Tag Archives: nuclear weapons

1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030!

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The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says China will have 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, an increase from a few hundred now. This is bad, in my view. It is also less than the U.S. and Russia have (5,000-6,000 each). Whatever one may think of China’s policies toward Tibet, Xinxiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, China has not invaded any sovereign UN member states without permission in recent memory (ever? there’s a good history question but I can’t think of one.) The United States and Russia have both invaded multiple sovereign states each in very recent memory (do I need to list them? Panama, Bosnia, Iraqx2, Afghanistan, Libya, Georgia, Ukraine, and I’m probably forgetting some – oh, Syria, when and how the f— did the United States invade Syria without anyone noticing? I’m not counting the dozens or hundreds of countries where we have boots on the ground with the permission of sketchy governments.) So who has reasons to be afraid of whom? I’m just saying, the United States leadership could try putting themselves in another country’s shoes and ask what they might be thinking and feeling. You don’t have to agree with your opponent to try to understand them better.

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war. I hope we can continue to make this statement for a long time to come. If we have 5,000 nuclear war heads, China has 300 (making up some round numbers here), and is threatening to build more, maybe there is some room for negotiation? Maybe they would agree to stop at 1,000 if the U.S. and Russia both agreed to reduce to 2,000. The whole world would be safer. We would have a shred of credibility when we tell other countries they don’t need nuclear weapons. This would be a clear win-win-win-(etc.) situation. Are there any courageous leaders left in our country or anywhere on Earth?

“nuclear capable states”

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I knew Japan was considered a nuclear capable state, meaning they have the technology, raw materials, and expertise to produce nuclear weapons if they so choose. I recently heard this claim about Taiwan, which was news to me. Now I have heard it about South Korea.

The risk of nuclear war is getting unacceptable. The U.S., Russia, and China could be leading on this issue, but are instead fanning the flames.

2022 in Review

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First, my heart goes out to anyone who suffered hardship or lost a loved one in 2022. People still died from Covid-19 of course, not to mention other diseases, violence, and accidents. People are living, dying, and suffering horribly in war zones from Ukraine to the Middle East to Myanmar. Having said all that, for those of us living relatively sheltered lives in relatively sheltered locations like the United States, 2022 does not seem like it will rank among the best or worst of years in history.

Highlights of the Year’s Posts

These are the posts I picked each month as most frightening and/or depressing, most hopeful, and most interesting.

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
  • FEBRUARY: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
  • MARCH: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
  • APRIL:  The use of small nuclear weapons is becoming more thinkable. Just a reminder that nuclear war is truly insane. Assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war, food insecurity might be our biggest near- to medium-term issue. One lesson of World War II is worries about food security played a role in the diseased minds of both Hitler and Stalin. And food prices right now are experiencing a “giant leap” unprecedented over the last couple decades. Food security, natural disasters, sea level rise, migration, and geopolitical stability all can form ugly feedback loops. And no, I couldn’t limit myself to just one depressing story this month!
  • MAY: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
  • JUNE: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
  • JULY:  One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.
  • AUGUST: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.
  • SEPTEMBER: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.
  • OCTOBER: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
  • NOVEMBER:  Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
  • DECEMBER: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
  • FEBRUARY: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
  • MARCH: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
  • APRIL: While we are experiencing a disturbing homicide wave in U.S. cities, violent and overall crime are not necessarily at historical highs and are more or less flat. And yes, this was the most uplifting story I could come up with this month. Brave politicians could use the Ukraine emergency to talk about arms control, but if anybody is talking about that I am missing it.
  • MAY: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
  • JUNE: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
  • JULY: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.
  • AUGUST: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).
  • SEPTEMBER: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.
  • OCTOBER: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
  • NOVEMBER: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
  • DECEMBER: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Brilliant Synthesis

Technology

The last couple years, I led off with other things and came around to a technology roundup towards the end. This year, I’ll just shake things up (yes, I’m wild and crazy like that) and lead off with technology developments during the year.

