Professor Alan Whiteside is an AIDS researcher and author. He is Professor of Economics and Director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and is a member of the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society. He has written several books on HIV and AIDS, including HIV/AIDS: A Very Short Introduction. In this original post below, Professor Whiteside discusses the recent encouraging results of HIV vaccine trials in Thailand.

The human immunodeficiency virus the cause of AIDS, is fortunately not easily transmitted. When it first appeared in 1981, there were fears of a global epidemic, some thought it would be on the scale of the impending Swine flu (H1N1) outbreak. This has not and will not happened. However those who are infected will eventually develop AIDS and in the absence of treatment will die.

There are an estimated 33 million people living with HIV in the world. The majority are in sub-Saharan Africa and more women than men infected. Most HIV transmission takes place through unprotected sexual intercourse. Some people are infected through drug abuse – sharing contaminated needles. If a woman is HIV positive and pregnant then there is a chance that her child will be born with the virus or infected while breast feeding (vertical transmission).

HIV transmission can be prevented. In injecting drug using populations provision of clean needles will halt the epidemic – as was done in a number of western cities. It is rare for vertical transmission to occur in the rich world, pregnant women will be given drugs and babies formula feed, in the poor world one dose of nevirapine will greatly reduce risk. New interventions are being developed and tried and it is likely that this form of transmission can be further reduced.

Preventing sexual transmission requires behavior change. Clearly not being sexually active will ensure a person remains HIV negative. This is not an option for humankind or most individuals. Having only one partner (who is faithful) will be effective but again, human nature being what it is, this is not a realistic goal despite what many faith-based organizations would have us believe. Condoms are generally effective provided they are used consistently and correctly. Unfortunately this too is not always an option. In some settings they are not available or are discouraged by religious leaders. Women may not be empowered to insist or even ask their partners to use them. And of course there are many who just don’t like them.

I believe that halting the HIV epidemic requires a mix of behaviour change and science. With regard to behaviour the key is developing respect. People should not enter sexual relations without respecting each other. If they do then they will either be faithful or they will want to protect their partner(s) by knowing their HIV status and/or using condoms.

Science has brought us drugs that keep people alive albeit at price. It is too science that we look in the area of prevention, here there are a few possibilities. Male circumcision provides a degree of protection for men. A microbicide, a substance that could be inserted into the vagina prior to intercourse that would kill viruses and bacteria would be female controlled and highly beneficial. A number are being tried. But the first prize would be an effective vaccine.

In 1983 when the virus was first isolated the then US Secretary of Health and Human Services announced confidently that a vaccine was imminent. This proved to be widely optimistic and in my book I said: “Despite rapid scientific advances there are no simple solutions. There will almost certainly not be a vaccine available by 2015 the date the Millennium Development Goals were to be met”. At the time of writing there were just four pharmaceutical companies with vaccines in trials; only one candidate had gone through all trials and it was not effective.

The news over the past week of developments in Thailand is extremely significant. The US Military HIV Research Programme and Thai Ministry of Health announced that a ‘combination of two vaccine candidates’ is at least partially effective in preventing HIV transmission. It was reported that the combination is 31% effective at preventing infection with HIV. Clearly this is not were we need to be but it is a breakthrough. More information will be given on 20th October this year at an AIDS vaccine meeting in Paris.

At this point those of us working in the field of HIV/AIDS are encouraged. It is in the words of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative’s Chief Executive “a significant scientific achievement. It is the first demonstration that a candidate AIDS vaccine provides benefits in humans”. It will lead to new investment and energy in the development of vaccines.

Although an effective vaccine is still some years off, there is at last good news on this front.

Andrew Robinson was literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006 and is now a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Story of Writing, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts. His latest book is Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction. Below is an original post by Andrew asking whether the internet will create a universal writing system.

The internet appears to suggest that the dream of universal communication across the barriers of language, nation, and culture by means of writing is within reach. Three centuries ago, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote: “As regards signs, I see … clearly that it is to the interest of the Republic of Letters and especially of students, that learned men should reach agreement on signs.” But the nature of writing systems means that Leibniz’s vision remains an impossible illusion. There is no such thing as a universal writing system, and there never will be.

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation: “We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is strictly limited. They are most effective when they represent a service or concession that can be represented by an object, such a bus or bar glass. They are much less effective when used to represent a process or activity, such as Ticket Purchase…”.

