Warning a Monster but Provoking a Bear
Yesterday the United States, the UK and France launched a “precision attack” on Syrian chemical weapon sites. Russia swore to protect its ally. So far, the event seems to be contained with no escalation in sight. But what if a missile had landed on a Russian garrison? What if Putin felt that he had to reply with some show of force? It is easy to imagine how one thing could lead to another. Perhaps Israel would feel threatened and soon the unimaginable happens and one or two nukes are unleashed.
It is easy to forget that there are 1,800 US, Russian, British and French nuclear warheads ready for use on short notice. Those warheads are backed by another 12,400 warheads that could be used by the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea with a few days, weeks or months of preparation.
But you are probably thinking, “Yeah, I get the numbers, but I just don’t believe that President Trump, President Putin or President Xi Jinping would be stupid enough to fire off one of those things.” You are probably correct. On any given day it’s not very likely. But if you read The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg you will realize that mistakes are made and leaders unintentionally back themselves into corners. He recounts several nuclear close calls and explains how the Cuban Missile Crisis took us much closer than anyone knew to all-out nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union.
Ellsberg explains that one reason we live on the nuclear precipice is that the United States has always maintained a first-strike option. Ellsberg explains that, “The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago. Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets including command and control, many in or near cities. The declared official rationale for such a system has always been primarily the supposed need to deter — or if necessary respond to — an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. [but]…. The required U.S. strategic capabilities have always been for a first-strike force… [launching an attack] …either on tactical warning of an incoming attack or strategic warning that nuclear escalation is probably impending…. ”
To understand the magnitude of the problem we need to understand the amount of firepower that the United States and other world powers can trigger within minutes of a decision to launch. “As of 2017, the U.S. had 3,822 nuclear weapons…” “The active stockpile included 1,367 deployed strategic warheads…and around 200 deployed tactical warheads.” Worldwide, “…there are an estimated 14,200 nuclear weapons…nearly 1,800 US, Russian, British and French warheads are on high alert, ready for use on short notice.”
Government and military leaders of these nuclear powers argue that these weapons are required to keep the peace, and to protect their respective countries. The reality is that a small nuclear exchange of only a few warheads, as could happen with North Korea, would kill hundreds of thousands to millions of people. But the big danger stems from the possibility that a small nuclear exchange could escalate into a full nuclear exchange, and that could spell the end of human civilization.
In the mid-2000s climate scientist Alan Robock used detailed climate models to test the effect of an exchange of 50 nuclear weapons. He found that, “…an exchange involving just 50 nuclear weapons — the kind of thing we might see in an India-Pakistan war, for example — could loft 5 billion kilograms of smoke, soot and dust high into the stratosphere. That’s enough to cool the entire planet by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.25 degrees Celsius) — about where we were during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Growing seasons could be shortened enough to create really significant food shortages.”
To imagine a war involving a thousand or more warheads, you have to go back sixty-five million years ago when an asteroid hit Earth near the Yucatan peninsula. “The resulting dust cloud, mixed with smoke from fires, blocked out the Sun, killing the dinosaurs, and starting the age of mammals…This teaches us that large amounts of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere have caused massive climate change and extinction of species.”
The situation is that the survival of every human that lives today, or will ever live in the future, is dependent on Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping and the other leaders of nuclear-armed states making the right decisions every day to avoid an intentional or accidental nuclear conflagration that would destroy life as we know it.
Please take a few minutes to comment. Tell me two things:
1) Do you believe nuclear war is a realistic threat?
2) What can we do to reduce the risk?