Solar energy has been a long time coming, but 2022 was a year when it really started to be at the forefront of the energy conversation and hard for the skeptics to ignore. We keep hearing that it is now the cheapest form of energy to build and put into operation. That means it is now limited by the materials needed to produce the panels, by the space needed to deploy the panels, and by the transmission and temporary storage infrastructure. Building rooftops take up a lot of space and are mostly not used for other things, so this seems like an obvious place to put the panels. The oceans of pavement we use to operate and park vehicles make up another somewhat obvious place – we can toughen the panels and drive on them, or we can put cheap roofs over the pavement and cover them with panels. Materials can be an issue because many of them are mined and sold by unsavory characters and governments, and there is clearly an environmental impact. But remember that we are trading this off against today’s coal, oil, and natural gas industry, not against some socially and ecologically blameless party. This industry intentionally lied to the public for decades and in the process did immeasurable damage to a planetary biophysical system.

Metals and minerals are also just limited. But even in hard-nosed economic terms, if solar panels are the lowest-cost option as we are hearing, they are holding their own with the costs of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. We could tax social and environmental impacts at international borders if we had the courage to do so, but even without that it is hard to imagine a system more damaging and irresponsible than the one we have been dealing with for the past century or so.

People will also say we haven’t kept the distribution infrastructure up to date, and this is true. In the United States at least, we don’t keep public infrastructure in a state of good repair. But we do create infrastructure when big business demands it, and they will demand an electric grid that can support their products when it comes to electric vehicles, devices and facilities. There may be a period of pain between when big business demands it and when the U.S. government provides it, and other countries will almost certainly outdistance us.

Longer term, as Fully Automated Luxury Communism tells it, space for solar panels will not be a problem because we will put them in, well, space. And this is not a far-future fantasy. The technology to gather the energy in space and beam it to the Earth pretty much exists now and governments and companies are seriously working on practical implementation. They swear it is safe, and even if it is not totally risk-free remember again all the death, pollution, and permanent planetary destruction the fossil fuel sociopaths have wrought.

Now, what about nuclear power? If we had really focused on it decades ago, we might not be in the climate change mess we find ourselves in now. It could still be a solution to the climate change mess in the future. But given how long it takes to bring new nuclear technology online at a large scale, and how fast solar energy appears to be scaling up and how reliable it appears to be, is it time to stop working on nuclear? I’m talking about known fission technology here. As for fusion, given that it is “always 20 years away” (no matter the year we are actually in), is it time to stop working on it and just throw all our research efforts at solar?

And materials will not be a problem either because we will produce them from asteroids and bring them to Earth, ending material shortages forever. I say, good but better to just use them to build things in space because we are running out of capacity to absorb the byproducts of the materials we already have down here. Just digging things up that were already in the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere and oceans has caused enough trouble.

By the way, once we are in space and messing around with asteroids, government and private actors will be able to divert their trajectories. It is easy to imagine scenarios where this is a great thing that actually saves all life on the planet. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where industrial accidents or intentional government actions threaten life on the planet. An international treaty and some oversight of this seems like a good idea as the messing-with-asteroids industry really starts to get going.

I don’t have my pet mini-mammoth yet, but biotechnology is continuing to gain steam. The idea of treating aging as a disease to be cured seems almost too obvious, but it seems to remove some bureaucratic obstacles that have been holding science and medicine back. Covid-19 was probably, maybe, perhaps not a lab leak. But it could have been, because the technology to make something like it, or much worse, exists in labs right now. It could be made if it has not already, and it could be leaked accidentally or intentionally, if it has not been already. And like nuclear technology, it will proliferate. Compared to nuclear technology, I think it will proliferate much faster and be much easier to hide. I have trouble envisioning any solution to this that does not involve heavy-handed surveillance.

On the positive side, biotechnology may be able to feed us when there are a lot more of us. With cellular agriculture, we can theoretically make meat or just about any kind of plant or animal tissue, and then we can eat it. We may finally be on the verge of modifying plants so they can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy, which is both exciting and scary. With a combination of abundant cheap electricity (from solar energy), abundant cheap materials, and highly efficient lighting though, we might be able to grow all the food we need in high rises without needing frankenplants.

And finally, the idea of controlling the weather with windmills is pretty fascinating. If we figure this one out, we might be able to end damage from floods, droughts, and hurricanes. But obvious Bond villain Elon Musk will also be able to use this to hold the world hostage for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS. That doesn’t really matter though because he is probably already planning to crash an asteroid into us anyway.