Pictographic and logographic signs at airports and beside highways are a limited language of universal communication, which belongs to proto-writing, not full writing. Mathematics, too, is a universal language, but it is no use for most purposes of written communication. Painting and music communicate powerfully across cultures, but their meaning is diffuse and ambiguous. To communicate any and all thought always requires phonetic symbols. Wikipedia may have started in English, but it subsequently evolved versions written in over two dozen languages, including Esperanto. Full writing and reading depend on knowing a spoken language. This fact has not been altered by the internet—however many computer icons (and emoticons) we may encounter online.

Until the last few decades, it was generally agreed that over the centuries western civilisation had tried to make writing a closer and closer representation of speech. The alphabet was naturally regarded as the pinnacle of this conscious search; the Chinese script, conversely, was widely thought of as hopelessly defective. The corollary was the belief that as the alphabet spread through the world, so eventually would mass literacy and democracy. Surely, one might think, if a script is easy to learn, then more people will grasp it; and if they come to understand public affairs better, they will be more likely to take part in them and indeed demand a part in them. Scholars thus had a clear conception of writing progressing from cumbersome ancient scripts with multiple signs to simple and superior modern alphabets.

Few are now quite as confident. The superiority of alphabets is no longer taken for granted. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had an ‘alphabet’ of 24 signs nearly 5000 years ago, but apparently chose not to use it alone, and instead developed a logo-consonantal system with over 700 signs in regular use. The Japanese, rather than using their simple syllabic kana more and more frequently, chose to import more and more kanji from the Chinese script, creating a writing system of unrivalled complexity. Mayan glyphs show that the Maya could have used far more purely syllabic spellings, if they had wished, instead of their elaborate logographic and logo-syllabic equivalents.

We might also mention the notorious irregularity of modern English spelling, which is by no means a logical and straightforward representation of speech. George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to invent a rational alphabet for spelling English. But the Shaw alphabet, though ingenious and simple to write, has never been used. It is almost impossible to imagine public acceptance of a wholesale change in English orthography of the kind that was introduced in Turkey in 1928, when the country changed from writing in the Arabic script to writing in the Roman alphabet, or in Korea, with the less abrupt changeover from Chinese characters to Hangul.

The reason why scripts flourish or vanish has more to do with political and cultural considerations than purely linguistic ones. Literacy concerns far more than merely learning how to read and write. A Japanese physics student once outlined for me the genuine linguistic disadvantages of writing only in kana, without kanji, and then added: ‘After all, a long tradition cannot change like that. It will NEVER happen!!’ In other words, writing Japanese in kanji is a key part of Japanese identity.

Many scholars of writing today have an increasing respect for the intelligence behind ancient scripts. Down with the monolithic ‘triumph of the alphabet’, they say, and up with Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, with their hybrid mixtures of pictographic, logographic and phonetic signs. Their conviction has in turn nurtured a new awareness of writing systems as being enmeshed within societies, rather than viewing them somewhat aridly as different kinds of technical solution to the problem of efficient visual representation of a particular language.

While I personally remain sceptical about the expressive virtues of pictograms and logograms, this growing holistic view of writing systems strikes me as a healthy development that reflects the real relationship between writing and society in all its subtlety and complexity. The transmission of my intimate thoughts to the minds of others in many cultures via intricate marks on a piece of paper or a computer screen, continues to amaze me as a kind of barely explicable magic.

Hermione Lee is a well-known biographer, having written major Lives of Virginia Woolf (1996) and Edith Wharton (2007). She has also written critical studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Philip Roth. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society for Literature, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE for services to literature, and in 2008 she was elected President of Wolfson College, Oxford. She has recently written Biography: A Very Short Introduction, and below is another wonderful video by our friends Meet the Author in which Professor Lee explains the motivation behind writing this book.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We at OUP UK were delighted recently when we heard that Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon had won The Dingle Prize. It is awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science for the best book in the history of science, technology and medicine accessible to a non-expert readership, with the judges declaring that Thomas Dixon’s book “is clearly and concisely written, well argued, and accessible to the non-expert; it should appeal to a wide readership not only beyond the history of science community but also outside academia”.

Below is an extract taken from the book, regarding Darwin and evolution. Thomas Dixon has previously written two posts for OUPblog, which can be found here and here.

In his early 20s, Darwin was looking forward to a career in the Church of England. He had embarked on medical training in Edinburgh a few years earlier but had found the lectures boring and the demonstrations of surgery disgusting. Now his father sent him off to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where young Charles signed up to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and set about studying mathematics and theology with a view to entering holy orders after graduation. But Darwin found that theology appealed about as much as surgery. His real passion at this time was for beetle-hunting rather than Bible-reading, and he had an early triumph when one of the specimens he had identified appeared in print in an instalment of Illustrations of British Entomology. In 1831 this enthusiastic young amateur naturalist was invited to join the HMS Beagle as a companion to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy, and to undertake collections and observations on matters of natural-historical interest. Perhaps he was not, after all, destined to become the Reverend Charles Darwin.

