Fun Facts About Nuclear War: Part II
Three Things #145: November 17, 2024
Last week I shared a few things I learned from Annie Jacobsen’s excellent book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Here are a few more things I learned from the book.
Thing #4: Defense 🛡️
“It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.” - Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario
Many Americans naively believe that, even in the nightmare scenario where the country was targeted by one or more inbound, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, we’d be able to shoot them down before they did any harm. After all, we’ve seen Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system continually shoot down thousands of rockets, sometimes dozens at a time, and Israel has successfully defended itself from medium-range ballistic missiles launched from Iran, with the help of the US and other allies. Surely we could handle a handful of missiles headed our way, especially with our expensive early warning detection system.
Jacobsen does short work of this myth in her book. She explains how, for one thing, ballistic missiles travel unbelievably fast and they’re only detectable during the first few minutes of flight. For another, the sort of medium-range ballistic missiles that Israel shot down, to say nothing of the relatively tiny, slow moving missiles it’s typically defending against, are a totally different class of threat from an ICBM. Jacobsen explains that we have only a few dozen Aegis missiles designed to defend against an ICBM, and they’re incredibly unreliable: in simulations and tests their success rate is extremely limited. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that we could successfully defend ourselves against even a single inbound ICBM. We’ve spent literally trillions of dollars on defense systems that are unreliable at best and useless at worst.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, as described last week, a submarine-launched ballistic missile has an even shorter flight time and is even harder to defend against. Opinions differ on whether an adversary such as North Korea could get a submarine close enough to the US to launch such a surprise attack, but many believe it’s feasible, and Jacobsen presents one feasible scenario in her book.
The present reality is that the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, cannot adequately defend itself against even a small-scale nuclear attack. This is yet another reason that nuclear warfare is absurd and must never happen.
Thing #5: Close Calls 🚨
“Après moi, le déluge” - attributed to Louis XV
We’ve established that, once missiles start flying, the end of the world is nigh. What could possibly be worse?
How about missiles launched by mistake, or on the basis of false information?
The reality is that nuclear close calls are frighteningly rare. There’s a long, terrifying history of them happening in both the US and Russia. At times these have been due to simple brinksmanship: most famously, the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the USSR deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba in response to US deployments in Italy and Turkey. During the crisis the US nearly attacked Russian installations in Cuba in response, an act that could’ve triggered a full-blown nuclear conflict. President Kennedy was advised to carry out such an attack, but ultimately chose a less aggressive course of action which led to deescalation. He’s credited with having been nearly the only person standing between peace and nuclear war with the USSR. The Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered the time when the US came closest to nuclear war.
Some close calls have been due to the moon, sometimes computer error, sometimes human error. Stanislav Petrov, the lieutenant colonel in charge of Russia’s nuclear early-warning system during the 1983 false alarm incident, has been called “the man who saved the world from nuclear war” for correctly deciding that the erroneous alerts he saw were a false alarm. Had he relayed the information he received, that the US had launched five nuclear ICBMs, up the chain of command like he was supposed to, there’s no telling what might’ve come to pass.
The likelihood of false positives and close calls is higher than it might otherwise be due to equipment issues. US nuclear detection equipment has malfunctioned many times. And, as Jacobsen describes, the Soviet early warning system is known to sometimes mistake cloud patterns for a nuclear launch.
Let me say that again, because it’s absolutely terrifying: the system that the Russians rely on today to detect incoming nuclear missiles sometimes misinterprets cloud formations as missiles.
Of course, false alarms could be easily handled if we had active emergency hotlines with all of the other nuclear powers. We do not. At times when relations with countries including Russia and China are at a low point, as they are today, American officials have often had trouble getting in touch with their Russian or Chinese counterparts. Sometimes this can take a day or more.
And, as we’ve seen, a day is an infinity when it comes to nuclear war.
Thing #6: Humanity 🕊️
“We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us—a world in flames.” - Hitler
One might think that, given the death, destruction, and suffering that nuclear war would inevitably cause, it could never actually happen for the simple reason that no rational person could possibly choose to bring it about. In other words, nuclear war is so horrible and so unthinkable that no leader, no matter how despotic, could possibly bring such an outcome upon their own people, to say nothing of the impact on the rest of the world.
I’d very much like to believe that this is the case, but the cold, hard truth is that it probably isn’t. Jacobsen does a good job of explaining why.
While nuclear war is clearly irrational, the most likely scenario for its trigger is the “Mad King” scenario. One would think that self-preservation and the desire to avoid nuclear war are mutually exclusive, but history has shown that this isn’t necessarily the case. Hitler is said to have uttered the famous quote above, expressing his disregard for the rest of the world. The best candidate for Mad King today, Kim Jong Un, hasn’t followed even basic international protocol such as notifying his neighbors of nuclear tests, and has also taken huge risks.
Then there’s the fact that, whatever the trigger, once nuclear war begins, there are no rules. Human history has always been violent. As technology has progressed we’ve found more and more effective and efficient ways to bring death, suffering, and destruction to those we perceive to be enemies. The nuclear bomb is sort of the ultimate weapon, the bomb to end all bombs. It’s so effective and so powerful that the rules that have always guided warfare and conflict, and are encoded in treaties such as the Geneva Convention, simply don’t apply: there are no rules. Jacobsen drives this point home several times.
One of these rules is proportionality: the idea that the response to an attack should be proportional to the attack. But there’s nothing proportional about even a single “strategic” nuclear bomb, given the enormous amount of chaos it would bring about and the far-reaching, long-lasting consequences. Another of these rules is to avoid civilian targets and to focus on legitimate military targets. Nuclear bombs, even when targeted at nuclear facilities, are simply too big and too powerful to avoid civilian casualties.
The other thing that strips nuclear war of its humanity is the game theory, as discussed last week. In any ordinary conflict scenario, combatants have time to plan attack, defense, counterattack, etc. This simply isn’t the case in a nuclear war. As we saw last week and as Jacobsen makes clear in her book, the speed with which nuclear war plays out and the sheer level of chaos and destruction dictates that, in game theoretical terms, each player’s moves are effectively determined and “locked in” before a conflict even begins. There is quite literally no time to adjust strategy or factor in human concerns.
This is precisely what’s meant by those euphemisms mentioned last week: hair-trigger alert, launch on warning, escalate to deescalate, etc. The very mechanism of mutually assured destruction and of deterrence itself hinges upon the notion of a credible commitment to retaliate in force. If no such commitment exists, or if it isn’t credible, then a country is vulnerable to attack and may seem like an easy target. But if these mechanisms are in place and are credible then there’s no dialing back nuclear war once it’s begun. There’s no room to contemplate the death, suffering, and destruction that it will bring about. These mechanisms simply do not allow it.
International law, global social norms, and the basic requirements of humanity, i.e., how humans treat fellow humans, all dictate that nuclear war must never be fought. The game theory makes disarmament difficult, but I remain optimistic that, as external threats such as climate change and AI continue to mount, we’ll find a way to come together and eliminate this eminently avoidable threat once and for all.