Nukes

If you prefer to listen rather than read:



Or download the MP3

---

The key theme of this blog is that progress has not saved us. It has not made us any less sinful, it has not improved our lives in any of the ways that really matter, but has rather introduced opportunities to sin that for someone living 200 years ago would beggar the imagination.

Of course it’s easy and maybe even forgivable to think this is not the case. We live longer, there’s less hunger and poverty, along with this comes more freedom and less violence. For now we’re going to focus on that last assertion, that things are less violent. And since we already broached the subject of nukes in our last post, we’re specifically going to continue to expand on that idea.

One of the best known arguments about a decrease in violence comes from someone who I actually admire quite a bit, Steven Pinker. He made the argument in his book The Better Angels of our Nature. Taleb, as you might imagine, disagrees with Pinker’s thesis and in what is becoming a common theme, asserts that Pinker is confusing the absence of volatility with an absence of fragility. If you want to read Taleb’s argument you can find it here. Needless to say, as much as I admire Pinker, on this issue I agree with Taleb.

As I have already said, this post is going to be an extension of my last post. In that last post I urged people to take a longer term outlook, and to eschew the immediate political fight in favor of a longer term historical outlook. In other words that post was about being wise, and this post is about what will happen if we aren’t wise. In particular what things look like as far as nukes.

As you can imagine if our survival hinges on our wisdom, then I’m not optimistic, and I personally predict that nukes are in our future. In this, I think, as with so many things, that I am contradicting conventional wisdom, or at least what most people believe about nuclear weapons, if they in fact believe anything at all.  If they do they might be thinking something along these lines: It’s been over 70 years since the last nuke was exploded in anger. (In fact I am writing these words on the 71st anniversary of Nagasaki, though they won’t be published until a few days later.) And they may further think: Yes, we have nukes, but we’re not going to use them. Sure some crazy terrorist may explode one, but the kind of all-out exchange we were worried about during the cold war is not going to happen. First don’t underestimate the impact of a loan terrorist nuke, and secondly don’t write off an all-out exchange either. Particularly if we’re going to poke the bear in the manner I described in my last post.

The first question to consider is why are we still worried about nukes even 70 years after their invention? Generally the development of a technology is quickly followed by the development of countermeasures. To take just one example, being able to drop bombs from the air was terrifying to people when that first became a possibility, but it didn’t take long to develop fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and surface to air missiles. Then why, 71 years after Nagasaki and 50+ years after the development of the ICBM, can we still not defend ourselves? Can’t we shoot missiles down? Well first off even if we could a lot of people think building a missile defense system is the ultimate way of poking the bear. For what it’s worth I don’t fall into that camp despite my reluctance, in general, to poke the bear. But even if we decide that’s okay, right now it just isn’t technologically feasible to make a missile defense system that works against someone like Russia or China.

At this point I’d like to offer up data on the effectiveness of various anti missile systems and unfortunately there’s not a lot of it, and what there is isn’t good. If North Korea or Iran happened to launch a single missile at the United States we might be able to stop it, but when asked what he would do in that case one knowledgeable US official is reported to have said:

If a North Korean ICBM were launched in the direction of Seattle, …[I] would fire a bunch of GMD interceptors and cross [my] fingers.

Some clarification: GMD stands for Ground-based Midcourse Defense and is our current anti-ballistic missile platform, also North Korea currently doesn’t have a missile capable of reaching Seattle. But it’s interesting to note what they do have, given how impoverished the country is in all other respects.

As I said I’d like to offer up some data, but there isn’t much of it. Recent tests of our anti-missile systems have been marginally promising but they have mostly been conducted in a reasonably controlled environment, not on actual missiles being fired by surprise from a random location, at a time chosen by the aggressor for optimal effectiveness.

Tacked on at the end of the Wikipedia article on the US’s efforts at missile defense is a great summary of the difficulties of defending against a Russian or Chinese ICBM. In short:

• Boost-stage defenses are the only layer that can successfully destroy a MIRV (an ICBM that has multiple warheads.)
• Even so, boost stage interception is really difficult particularly against solid fuel ICBMs of the type that Russia and China use.
• And even then the only current technology capable of doing it has to be within 40 km (~25 miles) of where the missile is launched. For those in Utah that means that if you had an anti missile defense system located at Hill Air Force Base it could shoot down missiles launched from no farther away than downtown Salt Lake City.