The voyage of the Beagle lasted from 1831 to 1836. The primary purpose of the expedition was to complete the British Admiralty’s survey of the coast of South America, but its five-year itinerary also took in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Darwin’s observations of rock formations, plants, animals, and indigenous peoples were incidental to the purpose of the expedition but absolutely central to his own intellectual development. On board the Beagle, Darwin’s religious views started to evolve too. He had no doubt that the natural world was the work of God. In his notebook he recorded his impressions of the South American jungle: ‘Twiners entwining twiners – tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah.’ To Darwin, these jungles were ‘temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature’, in which no-one could stand without ‘feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body’. He even admired the civilizing effects of the work of Christian missionaries too, observing that ‘so excellent is the Christian faith, that the outward conduct of the believers is said most decidedly to have been improved by its doctrines’.

Back in England, however, after the voyage, Darwin would start to have doubts. His grandfather, father, and elder brother had all rejected Christianity, adopting either Deism or outright freethinking unbelief. He seemed to be heading in a similar direction. His reasons were many. His travels had revealed to him at first hand the great variety of religious beliefs and practices around the world. All these different religions claimed to have a special revelation from God, but they could not all be right. Then there was his moral revulsion at the Christian doctrine that while the faithful would be saved, unbelievers and heathens, along with unrepentant sinners, would be consigned to an eternity of damnation. Darwin thought this was a ‘damnable doctrine’ and could not see how anyone could wish it to be true. This objection hit him with particular force after the death of his unbelieving father in 1848.

There were two ways in which Darwin’s re-reading of the book of nature also gave him reasons to re-think his religion. He and others before him had seen in the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments evidence of the power and wisdom of God. But Darwin now thought he saw something else. Hard though it was for him to believe it himself – the human eye could still give him a shudder of incredulity – he came to think that all these adaptations came about by natural processes. Variation and natural selection could counterfeit intelligent design. Secondly, along with the silent beauty of the jungle he had also observed all sorts of cruelty and violence in nature, which he could not believe a benevolent and omnipotent God could have willed. Why, for example, would God have created the ichneumon wasp? The ichneumon lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, with the effect that when the larvae hatch they eat their host alive. Why would God create cuckoos which eject their foster siblings from the nest? Why make ants that enslave other species of ant? Why give queen bees the instinct of murderous hatred towards their daughters? ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write’, Darwin exclaimed, ‘on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!’

Darwin never became an atheist. At the time he wrote On the Origin of Species he was still a theist, although not a Christian. By the end of his life he preferred to adopt the label ‘agnostic’, which had been coined by his friend Thomas Huxley in 1869. Darwin, for the most part, kept his religious doubts to himself. He had many reasons to do so, not least his desire for a quiet life and social respectability. The most important reason, though, was his wife Emma. In the early years of their marriage, Emma, a pious evangelical Christian, wrote a letter to Charles of her fears about his loss of faith in Christianity and the consequences for his salvation. She could not bear the thought that his doubts would mean they were not reunited after death in heaven. The death of their beloved young daughter Annie in 1851 brought home again the need for the consolation of an afterlife. The difference between Charles and Emma on this question was a painful one. Among Darwin’s papers after his death, Emma found the letter she had written to him on the subject 40 years earlier. On it her husband had added a short note of his own: ‘When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this.’

Last Thursday Britain – along with the rest of the European Union – went to the polls to elect our MEPs. Because of the number of votes across the EU, results were not announced until Sunday night, and there were plenty of upsets for the UK politicians. The EU provokes opinions from all shades of the political spectrum here, largely concerning whether Britain should still be in the EU at all, so I decided to find out how Britain joined the European Union. Below is an extract from The European Union: A Very Short Introduction by John Pinder and Simon Usherwood, which gives the low-down on when Britain, along with Ireland and Denmark, became a member.

President de Gaulle resigned in 1969 and was replaced by Georges Pompidou. Nationalist fundamentalism as a basis for French policy gave way to pragmatic intergovernmentalism. Britain, Denmark, Ireland, and Norway still sought entry; France’s partners supported it; and, instead of vetoing enlargement as de Gaulle had done, Pompidou consented, providing it was accompanied by conditions of interest to France: agreement on the financing of the CAP, as well as elements of ‘deepening’ such as monetary union and coordination of foreign policy. In addition to serving the French agricultural interest, these were intended to integrate Germany yet more firmly into the Community, as well as guard against the danger that widening the Community would weaken it.

