It goes without saying that the US and Russia both have many, many plans
to attack one another. Generally speaking, however, it’s been treated
as bad form to bring them up, and worse form to brag about them.
So Russia is criticizing US General Jeffrey Harrigian for talking up how
the US has plans to destroy all air defenses in the Russian exclave of
Kaliningrad, saying there should be “no doubt” the US could do it.
Russian Foreign Ministry officials say they consider the statement a
“threat” and also particularly irresponsible, while the Defense Ministry
said that Kaliningrad is well defended from US aggression.
US forces in Poland often conduct wargames settling around moving north
into Kaliningrad, and the region is small enough that the US could
probably take it, at least for a time, in the event of a war.
That probably doesn’t matter, however, as a full-scale ground war
between the US and Russia where they’re seizing territory almost
certainly would escalate into a nuclear conflict,and by the time the
general is proven right, tens or hundreds of millions of people are
about to be killed in a conflagration.
Given that a thermonuclear exchange is unlikely to be limited, and that
the detonation of large thermonuclear weapons over 100 cities would be
sufficient to establish a decadal nuclear winter, and given that we
estimate that there are now some 17,000 nuclear weapons and pits in
storage to construct a further 50,000 or so, it is unlikely that this
could be avoided, and given that the last such event killed over 70% of
all species on earth, and given that human jind is the apex predator and
that no apex predator has ever survived an extinction event, the death
toll is much more likely to number about 7.8 billion than “tens or hundreds of millions of people” were it to happen
tomorrow.
Well, that would take care of the global warming issue people are hung up on while nuclear war is being contemplated in Wash. Not to mention all the other endless wars going on started by Wash. Gov. today is the enemy, obviously.
It would also go along way in doing population control.
Maybe that’s the plan??
It was. Rand Corp dd extensive research on “Wars of Depopulation” which were adopted as active war contingency plans should detection of resource based limits to growth occur, in the mid-1970s, and despite the leakage of these plans in the late 1970s, renewed since then. More recent models show that nuclear winter means that it will not work. That may not be enough to prevent them from happening at this point.
A more likely depopulation event would be the biological bomb. Somewhat easier to control who survives through vaccination and/or antidote. Gene specific disease is also particularly nasty. Whom keeps an eye on bio labs is anybody’s guess.
Weaponizing disease is not nearly as easy as it seems to be in the films. Besides, the perpetrator would be reasonably obvious and vaccinations and antidotes can be reverse engineered,
While there are a few nasty possibilities, the requirements for a good bioweapon impose certain fairly tight constraints on what diseases might be candidates, and the field is small. However, whichever disease is chosen, we all share far too many genes these days for gene based attacks to have any chance of succeeding as a national target selection filter.
Film ? Congress authorized research for gene specific bioweapons in 04. Science has been busy.
Agree, with modification. Government is not the problem. The problem is that it is being administered by radical militants.
Actually, my guess is that a billion people – or two or three or four – would handily survive a nuclear war and any “nuclear winter” (which IIRC has never been a proven scientific hypothesis) – and most will be grateful that the US isn’t around to cause trouble any more.
There might be a significant increase in the cancer rate among the rest of the world, but civilization would continue after a few decades of sorting out the mess.
I’m not that concerned about nuclear war “ending the world” – only the city in which I reside (either as a result of a nuclear hit – and I live in a city that would be hit) or the economic and social chaos that would affect the city I reside in if it were not directly hit.
However, I intend to pay attention so hopefully I will see when the odds are that WWIII is in play – and get my butt out of this city and maybe the country.
Actually there have been studies of this, most by military scientists and government research institutes including Rand Corp., but some are academic and have been published. For example, Mills MJ, Toon OB, Lee‐Taylor J, Robock A (2014-02-07). Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict. Earth’s Future,2, 161–176. https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000205.
There is a name for animals that no longer have suitable ecosystems in which to live. Extinct.
The global nuclear winter which would follow any major thermonuclear exchange would result in an earth 8C to 12C colder than present, insufficient surface insolation to preserve plant growth or oxygen replenishment, and when temperatures begin to recover after a decade or more, insufficient ozone to prevent massive DNA damage from brief exposure to sunlight in a world that will return to global warming, exacerbated by 800 billion tonnes of putrefying dead things adding methane into the atmosphere as the ice recedes, which will swing the temperature back to the unsurvivable +8 to 12C we are currently heading towards (far faster than predicted by the IPCC which explicitly omits the effects of methane from its models, and has not allowed for the recently discovered feedback cycle of a cloud free equatorial zone once a 3C warming over 1750 is achieved) .
