On the Eve of Destruction?

The Eastern world, it is explodin'
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'…
… But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
How you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction
— “Eve Of Destruction” by Barry McGuire

Back in June, The Atlantic published a nicely terrifying article by Eric Schlosser, “What if Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?”

During the past month, I’ve spoken with many national-security experts and former government officials about the likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the probable targets, and the proper American response. Although they disagreed on some issues, I heard the same point again and again: The risk of nuclear war is greater today than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis.

Those are words that will keep me up all night mainlining pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. Are we really on the verge of utter annihilation and what will that do to my 401(k)?

Two questions pop into my panic-stricken brain:
1 - What might cause a nuclear war?
2 - What would a nuclear war look like?

A few days ago, Michael Tracey, professional gadfly and alleged journalist¹, dropped this banger into the Twitter maelstrom and got scads of replies denouncing him for being a Putin apologist.

Michael Tracey @mtracey

If tomorrow Putin launches a preemptive strike on Washington, DC or something, it will be forevermore denounced as "revisionism" to mention literally anything the US did prior to that date

The thing is, he isn’t completely wrong.² Russia isn’t alone in this tango on the brink of doom. What America does will help determine whether we spend next week complaining about a pop star playing Thomas Jefferson’s harpsichord or scrounging for mutant rat kebobs in the rubble of downtown Baltimore.

The hostility to Tracey’s tweet reminds me of the reaction to the Sept 11 attacks. A rousing wave of patriotism meant that questioning voices were shouted down. A few days after the towers collapsed, The New Yorker published some writers’ responses. Susan Sontag wrote three brief paragraphs and unleashed a storm of anger (she was called “a moral idiot” and a “traitor”).

The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.

Sontag was correct. The 9/11 attacks didn’t occur in isolation. The United States’ foreign policy (support for Saudi Arabia, support for Israel) had angered Osama Bin Laden and led to his mad jihad. This doesn’t mean Bin Laden’s attacks were justified, just that he had reasons based on America’s actions. When emotions are high, however, people have a hard time hearing an explanation of a terrorist’s motivations as anything but a defense of their actions.

So Tracey is right, up to a point: If Putin bombs Washington it will be partly in response to actions taken by the United States. For that reason, it’s always worth considering and reconsidering whether America is making the best choices. Where Tracey strays (again and again and again) is in how much weight he gives to America’s actions relative to Putin’s. I appreciate that he’s going against the relentless flow of conventional wisdom (I truly do) but where a pinch of contrariness is useful, Tracey dishes up a whole stew. (For breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)

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Ukraine attacked

Unequivocally, the bulk of the responsibility for this madness falls on Russia and Putin’s shoulders. After years of interfering with Ukraine’s internal affairs, including his 2014 occupation of Crimea and the Donbas, Russian troops poured into Ukraine late on the evening of February 23 in an attempt to quickly crush President Zelinksy’s troublesome government. The Russians managed to seize some Ukrainian territory but failed to take the key cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv. Since then, Ukraine has been slowly retaking its lost lands.

Ukraine’s success would have been impossible without foreign military aid, particularly from America. The Biden administration has provided almost $17 billion to Ukraine, much of it in the form of high-tech military vehicles, like the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) pictured here.

At the beginning of September, Ukraine launched a wildly successful attack near Kharkiv, pushing back the Russians whose forces seemed to fall apart like tissue paper. Much of Ukraine remains occupied, but for the moment Ukraine seems to have momentum on its side.

Big Brother Speaks

Putin has responded to these setbacks by doubling down on the invasion. First, on September 21, he called up 300,000 Russian reservists, most of them poorly trained, to throw into the Ukrainian fight. Then on Friday (September 30), Putin delivered an angry speech, announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, and denouncing the United States and its policies.

The four provinces that Putin claimed to annex:

Putin’s firey and more than a little wacky speech—televised to the whole country—portrayed the United States and the West as an enemy determined to dominate Russia. They were the real power behind the Ukrainian government.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West decided that the world, all of us, would forever have to put up with its dictates. Then, in 1991, the West expected that Russia would not recover from such shocks and would fall apart on its own. Yes, it almost happened – we remember the 90s, the terrible 90s, hungry, cold and hopeless. But Russia resisted, revived, strengthened, again took its rightful place in the world.

Now Russia is ready to use whatever means are necessary to “defend” itself. Putin referred to America’s “setting a precedent” by using nuclear weapons during World War 2, an ominous hint that Russia might be willing to use them to defend its own interests.

The United States is the only country in the world that has twice used nuclear weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and setting a precedent.

The West is not merely a military threat, they are a “Satanic” threat.

Now they have moved on entirely, to a radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family ...

The dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This is a complete denial of humanity, the overthrow of faith and traditional values. Indeed, the suppression of freedom itself has taken on the features of a religion: outright Satanism.