France’s partners favoured both widening and deepening. Germany’s new Chancellor, the federalist Willy Brandt, played a leading part in a summit meeting of the six government heads in The Hague in December 1969. While he became famous for his Ostpolitik, relaxing tension with the Soviet bloc and with East Germany in particular, Brandt accompanied it with a Westpolitik for strengthening integration in the West. At The Hague he both promoted enlargement and proposed an economic and monetary union. This was agreed in principle, along with the other French conditions; and these projects were developed within the Community alongside the entry negotiations.

The principle of economic and monetary union was not, however, realized in practice until the 1990s. France, showing a preference for federal policy instruments rather than institutional reform, wanted a single currency. For Germany, this would have to be accompanied by coordination of economic policies, together with majority voting in the Council and powers for the European Parliament. But these were reforms too far for France in that early post-gaullist period. The result was a system for cooperation on exchange rates that was too weak to survive the international currency turbulence of that period. The system devised for foreign policy cooperation, kept separate from the Community owing to French insistence on sovereignty in this field, was strictly intergovernmental. Though quite useful, its impact was limited. It was the hard financial interest of French agriculture that secured a solid outcome, in a financial regulation that was to be highly disadvantageous for the British, whose small but efficient farm sector differed from those of the six member states.

The financing of the CAP again raised the question of powers for the European Parliament, on which the Dutch, supported by Belgium, Germany, and Italy, continued to insist. Pompidou’s reaction was to accept the principle that the European Parliament would share control of the budget with the Council, but to exclude as much as possible of the expenditure, including in particular that on agriculture. This was accepted, faute de mieux, by France’s partners in an amending treaty in 1970; and the Parliament’s role was enhanced in a second treaty in 1975, after Pompidou had been succeeded by the post-gaullist President Giscard d’Estaing. While this was just a foot in the door to budgetary powers for the Parliament, it was to grow into a major element in the Community’s institutional structure.

Though agriculture and Commonwealth trade still presented difficulties and the British public appeared unconvinced, Prime Minister Heath established good relations with President Pompidou and drove the entry negotiations through to a successful conclusion. Britain, together with Denmark and Ireland, joined the Community in January 1973, though the Norwegians rejected accession in a referendum. The British too were to vote in a referendum in 1975. Harold Wilson had replaced Edward Heath as Prime Minister in 1974 following an election victory by the Labour Party, which was turning more and more against the Community. After a somewhat cosmetic ‘renegotiation’, the Wilson government did recommend continued membership; and in 1975 the voters approved it by a two-to-one majority. But Labour became increasingly hostile, to the point of campaigning in the 1983 elections for British withdrawal. Meanwhile Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister as a result of the Conservative election victory in 1979. While French post-gaullist governments were moving back towards support for earlier concepts of the Community, she was developing a stormy relationship with it, fighting to assert the principle of intergovernmentalism. Until 1984 she also fought to ‘get our money back’, as she put it, by blocking much Community business until she secured agreement to reduce Britain’s high net contribution to the Community’s budget.

In 1974 President Pompidou died and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing succeeded him. Although Giscard had been de Gaulle’s Finance Minister, he was not of the gaullist tradition and wanted to mark his presidency with measures to develop the Community. Ambivalent about federalism, he acted to strengthen both the intergovernmental and the federal elements in the Community’s institutions, with initiatives to convert the summits into regular meetings, as the European Council of Heads of State and Government, as well as to launch direct elections to the European Parliament.

Following consultation with Monnet, who had remained active until then as President of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe in which he had brought together the leaders of the democratic political parties and trade unions of the member states, Giscard successfully proposed both the European Council and the direct elections. The European Council was soon to play a central part in taking Community decisions, settling conflicts that ministers in the Council were unable to resolve, and agreeing on major package deals. Provision had already been made for direct elections in the treaties of the 1950s, subject to unanimous agreement in the Council, which had been unattainable while gaullists ruled France. But the governments now agreed and the first elections were held in June 1979. This step towards representative democracy was to have a big impact on the Community’s future development.