Such an earth would not support human life during the nuclear winter or after.
Which is why the functionally extinct temporary survivors of the initial strikes will not be the lucky ones, as their deaths will be protracted but inexorable.
While cascading effects after a nuclear war , such as global cooling , secondary wars and desintegration of infrastructure could increase the death count from an initial 10% to say 90% or 99%, this is not the same as extinction. 0.1% is 7.000.000 people. Even with a shortened lifespan that is still not extinction.I wouldn’t focus on whether nuclear war leads to actual extinction. There is no need to agree on that. A consensus on less than extinction is good enough.
As I said, these studies continue to be debated and criticized…
See the Wikipedia article which summarizes the research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate
The basic problem is that nothing has been proven – all the studies are based on firestorms from large scale conventional bombing and the two US uses of nuclear weapons. They are invariably based on computer models, the accuracy of which is entirely dependent on the quality of the model and the assumptions made. Everything else is speculation.
This is the same problem the Club of Rome projections done in the ’70’s had, and stuff like Paul Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” which proved to be totally erroneous. Large-scale computer models tend to be wrong and subject to cognitive bias of their developers.
Humans – if not human civilization – have survived the worst conditions experienced so far on the planet, at least since life evolved. Humans are at least as good as other animals at surviving climate change – and technology makes a huge difference.
I think having major doubts about not surviving nuclear war are warranted.
You are welcome to your opinion, but unless you have in-field qualifications you have not shared, it is hard to understand why you think they should be considered seriously when they seem to run counter to a fairly broad multi-disciplinary consensus?
Science stopped trying to do “proofs” right around the time that science evolved from metaphysics and philosophers largely stopped trying to do maths and science. It was not a coincidence. As Wittgenstein observed, “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Science builds models that work. Models do not have to be perfect. The model is not the terrain. They only have to be useful. So while computer models tend not to include all the amplifying factors (This is, for example, why the IPCC has consistently underestimated the scope and speed of change) the models undoubtedly point in the right direction. And no matter how bad you thingk the models might be, we have only one planet, and the best anyone can do is model what might happen, as no matter how many experiments may be planned, it can only be destroyed once, and we are already on the brink of that.
The Club of Rome was remarkably prescient, as are multiple related Rand Corp studies. The fact that people misinterpreted what they were saying is not their fault. See for example this recent comparative reanalysis e.g. https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2763500/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf.
” at least since life evolved”
This is utter nonsense. Life evolved within 200,000 years of when the earth solidiified sufficiently to record traces of life, at least 3.77 billion years ago and perhaps as early as 4.4 billion years ago, about 100,000 years after early seas are known to have formed. Since then the earth is known to have undergone multiple extinction events when more than 50% of the species on the planet have been eliminated, and it is currently experiencing another such event.
Humans have never experienced an extinction event, and, as no apex predator has ever survived an extinction event, and humans are an apex predator and so dependent on the health of the entire biosphere, there is no reason to imagine that they could survive one now. Attempting to argue that because we exist we have never been killed, and because we have never been killed, we never will be killed really is a fallacy. Would you take somebody seriously who, falling from the top of the Empire State Building calls out as he passes the 12th floor, What, me worried? Why? Nothing bad has ever happened to me before in my life. Why should I be worried now?”
Humans have not even experienced a global temperature change of more than 3C deviation from the 1750 preindustrial. Indeed, comparatively small changes can play havoc on human society. For example, in 1816 climate abnormalities caused a decrease in global temperatures by some 0.5C, but is still known as “the Year Without a Summer”, “Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death” and “the poverty year”. No model shows that we have a chance of surviving a change greater than 3C as a species, because an average does not speak to the extremes, and it takes only one extreme to kill a relatively fragile human. For example, a wet bulb temperature of 35C/95F for an hour or two will leave naked humans lying under fans in the shade dead of hyperthermia.
Besides, your claim about humans ignores the reality that individual families have an average life expectancy of around 5 million years. Need I remind you that we hominids have been around for 5 to 7 million years already.
Even more delicate than hominids, technology is fragile. Early christers managed to destroy the Attic Greek civilization that created the Antikythera so successfully that it took well over a thousand years for the kind of civilization capable of recreating it to redevelop. The Congressional Research Service estimates that a power failure across a broad area, whether due to a Harrington event, a deliberate EMP attack or a failure cascade could result in the deaths of 95% of Americans over the course of a year. What level of technology is likely to survive such an event?