The Wikipedia article concludes by saying that, “There is no theoretical perspective for economically viable boost-phase defense against the latest solid-fueled ICBMs, no matter if it would be ground-based missiles, space-based missiles, or airborne laser (ABL).” (A reference from the following paper.)

In the end it’s not hard to see why nuclear missiles are so hard to defend against. Your defense can’t be porous at all. Letting even a single warhead get through can cause massive destruction. Add to that their speed and small size and you have the ultimate offensive weapon.

Thus far we’ve talked about the difficulties in defending against a Russian or Chinese ICBM. But of course we haven’t done anything to address why they might decide to nuke us. I did cover that at some length in my last post, but before we dive back into that, let’s look at people who we know want to nuke us, terrorists.

Obviously there are no shortage of terrorist groups who would love to nuke us if they could get their hands on one. Thus far we’ve been lucky and as far as we know there are no loose nukes. And I’m sure that preventing it is one of the top priorities of every intelligence agency out there, so perhaps it won’t happen. Still this is another situation where we’re in a race between singularity and catastrophe. On a long enough time horizon the chances that there will be some act of nuclear terrorism approach 100%. To argue otherwise would be to assert that eventually terrorism and nukes will go away. I will address the later point in a minute, but as to the first I don’t think anyone believes that terrorism will disappear. If anything, most sources of grievance have increased in the last few years. If you think I’m wrong on this point I’d be glad to hear your argument.

Of course, if we never have an incident of nuclear terrorism, then, as I frequently point out, that’s great. If I’m wrong nothing happens. But if I’m right…

Perhaps you might argue that a single nuke going off in New York or Paris or London is not that bad. Certainly it would be one of the biggest new stories since the explosion of the first nuclear weapons and frankly it’s hard to see how it doesn’t end up radically reshaping the whole world, at least politically. Obviously a lot depends on who ultimately ended up being responsible for the act, but we invaded Iraq after 9/11 and they had nothing to do with it (incidentally this is more complicated than most people want to admit, but yeah, basically they didn’t have anything to do with it and we invaded them anyway.) Imagine who we might invade if an actual nuke went off.

And then of course there’s the damage to the American psyche. Look at how much things changed just following 9/11. I can only imagine what kind of police state we would end up with after a terrorist nuke exploded in a major city. In other words, I would argue that a terrorist nuke is inevitable and that when it does happen it’s going to have major repercussions.

But we still need to return to a discussion of a potential World War III, a major nuclear exchange between two large nation states. What are the odds of that? Since the end of the Cold War the conventional wisdom has been that the odds are quite low, but I can think of at least a half a dozen factors which might increase the odds.

The first factor is the one I covered in my last post, and that is that we seem determined to encircle and antagonize the two major countries that have a large quantity of nuclear weapons. I previously spoke mostly about Russia, but if you follow what’s happening in the South China Sea (that article was three hours old when I wrote this) or if you’ve heard about the recent ruling by the Hague we’re not exactly treating China with kid gloves either. I’ve already said a lot about this factor so we’ll move on to the others.

The next factor which I think increases the odds of World War III is the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I know that most recently Iran looks like a success story. Here’s a country who wanted nuclear weapons and we stopped them. Well of course that remains to be seen, but it does seem intuitive that the longer we go the more countries will have nukes. Perhaps it might be instructive to determine a rate at which this is happening. In 1945 there was one country. Today in 2016, everyone pretty much agrees that there are nine. Dividing 71 years by 8 we get a new nuclear nation every nine years. Which means that in 99 years we’ll have another 11 nations with nuclear weapons, assuming that the rate of acquisition doesn’t increase. But actually most technological innovation doesn’t follow a linear curve. Consequently we may see an explosion (no pun intended) in nations with nuclear weapons, or it may be gradual or it may not happen at all (again this would be great, but unexpected.)

But let’s assume the rate at which new countries are added to the nuclear club stays constant and it takes 9 years on average to add a nation to the club and that in 100 years we’ve only added 11 more countries. On the face of it that may seem fairly minor, but if we assume that any two belligerents could start World War III then we would have 55 potential starting points for World War III rather than the one starting point we had during the bipolar situation which existed during the Cold War.

In saying this I realize, of course, there were more than two nations with nukes during the Cold War, but everyone had basically lined up on one side or another, in 100 years who knows what kind of alliances there will be. Even France and the United States have had rocky patches in their relationship over the last several decades. (More about France later.)

The third factor which might increase the odds is the wildcard that is China. As I mentioned in my last point for a long time we had a bipolar world. The Soviet Union only had to worry about the United States and vice versa. Now we have an increasingly aggressive China whose intentions are unclear, but they’re certainly very ambitious. And, from the standpoint of nuclear weapons, they’re keeping their cards very close to their chest.

