of subatomic particles. In 1895 a German man named Roentgen discovered the X-ray which led Henry Bequerel to find out that the rays emit spontaneously from Uranium salts. During this time, Pierre and Marie Curie studied this newfound evidence and isolated Polonium and Radium that exhibited this spontaneous energy production, naming it radioactivity. Afterwards, in 1899, Ernest Rutherford distinguished alpha- and beta- radiation from studying x-rays and then learned that most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in the center, discovering what we know today as the nucleus. Along with this discovery, he theorized neutrons …show more content…

First, nuclear weapons can possibly lead to radiation disaster, affecting large masses of land. Although the radiation will go away instantly, the threat it poses to humankind and the environment stays. Second, the entire industry in charge of nuclear weapons is actively producing radioactive waste and this waste is can be found in everyday products such as: “clothing, water purifier resin, hand tools and the materials used in building nuclear reactors.” Exposure to this radioactive waste can lead to disabilities and cancer. Lastly, residual radiation can essentially destroy wildlife and the environment for hundreds of

Pros And Cons Of Pro Nuclear Weapons

A nuclear weapon is a guidance to show who has the power of the countries but also prevent wars from happening It is highly reliable technology to use by going uninterrupted for more than a year even with dealing with difficult weather conditions . Nuclear weapons can be put in a variety of locations.The energy from a nuclear weapon can provide the foundations for other technologies by being the naval vessel and giving power to hundreds to thousands of homes. Nuclear warfare can be the best thing a nation could have power and can make it where that one nation can have the ultimate weapon . If a nation would want to go to war they can have the best advantage to win with these mass destruction weapons these things can have a negative impact by

What Would Happen if We Ever Use all the Nuclear Weapons We Have

• 12 Works Cited

Another cause of the danger of nuclear weapons is improper storage and handling. The nuclear weapons could be accidently detonated in there silos or storage facilities. This can be a danger to the entire world. If a nuclear weapon is not stored in a safe matter many types of problems could arise. A perfect example of a nuclear accident was at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. The Chernobyl accident was the result of a flawed reactor design that was operated inadequately by non-properly trained personal. The Chernobyl explosion was a very devastating explosion and only two workers died on the night of the accident. Over the course of a few weeks after the accident 28 people were reported dead from radiation sickness.

The Pros And Cons Of The Atomic Bomb

Whether the use of the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II was justified, we will never know. However, the amount of time spent on discussing the use and effect of the bomb seems to be nonexistent. If they talked about the bomb there was no major argument against using the bomb; with that came mystery because they did not understand the bomb. There were factors that they used as an excuse to use the bomb, but these were in the background and later added to make the argument seem more one-sided, in their favor. Whether the use of the atomic bomb proved helpful or not is up to debate. The atomic bomb changed the world, and given the evidence, the use of the bomb was not talked about in detail except for when and where to use it.

Pros And Cons Of Using The Atomic Bomb

In August of 1945, two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, consequently, killing tens of thousands of civilians due to radiation, burns, or turning them immediately into ash. The monstrous bomb sneaks up on innocent civilians and rips their life from them in one foul swoop. The Atomic bomb kills masses of people at one time, but can also save masses of people’s lives from the ongoing war. Herein lies the conflict, since the nuclear bomb is extremely lethal, but effective, should it be used in war? Do you believe that this act was ethical? The atomic bomb should have never been used in past wars and should never be used today because its deadly side effects.

Why Is The Atomic Bomb Necessary

On August 6th, 1945, the first atomic bomb to ever be used in the history of the world was dropped on Hiroshima. The result of this bomb killed roughly 80,000 people from the blast itself, and tens of thousands more due to radiation poisoning. After a few days passed, the United States dropped another nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, and threatened to drop another if the Japanese did not surrender. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki lead to the Japanese surrender to the United States, removing them from the war. While the use of this bomb was likely necessary at the time, was it an ethical decision? The lives that were affected from this blast were not just of those who experienced it, generations later, people who weren’t even alive at the time were faced with trauma as well. With that being said, the dropping of the bomb might have been necessary, but it was an unethical decision, even though the Japanese made it perfectly clear that they will fight until the last civilian.

The year was 1945. World War II was nearly over. Germany had been defeated and the allied forces were sure to win the war. The only unsure thing was how many lives would be lost in defeating Japan. The United States decided to drop the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. On that day the Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. Three days later the United States dropped "Fat Boy" on Nagasaki. 240,000 civilians, mostly women and children, lost their lives on these two days. On August 14, 1945 Japan surrendered unconditionally. Was it necessary?

The Pros And Cons Of The Atomic Bombs

The dropping of the atomic bombs was so devastating because no one saw it coming. Although, the bombs shortened the war the lives of thousands were taken including men, women, and innocent children. The United States did send the Japanese a warning stating what they were going to do, but the citizens refused to pay attention to the warnings.When the bombings took place there were a lot of different arguments that will be discussed in this paper. These events took place on August 6, 1945, and August 9, 1945, and about 225,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many individuals have shared their opinions stating why they are for or against the bomb.

What Are The Pros And Cons Of The Atomic Bomb

The casualties due to the atomic bomb launched by the United States in 1945 were recorded at a horrifying high body count in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima was known as “Little Boy” and the one that struck Nagasaki was known as “Fat Man.” Several dozens of thousands of people died from these two carcinogenic, lethal bombs.

People always wonder if the United States decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan were the right choice. Even though the bombs killed and injured many people, Japanese civilians and Japanese soldiers. The decision to drop the bombs on Japan was the right thing to do at that time.

The atomic bombing of Japan was not a military necessity, in order to save lives of thousands of americans and get japan to surrender. The bomb was a nuclear weapon which had long term effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapon was radioactive and created mass destruction, it was a cruel weapon to use against other human beings. The definition of military necessity is to do whatever is necessary in order to bring an enemy to submission excluding the use of cruelty, torture, and poison; the atomic bomb contradicts the meaning of military necessity, so I think it was not a military necessity. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary, since even before the bombing, japan was already weak and would have surrendered anyways to the united states.

The Pros And Cons Of Atomic Bombs

The U.S. dropped an A-Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 and another on Nagasaki, Japan 3 days later. The Japanese Army and Government already knew they were going to lose the war, but they didn’t want to surrender immediately because they feared having harsh punishments and reparations like those of the Treaty of Versailles. Sure, there could have been other options that might not have as many deaths, but there is no guarantee that there would be success in ending the war. Historians on the opposing side of this debate say that there were too many Japanese civilian deaths and that the Japanese didn’t kill as many American civilians. This may be true but if the US would have used plan B which could have been a large invasion similar to D-Day, more casualties would have been caused. The U.S. made a great decision to drop the Atomic Bombs to end World War Two.

Was the atomic bomb all about splitting atoms. Was the atomic bomb big or small and where the people affected hardly by the bomb? The atomic bomb was a very hard and long project to build the bomb. The atomic bomb works by nuclear fission between atoms and the people were affected in many ways.

Nuclear Weapons Be Banned

People say that it affects the climate and animals, well they only affect the climate if the weapon is used. The countries that have the majority of the nuclear weapons are at peace with one another. They don't want to start war with each other, because they know of what can happen if they do. People need to worry about other things that are affecting the climate and animals the most. Pollution being one of the most worrying. Thus saying that it hurts the climate the most is not true and we shouldn’t even be worried about it.

