Tag: nuclear armageddon

Easy Does It, Boys

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I was talking to an old friend a few days ago and the subject of war came up.  Now it wasn’t the Ukraine war or the Iran war but it was all war.  And I said I was worried that we might be in a situation where extreme escalation was a possibility.  And my rationale was that nuclear states are starting to get involved in larger conflicts like Ukraine and Iran and if these conflicts start to escalate, they very well might produce situations where the cost of losing is deemed too high by leadership and brinksmanship could drag us into the tactical nuclear scenarios.  And that could very easily spill over into doomsday situations.

Now, I was clear that I thought that Putin, Trump and Xi were all likely to want to keep a lid on any dangerous escalation but the current situations were very, very unstable and dangerous.  And because my mind works by analogies I immediately thought to try and compare this situation to World War I.  Well, it’s really nothing like 1914 except that a relatively minor incident might trigger a general conflagration.  I might compare our current position to that of the British back then and China to Germany and Russia to Austria, let’s say.  And these are just absurdly vague equivalencies but that’s how my gloomy mind works.  But despite the vagueness and the obviously different circumstances today, it occurs to me that things are a lot hotter than they’ve been for a very long time and the balance of power is become a lot less friendly to us.

Now, does this mean I’m digging a bomb shelter and prepping for the apocalypse.  No, I’m not.  But that might have a lot more to do with just how old and tired I am now.  Surviving a nuclear holocaust somewhere between New York City and Boston is an absurdity that I don’t even want to consider.  But at the same time, it feels like rethinking the cold war realities is more relevant than it’s been since the 1990s.

Of course, the other side of this coin is the fact that none of the nuclear powers wants to be seen as weak.  But with drone technology rendering most of the conventional battlefield hardware obsolete it’s very easy for superpowers to get drawn into frustrating and embarrassing regional conflicts that can easily lead to dangerous thinking about the advantages of being a nuclear power.  And regional conflicts seem to be growing in size and number.

Well, anyway, I’ve shared my thoughts or maybe I should say fears.  It’s been a long time since I worried about nuclear war.  And it’s not like anything can be done by the likes of me.  But it just adds another layer of stress to a world that’s already chock full of crises.  Well, I hope Trump and Vance and Rubio are keeping the lines of communication open to Putin and Xi.  Wouldn’t want a miscommunication to turn into the apocalypse.

Lawn Football

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I’ve got nothing to write about tonight.  I was on a long errand today and it kept me from looking around or thinking much.  About the only thing I did do was read some of the war headlines.  The Russians continue their slow relentless pummeling of Ukraine.  Currently they’ve cut off the southeastern city of Vuhledar (or Ugledar to the Russians.  These Slavic languages are challenging for a poor Westerner).  And after pounding it with artillery until it looks like the dark side of the Moon, they’ve offered the 1,500 defenders a window of opportunity to surrender.

The Ukrainians (or the Americans) have destroyed several very large ammunition bunkers that were very deep into Russian territory with advanced long-range missile technology.  The story is that the missiles came from the Baltic states.  Russia responded by saying if they are attacked by advanced NATO technology they will respond with up to and including nuclear weapons to even the score.

And today the Israelis pounded the underground headquarters of Hezbollah trying to kill Nasrallah their leader.  It’s probable that Hezbollah and Iran are weighing their options for retaliation.  Some people are saying that Israel is deliberately attempting to provoke Iran into a major attack to draw the United States into a larger war.

Well, where does that leave us?  Is Biden (or whoever actually calls the shots) trying to start a war with Russia and/or Iran?  Are some factions in the government (CIA?  State Department?)  trying to start WW III?  Are other groups (the Pentagon?) trying to prevent it?  Is this wag the dog for the election or is this really start a war for the election?  I have to confess I can’t figure it out.

Obviously, I’m interested, but for the life of me I can’t figure out if this helps Harris or Trump.  All I do know is that there is a more than negligible chance that they will trigger at least a limited nuclear exchange.  Now how crazy is that.  After avoiding nuclear war for eighty years when madmen like Stalin and Mao had their hands on the trigger, we’ll be shepherded into nuclear Armageddon by Dementia Joe Biden and Kamala “Cackles” Harris in order to try and make the country forget just how badly they’ve run the country for the last four years.  It just seems like a terrible joke to play on a country that used to be somewhat sensible and well-run.  The Democrats always claimed that a psychotic Republican, like they pretended Nixon and Reagan and Trump were, would be the one who goaded the Russians into a nuclear exchange because of “cowboy” military posturing.  Instead, the neocons in the State Department pushing their color revolution template into Ukraine seem to have crossed a line in the sand that even a moderate like Putin couldn’t ignore.

Well, what can you do?  All these things are in the hands of the Democrats for at least the next four months and if they imagine that brinksmanship is to their advantage then brinksmanship it will be.  I just didn’t have anything else to think about tonight so I thought about this.

Kamala Harris with the nuclear football.  Might as well hand it over to the guy who cuts the lawn.  If he can survive operating power tools, he’s gotta be smarter than her.

What Will We Stumble into Next?

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What if the Europe of 1914 had figured out a way to avoid the Great War?  What would European civilization look like today?  Would the colonial empires have maintained their existence and by now have coalesced into a world completely dominated and controlled by Europe and its descendants?  Would the scientific and commercial progress of this civilization have produced the first truly global state?