That year of the first direct elections also saw a significant move towards monetary union. On becoming President of the Commission in 1977, Roy Jenkins, formerly a leading member of the Labour government, who without being explicitly federalist favoured steps in a federal direction, had looked for a way to ‘move Europe forward’ and concluded that the time was ripe to revive the idea of monetary union. This was taken up by the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who saw it as a way to spread the burden of a difficult relationship with the US that resulted from the weakness of the dollar and the strength of the mark, and who was also influenced by Monnet’s ideas. Schmidt and Giscard had forged a close relationship as Finance Ministers before becoming Chancellor and President in 1974; and they readily agreed on a proposal for a European Monetary System (EMS), with a strong mechanism for mutual exchange rate stability, and a European Currency Unit (ecu) to perform some technical functions. This was accepted by all save the British government, in the context of the Labour Party’s growing hostility to the Community. So all but one of the member states participated in the EMS when it was created in 1979, alongside the Community rather than within it: an example of a recurrent pattern, with a number of states proceeding together while Britain, sometimes with one or two others, stands aside – usually deciding eventually to participate.

Today I am pleased to be able to bring you a new video from our friends at Meet the Author. Nigel Warburton is the author of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, and here he is explaining what inspired him to write the book, and what the key arguments in free speech are.

He has previously written for OUPblog here, and an excerpt from his book can be found here.  Check out the video after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Oxford Literary Festival 2009 runs from Sunday 29 March until Sunday 5 April at Christ Church College.

The OLF has taken place at Christ Church for the last few years. What an amazing place to hold a literary festival! This photo is of Tom Tower, and is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Oxford.

The Festival Book Tent, where all the soap box talks take place is in a marquee in the College grounds. To get there, you have to walk through the Memorial Gardens. This is a view of the College buildings from the Gardens.

Once inside the Tent, there are plenty of Very Short Introductions on display – just what we like to see! Those covers look fantastic all sitting together, don’t they?

And this is the VSI soap box alongside our banner! It was made specially for us by our Head of Publicity’s partner, and has seen several years’ service at the OLF.

Lastly, meet David J. Hand. He kicked off our 2009 soap box talks with his Very Short Introduction to Statistics. A healthy-sized crowd quickly gathered round, and asked lots of fantastic questions about everything from statistics and the credit crisis, to census data, and one lady even asked where he got his coat!

So far this year we have also had talks from Nigel Warburton on Free Speech, William Bynum on The History of Medicine, Ritchie Robertson on Kafka, and Russell Stannard on Relativity. Coming over the rest of the week are Mark Maslin on Global Warming, David Cottington on Modern Art, Véronique Mottier on Sexuality, Elleke Boehmer on Nelson Mandela, Klaus Dodds on Geopolitics, Richard Bellamy on Citizenship, and Rana Mitter on Modern China. If you’re in Oxford, please do pop along. All soap box talks are free.

Yesterday we looked at the question ‘Why are there more women active in the Christian Church than men?‘ from our UK promotional book Very Short Answers to Very Big Questions. Today I’m bringing you another question and answer from the book: Do nuclear weapons make the world a safer place? The answer comes from Joseph M. Siracusa and his book Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction.

Does the spread of nuclear weapons make the world safer or more dangerous? Most people usually have an instinctive reply to this question: Of course, it makes things more dangerous. How could it not? It might seem surprising, therefore, that not all nuclear analysts agree, and the debate remains unresolved. Like so many of the issues relating to nuclear weapons, the debate is built largely on speculation and ambiguous historical experience. Nuclear weapons remain attractive to insecure or ambitious states. In regional rivalries such as the subcontinent, East Asia, and the Middle East, the bomb still has influence. Whatever else one has to say – and presumably not much has been left unsaid about the nuclear strategy of the past six decades – nuclear status still imparts extraordinary prestige and power. The nine current members of the nuclear weapon club still possess about 27,000 operational nuclear weapons of various types between them. At least another 15 countries have on hand enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.

Since 1945, many influential voices have expressed alarm that the spread of nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to world destruction. So far, that prediction has not been proved right. But is that because of effective efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, or, to borrow a phrase from former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, just ‘plain dumb luck’?

Nuclear proliferation remains urgent not just because of the risk of a terrorist organization getting its hands on nuclear weapons, but because the proliferation of weapons necessarily means a proliferation of nuclear deterrents. Nuclear weapons have long been a force multiplier, able to make up for imbalances in conventional military power. Paradoxically, then, the unassailable lead of the United States in military power and technology might actually invite other nations to acquire the bomb as a way to influence or even deter American foreign policy initiatives. The lesson of the first Gulf War, one Indian general was reported as saying, is that you do not go to war with the United States without the bomb, the 2003 invasion of Iraq serving as yet another glossy advertisement of the protective power of a nuclear arsenal. This is not a new development. It is, in fact, a lesson American policymakers have been concerned about for some time, and one for which no easy solution seems likely. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, outlined the problem in December 1993:

During the Cold War, our principal adversary had conventional forces in Europe that were numerically superior. For us, nuclear weapons were the equalizer. The threat to use them was present and was used to compensate for our smaller numbers of conventional forces. Today, nuclear weapons can still be the equalizer against superior conventional forces. But today it is the United States that has unmatched conventional military power, and it is our potential adversaries who may attain nuclear weapons.