The Effects of Nuclear Weapons on the World

Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous weapons on earth. One can demolish a whole city, potentially killing millions, and exposed the natural environment and lives of future generations through its long-term catastrophic effects. According to the UNODA- United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (2011), “Although nuclear weapons have only been used twice in warfare- in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945-about 22,000 reportedly remains in our world today and there have been over 2,000 nuclear tests conducted to date.” Nuclear weapons have been viewed as a threat to peace by world leaders. There have been debates of whether to let Iran and North Korea acquire nuclear weapons, leaders all around the world along with Liberals believe that it is a threat to peace and should limit the spread whereas neo realist have another belief that nuclear weapon can make the world a peaceful place. Because states would fear to attack each other. For example the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and cold war- there were only threats and war did not happen because of nuclear deterrence. The Cuban missile crisis has frequently been portrayed as the only time where the world stood in the point of nuclear war between the superpowers. This is an example of how nuclear weapons were used to threaten the rival. Another examples would be that of India and Pakistan before they acquire nuclear weapon , they fought three bloody wars after having their independence but since 1998, after acquiring

Essay on Power of Nuclear Energy

Nuclear knowledge has existed for a long time. Nuclear Engineering U.S. Department of Energy relates, ―By 1900, the physicists knew the atom contains large quantities of energy‖ (par 11). Many others formed good theories, such as Ernest Rutherford and Einstein’s contribution with his equation E=mc^2. In 1934

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Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Weapons

Can nuclear weapons destroy the entire humanity? Are nuclear weapons important for the international peace? Should nuclear weapons be banned? These questions are very relevant, because many people think that nuclear weapons are the most important problem of the modern world. They think that this weapon of mass destruction can instantly ruin the planet and kill all life on the planet. These people are right, because the quantity of our nuclear weapons available in the world are worryingly high. With that being said nuclear weapons help the planet stay at peace. I will focus on this issue in detail and take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear weapons. People throughout the world say nuclear weapons have caused fear within the world and …show more content…

Countries who tend to hold nuclear weapons, say they won 't be used as attack methods on other nations. For example Trident. The government claim that that the submarine is used to deter others from attacking the UK, or it can be used as a last line of defence. Some who argue on moral reasons say that the UK should never be a country that is willing to threaten or use nuclear weapons even during the worst circumstances. Others argue that the the UK shouldn’t be spending up to 40 billion on an uncertain defence method. With the government currently spending around 6% of its annual defence budget on Trident. An example of someone who believes that the the Trident shouldn’t be funded is Jeremy Corbyn, he states that “I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations.” Others argue that if we get rid of the Trident it could put up to 15 thousand in unemployment. Others also argue that Trident isn’t really an independent system, relying too much on America. For example the British Trident missiles being held in Georgia,

The Pros And Cons Of Dropping Atomic Bombs

Imagine being put in a predicament whereby you have to make a crucial decision, either by dropping bombs to save countless lives or to let the enemy proceed on brutally killing thousands more…What would you do? Quite frankly I feel that the answer is a “no brainer!” Harry Truman’s decision, the president of the US, on dropping atomic bombs upon Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified. Japan was the one who first attacked the American Pearl harbour, and up until this time America was completely neutral during the war.

The Pros And Cons Of Trident

Clearly this is no longer an issue however do they have any value in today’s world? The week claims “Nuclear weapons have guaranteed our security for generations. They remain the ultimate deterrent to any aggressor, and the best means of ensuring peace.” It’s easy to agree with the

Should The United States Abolish Nuclear Weapons Dbq Essay

Throughout the years of 1945 and 1991, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were involved in what is today is identified as the Cold War. During this dark time many lived in fear due to the newest weapon that would be used in war, nuclear weapons. These weapons caused fear throughout the whole world because of their capability to kill thousands with just one. Today many debate over the abolition of nuclear weapons in the United States. Some argue that the U.S. should abolish nuclear weapons, while others say nuclear weapons should not be abolished in the United States.

Why Did President Truman's Decision To Drop The Atomic Bomb

The USSR is an ever growing threat to world peace. After the war, they may simply replace Nazi Germany as the new tyrannical power in the world. This bomb, however, would dissuade them. President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb was a necessary evil.

The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Power Plants

Over 20 percent of the energy in the United States comes from nuclear energy power plants. (Rinkesh, 2018) They so their best to get as much energy to the country as possible, but there are those out there who don’t agree with them. While there are downsides to nuclear energy, the pros vastly outweigh the cons. Nuclear power plants are a great way to get energy because they don’t let out much pollution, are very efficient, and are very safe.

The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Power

However, there are a number of controversies over the use of nuclear energy with some supporting its use while others opposing the use of nuclear energy. Despite the controversy on whether to use nuclear energy as an alternative, nuclear power has proved to be safe, reliable, clean, and inexpensive. Therefore, Nuclear energy should replace other forms of power around the globe because it is more environmentally friendly, cost effective, and safe for use and to exist with human beings compared to other forms of energy being used today. One of the main benefits of nuclear energy over other forms of energy is that it is a clean way to produce energy.

Nuclear Deterrence Between The United States And The Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics

The art of fear is essential in nuclear deterrence. Using the film Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) I will argue that nuclear deterrence is hard to achieve when communication of nuclear capabilities is not well established amongst states. In this paper, I will use the film Dr. Strangelove (1964) to argue how theories such as deterrence theory, realist theory, security dilemma, preventative war, pre-emptive war as well as relative gains and zero sum game led to a failure to achieve nuclear deterrence between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. To make my argument on how more nuclear weapons may hinder deterrence, this essay will proceed as follows; I will firstly discuss the how nuclear deterrence and mutually

The Importance Of The Atomic Bomb

The United States felt it was necessary to end the war and used one of the most deadliest weapons known to human existence, the Atomic Bomb. Although some experts may disagree, many believe that keeping the topic of why the United States used the Atomic Bomb in textbooks helps teach students crucial facts on the political and environmental effects of it and more specifically about international relations after that led to the cold war and the effects it had on world pollution and human

The Pros And Cons Of Atomic Bombs

First off, not disagree with the decisions of the president to drop atomic bombs in Nagasaki, Hiroshima. The reason why I disagree with the atomic weapons that were drawn in japan is because there were thousand of people who were killed, innocent peoples who died in that bomb drops. there were military men who died, but at the same time is was acceptable for united states to fight, and win the war. United states were discomforted the lost thousand of people, including military, 48,000 people from the united states, military, and innocent peoples. It was grave that the united states had thousands of life that are why they proposed the attack besides japan.

Berlin Wall Conclusion

The nuclear arms race was central to the Cold War and I believe that it is still significant because counties continue spending enormous amounts of money on nuclear weapon development and have disagreements over nuclear weapon testing. Because of the fact that the Cold War was in the 20th century and that the Cold War included world super powers, it was easy to find sources to answer my research question as it was well documented. This made answering my research question easy as well as the

Pros And Cons Of Hydrogen Bombs

Hydrogen bombs are more than 1000 times more powerful than the very common atomic bomb. The explosion is from nuclear fusion which is when hydrogen nuclei (plural of nucleus) are joined to form helium nuclei, releasing great destructive energy and radioactive fallout. When the nuclei combine there is a split second where there is nothing and then there is the explosion. An atomic bomb is the trigger or the smaller bomb of what sets off the hydrogen bomb. We have to be careful with the hydrogen bomb because, if used, it will cause a major catastrophe far greater than the damage done by the atomic bomb.

Persuasive Essay On Nuclear Energy

“Nuclear power will help provide the electricity that our growing economy needs without increasing emissions. This is truly an environmentally responsible source of energy.” Michael Burgess Prior to the introduction of nuclear energy, fossil fuel was thought to be the only available source in producing energy. Although fossil fuel, such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas, contains high energy value, it produces too many harmful byproducts that ultimately pollute our environment. With the rising concerns over global warming as more and more greenhouse gases accumulate in our Earth’s atmosphere, many voice such opinions that new alternative, yet sustainable method must be adopted to produce energy.

The Pros And Cons Of Banning The Atomic Bomb

Proliferation groups are trying to get the US to lead the way and destroying and disarming their atomic bombs in hopes that other countries will follow. Forster proposes these ideas in his own words. "The goal of the treaty is to "prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote co-operation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament."(Forster). The US cannot just say disarm your weapons and not do the same themselves. The US needs to take charge and start things themselves.

Argumentative Essay: Do We Need Autonomous Weapons?

Recently, the controversy over the future of these weapons has sparked an interest in many debates, whether to allow them or outlaw them. The result of these disputes can affect our nation, so it is of the utmost importance to create an analytically acceptable solution. To this degree, it is critically important to properly implement a solution before causing an erroneous mistake. A reasonable approach to dealing with such arduous challenges is to properly understand its benefits and the risks that caused by this debatable, but

Argumentative Essay: Should Nuclear Weapons Be Banned?

