Suigenocide II: Runaway Global Warming

An extinction-level general nuclear war is more likely now than at any time since the Cuban Mssile Crisis of 1962. Next to that, runaway global warming is less certain a suigenocidal event.

Nevertheless, scientists have identified several real, physical mechanisms of positive feedback by which global warming self-accelerates, even without our pumping additional greenhouses gases into the atmosphere—which we continue to do, willy nilly. In rough order of importance, these mechanisms are: (1) emission of methane from melting permafrost and dissociating deep-sea methane hydrates, (2) the loss of a huge global heat sink as glaciers and polar icecaps melt, and (3) the decrease of the Earth’s reflectivity (albedo) as surface ice melts in our glaciers and at the poles.

We know that all these phenomena are real, ongoing and now mostly independent of our burning fossil fuels. We also know that their interaction in accelerating warming is non-linear. So they can act far more quickly than “common sense” might suggest, because they obey the rules of nonlinear math.

Percentages and “proportionality” just don’t work for positive feedback. If you’ve ever tried to shield your ears from a screeching amplifier that feeds sound from speakers right back into a microphone, you know. The shriek blows up before you can put your hands over your ears. And it doesn’t really depend on precisely how close you put the microphone to the speakers. That’s a classic example of positive feedback, albeit on a human not a geographic scale.

For global warming, we know similar feedback mechanisms are at work. But we can’t quantify them because we can’t get the data. Melting permafrost in Siberia and Northern Canada is hard to study, because it lies in areas that are remote, hard to access, huge, and sparsely populated. Dissociation of methane hydrates at the bottom our our planet’s oceans is even harder to study; much of our oceans are as deep as Everest is high.

It’s also hard to quantify the speed and effect of melting ice. Weird phenomena that might cause the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap and the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica hide from our study under hundreds of meters of solid ice.

In fact, an ice shelf larger than New York City just recently collapsed, as seen on satellite photos. No scientist predicted this collapse in advance. The collapse came at a time of anomalous temperatures in Antarctica, 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual, for days at time. No one predicted that, either. These unanticipated anomalous events are earmarks of nonlinear positive feedback.

Because we don’t have all the related data, we can’t calculate the precise strength of this feedback loop. Scientists don’t include these phenomena in their projections because they can’t quantify them; so they stay below the radar of non-scientific politicians and government officials. But they are real.

We know for certain that the stable “steady state” of climate that persisted throughout our species’ evolution is becoming unstable and is changing rapidly. It can’t continue as it is while under an accelerating assault of greenhouse gases from both human and now independent sources. Because of positive feedback, those gases will continue to increase, even if all our burning of fossil fuels stopped cold this very year, which it is far from doing.

Our “common sense” only confirms these points of science. Everyone can sense that something more than the slow drip-drip-drip of our exhaust gases into the atmosphere is going on. Year by year, we are watching and suffering as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, Polar Vortex freezes, heat waves, wildfires and massive droughts increase dramatically in number and severity. Our global climate is now in clear transition, moving irrevocably from the long stability that fostered our species’ evolution to something else. We just don’t know—and as of now have no way of reliably predicting—what the next stable “steady state” will be.

We do know that the surface of the planet Venus, which is entirely shrouded by carbon dioxide, is hot enough to melt lead. At that temperature, few forms of life we know on earth could survive, except maybe the microbes that live near our deep-sea volcanic vents. But we don’t know precisely how Venus got that way, and it is much closer to the Sun. All we know at this point is that there is no geophysical limit on how hot planetary surfaces can get under the wrong conditions.

So if we are precise and honest with ourselves, what can we say about suigenocide? We certainly can’t rule it out, either by nuclear war or by runaway global warming. Based on all that we know now, both could do the job and extinguish us by our own hands.

The best we can say is that runaway warming is less likely to cause a complete suigenocide. A nuclear winter would be global, with global effect. In contrast, warming is likely to sterilize the tropics and the hotter temperate zones long before it makes the higher temperate zones uninhabitable, let alone those beyond the polar circles. So suigenocide by runaway warming is far less likely than that by nuclear war to be complete. Some part—maybe even a substantial part—of our species could survive runaway warming. At least we now think so.

The causes of runaway global warming are also more diffuse. It’s not the project of a single, deranged dictator (or two, if you include Kim Jong Un). Rather, runaway warming, without effective countermeasures, derives from the combined acts and omissions of three entire classes of people, who together comprise a substantial portion of our species.

The first class is the fossil-fuel oligarchs. They include the owners and top managers of fossil-fuel companies, who have spent decades and fortunes denying and throwing doubt on climate science. They also include the leaders of petrostates, such as Russian’s Putin, Saudi Arabia’s MBS, and Venezuela’s Maduro. They use their countries’ oil to garner undeserved wealth and power and oppress their people. To them, the risk of suigenocide by runaway climate changes is just one of many terrible risks they are quite willing to take for personal wealth and power while they live, without regard to our species’ future.

The second class of people is larger but less guilty. It’s the middle-class workers in developed nations who simply want to drive their pickup trucks and SUVs and won’t hear that their doing so is destroying our common climate. The third class—the largest and most innocent one—includes the leaders and the people of developing nations like India, Indonesia and Mexico. They aren’t much responsible for global warming so far, but they don’t want fighting it to block what they see as their cheapest (in the short term) and easiest path to development, modernization and the good life.

What would a rational world do under these circumstances? The richest and most powerful countries would co-opt the third class by assuming most of the burden of energy transformation and by helping the third class with cash grants, technology transfers and fair trade. The second class would be much smaller because of greater public understanding. Gas-hog drivers would understand, for example, that gasoline prices will only get higher as oil begins to run out, that it would be better to convert to renewable energy well before that time, and that the immense costs of climate-driven disasters will only explode dramatically, in unpredictable ways, if we don’t. And, in a rational world, the first class would have much less power—or not exist at all—because rational people would insist on rational leaders with a good plan to face a clear and present danger and its inevitable increase, before it inevitably becomes catastrophic.