“I think having major doubts about not surviving nuclear war are warranted.”
It is also true that you should have a 5 out of 6 chance of playing Russian Roulette and not dying. So why don’t people play Russian Roulette more often? Perhaps the reason is that that 1:6 chance ends everything for that player, forever. The cost of losing is great enough that the sensible person does not participate in such games.
Seeing that you like Wikipedia, I suggest reviewing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk. It turns out that my concerns are shared by many sources. For more you might evaluate the WEF Global Risks Report, produced by over 1,000 risk analysts, scientists, insurance risk managers, military and government planners and others each year. I think you will find that they agree with me too. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2019. On what are you relying for your assessment that the risks are negligible?
To pick out just one fallacy in your post:
” The Congressional Research Service estimates that a power failure across a broad area, whether due to a Harrington event, a deliberate EMP attack or a failure cascade could result in the deaths of 95% of
Americans over the course of a year.”
That EMP nonsense was promulgated by one scientist and Newt Gingrich. A large number of scientists view the EMP threat as highly speculative – especially when related to North Korea, which was Gingrich’s main promotion, namely, war with that state.
While there have been mass extinctions, as you state, there has never been a mass extinction of *humans* or *any* species with technology, which is my point, whereas you claim a “nuclear winter” – which as I pointed out is entirely speculative – will end human life. Citing various historical events which are irrelevant to modern civilization is precisely that – irrelevant.
I can see certain technological events that might result in mass human extinction – certain types of biological warfare or nanotechnology. But nuclear war is not one of them.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I reiterate that it is based on speculation, likely flawed computer models with cognitive bias and “extremist science” views which are not supported by adequate evidence, let alone proof.
In short, I’m not going to concern myself about such outlier events and neither should anyone else. Nuclear war’s immediate effects are entirely sufficient to require concern, without going to absurd extremes.
You appear to be taking a very inconsistent approach. On the one hand, you apparently object to models as “theoretical”. On the other, where there is compelling physical evidence available, as in this example (In 1859 telegraph lines and barbed wire fences melted, setting fire to telegraph offices and grasslands. Rail lines were buckled and unseated, and sleepers and grass ignited), you apparently reject it. Why is that? Today when planning a development, the first thing that is done is to calculate the power requirements and place an order for the transformers required, as these are now only fabricated in Korea and China and have a 5 to 10 year lead time). The specialized metals and insulation are simply no longer fabricated elsewhere and the skills needed to fabricate them elsewhere have been lost and could not be recreated under emergency conditions. As every cable would tend to destroy whatever is connected to it, a Carrington event (or nuclear EMP which could be more directed and so more damaging) would tend to eliminate the electric network and without electricity, communication, fuel, water, food and medical services would all rapidly become unavailable. You have not answered why you disagree with the scientists who think that this would pose an existential challenge, very likely triggering extreme wars as people fight one another over the remnants seeking to survive.
Far from “EMP nonsense”, most scientists and risk analysts who have researched this have concluded that it is a compelling existential threat. Rather than “speculative” it is based on observation of the known effects of a Carrington event on a pre-electrified world, on pulse activity from non-EMP enhanced nuclear tests, and on models of the possible impact of EMP-enhancement of nuclear devices.
The CRS is broadly recognized for their superb research abilities, and the EMP commission continues to be funded via Defense Authorization, so even if source impungement were not a fallacy. trying to assert that their reports are a product of “one scientist and Newt Gingtich” would still remain as fallacious as it is specious. See e.g. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32544.pdf.
While “a large number of scientists (discipline unstated)” might very well ” view the EMP threat as highly speculative”, many in field, including those of the FAS (Federation of American Scientists) who specialize in
would disagree. We know that the risk analysts, scientists and others consulted by the WEF, including scientists and economists of the National University of Singapore, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, amd the University of Pennsylvania disagree too.
Again, your claim that because no mass exttinction of humans has happened, none will happen is a fallacy. Humans are alive today only through luck (we know that their numbers were reduced from over three million to 1000 plus or minus an order of magnitude in the volcanic twilight of the mid 70,000 BCE era), and have, until recently*, not experienced the impact of an extinction event.
* Refer Chivian, E. and A. Bernstein (eds.) 2008. Sustaining life: How human health depends on biodiversity. Center for Health and the Global Environment. Oxford University Press, New York. and Thomas, C. D et al (2004). Extinction risk from climate change. Nature 427: 145–148.
I bet you could find a conspiracy in a game of Solitaire . . .
Public thoughts like that will affect the judgement of Russia in the 15 minutes they have to assess an alert on their systems.