And then he bizarrely wandered into gender debates more familiar to folks like Judith Butler and Abigail Shrier.

Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mum' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'? Have they gone completely insane? Do we really want ... it drilled into children in our schools ... that there are supposedly genders besides women and men, and [children to be] offered the chance to undergo sex change operations? ... We have a different future, our own future.

Putin framing his invasion of Ukraine as a war against left-wing social justice ideas (wokeness) takes chutzpah but I hope it will only be swallowed by the most gullible listeners.

(Culture war sidenote: It’s this kind of language that has made Putin appealing to some culture warriors. They aren’t happy with the ideas of trans activism etc. and speak of Putin as a defender of western values. This isn’t the place to heap ridicule on the idea of Putin as a defender of anything but Russian chauvinism and his own power, but please imagine me shoveling giant smoking piles of red-hot ridicule. I question some American cultural trends but Putin is not my savior and my son still calls me dad, not Parent Number Three. Ok, full disclosure: He calls me “pops,” but just because he thinks that’s funnier. I also think it’s fantastic that my lesbian cousins have kids who call them both “mom,” because they’re really great moms.)

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What to do?

Putin’s determination to continue the fight in Ukraine has left America and its allies with a difficult set of options, revolving around exactly how much help to give President Zelensky, and wondering what Russia will do in response.

At the invasion’s start, America’s choices were:
1 - Do nothing (and Ukraine is probably defeated).
2 - Provide military aid to help Ukraine fight (the choice we took).
3 - Send troops into Ukraine to fight directly (which would easily defeat the Russians but risks massive escalation).

Michael Tracey is right that choices “2” and “3” are provocations. How could they not be? Putin wanted choice “1,” and anything else was going to make him mad. The problem is, choice 1 is bowing to Russia’s aggression and accepting that Ukraine will become a puppet or be absorbed into Russia. Choice 1 is abandoning Ukraine in the same way that Britain and France abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938.

The downside of aiding Ukraine is too much help may make Putin so angry, or desperate, that he decides the best answer is to use nuclear weapons. This is madness, of course, but humans are good at madness. The 1945 bombing of Dresden was madness. Flying straight into the Twin Towers was madness. Putin is a strongman. He took and keeps power by projecting strength, by crushing his enemies. If his invasion were completely routed, that might weaken him so much that he would be forced out of power. This has to be on his mind.

We can’t be sure Putin would not use nuclear weapons if he feels his vital interests are threatened. This is a reason why some on the left oppose helping Ukraine. They aren’t worried about “Parent Number One,” they’re worried about one thousand nuclear bombs raining down on our cities. Understandably. If we let Putin do as he pleases, however, we create a world in which any thug with nuclear bombs can use them to get his way.

This is conflict. The West and Russia have different goals. Putin wants Ukraine absorbed into Russia’s sphere of influence, the West wants to prevent that. We both can’t end up happy.

So we’ve been playing a balancing game. Help Ukraine but without intervening directly. The idea is to pick the degree of provocation that Putin will tolerate, however much he may complain, but don’t go to the place where he snaps and presses the red button. The snag, of course, is we don’t know where exactly his red line is drawn. He may not know himself until we cross it!

Going Nuclear

For his Atlantic piece, Schlosser interviewed past and present experts in nuclear confrontation. They offered him different scenarios for what Putin might do, from a demonstration bomb—he shoots a nuke into the air, like a cowboy firing into the roof of the saloon, just to show that he’s serious—all the way to directly attacking a major Ukrainian city to force a surrender—as America did when they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. There is also, of course, the nightmare scenario of a direct attack on the United States.

Any kind of nuclear war is apocalypse territory. A study gaming a hypothetical 100-bomb exchange between India and Pakistan (long-time nuclear-armed foes) resulted in a projection of tens to hundreds of millions dead and a worldwide nuclear chill that could cause hunger for billions. A full-scale nuclear war with thousands of warheads launched would probably kill a billion outright and lead to a true nuclear winter. Most humans, even far from the bombs, would end up starving to death.³

A smaller exchange, one or two bombs, would be far less damaging. If big bombs are used to target cities, the losses could top 1 million, but if Russia uses its tactical (small) nukes, there would be far fewer casualties. Of course, once you use one bomb, it’s apt to lead to two counter bombs, which might lead to five counter-counter bombs, and so on until New York is vaporized and Peoria collapses into gang war over cans of baked beans. This is why we’ve avoided using nuclear weapons since 1945. Like bonbons, it’s hard to stop at just one.

And remember, Putin strongly implied at the start of the invasion that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend his Ukrainian fiasco.

Whoever tries to hinder us in Ukraine would see consequences, you have never seen in your history

A projected 2.4 megaton single bomb nuclear strike on Kyiv, illustrated by the disturbingly fascinating site Nukemap. Estimated dead: 1 million.