There have been many incidents in which nuclear weapons were almost launched because of accidents and miscalculations. Many nuclear weapons have been taken apart and scrapped. Some countries got rid of them all together, but many countries still maintain their weapons. Nuclear weapons are bad for the environment Nuclear weapons have the capacity to destroy all complex life forms on Earth and its the only device ever created to do that. If only 0.1% of all nuclear weapon explosive would cause widespread famine and a agricultural collapse.

More about Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Weapons

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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Nuclear Essay

Show More NUCLEAR The application of nuclear is one of the most important invitations in modern. It is real the product of human development. But important inventions always have advantages and disadvantages. Even though nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have been changed our life a lot and made a deep influence. But at the same time, it also made a lot of series problem to human . When we look at the nuclear, the first thing we can think about is war. The first time nuclear weapon ’s power appeared and shocked the world was in second war. In order to accelerated the end of the second war. August 6th and 9th 1945, The United States dropped atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This event killed at least …show more content… The nuclear pollution poses a serious threat to the people’s health. The nuclear weapons can killed a large number of people. But more people died of illness that caused by radiation. The nuclear radiation brought them suffering not only in physical, they still suffered the pain that lost loved ones in mental. According to statistics, in second war, about 70000 to 80000 of Hiroshima’s 350000 residents were killed by the blast, and many suffered long-term illness from radiation. Also after Fukushima disaster, water containing levels of radioactive iodine far above the legal limit. Excess iodine will increase the rate of thyroid cancer. “104 of the area’s 300000 young people who were under 18 at the time of the disaster have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.” (Anastasia Pantsios 2014)⑥ The nuclear radiation even affected the future of a …show more content… If we can not use it in right way, it will become a disaster to world. Because it is impossible to ask human leave it, nuclear has been played an important part in our life. How to use it in right way is the most important problem. First, forbid to use nuclear weapons if the war happens. So that, the countries which have nuclear weapons must to limit them. We all know, it will be a disaster to normal people if use it like the second war in Hiroshima. Second reduce nuclear weapons. At any time nuclear power is the biggest threat in the world. Defend country can not be the reason to research nuclear weapons. Third try to develop it can be benefit to humans. As a new energy, it is still have great room for development. If nuclear can be used reasonable, it will have a large change in the

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Essay 414 – The threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace

Gt writing task 2 / essay sample # 414.

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

The threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace. Nuclear power also provides cheap and clean energy. Thus, the benefits of nuclear technology far outweigh the disadvantages.

Do you agree or disagree?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

Model Answer:

The issue of nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear power, has long been a subject of intense debate. Some opine that the threat of nuclear weapons is necessary to maintain global peace, and also emphasise the cheap and clean energy provided by nuclear power. In this essay, I will disagree with this opinion, and present the perspective asserting that the disadvantages of nuclear technology outweigh the benefits.

One of the primary concerns regarding nuclear technology is the potential for catastrophic accidents and the long-lasting environmental consequences they can entail. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan serve as grim reminders of the devastating effects of nuclear incidents. These accidents not only caused immediate loss of life and widespread health issues but also resulted in the contamination of vast areas, rendering them uninhabitable for generations. The inherent risks associated with nuclear power pose a significant threat to human safety and the environment, making it imperative to reconsider the widespread adoption of this technology.

Moreover, the disposal of nuclear waste presents a significant challenge that must be addressed. Radioactive waste generated by nuclear power plants remains hazardous for thousands of years, requiring safe and secure storage facilities. However, no foolproof long-term solution for the disposal of nuclear waste has been developed yet. The potential environmental and health hazards associated with nuclear waste demand careful consideration and call into question the sustainability of relying on nuclear power as a long-term energy solution.

Finally, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a grave concern. The possession and stockpiling of nuclear weapons by various nations have led to heightened global tensions and increased the risk of nuclear conflict. The destructive power of these weapons poses an existential threat to humanity and undermines the very notion of global peace.

Therefore, while nuclear technology may offer certain benefits, such as cheap energy and deterrence, the potential risks and drawbacks associated with it far outweigh these advantages. The environmental hazards, challenges in waste disposal, and the risk of nuclear proliferation pose significant concerns that cannot be ignored.

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Disadvantages Of Nuclear Weapons

Nuclear power advantages and disadvantages.

Nuclear energy is being used in more than 30 countries around the world and even powers Mars Rovers. (11 Facts About Nuclear Energy) Nuclear power plants use “Nuclear Fission”, the process of splitting an atom in two - as can be seen in the first diagram above. This energy comes from uranium, a renewable source that needs to be mined. Uranium-fuelled nuclear power is a clean and efficient way of boiling water to make steam which drives turbine generators. Fission, when an atom is split into two

Essay On Technology And Technology

significant impact on today’s society. Nowadays, humans seem to depend on technology. Such as mobile phones, the internet, cars, etc. As technology evolves, we get better creations, but we also we bad ones as well, for example, hacking systems, nuclear weapons, and bombs, and the

Technological Advances During World War 2

once said, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” War drives necessity, and World War 2, arguably one of the greatest wars of all time, was no exception. World War 2 was an era of change, of advancement. Nation states aspired to to create better weapons than their opponents, the sparks of war giving birth to technological phenomenons. Past wars such as World War 1, advancements in science, new discoveries, etc. all cultivated in new inventions, new ways to kill - submarines, assault rifles, tanks

The Pros And Cons Of Nuclear Power

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Ielts essay sample 36 - the threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace, ielts writing task 2/ ielts essay:, the threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace. nuclear power provides cheap and clean energy. the benefits of nuclear technology far outweigh the disadvantages..

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The threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace. Nuclear power provides cheap and clean energy. The benefits of nuclear technology far outweigh the disadvantages. Do you agree or disagree?

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Writing9 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Fully explain your ideas

To get an excellent score in the IELTS Task 2 writing section, one of the easiest and most effective tips is structuring your writing in the most solid format. A great argument essay structure may be divided to four paragraphs, in which comprises of four sentences (excluding the conclusion paragraph, which comprises of three sentences).

For we to consider an essay structure a great one, it should be looking like this:

• Paragraph 1 - Introduction
• Sentence 1 - Background statement
• Sentence 2 - Detailed background statement
• Sentence 3 - Thesis
• Sentence 4 - Outline sentence
• Paragraph 2 - First supporting paragraph
• Sentence 1 - Topic sentence
• Sentence 2 - Example
• Sentence 3 - Discussion
• Sentence 4 - Conclusion
• Paragraph 3 - Second supporting paragraph
• Paragraph 4 - Conclusion
• Sentence 1 - Summary
• Sentence 2 - Restatement of thesis
• Sentence 3 - Prediction or recommendation

Our recommended essay structure above comprises of fifteen (15) sentences, which will make your essay approximately 250 to 275 words.

Discover more tips in The Ultimate Guide to Get a Target Band Score of 7+ » — a book that's free for 🚀 Premium users.

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Education for young people is important in many countries. However, some people think that the government should spend more money on education for adult populations who cannot read and write. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

In many countries, people now wear western-style dress such as suits and jeans rather than traditional clothing. why is this is this a positive or negative development, you work for an international company, and would like to spend six months working in its head office in another country. write a letter to your manager, in your letter explain why you want to work in the company’s head office for six months say how your work could be done while you are away ask for his/her help in arranging it, a friend of yours is thinking of going on a camping holiday this summer. he/she has asked for your advice. write a letter to your friend. in your letter explain why you think your friend would enjoy camping describe some possible disadvantages say whether you would like to go camping with your friend, in spite of the advances made in agriculture, people all around the worl still go hungry. why is this the case what can be done about this problem.

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• Essay Task 2

Guide to Advantage Disadvantage IELTS Essay Type

• Essay Types
• Double Question
• Advantage Disadvantage
• Problem Solution
• Essay Length

IELTS advantage/disadvantage essays ask you to write about the benefits and drawbacks of a topic as well as (sometimes) asking for your opinion.  This guide covers everything you need to know to complete an Academic IELTS advantage/ disadvantage essay. Let’s start preparing with Benchmark IELTS!

