Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree. We took an EE (electrical engineering) course and an ME (mechanical engineering) course or two were equivalent to some of ours like thermodynamics and heat transfer (although usually our sections had some additional requirements that were specific to chemically reactive systems. And we had to take a CE (Civil Engineering) course. I think the text I used for the CE course was called “Statics and Dynamics.” Here we talked about stress and strain and the different forces that needed to be calculated in order to specify the required strengths of materials used to design and construct a structure like a bridge or a dam. And it was always stressed that a safety factor was always needed. Even for the most cut and dry application that had been cookie cut for generations. You always wanted the strengths of the components to be greater than any possible forces that could be credibly imagined, by some generous factor. And the less well defined the risks the bigger the factor should be. So, if you’re building a nuclear power plant, something that didn’t even exist within the living memory of people still alive today and which has enormous inherent risks, you don’t skimp on the materials of construction. Ask the guy who designed the damping rods for the Chernobyl reactors.
Now as complicated as a bridge or a nuclear power plant design is imagine designing a global nuclear deterrence system based on mutually assured destruction with something like ten nuclear nation states all of which are in various uneasy states of enmity and competition with each other and three of which possess very large stockpiles of nuclear ICBMs. The policies needed to maintain this balanced system mostly requires that the major players do not willingly attempt to destabilize the status quo through direct confrontation with each other. And unbelievably we got through about seventy-five years of this without a single nuclear exchange between the nuclear armed states. A miracle.
And probably the reason it all worked was because, for the most part, the system was a defensive crouch that provided a nuclear tripwire that the Soviets were afraid to cross and at the time we were still too smart to try. But then the Soviet Union fell and we all stopped worrying about nuclear war and both sides thought to let things lay. And that got us to 2000. But then 9/11 happened and the neo-cons became politically important and ever since they’ve been wondering what would happen if we could leverage those wonderful relics of the last century, the ICBMs. So, color revolutions became the thing to do and now arming former Soviet republics is the new game.
Well, here’s the thing. Nuclear weapons as a defensive weapon is one thing. Nukes as a tactical offensive threat, even one that you just talk about, is a totally different animal. In fact, instead of being a stabilizing factor it’s a powerful destabilizing one
The analogy that is the basis of this whole essay is the difference between the strength of concrete in compression as opposed to against a shearing force. You can take a concrete pier and load it vertically with the weight of a building. This compressive force can be enormous and the pier is completely stable and far below the maximum loading it is designed for. But take that same pier and mount it sideways and try to use it as a beam with the same weight cantilevered and it will fail. That material does not have the same strength laterally as it has in compression. It will fail catastrophically. So, the engineer designing a structure has to know the strength of a component but also the correct circumstance in which to use it.
And that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to use nuclear deterrence as an offensive weapon. It’s the shield we hide behind as we snipe at the Russians behind proxies, like the Ukrainians, the Poles and maybe the Balts. We’re playing nuclear brinksmanship and we’re playing it badly. We’ve just given the Russians the excuse to call in proxies of their own. Possibly Hamas is the first of these. Maybe after them come some Lebanese or other Iranian proxies only this time inside our border. And maybe that’s what the neo-cons are hoping for. But it’s a stupid play. We did the Middle East invasion game after 9/11. It was a disaster. If we do it again with Russia and Iran and China as our enemies it will be a bigger disaster. The nuclear deterrence won’t deter the conventional wars. But if we push this whole rivalry too far it might just get us the nuclear war we thought could never happen. Brilliant political malpractice.
So, the moral of the story is, make sure you hire a competent engineer when you’re building something that your life depends on. In our case don’t hire Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden. They’ve got collapse written all over them.