As a general principle, human suffering and displacement caused by runaway climate change will decrease in direct proportion to a nation’s distance from the Equator, and (due to sea-level rise) will increase in direct proportion to the length of its low-lying coastlines. A non-scientist spook like Valdimir Putin might think Russia immune by virtue of its northern placement and relatively small coastlines (except in the Arctic). He has said so from time to time. But Russia has another problem: its Siberian tundra. Today, with hardened permafrost, Russia can at least build roads and railroads across that vast space, the better to transit Russia’s eleven time zones on the ground, and to access the region’s vast mineral wealth. But once the permafrost starts to melt, Russia may have not only the globe’s largest and most dangerous source of methane, but also the world’s biggest peat bog. Ask the Irish how that worked for them.

In a rational world, everyone everywhere would be helping to prepare a plan to phase out fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—as quickly as possible, with the least amount of pain all around, including postponed or thwarted economic development. In today’s world, everyone is busy figuring out how to cash in on the globe’s random distribution of fossil fuels as quickly and as much as possible, racing towards the day when oil and gas, at least, start running short—unexpectedly, just like the catastrophic effects of positive feedback.

That way inevitably lies shortages, price spikes and supply-chain bottlenecks, just like those going on right now as a result of economic sanctions against Russia for Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. Secondary effects can include food shortages and famines, and possible new wars over fossil fuels. At the end of the day, once oil and gas run out, there will be a vast store of “stranded assets”: drilling rigs (including offshore rigs and the specialized boats to place them), tanker cars, ocean-going tankers, LNG compressors, refineries, oil and gas pipelines and billions of internal combustion engines that run only on gasoline. All these will be useless, rusting hulks—dead-loss investments—when their fuels run out.

As this species-wide idiocy plays itself out, suffering and death will multiply globally. So before our species’ energy conversion is complete, we will no doubt suffer at least a partial suigenocide.

But it probably won’t be total. As bad as unrestrained positive feedback in global warming might be, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which some small part of our species would not survive, at least somewhere above the Arctic Circle. (Once the Antarctic ice caps melt, the South Polar land area will be far too small to support more than a tiny fraction of the world’s present population. It will also be divided from the rest of the world by a larger and much more impassable Antarctic Ocean.)

So there you have it. Two things could lead to our species’ suigenocide this very century: nuclear war and runaway global warming. The risk of the first is high now, but it should be easier to contain. It is, after all, the project of one man.

Runaway global warming is much harder to stop for two reasons. First, it’s based on real needs and industrial dependence spread across our globe. Second, the delusions and vested interests that keep us from addressing it effectively are widespread and entrenched. The number of people we have to convince or depose from power to avert this kind of suigenocide is incomparably larger than in the case of nuclear war.

Whatever the cause, and however limited in scope it may be, suigenocide, like suicide, is not a good survival strategy. If our species is to face these never-before-encountered risks, it’s going to have to act boldly and in unison. It’s going to have to face hard reality, and suppress comforting but false and counterproductive national and racial narratives. It’s going to have to cooperate closely, and on a global scale. It’s going to have to stop pointing fingers and get to work.

Otherwise, intelligent creatures from another star system will some day visit our little blue planet. They will survey the blasted, still radioactive rubble of our great cities, or they will visit the small remains of human civilization, sweltering in what used to be our frozen north. Through whatever orifices they speak, they will say something like, “What a promising two-legged species! This is the saddest case of suigenocide we’ve yet seen in this galaxy.”

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Suigenocide I: Nuclear War

Don’t try to look it up. It’s not in the dictionary. I’ve coined a new word, meaning “group self-extinction.” In the extreme case, it means “species self-extinction.”

It may be a new word, but it’s hardly a paranoid fantasy. We humans now have the power—and the potential—to extinguish ourselves in two ways. The first is a general nuclear war. The second is runaway global warming. Both are real possibilities, and both could actually happen in this, our still-young twenty-first century.

But before we get to the risk of nuclear war, let’s talk about precision.

“Talk is cheap,” goes the old saw. Today, talk is cheap to the point of total debasement. Every liar and fool now has the power to spread nonsense around the globe with a single click. Every day, in myriad ways, we lie. We distort. We exaggerate. We tell tall tales.

So the first thing we have to do in discussing the risk of suigenocide is set some verbal ground rules. Contrary to every trend and practice in our modern media, politics and human discourse, we have to try to be precise.

What the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs in Xinjiang is NOT genocide. As any student of Latin knows, the suffix “-cide” means killing. It comes from the Latin verb “caedere, meaning “to strike down” or “to kill.”

The Chinese are NOT killing Uighurs systematically, let alone en masse. They may have killed a few in battles with alleged “terrorists.” They may have executed a few as terrorists. But they have no grand plan for—and certainly no history of—murdering Uighurs in large numbers.

The Chinese are rounding up Uighurs en masse. They are putting them in concentration camps, subjecting them to forced labor and “re-education,” and trying hard to stamp out their language, their religion, and their unique Asian-Turkic culture. All that’s bad enough. But it’s nothing like the Holocaust, the Turks’ massacre of Armenians, or even what the Japanese did in the Rape of Nanking. What the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang is attempted cultural genocide. It’s reversible, at least in theory, and it’s NOT mass killing.

I stress this point to make an important distinction. The potential for suigenocide by nuclear war is real. It goes far beyond mere attempts on human culture, which anyway is incredibly diverse.

A general nuclear war could really do away with all of us, much as the big meteor did the dinosaurs. If the blasts, firestorms, radiation and resulting rampant cancers didn’t do us in, a “nuclear winter” could.