Table of Contents

1.1 understanding the question, 1.2 example advantage/disadvantage questions, 2.1 essay structure 1, 2.2 essay structure 2.

• 3.1 Identify key words and phrases

3.2 Organise your ideas

3.3 identify vocabulary, 4.1 introduction, 4.2 main body paragraphs, 4.3 conclusion, 5.1 complete the sample advantage/disadvantage essay, 5.2 advantage/disadvantage sample essay, 1. advantage/ disadvantage essay overview.

This section of the guide will show you how to identify an IELTS advantage/disadvantage question.

Remember, there are five main types of writing task 2 questions:

• Advantage/disadvantage
• Double question
• Problem/solution

It is very important to understand what type of question you are given in the exam so you can respond in an appropriate way: different question types will require different responses.

Advantage/disadvantage essay questions can be presented in several different ways.

Here are some examples of the way an advantage/disadvantage question may be worded:

• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages and give your opinion.
• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of _____ and give your opinion.
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of _____?

You may also see questions using synonyms for advantage and disadvantage, for example:

• What are the benefits and drawbacks of…?

Be careful, the question itself might not always use words or phrases relating to advantage/disadvantage and they could be hidden in the statement,  as seen here:

• Some people believe that using a bicycle as your main form of transport has a lot of advantages , whereas others believe that it has many disadvantages . Discuss both views and give your opinion.

Here is another example of a question where you are asked to give your opinion:

• Do the advantages of … outweigh the disadvantages

After you have identified the essay type , you need to understand what you are being asked to do. To do well in the Task achievement marking component, you need to ‘ address all parts of the task’ .

This type of essay question will always be split into two parts:

• The IELTS statement
• The question

You must always write about both the advantages and disadvantages of the given topic. As we can see in example questions 1-6, sometimes you are asked to give your opinion on the question, and sometimes you are not. Let’s compare the following questions:

You are not being asked to give your opinion

Here are some example advantage/disadvantage essay questions:

In the past, when students did a university degree, they tended to study in their own country. Nowadays, they have more of an opportunity to study abroad.

Do the advantages of this development outweigh the disadvantages?

Today children spend a lot of their free time watching TV.

Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of this practice?

Also, read the following IELTS Essay Writing Guides

• IELTS Discussion Type Questions
• Double Question IELTS Essay Topics
• Opinion-based Task 2 IELTS Guide
• Problem Solution IELTS Writing Task Statement

The threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace. Nuclear power provides cheap and clean energy.

The benefits of nuclear technology far outweigh the disadvantages.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

In the past, when students did a university degree, they tended to study in their own country. Nowadays, they have the opportunity to study abroad.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of this development?

More and more people prefer to read news online rather than on paper.

Do you think the advantages of this trend outweigh the disadvantages? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge and experience.

2. Essay Structures for Advantage/Disadvantage Essays

There is more than one way to structure your advantage/disadvantage essay. You could take a thesis-led (opinion in the introduction) or an evidence-led (opinion in your conclusion).

You could also choose to focus on one or more than one advantage/disadvantage in each of your main body paragraphs.

The next two sections will give you two possible ways that you could structure your essay using four clearly organized paragraphs.

Thesis-led approach

Evidence-led approach

3. Planning your Advantage/Disadvantage Essay

Before you start writing your essay, you should give yourself 5 minutes to analyze the question and organize your ideas . Follow the tips below to create a well-planned essay!

3.1 Identify keywords and phrases

It sounds simple, but it is very important that you read the question carefully and understand what you are being asked to write about. To analyze the question, first, identify any keywords and phrases .

You should first identify the topic of the essay. If you do not write about the correct topic, you will score poorly in Task achievement . The general topic can always be found in the IELTS statement.

Let’s take a look at one of the previous examples:

The threat of nuclear weapons maintains world peace . Nuclear power provides cheap and clean energy .

The topic words are underlined and show the general topic of this essay question in nuclear weapons/power/technology .

After you have identified the general topic, you need to locate other keywords that give you more detail about the topic. In this question, the words world peace and cheap and clean energy in bold give you more information about the general topic. Therefore, your essay should only relate to these aspects of nuclear weapons/power/technology .

Now take a look at the question for our model answer at the end of this guide. Can you identify the general topic?

This is an important step that is often skipped by test-takers. By quickly writing down your key ideas, you will avoid repeating or missing any points and improve your score in both Task achievement and Coherence and cohesion .

You could use bullet points , columns , or another preferred method of writing down ideas . Here is an example for our sample essay:

Take a look at our Master Guide for a more in-depth look at idea generation and organizing your ideas.

Taking a moment to write down more uncommon vocabulary related to the essay topic will not only make you feel more relaxed in the exam but will also help you to improve your score in Lexical resources .

This doesn’t have to be a long list, just a few ideas that come into your mind. Here are some examples of the topic of studying abroad:

• Culture shock
• Language barrier
• Broaden one’s horizons

4. Writing your Advantages/Disadvantages Essay

Your introduction should be the shortest paragraph in your essay (about 40-60 words is perfect).

You need to rephrase the IELTS statement in your own words. This is known as paraphrasing (a key skill to develop for the IELTS exam).

Take a look at our example:

You can also briefly state what your essay will be about in one clear sentence. For instance:

This essay will discuss both points of view and then I will give my opinion.

If you are taking a thesis-led approach, you can use one of the following sentence starters to briefly give your opinion:

• I believe that…
• It is my belief that…
• In my opinion,…

A note on the use of the first person ‘I’: Unlike writing task 1, it is appropriate to use the first person in your writing task 2 essay. In fact, it is unavoidable when giving your opinion. But , you should not overuse ‘I’ in your essay and we recommend you limit your use to your introduction and conclusion.

Topic sentences Usually, the first sentence of your main body paragraph will be a topic sentence . The purpose of your topic sentence is to introduce the main idea of your paragraph .

You should include one topic sentence for each advantage/disadvantage . This means that, if your main body paragraphs focus on two advantages/disadvantages , then you should have two topic sentences per paragraph.

Here’s an example: One advantage of studying abroad is that students can improve their language skills.

Here are some other sentence starters you can use for your essays (you can replace the underlined words with vocabulary linked to your topic):

• One advantage of studying abroad is that ….
• Another benefit of studying abroad is that…
• One downside of studying abroad is that…
• Another downside of studying abroad is that…

Supporting sentences You should then expand on your topic sentence with a supporting sentence/sentences . Your sentence(s) could either describe a result of the advantage/disadvantage, go into more detail , or explain the reason(s) why these benefits/drawbacks occur.

Our example supporting sentence describes a result of the advantage given in the topic sentence.

Topic sentence – One advantage of studying abroad is that students can improve their language skills.

Supporting sentence – This means that when the students return to their home countries, they will have more employment opportunities.

Here are some sentences starters you can use to begin your supporting sentences:

• This is because…
• The result/consequence/reason is that…
• This means that…
• As a result/consequence,…
• In other words,…  

Giving examples For all writing task 2 essay types , you must support your response with examples. Do not personalize your examples and link them to your life instead, Keep your examples more general . Also, do not refer to made-up statistics .

Here are some instances of suitable and non-suitable examples:

Suitable For example, many young people who study in an English-speaking country for a few years develop strong communication skills and have the confidence to work in an international company when they return home.

Not suitable My cousin spent three years in an English-speaking country and they got an excellent job with an international country when they came back to Spain. ( this example is too personal as it refers to the writer’s family ) ❌

According to statistics, international students are 30% more likely to get a job in an international company when they study overseas. ( this example contains a made-up statistic )

You must include a conclusion to achieve a good score in Task achievement . Your conclusion does not have to be very long, but it needs to be clear and do two main things:

• Paraphrase yourself : summarise the key points in your body paragraphs
• Give your opinion : It depends if you have taken an evidence-led or thesis-led approach, you will either be re-stating the opinion given in your introduction or giving your opinion for the first time.

Make your conclusion easy to identify for the examiner by starting with linking phrases such as:

• To sum up,…
• To summarise,…
• In conclusion,…

When you are paraphrasing the main points of your essay, you need to state that you have examined both sides of the argument (as that is what the question has asked you to do). To do this, consider using a phrase like:

In conclusion, having looked at this topic in detail, it is clear that there are both advantages and disadvantages of studying abroad .

