The Downside of Nukes
President Muffley: [about the Doomsday Machine] How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?
Dr. Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand... and completely credible and convincing.
-Stanley Kubrick, et al., Dr. Strangelove
Wednesday the 21st. Still feeling like hell, but not "sick" in any bacterial or viral sense. Just feel completely worn out.
Maybe it's the daily conversation with one person or another about the political disaster of the previous 24 hours, always fresh and always a little worse than where we were the day before.
The latest is, of course, the world's best known and perhaps least favorite oligarch switching sides in the Ukraine War, then trying to convince the world Daddy Trump made him do it.
Of course DJT, and therefore the United States, was complicit in what one writer this morning characterized as a Benedict Arnold-level betrayal. That seems like a stretch, but it certainly demonstrates to the world that we can't be trusted (hell, this whole war shows we can't be trusted: see our promise 35 years ago to protect Ukraine's sovereignty if it just gave up all those nukes the Soviets left within its borders). It also shows we're solidly on the side of the forces of evil in the world, and yes Virginia there is such a thing as evil.
Which all left me thinking about some of the foreseeable consequences of the nuclear age.
No one has used a nuke in combat since August of 1945. And yet, here we are witnessing two "unwinnable" wars, one in Iran and the other in Ukraine, where the only reason they're not winnable is that one side doesn't reach for the weapon they solely possess, and end the hostilities in one unthinkable afternoon.
I would pat the U.S. on the back and note our longstanding policy of seeing our nuclear capability as the ultimate deterrent and not an enhancement of our offensive capabilities, but must also note that the Russians have exercised similar restraint in a war that's cost them well over a million casualties, with no end in sight. The geopolitical and economic consequences of the level of mass murder inherent in a nuclear attack are simply too great to make the benefit worth the cost. Once we start nuking one another, with lots of nuclear powers scattered around the globe, where does it stop? Why wouldn't every country respond to the moment by creating its own nuclear arsenal, allowing it to truly up the ante if another country shakes the nuclear saber?
Which led my meander into thinking of another way the Ukrainian fiasco is unwinnable--for the free world, and not for Russia. Not only was 1945 the last time we witnessed a mushroom cloud over a belligerent's countryside; it was also the last time a war between major military powers ended with the conquest of a capital and the suicide of that country's senior leadership. If Hitler had succeeded in his quest for the Bomb, would an attack on a major European city with one of the small, dirty nuclear devices of that era have led to a discussion of ending hostilities with a diminished Third Reich still in place?
The deterrent effect of a credible nuclear threat has been, to now, that a country holding that card can never be defeated from the outside. There will never be a coalition army making some vast pincer movement from Ukraine and Poland into Belarus to destroy Russia's land army and sweep into Moscow. It's simply unthinkable. Putin knows this, of course, and knows that the biggest risk of a failure to conquer Ukraine isn't Russia's demise in a ground attack from the West. Rather, it's that some political rival will poison him or shoot him in his bed to seize the reins of power from within.
It seems one unfortunate consequence of the eighty year forced truce among the planet's major powers is that they now have complete impunity with regard to engaging in wars of conquest against their neighbors. The U.N. Charter once proscribed that sort of thing, but we're in a post-U.N. world it seems, and waking up to find ourselves in 1912, with now nuclear-equipped Great Powers jostling for lebensraum (I know, wrong conflict, but you get the idea). No problem as long as they stay out of each other's way.
Who's to stop them? It's not going to be by military means. Even the whims of Elon can't topple them from without.
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