Serious scientists, who’ve given the matter serious study, believe that an exchange of as few as fifty city-killer nukes could cause a “nuclear winter” much as would fifty or so Pinatubo-level volcanic eruptions. The whole sky would fill with ash and dust, up to the stratosphere. The ash and dust would block the Sun and take several years to settle. The ground temperature would drop precipitously, and there wouldn’t be enough sunlight to grow crops to feed ourselves or our domesticated animals. Most mammals, including us, would die off. Maybe cockroaches and some other insects would survive, perhaps by eating our dead, radioactive flesh.

Now let’s shift gears and discuss prevention. We suppose ourselves to be intelligent creatures. We even call ourselves “Homo sapiens,” Latin for “wise” or “intelligent” Man. If we really were as smart as we think we are, how would we stave off the nuclear war that Vladimir Grozny has repeatedly threatened (if only by implication) to back up his pre-medieval brutality in Ukraine?

The first salient point is the source of this threat. A single one of the nearly seven billion of us is threatening suigenocide. Why? He wants to force us to allow his partial genocide of Ukrainians (real, not cultural) and his violent theft of their land. As rational creatures, how should we respond to that threat?

Perhaps one good threat deserves another. I have no inside knowledge of recent American work on small nukes. All I know is that the Obama Administration undertook a huge project to develop and enhance them, in reliability, safety and accuracy. That was a project which I enthusiastically suppported, in part because it replaces doomsday scenarios, i.e., suigenocide, with more limited and even personal deterrence.

I also know that we Americans have stealth aircraft, and that, in general, aircraft (especially bombers) are larger than missiles. They are much larger than independent nuclear warheads as they approach their targets, stripped of their big booster rockets. So a stealth warhead should be easier to make, in theory, than a stealth bomber.

If the Russian Dictator threatens to go nuclear, suppose we threaten, in response, to send a stealthy small nuke his way. We could aim it wherever he is: his family dacha outside Moscow, his opulent palace, as revealed and located by Alexei Navalny, or even his office in the Kremlin. We could send him a single small nuke, or maybe two for good measure, announcing our intention, but not the timing, in advance.

If we eventually did launch one or two small nukes, the response would be up to Russia's generals, and the people who actually control the launches, to decide. They might allow the blast to remove a leader they probably don’t like much now anyway. They might try to launch likewise against our own leader. Or they might respond with Nuclear Armageddon and suigenocide.

An enemy as sophisticated technologically as Russia can distinguish between the radar signatures of one or two stealthy small nukes and a general launch of many missiles in an all-out nuclear war. So its taking the last and most terrible option seems unlikely. The first response, doing nothing, also seems unlikely, although in the chaos after a sudden, unexpected decapitation of the Russian government, it hardly seems impossible. The middle response—coming after our own leadership likewise—seems most likely. To reduce the risk of that option, we might put our top command in the air, in unmarked stealthy plains, continuously for a few of days, with mid-air refueling. We might have to vacate Washington D.C. for a time.

It’s horrid even to have to think about stuff like this in our twenty-first century. One would have thought that tearing an enemy city down, killing or enslaving all its inhabitants, and sowing the fields with salt went out with Rome’s annihilation of Carthage over two millennia ago. But here we have Putin doing the same sort of thing to major cities in an entire country, Ukraine, in our new century. The only notable differences are: the vastly greater destructive force of modern weapons (even conventional, non-nuclear ones), mass displacement of ordinary people as a substitute for enslaving them, and refraining from sowing the fields with salt, if only because Putin wants to steal Ukraine’s breadbasket and mineral riches for Russia.

The question before us is whether we have to suffer or condone pre-medieval brutality on a twenty-first-century scale in order to avert suigenocide. I think not. One way or another, we must rid ourselves of leaders who foist that brutality on modern civilization. Otherwise, we allow a single deranged man literally to control the world.

It would be best, of course, for the Russians to clean their own house; but we should do what we must. Small-nuclear decapitation of a deranged tsar would be a good model for deterring Kim.


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Three Little Words of Truth

“Здесь Вам врут” (zdyes’ Vam vrut: “here they lie to you”) — one of five antiwar slogans displayed by producer Marina Ovsyannikova on her hand-written sign on Russian Channel One, one of Putin’s chief video propaganda organs.

Russian is not an economical language. In most cases, the English translation of something in Russian is more compact, in both letters and syllables.

But not in this case. Here the Russian beats the English by twelve letters to sixteen, three syllables (and words) to five. In the long run, this three-syllable slogan may become as important to humanity’s survival as the better-known three little words “I love you.”

What mattered more than their pithiness was courage of the woman displaying them. Ms. Ovsyannikova is (or was) a producer on Russia’s Channel One, one of Russia’s few TV elite.

Already she’s been fined the equivalent of about $280. But she could lose her job and prestigious career. Unless she has a high-level protector, she could spend up to fifteen years in prison for daring to call Russia’s current atrocity in Ukraine a “war” rather than a “special military operation,” the dictator’s Orwellian phrase. In the teeth of all these threats, she refused to recant after being arrested. She’s a real heroine.

Her hand-lettered sign said it all, well and briefly:

“NO WAR” (In English)
“STOP THE WAR” (In Russian)
“DON’T BELIEVE THE PROPAGANDA” (In Russian)
“HERE THEY LIE TO YOU” (In Russian)
“RUSSIANS AGAINST WAR” (In English)

The great English novelist and prophet George Orwell knew that words matter, that truth matters. In his classic novel 1984, he predicted the advent of “Newspeak”—not far from today’s “spin.” He also penned these fictional Party slogans: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.”

Such a seer was Orwell that his fictional slogans would have served Vladimir Grozny well. As in Orwell’s fiction, Putin tries to achieve internal stability and “peace” in Russia by making war on its neighbors. He tries to convince his people that free elections, free markets and free speech will make them slaves to the West. He acts as if he believes that ignorance of his gratuitous butchery of civilians in Ukraine will make his people strong and unified. He is the consummate spook: his whole career has been based on lies, deception and violence in the shadows. He is Orwell’s Big Brother come to life.