Propaganda, Social Media, and Truth

Social media is being blamed for a lot of our social ills at the moment. When we hear “social media” discussed, it seems to mean first and foremost interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where anyone can post a short snippet of any information they want and make it available to anybody else on the platform. Youtube also seems to fit this mold to some extent, although Youtube is a mix of personal and professionally-produced content. Then, underlying all this are Google search and other algorithms or “search” engines which are searching both for content to show individuals and individuals to show content. There are bloggers using WordPress and a million other tools and sites trying to get their content out, usually not all that widely if my personal experience is any indication (to the 5 or 6 people worldwide who read this blog regularly?) Then there is the huge ecosystem of Amazon and all the other sites trying to sell us stuff. Then there is professional journalistic media and traditional publishing companies trying to have their say (and sell us stuff), and finally there is some sense of the broader internet underlying all this.

Beyond trying to sell us stuff, corporations and non-profit entities are trying to manipulate all these communication channels to get their messages into our heads. This is propaganda, with the main goal being to sell us stuff and a secondary goal being to create awareness and positive images of their brands so they can keep selling us stuff. Also so people won’t complain to politicians about whatever the corporations are doing and risk those politicians meddling in the system in ways that are averse to corporate profits. At the same time, these companies and special interest groups are paying off the politicians to support their interests behind the scenes. This works out well for them (the corporations, special interests and politicians).

Finally we have the U.S. government and governments around the world trying to influence public opinion, occasionally by providing accurate information, sometimes outright lies, and often something in between.

All this is competing for our “attention”. Personally, I strongly prefer having more information to less, and I do not want to see regulation aimed at reducing the amount of information available to me. I believe, perhaps naively, that I have some ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, and objective/honest communication from dishonest attempts to influence me. Regulation to protect children might be an exception to this – if social media sites are facilitating bullying and leading to mental health problems and even suicides, that is worth dealing with.

“Great Power Competition”, the “International Order”, and the United Nations

A major world leader of our time died in 2022. Okay, two world leaders if you really want to count Queen Victoria, but I am talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. To me, he represents a moment when optimism and visionary leadership had a chance to flower to the benefit of our civilization. He had a vision of long-term peace and stability, with powerful nation-states ceding some of their power to some form of world government. The basic vision was that no nation-state, no matter how powerful, would be able to succeed through violent means if it was opposed by all other nation-states acting together. With the threat of catastrophic war mostly behind us, humanity could have focused on solving all the other thorny problems, from food to energy to pollution to inequality. This was a beautiful vision, but unfortunately its moment passed us by, and we are back to the old cynical idea of coalitions of “great powers” arrayed against each other.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we are not focused on solving those other problems. The United Nations was supposed to at least be the seed of that new order that would usher in long-term peace and prosperity for our species. To be sure, the United Nations has accomplished a lot when it comes to human rights, science, agriculture, refugees, and other areas. It has also been a place where all the not-so-great powers of the world can band together and make their voices somewhat heard. But the Security Council was supposed to be the One Ring to Rule Them All and make “great power competition” obsolete. This has failed utterly, with the Security Council considered all but irrelevant at this point. Not only is “great power competition” ascendant, we seem to be proud of ourselves for bringing it back. If there is a devil, he must truly love “great power competition”.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we have failed utterly to solve other existential problems such as food security, global warming, sea level rise, ever-growing concentration of wealth, and the specter of a Captain Trips extinction plague whether of natural or manmade origin.

Resilience. Despite taking a gut punch, at the end of 2022 it feels as though our planetary civilization weathered the storm of Covid-19 and has more or less rebounded to something like the trend it would have been on. This is the textbook definition of resilience, and something to feel good about. If we get some time in between gut punches, we at least have an opportunity to work on our other problems while also preparing for the next gut punch. If we don’t make progress, maybe we can at least reach a state of stagnation rather than a self-actuated collapse. Can a civilization be resilient and stagnant at the same time? Maybe this is where we find ourselves, at least in the near term.

Happy 2023!

Taiwan and nuclear weapons

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According to The Strategist, Taiwan had an overt nuclear weapons program until 1976 and a covert one into the 1980s. It has nuclear reactors similar to the ones in Japan that can be converted to produce weapons-grade plutonium in short order if that decision is made.