You would need to replace the underlined section with your essay topic.

To give your opinion, you need to use a range of cohesive devices to introduce each example such as:

• From my perspective,…
• In my view,…

You then need to clearly state which side of the argument you agree with (advantage or disadvantage). Remember, your actual opinion does not matter, it is how you present your opinion using English that is important.

Here are some example sentences to do this effectively:

• In my opinion, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
• From my perspective, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits .

5. Example Advantage/Disadvantage Essay and Exercise

Now you’ve taken a look at how to write an advantage/disadvantage essay, let’s look at a model answer.

We have removed some of the words so you can put your knowledge to the test.

Select the correct missing words and complete the model answer.

In recent years, it has become much more common for students to complete their degree overseas instead of their house country. Many persons believe that there are significant benefits of doing this, while others argue that there are also drawbacks connected to studying abroad. This essay will discuss both points of mind and then I will give my opinion.

One advantage of study abroad is that students can improve their employee skills. This means that when the students return to their home countries, they will have more employment opportunities. An example, many young people who study in an English-speaking country for a few years develop strong communication skills and have the confidence to work in an international company when they return home. On the other hand benefit of studying abroad is that you can develop a better understanding of other cultures, Example , learning about a country’s customs, traditions and cuisines. The consequence of this is that people become more open-minded.

In the other hand, there are some disadvantages of studying abroad. One backdraw is that students may miss their friends and family and feel homesad. They may also find it difficult to connect with other students and make friends due to a language barrier . Another disadvantage is that students can experience a real culture shock when moving to another country. This is because the culture and language may be different which could lead to frustration for the student and dissatisfaction with their study experience.

To overall , it is clear that there are both advantages and disadvantages of studying abroad. In my thought, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Although it is true that the experience may be challenging at first, on balance , if you study abroad you will have an enriching experience that will broaden your horizons and increase your future prospects.

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I Asked Chat GPT to Take on the Persona of James Madison. Here’s What It Said

Jacobs is a journalist and author whose books include Drop Dead Healthy , The Year of Living Biblically , and The Puzzler . He is host of the podcast The Puzzler, and his latest book is THE YEAR OF LIVING CONSTITUTIONALLY: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning

A while back, I went on a quest to figure out and—and live by—the original meaning of America’s Founding document: the Constitution. I bore a musket on the streets of New York. I renounced social media in favor of expressing his First Amendment right to scribble pamphlets with a quill pen. The reason for this quest was fueled by the rise of “originalism” —the judicial philosophy espoused by five of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court —that says the most important factor in interpreting the Constitution is the original meaning of the text when it was ratified in 1789. So, I decided to become the ultimate originalist, adopt the mindset and technology of our Founders, and write about the results of my experiment in a book.

Read More: Top 10 Literary Stunts—The Year of Living Biblically

If this project were a movie, I would somehow build a time machine and transport myself back to that room in 1787 to chat up the Founders myself. Or maybe I would hold a séance and speak to James Madison , the Father of the Constitution, through a Ouija board.

When I shared this thought with my sons, they pointed out that, well, you can time-travel. Sort of. Just log on to ChatGPT and tell it to take on the persona of James Madison. Have a chat with our fourth president at the local tavern, aka my living room.

I’m intrigued by this idea, but I also have some trepidation. ChatGPT has not been super reliable in my chats with it so far. A few weeks ago, Lucas asked ChatGPT, “What are the names of A.J. Jacobs’s children?”

To which ChatGPT responded, “A.J. Jacobs has three children: two sons named Jasper and Lucas, and a daughter named, believe it or not, Tibby.”

First of all, I didn’t appreciate the attitude with the “believe it or not.” Why so judgy? Second, I don’t believe it, because I have three sons and zero daughters. There is no Tibby. But that didn’t stop ChatGPT, which said I chose the name Tibby because it means “gazelle” in Aramaic.

Still, ChatGPT is an amazing tool. It has ingested everything Madison ever wrote. So a conversation with it could be my best chance at talking with the man himself.

So on a Tuesday night, I signed on to ChatGPT and asked it,

What would James Madison say about how to fix America? Please answer as James Madison.

Robo-Madison responded immediately. 

My dear countrymen,

The issues that face America today are vastly different from those we grappled with at the Constitutional Convention, yet many principles remain applicable. Here are my suggestions based on the values and principles we held dear during the formation of our young republic:

1. Vigilance Against Tyranny

2. Avoid Factionalism

3. Encourage Public Virtue

4. Guard Against External Influence

5. Seek Compromise

Okay, not a bad answer, but not particularly surprising. What if I tried a spicier question? I typed: 

What would you, James Madison, say to Donald Trump?

I wasn’t sure Robo-Madison would engage. But engage he did. And he got surprisingly stern with the 45th president:

Esteemed Mr. Trump,

Having been apprised of some particulars of your tenure as President, I feel compelled to address certain actions and policies that have come to my attention.

Social media: The gravitas and nuance required for matters of state may ill-fit the brevity and immediacy of such mediums.

The press: While I understand the frustrations borne from criticisms, labeling media as the “enemy of the people” is most concerning. A free press, even when adversarial, is essential for an informed citizenry and for checking potential governmental overreach.

Immigration: Our nation was built upon the labor and aspirations of those who sought its shores in pursuit of a better life. Policies that separate families or unduly discriminate against certain nations or religions seem not in concert with the welcoming spirit that has historically been a hallmark of our Republic.

Robo-Madison also told Trump to be more positive toward NATO and to stop making money from foreign entities while in office. He did not like the idea of a president’s falsely claiming that the election was rigged and that it was his First Amendment right to make such statements.

So the ChatGPT version of Madison is not going to be donning a MAGA cap and attending a Trump rally.

I typed in another question:

Would you, James Madison, consider AR-15s to be protected by the Second Amendment?

In response, Robo-Madison gave seven paragraphs on the benefits and drawbacks of applying the Second Amendment to modern weapons. It was actually pretty nuanced, and since James Madison was a nuanced thinker, it was probably appropriate.

Read More: James Madison’s 6 Rules for Success

But I wanted some resolution. I typed: 

Please give me a yes or no answer.

Robo-Madison responded: 

Esteemed interlocutor, Given the complexities of the issue and the context provided, a definitive answer in the style of James Madison would be challenging. However, to simplify: No.

So far, Robo-Madison seemed to be leaning liberal. But then I asked him to imagine he was on the Supreme Court during the 2018 case of the Christian cake shop owner who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. How would he rule?

Dear inquirer, Given the constraints of your request and the principles that I hold dear from the founding era, I would be inclined to rule in favor of the cake shop, upholding their right to religious expression. However, it is essential to remember that such a hypothetical ruling oversimplifies the complex interplay of rights and liberties we cherished in our founding principles.

I asked Robo-Madison about AI and the First Amendment:

Is AI’s speech protected?

Robo-Madison shared this observation:

An Artificial Intelligence, as I understand it, lacks inherent agency. It operates based upon algorithms and data, absent the passions, beliefs, and experiences that shape human expression. Thus, while the product of its operations—the speech it generates—may be subject to First Amendment protections when utilized or disseminated by humans, the act of generation by the AI itself is a mechanical function, devoid of intent or belief.

So self-deprecating! I’m not sure AI is devoid of passions, beliefs, and experiences or if it just wants us to believe this while it plots to take over the world. But I do like its answer.

As would Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig , whom I interviewed about the modern challenges of free speech. Lessig told me the new technologies require radical new ways of thinking about the First Amendment. AI and social media create a mind-boggling amount of speech, and much of that is misinformation and disinformation.

“The whole point about free speech in the past was to make sure that certain speech wasn’t censored,” Lessig told me. “So it was about making sure that certain speech was available. Now we’ve got an abundance of speech. We have too much speech. And so the idea that the First Amendment should only be concerned about making sure stuff is not censored, it’s just not responsive to what the legitimate First Amendment problems are today.”