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(Not) Escalating

The question is then, what to do if Putin uses a nuclear bomb, bearing in mind that anything you do might lead to more bombs being dropped. Americans (and Russians) have spent decades planning out what they might do if those guys over there started dropping mushroom clouds. Back in the 1960s, policy genius Herman Kahn came up with “the escalation ladder,” marking the various steps a leader might take to achieve his goals (and avoid making everyone go “bye-bye”). “Kahn was one of the primary inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film.”

The point of the escalation ladder is not to climb straight up to armageddon but to take just the right step so that you get your enemy to back down without leading him to carry out a bigger retaliation that would then force you higher up the ladder. How to do this is the tricky part!

One way to avoid escalation is to eschew nuclear retaliation. The United States has a vast array of very deadly weapons that aren’t radioactive.

For example, if Russia hits Ukraine with a nuclear cruise missile launched from a ship, Nunn [former Senator Sam Nunn] would advocate immediately sinking that ship. The number of Ukrainian casualties should determine the severity of the American response—and any escalation should be conducted solely with conventional weapons. Russia’s Black Sea fleet might be sunk in retaliation, and a no-fly zone could be imposed over Ukraine, even if it meant destroying anti-aircraft units on Russian soil.

The danger is that anything you do, even non-nuclear retaliation, risks escalation. Humans mess up at the best of times and during a high-tension confrontation between nuclear-armed powers, anything is possible.

Everyone should know the name, Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a submerged Soviet submarine thought that war might already be underway, and was ready to launch its nuclear missiles. The launch required all three senior officers aboard the ship to agree, but Arkhipov was the one hold-out. Instead, the submarine surfaced and World War Three was avoided. What if there had been no Arkhipov on that submarine?

Imagine Ukrainian forces achieving a massive Donbas breakthrough. Donetsk is captured and tanks are rolling towards Luhansk. Putin demands they halt. When they refuse, Putin, facing growing protests in Moscow, orders three “small” nuclear strikes launched from Russia’s Black Sea fleet to hit behind the attacking troops in order to cut off their supply lines. Officials estimate thirty thousand civilians were killed in the attacks. The U.S. retaliates with a massive conventional strike on the Russian navy. Panicking, and receiving garbled communications from Moscow, the surviving Russian nuclear-armed submarines launch more strikes on Ukraine, including Kyiv. Deaths now top one million. President Biden, trying to scare Putin into calling off future strikes, orders an attack against Belgorod near the Ukrainian border (population 300,000). And… three weeks later you’ll be enjoying nuclear winter with your cold baked beans.

The idea of a series of mistakes like that is barely hypothetical. Back in March, The Economist covered much of this ground, including how a small-scale use of nuclear weapons might spiral into something larger. They also reported that just a few weeks earlier India had accidentally launched a nuclear-capable missile into Pakistan. Accidents happen.

Mr Meier sees “uncontrolled escalation as a result of mishaps, false flags or misunderstood signalling” as the most likely routes to disaster. Mishaps are, after all, a fact of life, and people at or on the edge of a war get nervous. On March 9th, as if to provide a worked example, a mistake during routine maintenance saw a nuclear-capable (but in this case unarmed) Indian missile fired into Pakistan, its nuclear-armed neighbour. India’s sheepish apology on the 11th would have been too little too late if tensions had been high.

Of course, this probably won’t happen in Ukraine. Putin will probably back down in the face of the risk of total destruction. He’ll probably accept defeat in Ukraine. Probably. Just typing that last sentence makes me nervous. Is Putin able to accept the humiliation of a defeat in Ukraine? I hope so. (Another possibility is that the war drags on for years until Putin dies or gives up.)

Tom Nichols, at The Atlantic, advises us to stand firm:

Opposing this Russian attack on the international order might require great sacrifice, but we must face the reality that no community of free nations can survive if it acquiesces to blackmail.

Tom’s probably right. He certainly knows more than I do (he taught for many years at the Naval War College). But Michael Tracey isn’t totally wrong, our decisions may lead to horrible results. Not acquiescing to blackmail means risking “great sacrifice”; we must face that reality with open eyes. How firmly we stand up to Putin, our choices in aiding Ukraine, will determine whether Ukraine stays free and whether Washington faces a nuclear strike. Our choices and how much sanity lurks between Putin’s ears.

1. I tease about Tracey but he’s done some good work. Back in 2020, he was covering the destruction caused during the post-George Floyd rioting that mainstream outlets downplayed. He goes where many other journalists don’t go. It’s just sometimes he goes where he shouldn’t go.

2. I think he is wrong that we wouldn’t discuss why an attack happened (assuming we survived). I think he’s right in thinking that there would be resistance to accepting any American blame.

3. Nuclear winter happens because bombs throw piles of dust into the atmosphere which then reflects sunlight away from the earth. No sun, no warmth, no plants, no us.