But we in the West must never conflate the Russian people with Putin, his spooks or his oligarchs. The Russian people are victims, not perpetrators. This includes many of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, some of whom never knew where they were headed until their tanks and troop carriers crossed the Ukrainian border. (Then some deserted.) They are all hapless tools of a system that has not changed much since the days of Ivan the Terrible (“Ivan Grozny”) and that has kept repeating its human depredations through Lenin, Stalin and now Vladimir Grozny. Communism was never much more than a false intellectual gloss on a continuing tradition of brutal autocracy.

That’s what’s so remarkable about Marina Ovsyannikova. In the midst of the latest version of oppressive Russian autocracy, and with the entire machinery of Russian state oppression arrayed against her, she stood up and honored the truth. She shows what all Russians could be if given the chance.

The late, great South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu also knew. After Apartheid had ended, he named his vehicle for achieving national racial harmony the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” (Emphasis added.) He understood that there can be no justice and no peace without truth. From the Nuremberg Trials accounting for the Holocaust, through Archbishop Tutu’s seminal work, to the still-incomplete apologies of Turks for the Armenian Genocide and Japanese for the Rape of Nanking, the truth is a precondition for understanding, for justice and for peace.

So we in the West must value, honor and nurture truth-tellers. If they flee, we must accept them as refugees. We must feed and house them and educate their children. And we must trust them to pipe their truth back into their sorry countries, through friends, family, distant relatives and (when possible) the media.

The Russian people are not our enemies. Nor are they enemies of the West. The self-sustaining Russian autocracy is, and so is Vladimir Grozny, as its current dictator. The good-hearted, if often inebriated, Boris Yeltsin, who picked him out of obscurity, could never have foreseen what he would become. Now The West, the Russian people, Ukrainians and we Americans all have a common interest in seeing him gone. And the Russian people, first and foremost, are the best (and perhaps the only) ones to make that happen.


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Cheap Attack Drones for Ukraine

In peacetime, democracies spend far too much on “defense.” Their weapons systems wax big and expensive because producing them is a profitable business, not a matter of national survival. So the weapons systems of democracies like the US and Turkey are a poor match for Ukraine’s needs today.

Consider drones, for example. Our American “workhorse” attack drone, the Predator, reportedly costs $40 million per unit (including the ground control unit). In comparison, Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 attack drone, now well tested in battle, is a bargain. It reportedly costs between $1 million and $2 million per unit. But that’s still a lot of money.

This high cost is not just a matter of funding, although that matters, too. When things cost so much, a whole bureaucracy grows up around their production, distribution, preservation, use, maintenance and repair. Losing a single unit, whether by accident, sabotage, poor logistics or enemy action, is a big deal. And producing nations worry about their capture, lest enemies and potential enemies reverse-engineer them. The whole chain of supply and use becomes expensive and complicated.

Nations at war have different needs. In its Soviet guise, Russia started developing the AK-47 automatic rifle toward the end of WWII. The great inventor Kalashnikov finished its development in 1947, hence the “-47” suffix. (The “AK” stands for “Avtomat Kalashnikova,” or “Kalashnikov’s automatic rifle.”) Although inspired by German submachine guns, Kalashnikov drove for simplicity, reliability, ease of use, economy and hardiness. His weapon is still in use 75 years later, showing how well he did his job.

Could Ukraine do something similar with concept of attack drones? Could the Western world, as Ukraine’s backer and supplier? I think so.

America’s standard-issue fragmentation hand grenade, the M67, reportedly weighs less than a pound. It costs an average of $45. Match it up with a delivery drone costing $450 or less, and you have a lethal attack drone. For the price of one predator, you could buy nearly 89,000 of these drones. For the price of one Bayraktar TB2, you could buy at least 2,000.

At that price, it doesn’t much matter if a whole truckload of them gets blown up by the enemy. They meet the two most important criteria for wartime: they are affordable, and they are expendable. And they can be transported easily in any vehicle capable of carrying a load and/or a person.

In comparison to our shoulder-fired missiles—our Javelins for tanks and our Stingers for planes and helicopters—these drones would make their users less expendable. As long as each drone has a camera, its user doesn’t need a direct line of sight to the enemy. Users can be safe in a bunker, or they can control the drones while running and dodging through a forest or urban environment.

A quick Google search for “delivery drone” reveals over a dozen private companies that now make drones capable of carrying an M67 grenade. Any electromechanical engineer worth his or her salt could jury-rig a way to let the drone operator remotely pull the grenade’s safety pin and/or release the trigger while flying the drone.

Though hardly optimized for tanks or aircraft as targets, a grenade going off near an aircraft’s windshield or an open tank cover would do some damage and likely retard an attack. And with a little more electronics and coordination, these drones could fly in swarms, perhaps even with a single operator. So they would have all the theoretical strategic advantages of “accurate weapons,” which tend to get the bad guys while sparing civilians and useful infrastructure.

Cheap killer drones have still another practical advantage. The hand-held control modules for their delivery-drone components are small, light, cheap and designed for use by people with minimal training. Some are even designed for children. That’s exactly what Ukraine needs right now for its forces of non-veteran volunteers, including civilians and foreigners.

Why aren’t we supplying these cheap, accurate weapons to Ukraine right now? Beats me. But with quick action from the Pentagon, willing private drone suppliers and (if needed) Congress, we might get these weapons to Ukraine in time to do some good. I can’t think of any better way, more quickly and at reasonable expense, to make a difference in Vladimir Grozny’s vile war of choice against civilians in Ukraine. And supplying these weapons would not risk World War III, or even expose the designs of more expensive drone systems.