Accordingly, Aspin concluded, the United States could wind up being the equalized. To take an earlier example, John F. Kennedy acknowledged in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis that even a small number of nuclear weapons could deter even the most powerful states.

A central element of the proliferation debate revolves around the perceived effectiveness of nuclear deterrence. If deterrence works reliably, as optimists argue, then there is presumably less to be feared in the spread of nuclear weapons. But if nuclear deterrence does not work reliably, pessimists maintain, more nuclear weapons states will presumably lead not just to a more complicated international arena but a far more dangerous one.

Some analysts have made a compelling case that the fear of nuclear proliferation, or the spread of nuclear weapons, has been exaggerated. Some go even further and argue that proliferation may actually increase global stability. It is an argument peculiar to nuclear weaponry, as it does not apply and is not made with regard to other so-called weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons. Nuclear weapons are simply so destructive, this school of thought argues, that using them is such a high bar that it would be madness itself to launch against a nuclear-armed foe. Put another way, nuclear states should know better than to fight wars with each other. The argument that proliferation is not necessarily a dire threat has been made in expansions both lateral – to other countries – and vertical – in the growth of nuclear stockpiles. ‘Since 1945’, remarked Michael Mandelbaum, 25 years ago, ‘the more nuclear weapons each has accumulated, the less likely, on the whole, it has seemed that either side would use them’. Others have made similar arguments. Kenneth Waltz maintains, for example, that nuclear weapons preserve an ‘imperfect peace’ on the subcontinent between India and Pakistan. Responding to reports that all Pentagon war games involving India and Pakistan always end in a nuclear exchange, Waltz argues that ‘Has everyone in that building forgotten that deterrence works precisely because nuclear states fear that conventional military engagements may escalate to the nuclear level, and therefore they draw back from the brink?’

It was an idea frequently debated during the Cold War. French military strategist General Pierre Gallois observed in 1960 that the path to greater stability lay in the increased proliferation. ‘Few people are able to grasp that precisely because the new weapons have a destructive power out of all proportion to even the highest stakes, they impose a far more stable balance than the world has known in the past’, he said. ‘Nor is it any easier to make people realize that the more numerous and terrible the retaliatory weapons possessed by both sides, the surer the peace … and that it is actually more dangerous to limit nuclear weapons than to let them proliferate.’ Gallois made this argument in the context of justifying the French bomb and increasing NATO nuclear capabilities. ‘These’, Gallois concluded, ‘are the realities of our time.’

Notwithstanding a few notable proponents of the ‘proliferation equals more security’ argument, the weight of opinion is mainly on the other side of the ledger, heightened, especially since 9/11, that the spread of nuclear weapons is a bad thing – a very bad thing, in fact. The issues driving nuclear-armed states and even terrorist groups are no longer just political; we have also seen the obsessiveness of religious fundamentalism, which does not seem amenable either to diplomacy or humanitarian restraint. Indeed, since 9/11 the ‘rules’ have changed and experts suggest that there are at least some terrorists who do want to inflict mass casualties. In this context, nuclear terrorism not only represents an effort to intimidate and coerce, but also poses a critical threat to states and peoples around the world.

Political scientist Scott Sagan has also highlighted the ways in which organizations and communications can fail; for example, rather than being anomalies, accidents should be seen as an inherent part of organizations. When nuclear weapons are thrown into the mix, the risk of catastrophic accidents becomes inevitable. Moreover, Sagan holds the view that a fundamental level of risk is inherent in all nuclear weapons organizations regardless of nationality or region. Clearly, it is an element that compounds the problem of nuclear weapons in regions still embroiled by centuries-old religious, cultural, and ethnic tensions. All of these elements combine in a barely controllable milieu of states’ nuclear weapons policy, a disaster waiting to happen.

Here in the UK we recently put together a fun little free book to promote the Very Short Introductions called Very Short Answers to Very Big Questions. In it, we asked some weighty questions like How modern is China? Is euthanasia murder? Is privacy a fundamental human right? Is globalization slowing down?

In the post below, I’ve reprinted the answer to the question ‘Why are more women active in the Christian Church than men?’. The answer comes from Linda Woodhead and her book Christianity: A Very Short Introduction.