Weak security guarantees from the United States, coupled with escalating aggression from China, may soon present Biden [this article is from December 2020] with a Taiwan that believes its only option for survival is to take a page from the Israeli playbook and restart a covert nuclear weapons program. When Taiwan went down that path between 1967 and the late 1980s, the government in Taipei ultimately backed away from nuclear weapons because it appeared China was liberalising and heading toward democratisation…

According to China expert Michael Pillsbury, author of The hundred-year marathon, the Chinese Communist Party intends to integrate Hong Kong and Taiwan back into China in time to achieve ‘Middle Kingdom’ status by 2049—the centennial of the CCP’s victory over the Guomindang in the Chinese civil war…

Taiwan already has two operational nuclear power plants on opposite ends of the island that could produce plutonium. It could use a ‘Japan option’ of enriching its radioactive materials for weaponisation in a short timeframe.

The Strategist

I think we take it for granted that nuclear proliferation is driven by a few rogue states. But this does not appear to be the case. The world appears to be on the verge of getting much more dangerous. Every country with nuclear weapons increases the odds (depressingly, the certainty, given enough time) of a nuclear detonation somewhere, sometime.

The Cuban Missile Crisis would seem to offer a cautionary tale. Put some nuclear missiles on an island near an aggressive nuclear superpower, and bad things can happen. We give our (U.S.) democratically elected leader at the time for avoiding catastrophe by acting tough and making the authoritarian leader “blink”. How much of that was luck, and how long until our world’s luck runs out if we keep taking risks like that? Another cautionary tale would be China’s invasion of Korea in the 1950s. They did not have nuclear weapons at the time, the U.S. not only had them but had recently used them, and China did not “blink”.

more on tactical nukes

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A New Yorker article lays out situations under which Russia might consider using tactical nuclear weapons.

Four scenarios may lead Russia to use a nuclear weapon, according to Kimball of the Arms Control Association. To coerce Kyiv or its nato allies to back down, Putin could carry out a “demonstration” bombing in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean or the Baltic Sea—not for killing, but “to remind everyone that Russia has nuclear weapons.” Russia could also use tactical weapons to change the military balance on the ground with Ukraine. If the war expands, and nato gets drawn into the fight, Russia could further escalate the conflict with the use of short-range nuclear weapons. “Both U.S. and Russian policy leave open the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to an extreme non-nuclear threat,” Kimball said. Finally, if Putin believes that the Russian state (or leadership) is at risk, he might use a tactical nuclear weapon to “save Russia from a major military defeat.” Russia has lost some twenty-five per cent of its combat power in the last two months, a Pentagon official estimated this week. Moscow’s military doctrine reserves the right to use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction” against Russia or its allies, and also in response to aggression via conventional weapons “when the very existence of the state is threatened.” In military jargon, the country’s policy is “to escalate to de-escalate,” Richard Burt, the lead negotiator on the original start accord, which was signed by Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush in 1991, told me. “The idea is to so shock the adversary that a nuclear weapon has been used, to demonstrate your resolve that you’re willing to use a nuclear weapon, that you paralyze your adversary.”

New Yorker

Nuclear weapons are a cheap way to make a big bang, or at least threaten to do so. Cheap compared to maintaining a huge, capable conventional military force anyway. Russia seems particularly dangerous right now because it is a relatively poor, backwards country whose leadership has successfully used limited military aggression to appear strong and strategic to a domestic audience. The Ukraine war seems to have changed that, with Russia’s conventional military looking weak, ineffective, and the leadership lacking in strategery. Nuclear brinksmanship or even the recklessness of some kind of limited nuclear attack could be seen as a way to regain the upper hand. Let’s hope not.

Thinking a little about what might induce the Russian leadership to call off this attack, new nuclear agreements with the U.S., like reducing the arsenal overall, removing weapons from Europe, or a no-first-use pledge, seem like they should be on the table and would benefit everybody.

March 2022 in Review

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The Ukraine war grinds on as I write on April 7, with the Russian military seemingly pulling back from some areas while slaughtering civilians (hostages?) farther east and south. I proffered some limited views on the situation and media coverage of the war during the month, but I won’t go into it below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.

Most hopeful story: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ready.gov has posted helpful information on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion.

the 1962 Single Integrated Operational Plan

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This is just chilling.