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Globalization and Ukraine

For over half a decade, the Western world has grappled with the discontents of modern, globalized civilization. The notions of “free trade” and “maximizing productive efficiency” had led the West to sell its jobs and its factories to low-wage nations like China. Then the West tried to content itself with so-called “service” economies, even lauding them as “advanced.”

So the West’s so-called “developed” nations’ came no longer to invent or make much. Instead, their workers took up shuffling paper, handling money (mostly virtually), cooking and serving each other food, giving each other haircuts, and suing each other. (We leave aside the arts, which may be the best part of a “service” economy. You can’t eat, drive or live in a book, play, song or painting.)

This state of affairs provoked exploding angst among production workers. Especially in so-called “developed” nations, it spurred vast political movements, now dubbed “populism.” It put our Demagogue in the White House. It motivated the rise of autocrats in Hungary, Poland and Turkey. After four centuries of the Western Enlightenment, it has led thinkers to foresee its end.

Bewitched by facile economic abstractions that fail in practice, the West has made scant progress in winding globalization down. The Demagogue imposed non-targeted, blunderbuss tariffs that were mostly counterproductive. Corporate CEOs started thinking about the cost and vulnerability of long supply chains, and how to bring some production home. National-security mavens started worrying about what might happen, in a conflict, to a nation that makes hardly anything tangible anymore.

But the process of de-globalizing was barely getting started, moving with all the speed of molasses in winter. Then, in the space of two weeks, Vladimir Grozny, with his atrocity in Ukraine, literally blew globalization up.

His means was as simple as it was unexpected: a gratuitous, unprovoked imperial war of aggression against Ukraine, replete with massive bombardment of civilians and civil infrastructure. Long after the end of the bloodiest war in human history, plus the development of nuclear deterrence, no one could foresee such a thing.

Virtually no one did, with the possible exception of a few hard-headed realists in our CIA. Most analysts were looking for some clever bluff or diplomatic ploy, not a bloody, inhuman war against civilians and civil infrastructure. But one man—the modern world’s most complete autocrat after Kim Jong Un—brought all this to us out of his very own aging and fevered brain.

Now that it’s happened, and now that its consequences are inescapable, we should all think hard about it. What wider consequences does it portend?

As always, it’s worth looking first at the positive. Believe it or not, something positive may well come out of Putin’s Atrocity.

By blowing up globalization in the space of two weeks—albeit limited to Russia and its eleven time zones—he gave the lie to all the myths and specious “economics” that have held the world in thrall for two generations. Well-justified outrage, fear and hate have motivated us in the West to do in weeks what careful rethinking might have taken decades.

Take oil first. It’s the most “globalized” of commodities, perhaps save wheat or rice. As I analyzed recently, it’s going to run out globally, certainly this century, most probably within about two decades, give or take. So the “dress rehearsal” for runout caused by Putin’s Atrocity is a valuable lesson for a global society addicted to oil, especially the West.

How senseless is this addiction? Once our species’ energy transformation is complete, distributed solar, wind and much safer nuclear energy (perhaps including energy from nuclear fusion) will all be generated locally, near where it’s used. If necessary to even out local variations in sun and wind, and if battery and other storage is inadequate, some energy may be transmitted a few hundred miles or so. Transmitting it, as distinguished from generating it, will be relatively costless: the only cost of transmitting electricity over an existing grid is the cost of maintaining that grid.

In contrast, consider what we do with oil today. The bulk of production comes from a few places with the huge oil reserves and (to put it delicately) unusual politics: Iran, Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. From these places, it gets shipped thousands of miles around the world to wherever it is burned.

Think numbers a bit. We humans use over 100 million barrels of oil per day. A barrel of oil masses 136 kilograms and weighs about 300 pounds. So every single day, rain or shine, we ship 13.6 billion kilograms of oil—13.6 million metric tons, or 15 million Imperial tons—thousands of miles all over the world, and all just to burn them up. As just one example, that’s a mass/weight equivalent to half a million cars, every single day.

And what happens to all this oil once it gets where it’s going? It gets refined, at the cost of additional pollution and waste of energy. Then it gets burned up, polluting our atmosphere and warming our planet in way that will render our climate, weather, sea levels and coastlines unrecognizable, in about the same time as it takes for oil to run out.

This whole process produces nothing tangible or lasting, at least not directly. It can assist in the making of things, mostly by moving their raw materials and their parts about. But most of the oil gets burned up in transportation, including transporting people and the oil itself, as well as its refined products. How much sense does that make, just from the perspective of waste, let alone climate change?

Through the global reaction in isolating Russia, Putin’s Atrocity has shown us just how unnecessary all this is. There will be price hikes. There will be market dislocations and instabilities. But we will get through this, with a will and a determination borne of outrage at Putin’s Atrocity. (We will get through it quicker and better if we have a rational plan to transition to non-fossil energy, with national fossil reserves appropriately conserved and protected and used sparingly during the transition.)

Once we do, this experience will have shown us just how quick a transition away from global dependence on a few petrostates could be. If we can make that transition in weeks for one big petrostate, when motivated by well-justified outrage, fear and hate, can we do it in a few years, globally, when motivated by our own rational, economic self-interest and our own long-term survival and happiness? The jury is still out.

Endnote: the Two Kinds of Globalization There are two kinds of globalization: the globalization of things, and the globalization of information. The reasoning in this essay applies only to the former.

Today it makes little sense to ship things—especially consumable commodities like oil—around the globe, except perhaps in the start-up phases of new industries. For an example, consider rare, non-consumable commodities like the lithium, cobalt and rare earth metals used in electric cars. With enough clean energy, these materials can be recycled from exhausted products. American business is already doing that with lithium-ion batteries for electronic products and for Tesla cars. With enough green energy, similar mined products will be needed only to establish an industry; once the industry reaches national or regional scale, recycling can maintain its “steady state.”

