2016: Is Buffet concerned about weapons of mass destruction?
CAROL LOOMIS: This question comes from Chris Gottscho (PH) of New York.
Mr. Buffett, you have expressed concern about cyber, biological, nuclear, and chemical attacks, but preventing catastrophe is not getting enough attention.
For example, a bill passed the house unanimously to harden the electric grid against the high-altitude nuclear explosion. Not too many bills pass unanimously these days, but then the bill got bottled up in the Senate.
Have you considered funding — wouldn’t it be a good idea for you to consider funding a lobbying and educational campaign to promote the public good in this area and counteract industry lobbyists who are often more interested in short-term profits?
WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Well, in my view, there is no problem remotely like the problem of what I call C-N-B-C, cyber, nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks, that either by rogue organizations, even possibly individuals, rogue states, I mean, you know, if you think about — you can think about a lot of things. It will happen.
I think we’ve been both lucky and, frankly, the people have done a very good job in government, because government is the real protection on this, in not having anything since 1945.
We came very, very close during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I don’t know what the odds were, but I do think that if there had been — I can think of many people that if they’d been in place of either [U.S. President John] Kennedy or [USSR Premier Nikita] Khrushchev, we would’ve had a very different result.
And it’s the ultimate problem. As I put in the annual report, it’s the only real threat to Berkshire’s economic — external threat to Berkshire’s economic well-being over time. And I just hope when — it’ll happen — I hope when it happens that it’s minimized.
But the desire of psychotics and megalomaniacs and religious fanatics and whatever to do harm on others is a lot more when you have 7 billion people on earth than when you had 3 billion or so, which was the case when I was born — less than 3 billion.
And unfortunately, there are means of doing it. You know, if you were a psychotic back far enough, you threw a stone at the guy in the next cave, and you would sort of limit — relationship of damage to psychosis.
But the — and that went along, you know, through bows and arrows and spears and cannons and various things. And in 1945, we unleashed something like the world had never seen, and that is a pop gun compared to what can be done now.
So there are plenty of people that would like to cause us huge damage. And I came to that view when I was in my 20s. And in terms of my philanthropic efforts, I decided that that was one of two issues that I thought should be the main issue, and I got involved with all kinds of things like the Concerned — Union of —
CHARLIE MUNGER: You supported the Pugwash Conference year after year and were exactly all by yourself.
WARREN BUFFETT: Union of Concerned Scientists, and I have given some money to the Nuclear Threat Initiative that was going to create a — sort of a Federal Reserve system to bank uranium that will take away some of the excuse for countries to develop their own highly-enriched uranium.
So — but it’s overwhelmingly a governmental problem on what you’re dealing, and it should be, and I think it actually has been the top priority for president after president. It’s not the thing they can go out and talk about it every day, and they don’t want to scare the hell out of everybody, and they also don’t want to tip people’s hands as to what they’re doing.
But being in the insurance business — you don’t have to even be in the insurance business — you can — you know that someday somebody will pull off something on a very, very, very big scale that will be harmful.
Maybe it will — the United States is probably the most likely place it happens, but it can happen a lot of other places, and that’s the one huge disadvantage to innovation. I mean, people —
CHARLIE MUNGER: Warren, I think he also asked, why don’t we, Berkshire, spend a lot more time telling the government what it should be doing and thinking?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I’ve tried telling people. (Laughs)
Nobody disagrees with you on it. They just — it seems sort of hopeless to — I mean, they don’t know what to do beyond what they’re doing.
And incidentally, they’ve done a lot of things. I mean, not all gets publicized, but — and I think Kennedy and Khrushchev — I mean, Khrushchev shouldn’t have been sending it over to Cuba, but at least he had enough sense when he knew Kennedy meant business to turn the ships around.
But it’s — you can’t count on there being Kennedys and Khrushchevs all the time in charge of things.
And the mistakes that are — I see the mistakes that are made in business or human behavior where people act so contrary to their own long-range self-interest that — humans are very — you know, they’ve got a lot of frailties.
You can argue that if Hitler hadn’t been so anti-Semitic, you know, he could’ve kept a lot of scientists that might have gotten him to the atomic bomb before we did, but he was — he drove out the best of the scientific minds and fortunate —
CHARLIE MUNGER: Imagine a guy stupid enough to think the way to improve science is to kick out all the Jews. (Laughter.)
WARREN BUFFETT: It was — the hero of the 20th century may have been Leo Szilard. I mean, Leo Szilard is the guy that got [Albert] Einstein to cosign a letter to [President Franklin] Roosevelt and say, you know, one side or the other is going to get this, and we better get it first, basically. He said it much more eloquently than that. You can go to the internet and look up the letter, but — you know, we’ve both been good and we’ve been lucky.
But, if you remember post-9/11, people started getting a few envelopes with anthrax, and they went to, like, the National Enquirer and Tom Brokaw and Tom Daschle — I can’t remember.
I mean, who knows what — when you’re — when you’ve got a mind that’s going to send anthrax to people, you know, how that decision making is made is just totally beyond comprehension. And that person did not end up doing a lot of damage, but the capability for damage is absolutely incredible.
I don’t know how Berkshire does anything about — I don’t know how to do it philanthropically. If I knew how to do — reduce the probabilities of the C-N-B-C-type mass attack, if I knew how to reduce the probability by 5 percent, all my money would go to that, no question about that, maybe 1 percent.
CHARLIE MUNGER: But hasn’t it been true we haven’t been very good at getting the government to follow any of our advice?
WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. But this one’s important. (Laughter.)
CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, well —
WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Nobody argues with you about it. They just sort of throw up their hands. And some people work for a while on it and just get discouraged and quit.
I was involved — I forget the exact name of it, but their idea was — a bunch of nuclear scientists — this is long ago, but their idea was to affect elections in small states, the theory being that government was the main instrument and you would have the maximum impact. And just one after another, you know, people took it up and got discouraged.
I don’t — I don’t think it’s because we — we’ve had the wrong leaders. I think our leaders have been good on this.
I think that any candidate — well, I do not worry about the fact that either [Hillary] Clinton or [Donald] Trump would regard that as the paramount problem of their presidency.
But I just don’t know — the offense can be ahead of the defense, and that’s — you can win the game 99.99 percent of the time, but eventually anything that has any probability of happening, you know, will happen.
I wish I could give you a better answer. Charlie, have you got any —
CHARLIE MUNGER: I have no hope of giving a better answer.
WARREN BUFFETT: That’s what they all say to me. Yeah.