Accurate Weapons III

For an endnote on why a weapon’s “accuracy” depends on how it’s used, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

In a series of posts on this blog, I’ve argued that the accurate weapons recently produced by modern science and technology can advance the causes of human civilization and species survival. (Read, in the following order, this, this, and this post.)

The argument proceeds in three steps. First, accurate weapons can impose personal and individual responsibility, to an extent never before possible, upon butchers, the authors of genocides, and leaders of nations who start “optional” wars of aggression. They can even stop or prevent international wars of aggression, as they appear to be doing right now in Ukraine.

Second, trying to impose collective responsibility for butchery simply doesn’t work. Punishing all of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany after it started and lost the First World War ultimately produced Germany’s Nazi psychosis and the Second World War, with its fifty million premature deaths. Collective punishment was not a good solution. It was also one against which our then president Woodrow Wilson argued mightily, but in vain.

After the Second World War, the again victorious allies took a different tack. In the Nuremberg Trials, they imposed personal and individual responsibility on the authors of the unprecedented international aggression and the Holocaust. Far from imposing collective responsibility on the aggressor nations, as after the First World War, the US authored the Marshall Plan. That marvelous reconstruction project converted the devastated aggressors Germany and Japan into the model nations they are today, not to mention humanity’s third and fourth largest economies. Individual punishment and collective empathy turned out to be a much better solution.

The third step in the argument is to define “accurate” weapons. Simply put, they are weapons that don’t just hit their intended targets, but also kill the bad guys without causing much, if any, “collateral damage.” In other words, they impose the ultimate physical accountability, death, on the individuals most responsible for butchery, genocide or wanton aggression, without harming much of anyone or anything else.

Nuclear weapons are “accurate” in this sense only if they are never used. Starting an endless war against against a foreign and mostly misunderstood culture, even to get rid of a vile dictator like Saddam, is most definitely not using accurate weapons. Today’s most accurate weapons are things like snipers, ninjas, poison, pinpoint and bunker-busting missiles, shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and (most recently) killer drones.

The final step in the argument is to compare the (so-far rare) use of accurate weapons with humanity’s steady progression toward “Total War” during the last century. Hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent civilians perished in such events as the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention thousands of smaller acts of massive state aggression in the midst of a global war. The dismal record of impossibly disproportionate violence against civilians continued in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and continues today in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.

The reductio ad absurdum of inaccurate weapons came during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the entire civilian populations of the United States and the Soviet Union—and possibly all of humanity—risked extinction or catastrophic maiming in order to “punish” the rival authors of the Cold War. Slowly, over decades, that brush with self-extinction motivated our species to reconsider the absurd notion of “total war” and develop more accurate and less cataclysmic weapons.

This brings us up the most recent example of the use of accurate weapons: last Friday’s assassination of the Iranian killer General Qasem Suleimani and his Iraqi conspirator and counterpart. The weapon used, a killer drone, was “accurate” in the sense that those it killed were, as far as is now known, only the targeted bad guys and their immediate aides and adjutants. There appears to have been no “collateral damage” at all, except a couple of vehicles.

I know, I know. This most recent use of accurate weapons couldn’t have come at a worse time and couldn’t have been ordered by a worse commander in chief. It could lead to a war that no one wants.

On both sides, the senseless “Little Cold War” between the United States and Iran bears more resemblance to a grudge match between Mafia capos than a rational act of policy on the part of modern nation-states. (I’ve outlined the analysis in this post and this one and won’t repeat it here.) And our own leader, who reportedly surprised his underlings by ordering the strike, is an erratic, impulsive, irrational, scatterbrained, irascible, profane and bigoted old coot, who gets his ideas from watching the showmen and purveyors of pure right-wing propaganda on Fox. As an expert commentator described persuasively, the process by which he made the decision to strike bore absolutely no resemblance to the cautious, deliberate, rational exploration of causes and probable effects of which our government and military are capable.

And yet, and yet . . . The deed is done. Its consequences, both immediate and long term, are still unknown. Could some of them at least be positive?

No one questions Suleimani’s role in multiple minor wars and lethal attacks around the Middle East. He was a clever and effective minor butcher, not on the scale of Saddam or Assad, but nevertheless a mass murderer. He appears to have played a key role in the ongoing butchery of Yemen, for which Iran’s higher leaders, MBS and the Saudi Princes bear joint responsibility. (The Trump Administration’s claim that Suleimani had been planning more immediately imminent butchery seems a transparent excuse based on thin evidence, but his past butchery was real.)