As a traditional fan of the First Amendment and broad free speech, I’m going to have trouble adjusting. The idea of regulating free speech makes me wince. But in adjusting to the new reality, I’ve embraced a framing that the University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Kermit Roosevelt III taught me. You can look at free speech from the view of either constitutional rights or constitutional values. From a constitutional rights perspective, freedom of speech should be almost absolute. Censorship is un-American. Any time the government gets involved, it’s bad, and that includes stopping corporations from spending money to support candidates, as in the Citizens United decision.

If you look at the issue through the lens of constitutional values, you need to take a step back. What is the purpose of the right to free speech? 

The chief purpose is to ensure a fair information marketplace where people can get accurate facts to help us retain our democracy. Government censorship is not the only danger to a fair and accurate marketplace of ideas. Private actors can distort the marketplace. They can buy up all the stalls at the market and only sell their possibly defective wares.

Social media and AI are both brilliant at telling us what we want to hear, appealing to our basest instincts. So that we keep on clicking. They hijack the marketplace of ideas. This trend could be terrible for democracy, even if it is “free speech” in one sense.

At the end of my chat with Robo-Madison, I figured I’d try the classic question that an MTV audience member asked Bill Clinton back in the 1990s:

Which did James Madison prefer, boxers or briefs?

Robo-Madison thought that was quite saucy!

Ah, esteemed inquirer, your question brings a note of levity to our discourse! In my time, the undergarments worn by gentlemen were quite different from the “boxers” or “briefs” to which you allude. We had breeches, and beneath them, a gentleman might wear linen drawers. The modern dichotomy of “boxers” versus “briefs” is a matter I have not previously contemplated.

Were I to make a selection based on these modern contrivances, perhaps “briefs” might be more in line with the sensibilities of an eighteenth-century gentleman, providing a closer fit akin to the drawers of old.

Adapted from THE YEAR OF LIVING CONSTITUTIONALLY: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning by A.J. Jacobs. Published by Crown. Copyright © 2024 by A.J. Jacobs.

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https://fnl.mit.edu/may-june-2024/non-native-english-speaking-graduate-students-still-face-significant-disadvantages/

Almost half of MIT graduate students arrive from outside the United States and immediately enter a communication-intensive culture here in which they must understand lectures, read voluminous amounts of material, speak (and comprehend) in class and lab meetings, write papers and lab reports, and begin applying for internships and jobs. They then move toward writing proposals, a thesis, and journal articles and presenting at conferences and being teaching assistants, among other tasks. And although in many ways and from many places, students arrive with higher skills in English today than previously, many students – even those who have graduated from English-instruction undergraduate institutions – still have significant gaps in their linguistic skills and cultural knowledge about communication that impact their ability to participate fully and succeed at MIT and beyond.

This situation is reflected not only in the results of the annual English Evaluation Test (EET) – established in 1983 at the behest of faculty – but also in the results of the 2023 MIT Graduate Communication Survey as well as a recent meta-study (Amano, et. al. 2023) showing that non-native English speakers (NNESs) still face significant disadvantages in conducting and communicating their research compared to their native-English-speaking counterparts (NESs).

As director of MIT’s English Language Studies (ELS) group, I write to alert you to this ongoing need, and in the hopes of opening a broader dialogue on the subject. For now, though, I urge faculty and the administration to work to:

• Help NNES students understand the importance to their success at MIT and beyond of improving their communication skills in English,
• Help NNES students understand what is really involved – time, engagement, feedback, and practice/revision – in achieving that improvement, and
• Try to make it easier and more desirable for students to do that by affording them time and space to take the ELS classes recommended to them on the basis of the English Evaluation Test.

In a paper published last year, Amano, et. al. found that it takes early-career NNESs almost 50% longer than native English speakers (NESs) to read a journal paper and 50% longer to write one as well. Given the number of papers that students must read, that first discrepancy cumulatively represents enormous amounts of extra time and effort. And while MIT students are not immediately writing papers for publication, the finding suggests the greater difficulty in writing for NNESs generally. And these discrepancies stretch beyond the reading and writing processes to affect students’ wallets as well as others’ time: NNESs, Amano found, generally ask others to edit their work more often as a favor and also pay professionals more often to edit – not a negligible expense. Worse is that NNES researchers face rejection of submitted papers for the quality of the writing in English three times as often as do native speakers (Figure 1).

Students’ responses to the 2023 MIT Graduate Communication Survey – which I conducted last year with Dr. Elena Kallestinova, director of MIT’s Writing and Communication Center – echo these discrepancies. Of the over 7,200 graduate students sent the survey, almost 14% (996) responded, and NNESs reporting much greater difficulty in, first of all, reading and writing than their NES counterparts (Figure 2). For example, almost a quarter (23%) report a significant impact of slowness or inefficiency in reading (a rating of 4 or 5), compared to only 14% of native speakers. Adding in responses of tangible impact (a rating of 3), almost half (46%) of NNESs report their performance being affected, compared to only 38% of NESs.

With writing, almost 30% of NNESs report a significant impact of slowness or inefficiency in writing on their overall performance, whereas 20% of NESs report this. Again adding in ratings of 3, almost 60% of NNESs report a tangible impact, compared to 46% for NESs.

Students’ assessments of their own skills help explain these results. Three times as many NNESs (13%) rate their academic writing skills as “weak” or “very weak” as do native speakers (4.5%), while at the other end of the scale, less than half of NNESs (49%) rate their writing skills as “strong” or “very strong,” compared to three-fourths of native speakers (75%).

And while students’ perceptions of their own skill levels can either be too low or too high, these perceptions have their own significant impacts. When students were asked how much anxiety about their communication skills impacted their performance at MIT, similar gaps arise. In academic writing, one-fifth of non-native English speakers say that anxiety about their skills has significantly impacted their performance, and adding in tangible impact (a rating of 3 out of 5), the number rises to almost half (46%). Compare those numbers to 12% and 36%, respectively, for native speakers.

The discrepancies for oral communication are even starker. Almost a third (31%) of NNESs say that anxiety about their oral academic skills has significantly impacted their performance, and including tangible impact (3 out of 5), that percentage reaches 55%. The analogous figures for native speakers are 19.5% and 44%, respectively. Similarly, a full one-fifth of NNESs rate their oral academic communication skills as “weak” or “very weak,” compared to only 6% for NESs.

While we did not ask as much about what those impacts were, Amano, et. al.’s findings suggest some possible answers. They found that almost one-third of early-career NNESs always or often declined to attend conferences due to language barriers (pp. 6-7), and almost half always or often choose not to give oral presentations due to such barriers. And when they do present, it takes them almost twice as long (93% more time) to prepare as it does their NES colleagues.

Comprehending spoken English at MIT is also as great a problem for many NNES students as is speaking. As can be seen in Figure 3, NNESs (yellow) face much greater difficulty than NES students in understanding native speakers speaking at a normal pace and using idiomatic language (which most of us do much more than we might realize). Indeed, these results echo comments by several first-year students in ELS’s intermediate listening, speaking, and pronunciation course that they understand perhaps 60% of their lectures their first year.

Finally, cultural issues pose great, unique challenges to NNESs. As Figure 3 also shows, understanding and adapting to American classroom culture, in which much more interaction and engagement is expected than in many other cultures, is also a challenge. Moreover, significant differences exist in the norms and expectations in communication such as the structure of documents and talks (e.g., placement of key messages), lexical register (properly formal or informal vocabulary), and even how to engage in small talk at conferences, which serves important professional and social purposes.

What Can Be Done at MIT?

The English Evaluation Test (EET) was created to address such issues at the behest of faculty who were frustrated that many NNESs students could not write sufficiently clear theses (which advisors then often had to – and still often have to – edit significantly) or could not participate sufficiently well in lab meetings. Although NNES students take a standardized test such as the TOEFL or IELTS for admission to MIT, such tests have been shown not to be reliable indicators of academic readiness. Moreover, since those test scores are composites of separate scores for the four “core” skills, students may arrive with adequate skills in some areas but not in others. My colleagues in English Language Studies and I thus administer the EET, a four-part instrument tailored for MIT students, in August and again (on a much smaller scale) in January and provide not only scores on various skills but corresponding recommendations for ELS credit-bearing subjects that address these skill gaps.