A full nuclear SIOP strike launched on a preemptive basis would have delivered over 3200 nuclear weapons to 1060 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied countries in Asia and Europe;

A full nuclear strike by SIOP forces on high alert, launched in retaliation to a Soviet strike, would have delivered 1706 nuclear weapons against a total of 725 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied states;

Targets would have included nuclear weapons, government and military control centers, and at least 130 cities in the Soviet Union, China, and allies;

The National Security Archive

That is clearly insane. What secret plans to destroy everything human civilization has achieved in the last 10,000 years are on the books today?

tactical nuclear weapons

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Center for Public Integrity has an article explaining how a war involving tactical nuclear weapons could play out. The problem, beyond the obvious horrible human and environmental toll they would take, is that they would likely be the link in escalation from conventional war to civilization-annihilating total thermonuclear war. Please no.

Had such an invasion ever come, the commanders in the field, given authorization to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat, would retreat after deployment. (Soviet plans for war were to specifically attack tactical nuclear sites.) The war would then either end in hours with an exchange of ICBMs, or with a ceasefire negotiated to prevent armageddon.

Defense intellectuals describe the steps between peace and thermonuclear oblivion through an “escalation ladder,” with the leadership of both countries at war taking actions that invite the other country to either escalate, by increasing the stakes and tensions, or de-escalate, by backing away from further conflict. Tactical nuclear weapons are the rung separating conventional battle from a nuclear war.

Soviet leaders developed their nuclear weapons and doctrine as a response to U.S. nuclear war planning, and awareness of U.S. nuclear deployments to Europe. Both the U.S. and USSR assumed that once tactical nuclear weapons were used, it was more likely that thermonuclear exchange, not deescalation, would follow.

Center for Public Integrity

So the strategy was to out-crazy the other side. We rolled the dice on that risky strategy and won, but roll the dice enough times and everyone on both sides will lose.

The best thing that could possibly come out of this horrible Ukraine war, once the dust settles, would be renewed arms control negotiations. I am not too hopeful for that because the world seems to be in a very cynical place right now.

the war in Ukraine

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I keep saying I don’t want to analyze fast moving current events, but I can’t help it. Here are a few things I want to say. It’s March 5, 2022 as I write this.

First, Putin’s actions are deplorable and inexcusable in terms of the human suffering they are causing and in terms of the very real risk of nuclear war they entail. Nothing I say below changes this. To say any of the points below excuse Putin’s actions would be like Hitler saying “Stalin did it first”. (Stalin slaughtered millions of Ukrainians before Hitler slaughtered millions of Ukrainians and Poles, among many others. Tens of millions of wrongs obviously don’t make a right. They add up to pure and unfathomable evil. Putin is putting himself in this category although he is only slaughtering human beings by the hundreds or thousands so far. But we are one nuclear exchange away from a body count even Hitler and Stalin might not have been able to fathom.)

There is a lot of obvious propaganda coming from the Russian side. There are a lot of lies (many so obvious they are just dumb) posted on social media by random people for random reasons. But there is also obvious spin coming from the U.S. government, and our media and public is buying into it without question. You don’t have to support Putin to just be a little skeptical about what you are hearing and ask who you are hearing it from and what their motivations might be. We are hearing that the war is going unexpectedly badly for the Russians. We are hearing that Russian morale is low. We are hearing and seeing videos of ordinary people stopping tanks and standing up to soldiers. We are hearing that Russia has not established air superiority. We are hearing that Putin is irrational or mentally ill. There may be kernels of truth to any and all of this, but it is all coming from U.S. government/military/intelligence sources and being parroted uncritically by our media. Government officials at all levels are giving interviews with very similar talking points, suggesting to me that it is a coordinated intelligence effort. Major newsrooms are either in on the propaganda effort (as it is clear to me they were on the Iraq weapons of mass destruction debacle), or they just don’t have other sources of news so all they can do is repeat what they are hearing from the government and each other.

Take any article on the situation and replace Russia or Putin with the United States, then replace Ukraine with Iraq. The world could have justified imposing “crippling sanctions” on the U.S. for that illegal “war of choice”. They don’t do that because they don’t have the political, military, or financial power to get on the wrong side of the United States, and we abuse that power.