Some products require only commodities available locally, such as cement, iron, or other common minerals. These products can be made with best practices transmitted (perhaps for a royalty) from anywhere on Earth. Even now, for example, we can imagine houses and buildings being built by 3D printing, with plans transmitted from anywhere, as could the 3D printers themselves.

Information is another story. Our species’ global system of telecommunication, including undersea cables and satellites, is already well established, although not yet entirely global. The primary costs involved in it now are those of maintenance. The marginal cost of sending a message or video clip anywhere on Earth is practically zero.

So globalization of information—news, science, technology, know-how, or the arts—is practically costless and extremely valuable. In fact, it was (paradoxically) the globalization of information, in the form of news about Putin's Atrocity, that appears to have motivated the coup de grace for globalized trade in oil.


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Ukraine and Energy Transformation

Believers like to say “God moves in mysterious ways.” I’m not much of a believer, but that saying did pop into my head recently. For over half a century, we Americans (and everyone else) have pontificated, postured and procrastinated about oil running out and global warming. Now Vladimir Grozny’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine may finally get us actually to do something about them.

The huge recent surge in oil and gasoline prices—at the mere suggestion of a boycott of Russian oil—is a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Some time this century, oil will run out globally. When it does, price surges like those we are now suffering will come on steroids. But they will be different: they will come in waves, and they will be permanent, not temporary. As oil runs out globally, those regions and nations that still depend on it will compete against one another for a rapidly dwindling supply. Other wars, for resources, may result.

Oil wells don’t come with little gauges telling how much oil is left in the reserve below. They can, and they do, run low and run dry unexpectedly. This is especially true for fracked oil, which is extracted, under high pressure, from an impossibly complex maze of underground cracks, fissures and tiny pools.

Petrostates like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela own unusually big underground pools. In theory, they could constantly measure their remaining reserves by seismic and other means. But in practice they don’t. Why bother doing that, when it would cost money, take lots of time, and distract scientists and engineers from finding yet more oil, and you’ve already got the world’s biggest reserves anyway?

Of course they measured reserves when they started drilling, mostly decades ago. If they do any new reserve accounting today, they simply subtract cumulative production from their original reserve estimates and rely on that. (Accountants can do that, so they don’t have to bother the scientists or engineers.) Unfortunately, this shortcut doesn’t account for: (1) original error; (2) the vast improvement of reserve-measuring technology in ensuing decades; or (3) something unknown happening underground, which lets the oil slowly seep away. And bear in mind that all OPEC members have political and financial incentives to exaggerate the size of their reserves, because their bargaining power in OPEC depends on it.

So how quickly is oil really running out? In 2014, I made numerical estimates based on then-current known (and reported) reserves and then-current global consumption rates. Anyone can check my math with today’s figures; it’s not calculus, nor even algebra; it’s mostly arithmetic. Following is my original table, showing global-reserve lifetimes under various assumptions, but updated to account for the fact that eight years of consumption have gone by since then:

Working Life of All 2013 Global Oil Reserves Under Various Assumptions
(Based on 2013 global consumption, compounded at 1% annual increase)

Assumption	Total Global Reserves (Trillion barrels)	Remaining Life of Reserves after 2022 (years, rounded)
OPEC’s figures for Non-OPEC reserves are 50% low	1.774	35
All OPEC’s reserve figures are accurate and 100% recoverable	1.49	29
OPEC’s reserve figures for OPEC are 40% high or 60% recoverable	1.008	19
OPEC’s reserve figures for OPEC are 70% high or 30% recoverable	0.646	10

NOTE: These reserve-life estimates are probably at least 10% high because they are based on a 2013 global consumption estimate of 90.376 million barrels a day, while our own Energy Information Administration projects global consumption as over 100 million barrels a day for 2022.

These numbers assume that all non-OPEC oil reserves, as estimated by OPEC in 2013, are 100% recoverable. They speak for themselves.

Is using 2014 numbers now crazy? Probably not. I haven’t taken the trouble of collecting news reports of all new oil discoveries since then. But I don’t think I really need to. At a global consumption rate of 100 million barrels a day, a billion-barrel discovery would forestall run-out for ten days. If you were a condemned man on Death Row, and the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for 10 days, how much would you rejoice?

Bear in mind that a whole year’s stay of execution would require a discovery of a previously unknown reserves of 36.5 billion barrels. A ten-year reprieve would require 365 billion barrels, a over third of a trillion barrels. How many discoveries like that have you read about in the last eight years? (I don’t recall any.)

When the end comes, it will come suddenly, in months, not years. Why? Because the big producers have those huge, shallow, underground pools of oil. When they run dry, they’ll run dry suddenly, just like your car’s own gas tank. There won’t be any way to pump them for more oil, like a fracked well. And even if there is, it’ll be expensive and take time.

Think your nation’s entire industrial infrastructure will have time to adapt? Think your family will? And what will we all do with all those suddenly useless “stranded” assets: drilling rigs, oil pipelines, oil tankers, oil refineries, and gas stations, not to mention all the cars, trucks and buses that run only on gasoline?

That’s why what’s going on with gas prices right now is a good dress rehearsal for our species’ future if we don’t wise up. As the ancient Greeks used to say: “the suffered is the learned.”

To avoid prolonging this essay, I’ll make just one more point. It’s about what engineers call “positive feedback,” and what journalists call “a tipping point.” There are several known mechanisms of positive feedback in global warming, which I’ve discussed in several essays (the best are this one for an overview, and this earlier one with more detail). Suffice it to say that positive feedback, in the same time frame for oil running out, could render our Earth’s present climate, weather, sea levels and coastlines unrecognizable. Scientists suspect this is already happening, but they can’t say exactly when and how fast, because the most important underlying phenomena (permafrost melt, dissociation of deep-sea methane hydrates, and ice-shelf collapse) are hard to study and measure.

