Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And we had to take a CE (Civil Engineering) course.\u00a0 I think the text I used for the CE course was called \u201cStatics and Dynamics.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And it was always stressed that a safety factor was always needed.\u00a0 Even for the most cut and dry application that had been cookie cut for generations.\u00a0 You always wanted the strengths of the components to be greater than any possible forces that could be credibly imagined, by some generous factor.\u00a0 And the less well defined the risks the bigger the factor should be.\u00a0 So, if you\u2019re building a nuclear power plant, something that didn\u2019t even exist within the living memory of people still alive today and which has enormous inherent risks, you don\u2019t skimp on the materials of construction.\u00a0 Ask the guy who designed the damping rods for the Chernobyl reactors.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And unbelievably we got through about seventy-five years of this without a single nuclear exchange between the nuclear armed states.\u00a0 A miracle.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 But then the Soviet Union fell and we all stopped worrying about nuclear war and both sides thought to let things lay.\u00a0 And that got us to 2000.\u00a0 But then 9\/11 happened and the neo-cons became politically important and ever since they\u2019ve been wondering what would happen if we could leverage those wonderful relics of the last century, the ICBMs.\u00a0 So, color revolutions became the thing to do and now arming former Soviet republics is the new game.<\/p>\n
Well, here\u2019s the thing.\u00a0 Nuclear weapons as a defensive weapon is one thing.\u00a0 Nukes as a tactical offensive threat, even one that you just talk about, is a totally different animal.\u00a0 In fact, instead of being a stabilizing factor it\u2019s a powerful destabilizing one<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 You can take a concrete pier and load it vertically with the weight of a building.\u00a0 This compressive force can be enormous and the pier is completely stable and far below the maximum loading it is designed for.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That material does not have the same strength laterally as it has in compression.\u00a0 It will fail catastrophically.\u00a0 So, the engineer designing a structure has to know the strength of a component but also the correct circumstance in which to use it.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing.\u00a0 We\u2019re trying to use nuclear deterrence as an offensive weapon.\u00a0 It\u2019s the shield we hide behind as we snipe at the Russians behind proxies, like the Ukrainians, the Poles and maybe the Balts.\u00a0 We\u2019re playing nuclear brinksmanship and we\u2019re playing it badly.\u00a0 We\u2019ve just given the Russians the excuse to call in proxies of their own.\u00a0 Possibly Hamas is the first of these.\u00a0 Maybe after them come some Lebanese or other Iranian proxies only this time inside our border.\u00a0 And maybe that\u2019s what the neo-cons are hoping for.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a stupid play.\u00a0 We did the Middle East invasion game after 9\/11.\u00a0 It was a disaster.\u00a0 If we do it again with Russia and Iran and China as our enemies it will be a bigger disaster.\u00a0 The nuclear deterrence won\u2019t deter the conventional wars.\u00a0 But if we push this whole rivalry too far it might just get us the nuclear war we thought could never happen.\u00a0 Brilliant political malpractice.<\/p>\n
So, the moral of the story is, make sure you hire a competent engineer when you\u2019re building something that your life depends on.\u00a0 In our case don\u2019t hire Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden.\u00a0 They\u2019ve got collapse written all over them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree.\u00a0 We took an EE (electrical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[623,3578,3107],"class_list":["post-25982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-neo-cons","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-russia"],"yoast_head":"\n