Nuclear danger is fundamentally a problem of constructing mutual trust

Evidence

Anyone who is minimally informed is aware that the invention and deployment of nuclear weapons has created a condition of considerable danger (Bracken 1983). There is dispute — and probably rationally unresolvable dispute — about the scale of the disaster that is now possible and about the intensity of the risk that any particular assessment of this scale will in fact be actualized over any particular span of time. There are also a miscellany of proposals as to what different political actors would be well advised to do about these risks: few, if any, of them intellectually at all compelling. One point which is clear, however, is how centrally the nature of the problem of what to do is captured by conceiving it in terms of the construction, reproduction, and repair of structures of wellfounded mutual trust. There are two simple reasons why this is so, perhaps individually necessary and certainly jointly sufficient to ensure that it is so. The first is that the knowledge of how to make these instruments of destruction is ineliminable in principle except by their large-scale use. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1267

There is dispute — and probably rationally unresolvable dispute — about the scale of the disaster that is now possible and about the intensity of the risk that any particular assessment of this scale will in fact be actualized over any particular span of time. … One point which is clear, however, is how centrally the nature of the problem of what to do is captured by conceiving it in terms of the construction, reproduction, and repair of structures of wellfounded mutual trust. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1267

Categorization

• XREF: The ineliminable-knowledge point parallels Saramago: the doctor’s wife’s sightedness is ineliminable except by destroying it — both create trust problems where observability is the scarce, deciding resource.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘trust as policy vs passion’ distinction could extend the On Sacrifice piece’s discussion of sacral kingship as institutionalized trust.
• DEFINE: Defines the core problem of the trust literature: trust is not given but constructed, reproduced, and repaired.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1267