Christianity has much to offer women. Women benefit in two ways: first, by the restraint that appeal to Christian values may place on the unbridled exercise of male power; and second, by the recognition and affirmation of the value of typically feminine roles, virtues, and dispositions.

Even though the New Testament contains no unambiguous endorsement of female equality, and certainly offers no support to female dominance, there are hints and glimmers of a ‘kingdom’ in which things could be different. Jesus not only ministers amongst and with women, he teaches that humility, poverty of spirit, and sincere devotion are more important than worldly power or priestly status. He speaks of a love whose exercise knows no limits or distinctions, a love which, as Paul puts it, ‘is patient and kind . . . not jealous or boastful . . . not arrogant or rude . . . does not insist on its own way . . . ’. Such a message could inspire and empower those whose daily work and care were often ascribed little economic or cultural, let alone spiritual, value.

Christianity could also offer women congenial social space. In theory at least, the church community is bound only by ties of love – love for one another and for the God whose Son gives His life for His church. The resonance with the ethos of the family is striking, and it is no coincidence that the image of the family should be so central to ecclesiastical self-understanding (the church as the ‘family of God’). Though this image could be used to reinforce the rule of fathers, it could also have profound significance for those whose daily lives were taken up with the unrewarded tasks of loving, caring, and sacrificing for others. Women with children have much to gain from an institution like the church that supports the family, exalts the domestic role, offers support and companionship in the task of rearing and educating children, and, once children have left home, can find other caring roles for women to perform. In any case, women seem more inclined than men to join a community for the good of community and relationship alone, irrespective of any other roles or privileges that membership might bring.

What is more, for much of Christian history the church has been the only public space that women have been allowed to occupy besides the home – certainly the only one that wives and daughters might be allowed to attend independent of husbands and fathers. The later medieval period saw a flourishing of female piety, still evident in the rich flowering of feminized art and sculpture that occurred at that time, in which images of female saints abound. Despite Protestantism’s hostility to such images, some post-Reformation churches offered women new opportunities for education, literacy, and even public ministry. In the 19th century, missionary work and charitable activities offered women an outlet for energies and ambitions that would otherwise have been frustrated. Though the avowed aim of (for example) female-led temperance movements might be to curb the consumption of alcohol, the deeper concern was often to bridle men and machismo – male spending, male sexuality, and male violence. Even though it could not be made explicit, such organizations sometimes harboured elements of a feminist agenda. Churchmen might have become worried about such activities, but it was hard to control women who claimed to be carrying out the injunctions of Christ. Though the scriptures had more often been used to justify male control of women, it was possible for the tables to be turned.

But even if Christianity can attract women by affirming feminine virtue and providing congenial social space and tools of resistance to masculine domination, does not its close association of masculinity and divinity have the opposite effect? Not necessarily. In fact, women may be more attracted to the worship of a male God and saviour than men, and the reason is not hard to see. If society encourages women to love, serve, obey, and even worship men, then it is not difficult to transfer such attitudes to a male God – or for devotion to a male God to reinforce such behaviours. Indeed, in so far as society reinforces heterosexuality, it is much more natural for a woman to offer intense, emotional devotion to a male deity than for a man to do the same. Whilst men may have no difficulty in bowing down before the power, majesty, and fatherly authority of God, they are less likely than women to ‘give their hearts to Jesus’ or enter into an intense, emotional relationship with him. ‘Brides of Christ’ would surrender to Christ the heavenly bridegroom and feel themselves melting into him. Such imagery is not confined to the past. In many Biblical and Charismatic Christian circles today women still engage in romance with Christ, and still affirm – to quote one Evangelical ‘bride’ – that ‘Jesus alone understands me, forgives me and loves me’.

Such erotic piety may have different social and personal implications. It may reinforce patriarchal norms and encourage women to accept forms of male domination to which they would not otherwise be willing to submit. It may offer women a means of coping with such domination, but prevent them from questioning the social order of which it is a part. Or it may equip them with an effective means of resisting male domination and constructing different social arrangements. In Catholicism, for example, ‘brides of Christ’ could – and still can – escape earthly marriage altogether by entering a convent where they gather with like-minded women and may attain considerable independence from men.