Much is made of the fact that Suleimani’s successor, Ismail Qaani, is already on the job. But the precedent is set. Could it be that the knowledge of how Suleimani died, and the sense that Qaani could suffer the same fate at any time unless he lives his life underground, will moderate his behavior? There is nothing like personal and individual jeopardy, the same as the proverbial hangman’s noose, to focus one’s moral thinking. That’s the value of accurate weapons.

Of course the strike on Suleimani was a violation of international law and an act of war. But should it be?

Leaders of nations enjoy a long and hallowed tradition of legal immunity from attack in times of peace. But that tradition is based on little more than practical reciprocity. If we kill their leaders for every little disagreement, they’ll kill ours, too, and being a leader at all will become much more dangerous for everyone.

But does the threat of reciprocal killing justify legal immunity in even the most extreme cases? We are not talking here about mere differences in policy, or the practical and economic spats that occur regularly among nations. We are talking about mass murder, albeit on a relatively minor scale.

Suleimani’s crimes also have earmarks of attempted genocide. They appear motivated by the Shiite-Sunni divide, the Persian-Arab divide, and the fierce enmity between Iran and the House of Saud that resembles nothing so much as a family feud between medieval dukedoms.

We are not even talking about things like China’s mass incarceration of a million Uighurs. Though incarcerated, mistreated, brainwashed, and even forcibly sterilized, the Uighurs are still very much alive. They can be released and reunited with their families at any time. The crimes against them can be softened and atoned for, maybe even mitigated.

Murder cannot. It is final. There’s no statute of limitations on the crime of murder precisely because it’s final. In that sense it’s a unique crime. It’s even more horrific and irremediable when it involves multitudes and has overtones of genocide.

Even Kim Jong Un, the world’s most pathological tyrant today, has so far killed relatively few people deliberately. His catastrophic social and economic policies have caused millions of his own people to starve to death. Many have died in his labor camps. His regular provocations against South Korea have killed a few soldiers and innocent fishermen. But that’s not the same as deliberately slaughtering masses of innocent civilians like Assad (with barrel bombs and poison gas) or Saddam (with poison gas at Homs). Very likely, Kim’s knowledge that we have, or soon will have, small submarine-launchable nukes, against which Kim has no defense, and which could kill him in any bunker with minimal collateral damage to his people and his nation’s infrastructure, is one of many things deterring him from more murderous provocations.

So the question raised by Suleimani’s killing is a stark one. Are we humans all better off in a world where perpetrators of mass murder are vulnerable to sudden death from the skies, and that sort of personal “accountability” may restrain their mayhem or ultimately terminate it? Can mass murder be reduced by putting the lives of mass murderers in jeopardy with accurate weapons? Answering those questions will require a lot of thought by world leaders, the world’s military strategists, and legal minds. Suleimani’s assassination merely opens the discussion, which modern accurate weapons have rendered pertinent by making it much easier and less risky to kill mass killers without causing collateral damage.

Endnote: What’s an “accurate” weapon? As the recent downing of a civilian airliner near Tehran proves, “accuracy” in the sense of this post is not an intrinsic property of any weapon. It depends upon context. In particular, it depends upon the discipline, restraint and professionalism of the troops or spooks who use it.

If, as now appears likely, a precision ground-to-air missile downed the Ukrainian civilian airliner because the Iranians mistook it for an American warplane, it was most definitely not an “accurate” weapon in that use. Even mourners at a high-profile funeral can become inaccurate weapons when they trample each other to death.

Large nukes, for example, are generally highly inaccurate weapons except when never exploded, i.e., used only for deterrence. But small ones engineered to produce a minimum of radioactive fallout with very short half-lives could be “accurate” if used to take out a tyrant like Kim while moving his nation dangerously close to unprovoked nuclear aggression. In that case the “accuracy” would arise from a combination of the weapon’s intrinsic engineering and its use.

Even poison gas or barrel bombs—the weapons of mass murder preferred by the late Saddam and Assad—could be “accurate” if used to take out barracks-full of known terrorists. And of course a weapon is inaccurate if its targets are randomly selected civilians guilty of nothing, as was common in aerial bombing in World War II and as is usual in terrorism today. In the 9/11 attacks, the terrorists turned something as innocuous as civilian airliners into grossly inaccurate weapons of mass murder.

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