So if you think that what Putin’s vile war is bringing your nation and your family is an economic apocalypse, think again. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If Putin’s damned war jogs us all to get serious about using solar, wind and nuclear energy, we might just avoid a far greater and more global apocalypse by the skin of our teeth. Give the Devil his due (but don’t buy his oil).


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Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine . . .

Where will this series end? What comes next? Already an announcer on YouTube speculates that Moldova, which is not a NATO member, will be next.

What comes after that? Will Putin try to re-establish the Warsaw Pact and the Iron Curtain by force? Will he try to retake the Baltics, risking nuclear war with the West?

There are differences among victims, of course. Chechnya lies in the Caucasus region, where Russia has been fighting a low-level war with Islamic peoples for two centuries. Georgia wasn’t battered much because it didn’t offer much resistance; it mostly knuckled under.

Syria was the worst case, at least so far. With Assad’s blessing, and at his urging, Russia has turned Syria into a land of graves and rubble. An estimated 400,000 to 606,000 Syrians have been killed, with 6.8 million made external migrants, and 6.7 million internally displaced—in all more than half of Syria’s pre-war population. This is Vladimir Grozny’s version of “peace”: the peace of the grave.

Syria was a “special case” because it proved a breeding ground for terrorists. So even the West tacitly agreed to participate in the mayhem. Will Ukraine fare a bit better because it’s mostly Christian and white, and because its people are historically Russians’ “brothers”? We’re about to find out.

But the indiscriminate bombing of non-military targets in Ukraine’s cities already suggests a return to form: a brutal, well-established modus operandi. Bomb and terrorize civilians and get much of the population to flee. Make rubble of cities and historical sites if you have to. Once there is no one left with the will or courage to fight, install a pliant strongman as leader. Arrest, jail and/or kill anyone who resists, and be sure the strongman does the same.

This is the new imperialism, discovered by the Nazis but “perfected” in the twenty-first century by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Vladimir Grozny.

Putin today is not the same man who, years ago, spoke before the German Bundestag, in fluent German, about a peaceful trading zone from the Atlantic to the Urals. He’s not the same man who, without hesitation, once named “poverty in Russia” as the most shameful thing in his realm. Already he has wrought immense destitution and human suffering in and around his battered vassal states. And as near-global sanctions begin to bite in this new war of his, the Russian people will feel some destitution, too.

Whatever he may have been decades ago, Putin has become a monster. (That’s why he’s a poster boy for term limits.) He revels in personal dominance. He’s circulated a clip of him throwing judo experts. If you look closely, you can see that he moves like what he is: an old man of seventy. The stunt would be laughable if he were not the leader of a nation with a world-destroying arsenal of nuclear weapons and a recent record of repeated, brutal, unrelenting conquest. This is precisely the result that Boris Yeltsin hoped to avoid when he picked Putin as his successor. (For a glimpse at Yeltsin's now-failed aspirations, watch this speech he gave before the US Congress in 1992; for a representative short clip, set the timer at 5:00 for the Russian and 6:36 for the English translation.)

In mathematics, an infinite series can lead to a discrete, stable result. In human affairs, there can be no end to the misery. If this possibly infinite series of brutal imperial conquests continues, the pain and suffering will only get worse. There is no end to this series but what people of good will can impose with their own courage, patience and endurance.

While we Americans were embroiled in our bloodiest war ever—the one to free our slaves—English philosophers were developing a simple rule for our species. Let’s try to maximize human happiness. Later the formula became seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. That principle, less than 160 years old, marked the height of the Western Enlightenment. With it came the greatest flowering of science, art, human freedom and human happiness in our species’ recorded history.

The Enlightenment had a corollary, implicit in the preamble to our Constitution. The purpose of government is “promot[ing] the general welfare” of the people: their health, education, fairly paid and productive labor, and their general “pursuit of happiness.” Its goal is not imposing a rigid abstract system—any abstract system, whether Communism, socialism, or “limited government” that replaces a single strongman like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Putin with an untouchable class of self-focused oligarchs. Pursuing the people’s happiness has no neat, abstract general solution; it’s a practical affair that requires constant, devoted attention and ingenuity, day by day.

Now the Enlightenment is under siege, not just by Russia, but worldwide. I’m comfortably in retirement, although far from a rich man. In the last two years, I’ve spent more than enough to buy a good car on political causes to beat back strongmen at home and abroad. I’ll continue to do so. And I’d be proud to pay more in taxes to help people who are suffering from high oil and gas prices, to subsidize their buying or renting electric cars and/or switching to electric heating, and/or to build massive LNG terminals to ship our fracked gas to Europe, and so keep Germany and the rest of the EU warm in winter and committed to resisting brutality.

In the last century, our own “Greatest Generation” fought to keep the Enlightenment’s flame burning. They fought in a war that killed half a million of them and fifty million worldwide. They, their loved ones and the whole world paid a big price for waiting and temporizing.

So this time we must heed the lessons of the past. This time, we must stop the infinite series at Ukraine, while we still can do so without a wider war. This time, we must pay the much smaller price of completely boycotting Russian fossil fuels. We and Europe must not buy or use a drop of Russian oil or a cubic meter of Russian gas until Russian forces leave Ukraine.

Will there be economic pain? Of course. But the pain will only get worse if we wait. It may shift from economic pain to the real, physical pain of a wider war and devastation. There is no gain in waiting to confront bullies.

Although cut short by his assassination, JFK’s presidency was one of our most significant ever. He urged us to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” He faced the very same foe, in its Soviet guise, under threat of nuclear Armageddon. About a year later, he personally paid the ultimate price.

Today, all we have to do is forego the use of Russian fossil fuels, which are helping ruin our climate and are running out anyway. And those of us who can afford to do so can help alleviate the economic pain of those who can’t. The alternative is to let Vladimir Grozny win and risk a new Dark Age of bald, imperial brutality. Such a Dark Age would relegate smaller countries to a future of cluster bombs and small nukes, and our overheating Earth to the law of the jungle.