Most people have a tendency to dismiss China, because they are still quite far behind the US and Russia. But they’re catching up fast, and also since they weren’t really part of the Cold War there’s a lot of restrictions that apply to Russia and the US which don’t apply to China’s weapons, allowing them (from the article I just linked to)

...considerably more freedom to explore the technical frontiers of ballistic and cruise missiles than either the US or Russia.

The fourth factor involves a concept we’re going to borrow from Dan Carlin, of the podcast Hardcore History, it’s the concept of the Historical Arsonist. These are people like Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, etc. Who burn down the world, generally not caring how many people die or what else happens, in their quest to remake things in their image. You can see people like this going back as far as we have records up to as recently as World War II. While it’s certainly possible that we no longer have to worry about this archetype, they seem to be a fairly consistent feature of humanity. If they haven’t disappeared, then when the next one comes along he’s going to have access to nuclear weapons. What does that look like? During Hitler’s rise he was able to gain a significant amount of territory just by asking, how much more effective would he have been if he had threatened nuclear annihilation if he didn’t get his way?

This brings up another point, are we even sure we know all the ways someone could use nuclear weapons? In the past one of the defining features of these historical arsonists was they took military technology and used it in a way no one expected. Napoleon was the master of the artillery and was able to mobilize and field a much bigger army than had previously been possible. Hitler combined the newly developed tank and aircraft into an unstoppable blitzkrieg. Alexander the Great had the phalanx. Nuclear weapons, as I’ve mentioned, are hard enough to defend against in any case, but imagine the most deviously clever thing someone could do with that, and then imagine that it was even more devious than that. With something of that level, you might have historical arson on a scale never before imagined.

The fifth factor which makes the odds of World War III greater than commonly imagined is the potential change in the underlying geopolitics. By this I mean, nations can break up, they change governments, national attitudes mutate, etc. We’ve already seen the Soviet Union break up, and while that went fairly smoothly (at least so far, it actually hasn’t been that long when you think about it.) There’s no reason to assume that it will go that smoothly the next time. Particularly when you look at the lesson of the former Soviet Republics who did give up their weapons. When you look at what’s happening in Ukraine it seems probable that they might now regret giving up their nukes.

Of course the US isn’t going to last forever. I have no firm prediction what the end of the country looks like, and once again it’s possible that we’ll reach some sort of singularity long before that, but it may happen sooner than we imagine, particularly if the increased rancor of the current election represents any kind of trend. Thus if, but more likely when, something like that happens, what does that look like in terms of nukes? If Texas breaks off that’s one thing, but if you end up with seven nations who ends up with the nukes?

And then of course you could have the possibility of a radical change in government. Some people think that Trump would be catastrophic in this respect. On the other side of the aisle, many conservatives think that a country like France might get taken over by Muslims if demographic trends continue and immigration isn’t stopped. Certainly a book about the subject has proven very popular. Does a Muslim run France with nukes act exactly the same as the current nation? Maybe, maybe not.

The final factor to consider, at least for those who believe in revelation and scripture, are the various references to the last days which fit very well with what might be expected from nuclear warfare. We believe that war will be poured out upon all nations, and that the elements will melt with a  fervent heat and finally that the earth will be baptized by fire. Obviously saying I know what this prophecy means is a dangerous and prideful game, and that is not what I’m doing. What I am saying is that this is one more factor to be added to and weighed alongside the other factors which have already been mentioned.

The point of all this is not to convince you drop everything and start building a bomb shelter (though I think if you already have one you shouldn’t demolish it.) Along with everything I’ve said I still believe that no man knoweth the hour. I’m also not saying I know that some form of nuclear armageddon will accompany the second coming. My point as always is that we are not saved and cannot be saved through our own efforts. Only the Son of Man and Prince of Peace has the ability to bring true and lasting peace. Further, and perhaps even more importantly, thinking we have or even can achieve peace on our own, that we just need to keep pushing the spread science, or liberal democracy, or our “enlightened” western values, is more dangerous and more likely to hasten what we fear than reminding ourselves of the fallen nature of man and restricting ourselves to the preaching of gospel, while eschewing the preaching of progress.

In the end, attempting to eliminate World War III may paradoxically hasten its arrival...`

---

If you long to relive the terror of the cold war consider donating, and I promise I'll have more posts allowing you to scratch that itch.