In the context of patriarchal societies, Christianity may therefore appeal to women because of its masculine bias, rather than in spite of it. Christianity may have much to offer women who wish to turn their backs on power and embrace the virtues of love, humility, powerlessness, and self-sacrifice. But it also has a considerable amount to offer those who want some share in such power. For if power is concentrated in a male God and His church, there is much more to be gained by joining it than by rejecting it. Not only could Christian women claim the protection of the Almighty Father God, they could also enter into a relationship with Him that was every bit as close and intense as that enjoyed by a man. By such means a handful of women in Christian history have claimed the right to do theology, to speak for themselves, even to command kings and popes; in the societies in which they lived it is hard to imagine any other route by which they could have done so.

Nigel Warburton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books on the subject. Below is an excerpt from his latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, on liberty versus licence to say what you want. His previous blog for OUP is here.

Defenders of free speech almost without exception recognize the need for some limits to the freedom they advocate. In other words, liberty should not be confused with licence. Complete freedom of speech would permit freedom to slander, freedom to engage in false and highly misleading advertising, freedom to publish sexual material about children, freedom to reveal state secrets, and so on. Alexander Meiklejohn, a thinker who was particularly concerned to nurture the sorts of debates that are fruitful for a democracy made this point:

When self-governing men demand freedom of speech they are not saying that every individual has an unalienable right to speak whenever, wherever, however he chooses. They do not declare that any man may talk as he pleases, when he pleases, about what he pleases, about whom he pleases, to whom he pleases.

This is important. The kind of freedom of speech worth wanting is freedom to express your views at appropriate times in appropriate places, not freedom to speak at any time that suits you. Nor should it be freedom to express any view whatsoever: there are limits.

John Stuart Mill, the most celebrated contributor to debates about the limits of individual freedom, despite advocating considerably more personal freedom than most of his contemporaries were comfortable with, set the boundary at the point where speech or writing was an incitement to violence. He was also clear that his arguments for freedom only applied to ‘human beings in the maturity of their faculties’. Paternalism – that is, coercing someone for their own good – was in his opinion appropriate towards children, and, more controversially, towards ‘those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage’. But it was not appropriate towards adult members of a civilised society: they should be free to make their own minds up about how to live. They should also be free to make their own mistakes.

Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s memorable observation that freedom of speech should not include the freedom to should ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre captures an important point that is easily ignored when rhetoric about freedom takes over: defenders of freedom of speech need to draw a line somewhere. The emotive connotations of the word ‘freedom’ should not blinker us to the extent that we forget this. Allowing someone to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre might cause a stampede resulting in injury of even death, and a hoax might also undermine theatregoers’ reactions to a genuine cry of ‘fire’. Holmes made his comment in a Supreme Court judgement (Schenck v United States) relating to the First Amendment. He gave this judgement in 1919, but the offending act, printing and circulating 15,000 anti-war leaflets to enlisted soldiers during wartime, took place in 1917. The pamphlets declared that the drafting of soldiers was a ‘monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few’. For Holmes the context of any expression in part determined whether it could justifiably be censored. While this expression of ideas night have had First Amendment protection in peacetime, the same ideas expressed during a war should be treated differently and did not merit that protection. Here the war effort could have been seriously undermined, so Holmes declared these special circumstances justified a special restriction on freedom:

The question in every case is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

Holmes, like Mill, was committed to defending freedom of speech in most circumstances, and, explicitly defended the value of a ‘free trade in ideas’ as part of a search for truth: ‘the best test of truth,’ he maintained, ‘is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’. Holmes wrote passionately about what he called the ‘experiment’ embedded in the US Constitution arguing that we should be ‘eternally vigilant’ against any attempt to silence opinions we despise unless they seriously threaten the country – hence the ‘clear and present danger’ test outlined in the quotation above. Holmes as a judge was specifically concerned with how to interpret the First Amendment; his was an interest in the application of the law. Mill in contrast was not writing about legal rights, but about the moral question of whether it was ever right to curtail free speech whether by law, or by what he described as the tyranny of majority opinion, the way in which those with minority views can be sidelined or even silenced by social disapproval.

Both Mill and Holmes, then, saw that there had to be limits to free speech and that other considerations could on occasion defeat any presumption of an absolute right (legal or moral) to freedom of speech. Apart from the special considerations arising in times of war, most legal systems which Bradley preserve freedom of speech still restrict free expression where, for example, it is libellous or slanderous, where it would result in state secrets being revealed, where it would jeopardize a fair trial, where is involves a major intrusion into someone’s private life without good reason, where it results in copyright infringement (e.g. using someone else’s words without permission), and also in cases of misleading advertising. Many countries also set strict limits to the kinds of pornography that may be published or used. These are just a selection of the restrictions on speech and other kinds of expression that are common in nations which subscribe to some kind of free speech principle and whose citizens think of themselves as free.