Russia clearly felt threatened by that U.S. war, and by the NATO wars on Libya and even going back to the 1990s NATO war on Serbia.. The Afghanistan war seemed like a justified defensive action at the time even though it seems pointless in retrospect, but it was in Russia’s backyard and they could easily feel threatened. The U.S. has intervened in Syria, brought former Soviet countries into NATO, and almost certainly interfered in Ukrainian elections. Again, try to put ourselves in their shoes and we would be outraged to find that Russia had interfered with a Canadian or Mexican election let alone formed a military alliance with those countries. And remember when they formed a military alliance with Cuba and a nuclear war almost happened? Even the 1991 Gulf War must have been threatening to Russia as it seemed so overwhelming and came at a time of Russian weakness. Looked at another way, that war seemed at the time like a case where a sovereign UN member state was invaded by its neighbor, and the world came together to make it clear that would not be tolerated. Maybe this should have been the principle ever since then, rather than expansion of a (perceived) aggressive alliance in Eastern Europe. (Sorry Taiwan, this doesn’t help you.)

Now add U.S. politicians openly calling for Putin’s assassination, and imagine how outraged we would be if that rhetoric were reversed. Add the CIA openly salivating over the idea of a prolonged insurgency. Don’t think about a repeat of the death squads that caused so many civilians in Iraq and throughout Latin America to be tortured and disappeared, as the U.S. embraced right-wing elements and looked the other way in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend mentality.

I won’t second guess our political and military leadership in their response to this acute crisis, although the idea of NATO countries openly leaving guns and tanks on the border of Ukraine and Poland seems like a serious escalation to me. I assume the U.S. and NATO are openly sharing intelligence and advising the Ukrainian military on maneuvers. What are the chances there are really no CIA paramilitary or U.S. special forces in Ukraine? At least no tactical nuclear weapons have been deployed that we know of, and no naval confrontations have occurred.

Once this crisis passes and the dust settles, assuming it eventually does, maybe a group of courageous politicians could get together and make a serious renewed effort at arms control and risk reduction. That would be the absolute best outcome we can hope for from this crisis.

If you are experiencing a nuclear explosion press 1

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As I was doom scrolling yet again to check if the nuclear missiles are incoming, I came across this helpful website from ready.gov.

If you are experiencing a nuclear explosion and are still able to walk, first you should go to your basement and stay there for at least 24 hours. That makes sense to me. Second, and this is a little weird, you should take a shower if you can. I guess some people have showers in their basements. Third, and this is where it gets really weird, you should stock your basement with a vintage hand-cranked videocassette player and a VHS copy of the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After, starring 1983 John Lithgow, who was already not young, playing a plucky ham radio operator who will tell you what is going on. Finally, and this is where it gets unbelievable, you should call your health care provider.

Hello, this is your United States health care provider. Listen carefully as menu options keep changing. If you do not have insurance, press 1 and a recorded voice will tell you to go fuck yourself. If you have insurance, press 2.

Congratulations, you have pressed 2 indicating you have some type of health insurance. If you have a pain in the ass or balls, this may require specialist attention. If your health insurance does not cover this, press 1. Otherwise press 3.

Congratulations, you have pressed 3, indicating you have half decent health insurance. If you are experiencing A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION right now, press 4.

You have pressed 4, indicating you are experiencing or have experienced A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION. If your flesh has not melted from your bones and your bones turned to ash and blown away on the blast wave like in the opening scene of Terminator 2, please press 5 or stay on the line and a scheduling specialist may assist you.

Congratulations, you have pressed 5 indicating that you have experienced A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION but are somehow still alive and in urgent need of medical attention. We’re sorry, all our scheduling specialists are currently assisting other callers. Your call is important to us. The next appointment with your health care provider is in 6 months. But your health care provider’s schedule is only posted for the next 3 months, whatever that means. No, we won’t call you. You can try to call us in 3 months. Or you can try to call us every day and check if we have a cancellation. No, we won’t call you about that either. If you have a problem with that, you can just go ahead and press 1.

No, don’t be stupid and confuse this with The Day After Tomorrow.
Now that’s some dark shit. And we don’t need evil robots because we have politicians. Politicians, let’s keep this only in the movies okay?