I believe , actually it is a guess, that the end of the USSR has led to more bellicose thinking in the military and now we’re stuck with them.
And it is not just in the military. When Bolton was fired there were a lot of voices who opposed it claiming ‘at least he is competent’.
Have noted recent criticism by some respected figures that the senior military leadership is wanting in many aspects of selfless “leadership.”
Indeed their track record is one of almost total failure-they have not been challenged to produce results and merely have had tons of taxpayer dollars thrown their way for weapons systems that do not work.
Their answer, as illustrated with this general, is to utter threats, bombast, bluster, as one would expect on a grade school playground.
The Americans prefer to slaughter from the air. Troops on the ground, that’s when soldiers die. That’s when politicians start to lose votes.
Iran has a very capable air defense system, which precludes this approach, coupled with excellent marine area denial ability and long range strike abilities which would drastically complicate any American attack.
The US is vulnerable to perceived failure and economic pressure, both of which would be extreme.
And the big threat is that if global economic activity drops by some 35% or more, it will reduce particulate and aerosol pollution, increasing equatorial temperatures to the point where clouds could no longer form, and probably triggering a very rapid 8C to 12C of warming which would result in human extinction.
Somehow the war state has full access to the money of the citizens without the need for their consent. The money can pay for air wars and drone wars and for outsourcing and privatization. Assisted by PR I think there is still good confidence that there is freedom to operate. The Afghan war has led to relatively little resistance in 18 years.
Nobody cares about Afghanistan enough to make an issue of it, but the US is now spending more to sustain operations there than it cost to fight WW II, losing control of increasingly large regions of the country, becoming ever less discriminatory in its murderous obliteration of perceived opponents, and is no longer even pretending that its puppet government has a role to play inmm the future.
There is one problem that does not fit neatly into “they both the same” narrative. Russia has been the target by European powers — throughout 1,000 years or so. In recent history, from Napoleon’s France to Imperial Britain’s war for Crimea, then all European powers greedily chomping parts of weakened Russia after Bolshevik revolution — and the most detailed plan drawn by Hitler’s Germany to kill of population, and absorb Russia to Ural mountains. Tens of millions civilians and soldiers died. Now US has taken on the banner of vanquishing Russia on whatever pretext — it is easy to find one. Russia, having experienced a well articulated, executed and documented genocide — and survived, took that lesson to heart. Is there a reason an American general is scoping the effort to destroy Russian defenses?
Russia’s current strategic military doctrine stares that Russia will never again fight a war on its territory. US doctrine is, Full Spectrum Dominance. One extreme defensive and one extremely offensive war doctrines are existing today on this same planet.
I am afraid that we will not see much in the terms of war build up, and conventional forces. When it happens — it will be fast. US is thinking in offensive terms, disable offenses. Russia in disabling forward positioned assets, naval and bases in cruise missile range around its territory. I do not see this ending well. A testing ground can be Iran. But how to test anything without risking the other side exploring weaknesses. Russia and Iran’s border lies across Caspian Sea, and for Russia and China, Iran is a strategic buffer.
Will this result in testing some weapons?
All I see in this intention to find weakness in Russia’s antimissile defense — just a deflection from obvious debate about overstated defense capabilities of Patriot and Aegis systems. And thinking pragmatically, if one cannot make better defense system, try to make adversaries’ more vulnerable.
These are technicalities, and war and peace do not depend on them. We have lived in peace very long time — enough to forget what it means. And let our leaders play with war toys, almost forgetting what a fine line exists between war and peace.
This is rather serious if true:
US spy plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim Base in Syria: Russia
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/us-spy-plane-operated-drones-that-attacked-hmeymim-base-in-syria-russia/
Now, it makes sense that the US would be testing Russian ECM capabilities using drones in Syria and that might include US operators directly controlling said drones, operating under the guise of being Syrian insurgents from Idlib or wherever. And the Russians in turn would be using these US moves to ratchet up their ECM abilities. All good so far…
It’s all fun and games until someone puts an eye out…as they say.
What happens when one of these drone “tests” – under the guise of being operating by Syrian insurgents – gets successful and the drone actually attacks the Russian base and kills some Russians?
What happens when Russia gets pissed off and decides to drop the next US spy plane operating the drones in retaliation – or “by accident”?
Now, it could be that no US operated drone will actually fire on the Russian base. They could just penetrate the defenses, wiggle their wings and withdraw, taunting the Russian operators.
But you can see how dangerous this kind of tit-for-tat can get.