It’s an interesting question.  But I think very mistaken.  World War I (and World War II) happened because they had to happen.  Humans (and Europeans specifically) have been struggling for the last five hundred years with the results of the Enlightenment.  Enormous technological and sociological change have engulfed the world and we are nowhere near figuring out how to harness these changes safely.

And just in time to finish off what’s left of western civilization, we have Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland playing nuclear chicken with Vladimir Putin.  For eighty years the existential nature of the nuclear threat has kept both the Americans and the Russians on their best behavior when it came to serious escalation.  But all that has changed over the last decade or so.  The CIA and the State Department have been embarked on a progressively more provocative series of “color” revolutions.  And now they’ve culminated in the Ukraine War as the capstone.  At least a hundred and fifty billion dollars of American aid and billions more euros have been transferred to Ukraine and something like a half-million Ukrainian lives have been sacrificed in this endeavor and now the neo-cons have pulled out all the stops and will allow the Ukrainians to use F-16s and long-range missiles into Russia proper.  And Putin has responded with statements to the effect that tactical nuclear weapons will now be on the table if western offensive weapons are used in Russia.

It doesn’t appear that we have many more tosses left before something pretty bad is going to happen.  If I were to guess what will precipitate the escalation, I’d say that it will be a major missile strike on Moscow.  The Russians will respond with a major attack on the western cities in Ukraine and I assume they’ll attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian military along with killing Zelinsky.  The question is whether they think they have to use a tactical nuke to achieve this.

But either way, the escalation will be extreme and the number of civilian deaths will be measured in the thousands.  Now, it’s somewhere in this part of the escalation that I think we could see this whole thing spin completely out of control.  Direct attacks on Moscow will eventually radicalize Putin’s reactions to this strategy.  And especially if the civilian casualties are high, we run the risk that the attacks on Western Ukraine could spill over into Eastern Europe and trigger a retaliatory strike from Poland on Russian territory.  And from there we have a direct path to a nuclear exchange.

Biden and Blinken seem to be the caliber of idiot that we could expect to bring on a nuclear war for absolutely no good reason at all.  When people look back on this, they’ll probably try to identify the ideological reasons why war broke out at this time.  What they should look for are Joe Biden’s college transcripts and Antony Blinken’s psych evaluation.  For once the villain won’t be artificial intelligence.  It will be lack of intelligence.

Nuclear Armageddon as a Plot Device

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Recently Joe Biden made the news when he reversed a campaign vow and stated that under his administration the United States would maintain the right to nuclear first strike as a military option.  Now the idea of Dementia Joe mistaking the nuclear football for his tv remote and ordering up an all-out nuclear blitz on Russia and China while trying to access some kind of hair fetish programming is obviously concerning.

But really this article is more about fiction writing.  In a story that I have been working on (forever) I reached a point in the story where I considered that the best way to escape from the corner I’d painted myself into was by having thermonuclear war break out between Russia and the United States.

Admittedly, that seems like a sad statement on my writing abilities but in point of fact it provided a definitive solution to multiple plot problems I was faced with.  After all, there aren’t many scenarios that can put the US federal government on its heels.  But three 20-megaton thermonuclear ICBMs detonating over Washington is a leading contender.  So, I will confess that I considered the scenario very carefully.

One thing I noticed though is that the impact of a nuked United States is extremely disruptive to a storyline.  Even the most tyrannical US administration looks quite different after the mushroom cloud sprouts over it.  Because now all of a sudden millions of Americans are dead and the ones still living are stunned, scared and desperate for a path forward.  At that point they’d follow Satan himself if he knows where to get food and fuel.

So, everything in my story is turned upside down.  Instead of the plucky rebels fighting the evil feds in a series of hit and run attacks, suddenly they find themselves wondering how they’ll survive without the now non-existent FEMA agency to save them from starvation and hypothermia.  Now what happens to my rebellion story?  All of a sudden enemies need each other just to survive.  Freedom and independence suddenly don’t mean much when staying alive requires all hands-on deck.

So that’s the change in the atmosphere, the feel of the story.  Does it still make sense?  Can the story survive the change?  Not as originally conceived.  I was looking at a series of stories with the rebels taking on the Deep State one step at a time with the rest of the country sizing up the battle and the balance of power gradually tilting toward the rebels.  But now the battle is over but without the dramatic tension and the action.  Instead, we have a tale of catastrophe and dissolution.

And to make that story work will require a change in emphasis.  Now instead of a slowly building wave of battle we have a nuclear wipe out and a tide going out.  Instead of a war with winners and losers we have the flotsam and jetsam from a deluge struggling to survive and trying to rebuild some kind of patchwork of settlements.  That’s a totally different thing.  It becomes a bunch of smaller stories at the village level.  Instead of armies we have farmers and mechanics, men and women and their children trying to survive without supermarkets and gas stations, even without electricity.  It’s nothing like the story I was envisioning but somehow it makes sense.  Because even though we may have forgotten about the atom bomb it hasn’t gone away.  It’s still there and it has its own internal logic that makes it the executioner of last resort.  If we decide that the arc of history bends in our direction and we can do as we please no matter what, we may find that the arc is just the ballistic track of an ICBM.

So inexorably I think the story is telling me to make a turn.  Even as a fictional plot device it does make one pause.  Imagine the largest fifty American cities reduced to rubble and charred bodies.  Imagine fallout killing off a quarter of the survivors.  And food and fuel gone for the rest of the survivors.  The grimness of such a tale is hard to overstate.  How do you tell such a story so that people will want to read it?

Well, that’s a subject for another day.  But this one has helped me get my thoughts in some kind of order.  Okay, hit all those buttons!