Trinity

Currently I'm reading Almost Like A Whale by Steve Jones. I'm learning a lot about the low-level mechanics of evolution from it, and the fine distinction between species and varieties, and the role of hybridization. You see, one of the puzzles of evolution via natural selection is how we get from species A to species B with no apparent in-between species C that could possibly be viable in the wild. This is called hill climbing - the analogy being that getting from species A to species B involves temporarily reversing evolutionary progress in order to create a better adapted species later on.

I've also been reading The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's an alternative history - Europe is wiped out by the Black Death - completely depopulated apart from a few small settlements in the Orkneys. The history he outlines is interesting: the American continent is colonised in a completely different pattern. Europe is Islamic, India initiates the Industrial Revolution. The Native Americans and Japanese ally themselves against the Chinese. It's all very novel and entertaining, and told from the perspective of a group of characters in the grip of the Bhuddist cycle of death and rebirth throughout history, which is a very clever way of maintaining an unbroken narrative and plot through the centuries. The two histories converge in the present time. With Islam dominating Europe and the West of Asia, and China dominant in the East and the Americas, there is a clash of civiilizations. A Great War is fought, that dwarfs the First World War in magnitude with a front all the way across Asia. In spite of this there is no subsequent war, and nuclear weapons are not developed. No government makes the investment in the new weapon.

At first I thought that this was highly unrealistic, but this article "Pilgrimage to Trinity", written by the son of one of the Los Alamos gang, who went into nuclear physics himeslef - made me change my mind - the development of nuclear weapons turns out to be an example of technological evolutionary hill - climbing. The investment required to produce the material to build the first one is huge: but once it's done you are on the other side of the hill. It's something that's known to be possible, it's known there is a given route from A to B and it's possible to retrace the steps. The only way to prevent nuclear proliferation is never to build a thermonuclear weapon in the first place.

It's at a time like this I think of a newspaper article I read in 1992 - in the light of events in Europe at the end of the 1980's and the end of the cold war, membership in CND had declined dramatically, given that the chances of WWIII had dropped drastically. Why, does CND still exist? Why should anyone still have membership? "Because there are still nuclear weapons in the world", was the answer - and it appears to be right.

Too Late.

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