The New Yorker:

The risk of nuclear war has only grown, yet the public and government officials are increasingly cavalier. Some experts are trying to change that.

By Rivka Galchen

In “Preventing Nuclear War,” an essay published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in 1981, the Harvard law professor Roger Fisher imagines a President in the White House, discussing nuclear war. Fisher was involved in the Camp David Accords, served as an adviser to both sides during the Iran hostage crisis, and helped to arrange the 1985 Gorbachev-Reagan summit. Much of his professional life was centered on managing pressured, consequential situations. During the Cold War—and arguably still today—the most consequential situation was the possibility of nuclear war. Fisher, who was a pilot during the Second World War, makes what he describes as a “quite simple” suggestion to reduce the chances of launching a nuclear attack: “Put that needed code number in a little capsule and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer.” Like the rotation of military personnel who today trade off carrying the “nuclear football”—the briefcase that contains the nuclear launch codes—the person with the implanted capsule would be near the President constantly. In Fisher’s scenario, a Navy officer named George does the job. “The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife,” Fisher writes. “If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, ‘George, I’m sorry, but tens of millions must die.’ ” That there would be blood on the White House carpet is essential. “He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is.” The Fisher Protocol, as it was termed, makes vivid the reality that nuclear war, so often spoken of in the bloodless language of tactics and strategy, is unimaginably horrific.

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