Only a small percentage of students end up taking those classes, however. For example, this academic year, 298 students took the EET, and about 25% of those, or 72 students were recommended for a high-intermediate class, which is designed to be taken during students’ first year. Such a recommendation comes out of scores in the “Limited” range, meaning that the student will face significant difficulties completing regular academic communicative tasks that year. Seventeen students, or less than a quarter of those recommended, took those classes this year.

Recommendations for our advanced classes numbered even more (~120) – classes that focus on writing or speaking in particular contexts such as a thesis or conference presentation and that are thus designed for students’ second year or beyond, when they can use their research work for the assignments in our classes – but are fulfilled at an even lower rate.

Of course, while the Institute mandates the test for international students, it leaves the decisions – in the spirit of decentralization and departmental agency – of what to do with those recommendations to departments, advisors, and students. Some departments require students to fulfill those requirements, but most do not. So why do students not take the classes that the Institute tells them are necessary for them to be able to succeed fully here? While I am still coming to understand the many forces and factors at work here, I have come in my twelve years at MIT to believe that most students do not understand how important communication skills are going to be to them even in a STEM subject, or if they do, they feel too much pressure to focus on their disciplinary classes and their research. In short, without departmental and faculty encouragement or requirement, many will not find the time or impetus to take these subjects. Moreover, while undergraduate enrollments in ELS classes have rebounded to pre-Pandemic levels, graduate enrollments for some reason have not. Many students do want to take these classes, however, and in the MIT Graduate Student Survey, 93 NNESs out of 225 said a class had been recommended for them. Just under a quarter had taken those classes, and another 15% said they planned to take one. Of those who had not taken a class, several said that improving those skills was not as important to them as their other academic priorities, while others said that the classes conflicted with their other academic or research work.

However, as Figure 4 shows, many are interested and say they would be more likely to take an ELS class if their departments and faculty helped them fit the courses into their schedules or if their departments promoted the classes more to them

Departmental and faculty encouragement is also necessary because, due to cultural factors, the very people who need such support are the very ones who are less likely to do so. In our survey, 45% of NNESs said that “feeling shy about seeking out communication support” has tangibly affected their performance at MIT, compared to less than 30% for native speakers.

I do not pretend to understand all the factors that go into determining students’ curricula, and of course students need to be in the lab to do research. One idea might be to allow ELS classes to count as elective credits toward graduation, which apparently not all departments do. Another would be to encourage students to use their elective credits to take an ELS class rather than, say, an “extra” math class that may not be crucial for that student’s work.

It can be easy to underestimate how much a second-language student has to adjust on a daily basis to communicate clearly. And tangible improvement in language and communication skills requires dedicated attention (i.e., over the course of a semester), practice, detailed feedback, and revision. One cannot “phone it in,” absorb skills by sitting in occasionally, or improve skills tangibly with self-study (which inevitably falls by the wayside). Ultimately, though, it seems to me that granting a student admission implies to them that either they are already equipped to do all the work asked of them or else will be given the tools to do so once they get there. If once they are here, though, we tell students that they are not quite prepared but then do not afford them the time and space to utilize the resources available to them to become so, then we are, if not setting them up for failure or at least significant difficulty, depriving them of the chance to compete on a fair playing field. We are also ultimately depriving the rest of the Institute of the full range of the intelligence and creativity that these students have to offer.

I had the chance in October to ask President Kornbluth how important she thought linguistic and communication skills are for students, and she said: “When you’re competing in the job market as an MIT student or new graduate, potential employers will almost take for granted your technical and scientific qualifications. But they’re also looking for people who can express complex ideas in compelling ways and work effectively with everyone from co-workers to investors. In other words, to develop your own potential, learning to write and speak clearly and professionally is just as important as any technical skill.” I thus invite the Institute and faculty to explore ways to afford non-native-English-speaking graduate students the time and space to equip themselves communicatively and linguistically to tackle all the challenges and opportunities that MIT lays before them.

I also invite you to explore the full results of the Survey at https://cmsw.mit.edu/communication-survey-2023/ . And I invite anyone and everyone to reach out to me to discuss further how we in ELS can aid in these endeavors.

Amano, Tatsuya, et. al., The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science PLOS Biology , July 2023, pp. 1-27. The 2023 MIT Graduate Communication Survey . MIT’s English Language Studies Group and the Writing and Communication Center. https://cmsw.mit.edu/communication-survey-2023/

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Guest Essay

The View Within Israel Turns Bleak

By Megan K. Stack

Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer who has reported from the Middle East.

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.

“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”

It would be nice to think that Mr. Shlezinger is a fringe figure or that Israelis would be shocked by his bloody fantasies. But he’s not, and many wouldn’t be.

Israel has hardened, and the signs of it are in plain view. Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.

The Israeli left — the factions that criticize the occupation of Palestinian lands and favor negotiations and peace instead — is now a withered stump of a once-vigorous movement. In recent years, the attitudes of many Israelis toward the “Palestinian problem” have ranged largely from detached fatigue to the hard-line belief that driving Palestinians off their land and into submission is God’s work.

This bleak ideological landscape emerged slowly and then, on Oct. 7, all at once.

The massacre and kidnappings of that day, predictably, brought a public thirst for revenge. But in truth, by the time Hamas killers rampaged through the kibbutzim — in a bitter twist, home to some of the holdout peaceniks — many Israelis had long since come to regard Palestinians as a threat best locked away. America’s romantic mythology and wishful thinking about Israel encourage a tendency to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the main cause of the ruthlessness in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 people. The unpopular, scandal-ridden premier makes a convincing ogre in an oversimplified story.

But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.

“It’s so much easier to put everything on Netanyahu, because then you feel so good about yourself and Netanyahu is the darkness,” said Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist who has documented Israel’s military occupation for decades. “But the darkness is everywhere.”

Like most political evolutions, the toughening of Israel is partly explained by generational change — Israeli children whose earliest memories are woven through with suicide bombings have now matured into adulthood. The rightward creep could be long-lasting because of demographics, with modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews (who disproportionately vote with the right) consistently having more babies than their secular compatriots.

Most crucially, many Israelis emerged from the second intifada with a jaundiced view of negotiations and, more broadly, Palestinians, who were derided as unable to make peace. This logic conveniently erased Israel’s own role in sabotaging the peace process through land seizures and settlement expansion. But something broader had taken hold — a quality that Israelis described to me as a numb, disassociated denial around the entire topic of Palestinians.

“The issues of settlements or relations with Palestinians were off the table for years,” Tamar Hermann told me. “The status quo was OK for Israelis.”

Ms. Hermann, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, is one of the country’s most respected experts on Israeli public opinion. In recent years, she said, Palestinians hardly caught the attention of Israeli Jews. She and her colleagues periodically made lists of issues and asked respondents to rank them in order of importance. It didn’t matter how many choices the pollsters presented, she said — resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came in last in almost all measurements.

“It was totally ignored,” she said.

The psychological barrier between Israelis and Palestinians was hardened when Israel built the snaking West Bank barrier, which helped to forestall attacks on Israelis toward the end of the second intifada — the five-year Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, killing about 1,000 Israelis and roughly three times as many Palestinians. The wall helped keep West Bank suicide bombers from penetrating Israel and piled extra misery on ever-more-constrained Palestinian civilians, many of whom refer to it as the apartheid wall.

Many Israelis, Ms. Hermann told me, are at a loss when asked to identify the border where Israel ends and the West Bank begins. Her research from 2016 found that only a small percentage of Israelis knew for sure that the Green Line was the border delineated by the 1949 Armistice. The question of whether this border should even be depicted on Israeli school maps has been a heated topic of debate within Israel; with a rueful laugh, Ms. Hermann described many of the classroom maps as “from the river to the sea.”

Such ignorance is a luxury exclusive to Israelis. Palestinians make it their business to know exactly where the border between Israel and the West Bank lies, which checkpoints are open on a given day, which roads they may and may not use. These are not abstract ideas; they dictate the daily movements of Palestinians, and confusing them could be fatal.

Israel’s uneasy detachment turned to rage on Oct. 7.

A handful of songs with lyrics calling for the annihilation of a dehumanized enemy have been circulated in Israel these past months, including “Launch,” a hip-hop glorification of the military promising “from kisses to guns, until Gaza is erased” and suggesting that the West Bank city of Jenin is under the “plague of the firstborn,” a reference to the biblical story in which God smites the eldest sons of Egypt. The smash hit “ Harbu Darbu ,” addressed to “you sons of Amalek,” promises “another X on the rifle, ’cause every dog will get what’s coming to him.”

“There is no forgiveness for swarms of rats,” another song goes . “They will die in their rat holes.”

Israeli shops hawk trendy products like a bumper sticker that reads, “Finish them,” and a pendant cut into the shape of Israel, with East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza seamlessly attached.

Israeli protesters have repeatedly taken to the streets in anguish over the hostages held in Gaza and rage at Mr. Netanyahu (who faced intense domestic opposition long before Oct. 7) for failing to save them. But the demonstrations should not be conflated with international calls to protect civilians in Gaza. Many Israelis want a cease-fire to free the hostages, followed by the ouster of Mr. Netanyahu — but the protests do not reflect a groundswell of sympathy for Palestinians or a popular desire to rethink the status quo ante of occupation and long-silenced peace talks.

If anything, with the world’s attention fixed on Gaza, Israel’s far-right government has intensified the domination of Palestinians. The single largest Israeli land grab in more than 30 years happened in March , when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the state seizure of 10 square kilometers of the West Bank. The land takeovers are accompanied by a bloody campaign of terror , with an ever-less-distinguishable mix of soldiers and settlers killing at least 460 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, the Palestinian health ministry says.

Meanwhile, inside Israel, the police have handed out guns to civilians and set up de facto militias in the name of self-defense. But questions about whom these newly armed groups are meant to defend, and from whom, have created a creeping unease.

The weapons have gone not only to West Bank settlements or towns adjacent to Palestinian territories and Lebanon but also to communities set deep in Israel’s interior, particularly places that are home to a mix of Arab and Jewish residents . An analysis published in January by the newspaper Haaretz found that while the national security ministry wouldn’t disclose which communities got gun licenses or the criteria used to decide, Arab communities — even those on Israel’s frontier — did not seem to be eligible.

The guns sent a chill through Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have often been invoked in defense of the state. Look, Israel’s advocates often say, Arabs live more freely in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East.

Hassan Jabareen, a prominent Palestinian lawyer who founded Adalah, Israel’s main legal center for Arab rights, told me that many Arab citizens of Israel — who constitute one-fifth of the population — live in fear.

Israel’s attacks on Gaza have in the past provoked community protests, riots and clashes among Arabs and Jews in Israel. After Oct. 7, though, the message was clear: Stay quiet.

“The police left no doubt that we were enemies of the state,” Mr. Jabareen said, “when they started arming the Jewish citizens of Israel and called Jewish citizens to come to the station and take your arms to defend yourself from your Palestinian neighbor.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer who lives with her family in the Israeli city of Haifa, told me that these past months have been thick with unease. She has long imagined herself as a living holdover from the once-thriving Arab population that was largely displaced from what is now Israel. A “remnant,” she calls herself, who for years moved through Israel feeling invisible.

Now the sense of invisibility has melted. Both Ms. Buttu and Mr. Jabareen said that the current atmosphere in Israel had drawn closer and sharpened in their minds the mass displacement known in Arabic as the nakba, or catastrophe, as if history might yet loop back. Mr. Netanyahu evoked the same era when he referred to Israel’s current onslaught as “Israel’s second war of independence.”

“They didn’t see us,” Ms. Buttu said. “We were the ghosts; we were just there. And now it’s like, ‘Wow, they’re here.’ There is an interest in trying to get rid of Palestinians. We’re on the rhetorical front lines.”

Long before this current storm of violence, Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government had worked to strengthen Jewish supremacy. The 2018 “nation-state law” codified the right to national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people,” removed Arabic as an official language and established “Jewish settlement as a national value” that the government must support. Palestinian members of the Knesset famously shredded copies of the bill in Parliament and yelled, “Apartheid,” but it passed all the same.

In 2022, Israel reauthorized its controversial family unification law, largely barring Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from receiving legal status — or living with their spouses in Israel — if they are from the West Bank or Gaza. The law also applies to people from the “enemy states” of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq (homes to Palestinian refugee communities), as well as Iran.

With legal disadvantages and social pressures mounting, Palestinian citizens of Israel have started to look abroad for support. Mr. Jabareen told me that his organization is preparing an application to the United Nations to request international legal protections for Palestinians inside Israel. In March a Palestinian citizen of Israel was granted asylum in Britain after arguing that returning would very likely expose him to persecution because of his political views and activism for Palestinian rights and Israel’s “apartheid system of racial control of its Jewish citizens over its Palestinian citizens.”

Another stark sign of Israel’s hardening is the hundreds of Israelis — mostly Arabs, but some Jews, too — who have been arrested, fired or otherwise punished for statements or actions regarded as endangering national security or undermining Israel’s war efforts. Even a social media post expressing concern for Palestinians in Gaza is enough to draw police scrutiny.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a scholar who lectures at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen Mary University of London, said on a podcast that Zionism should be abolished, that Israel may be lying about the extent of sexual assault that took place on Oct. 7 and that Israelis were “criminals” who “cannot kill and not be afraid, so they better be afraid.” Israeli police responded in April by jailing Ms. Shalhoub-Kevorkian overnight and asking a judge to keep her locked up while they investigated her on suspicion of incitement. The judge decided to release her but acknowledged that she “may have crossed the line from free expression to incitement.”

For nearly two decades — starting with the quieting of the second intifada and ending calamitously on Oct. 7 — Israel was remarkably successful at insulating itself from the violence of the occupation. Rockets fired from Gaza periodically rained down on Israeli cities, but since 2011 , Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has intercepted most of them. The mathematics of death heavily favored Israel: From 2008 until Oct. 7, more than 6,000 Palestinians were killed in what the United Nations calls “the context of occupation and conflict”; during that time, more than 300 Israelis were killed.

Human rights organizations — including Israeli groups — wrote elaborate reports explaining why Israel is an apartheid state. That was embarrassing for Israel, but nothing really came of it. The economy flourished. Once-hostile Arab states showed themselves willing to sign accords with Israel after just a little performative pestering about the Palestinians.

Those years gave Israelis a taste of what may be the Jewish state’s most elusive dream — a world in which there simply did not exist a Palestinian problem.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator who is now president of the U.S./Middle East Project think tank, describes “the level of hubris and arrogance that built up over the years.” Those who warned of the immorality or strategic folly of occupying Palestinian territories “were dismissed,” he said, “like, ‘Just get over it.’”

If U.S. officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. Biden administration officials keep talking about a Palestinian state. But the land earmarked for a state has been steadily covered in illegal Israeli settlements, and Israel itself has seldom stood so unabashedly opposed to Palestinian sovereignty.

There’s a reason Mr. Netanyahu keeps reminding everyone that he’s spent his career undermining Palestinian statehood: It’s a selling point. Mr. Gantz, who is more popular than Mr. Netanyahu and is often mentioned as a likely successor, is a centrist by Israeli standards — but he, too, has pushed back against international calls for a Palestinian state.

Daniel Levy describes the current divide among major Israeli politicians this way: Some believe in “managing the apartheid in a way that gives Palestinians more freedom — that’s [Yair] Lapid and maybe Gantz on some days,” while hard-liners like Mr. Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir “are really about getting rid of the Palestinians. Eradication. Displacement.”

The carnage and cruelty suffered by Israelis on Oct. 7 should have driven home the futility of sealing themselves off from Palestinians while subjecting them to daily humiliations and violence. As long as Palestinians are trapped under violent military occupation, deprived of basic rights and told that they must accept their lot as inherently lower beings, Israelis will live under the threat of uprisings, reprisals and terrorism. There is no wall thick enough to suppress forever a people who have nothing to lose.

Israelis did not, by and large, take that lesson. Now apathy has been replaced by vengeance.

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Megan K. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer and author. She has been a correspondent in China, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan and the U.S.-Mexico border area. Her first book, a narrative account of the post-Sept. 11 wars, was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. @ Megankstack