Endnote: Killing Two Birds with One Stone

In one respect, Russia’s naked, unprovoked aggression in Ukraine might be a blessing in disguise. It might motivate our species, especially our own country, to decarbonize more quickly.

As I re-read my post above, the depth of my genuine emotion surprised me. The urge to confront Putin by boycotting Russian oil and gas completely came from deep within.

But then it hit me: the markets for oil and gas are global. In order to confront Putin’s aggression, we have to cut down on our use of oil and gas from whatever source. If we don’t, our continuing purchases will just help raise global demand and therefore the prices that Russia gets for its fossil fuels.

It’s an odd thing about our species. We are far more eager to fight a human enemy than to solve an abstract but real problem that threatens our happiness and even our survival. I guess that’s in our DNA.

But in this case we can kill two birds with one stone. We can resist Putin’s war of aggression economically, at the same time as we put our transition to carbon-free energy into high gear.

This dual purpose also works politically. Republicans have resisted energy transformation obstinately. But they are also looking for ways to belittle President Biden’s response to Putin’s aggression. Now, when boycotting Russian oil and gas seems the best means of responding without putting our own troops at risk (or extending NATO), they have little choice but to get on board, too.

Or at least that’s the logic of the situation. We can best fight Putin’s aggression in Ukraine by putting our own energy transformation on steroids, and so can Europe. And it all makes good long-term sense, because oil and (at least in the US) gas are going to run out in a few decades anyway.

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A War to End War?

Could this horrible, gratuitous war that Tsar Vladimir Grozny has dreamt up to slake his imperial lust be a war that ends war?

Of course that’s not his intent. Nor is it anyone’s expectation, at least as expressed publicly so far. But could it be an outcome?

For that to happen, three big things have to go right. All are possible, maybe even probable. So far, news reporting has focused only on one of the three: sanctions. That focus may be due to reportorial ignorance and neglect. Or it may be deliberate and strategic. Or it may derive from the fog of war.

But the outcome of this war in fact depends on three grand trends of technology and politics in our modern globalized society. If all go right, they could make war virtually obsolete, at least among nation-states. (Terrorists are another matter.) Let’s analyze.

1. Sanctions. The first and best publicized of the three relevant global trends is global interdependence. For all its discontents, including the rising populism of displaced workers, globalization has made the world a village.

The economic theory is simple and well known: comparative advantage. In a globalized free market, each nation and region makes and sells what it can make and sell best and most efficiently.

Germany and Japan make great cars and sell them globally. Taiwan makes semiconductor chips. Russia makes nukes, tanks and planes, and not much else. (It doesn’t make oil and gas; it drills for them.) The US makes smart phones and software and a lot of other high-tech stuff, but not much basic hardware. The US and England make and interchange money, dominating if not controlling international finance. They and the West are now working to replace Hong Kong, after China killed its freedom. And China? It makes just about everything else, including (until recently) most of the PPE to fight the pandemic. Its comparative advantage, now fading, has been cheap labor.

This state of affairs may be awkward and uncomfortable. But it’s real. How do we know? Because the pandemic’s supply-chain bottlenecks, still ongoing, showed us. China’s absorption of its own PPE production caused shortages in the US. Taiwan’s lockdowns and shipping difficulties caused shortages of semiconductors that halted car production in the US, Canada and Europe. And so on.

The whole idea of sanctions is to exploit this global interdependence in two ways. First, sanctions can use mutual interdependence to apply geopolitical pressure short of war. Second, maybe sanctions can even stop a war, including this one, by applying severe economic pain to an aggressor such as Russia.

Now that Germany under Olaf Scholz has jumped on board, the current sanctions put on Russia are the broadest, deepest and most complete ever applied. They will cause immense economic pain, not just currently, but for the foreseeable future. And they may hit Russia especially hard because its technology and productive capacity are focused primarily on military products and goals, including malware for cyber warfare.

Vladimir Grozny has accumulated big foreign reserves. But when they run out, are exhausted by unforeseen wartime expense, or frozen in sanctions, the parts of the Russian economy that depend on foreign technology and/or products will grind to a halt. A nation like Russia, with 145 million people, the world’s eleventh-largest economy, and a traditional focus almost entirely on military gear, simply does not make enough general-use products on its own to advance and develop normally in isolation.

So sanctions will hurt Russia badly, even if China doesn’t participate. The trouble is, they act slowly. Vladimir Grozny is self-evidently hoping that Ukraine will give up (or collapse) and become a Russian satrapy before Russia’s reserves, and its people’s patience, run out. That’s where the second grand trend comes in.

2. Accurate weapons. In several essays going back fourteen years (see, for example, 1, 2, 3, and 4) , I’ve explored the concept of “accurate weapons.” Simply put, these are weapons that maximize the impact on the bad guys and minimize what we euphemistically call “collateral damage”—the killing and maiming of innocents, especially civilians.

The rise of accurate weapons is not just a narrow military, technological or geopolitical issue. It’s a sea change in the whole idea of war.

During the first world war, a German thinker (but not a very good one) came up with the idea of “total war.” The basic idea was that, since civilian populations feed, house, train and support soldiers, they are also “the enemy” and fair game for killing. That thinking motivated the dirigible bombing of London in the first world war. In the second world war, it produced the Nazi V-2 attacks on London, the US fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and ultimately the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war.

The reductio ad absurdum of this specious reasoning was the idea of general nuclear war. For a while during the Cold War, the entire populations of the US and the Soviet Union were held hostage, quaking in fear of a war that could self-extinguish our species. You can also consider modern terrorism a corollary of “total war,” since it focuses not on military installations or arms production plants, but on terrorizing civilian populations.

The idea of “accurate weapons” is a repudiation of both “total war” and terrorism. If you can accurately knock out the missiles, aircraft, tanks and troop carriers that bring aggression and aggressors, you can, in theory, stop a war without civilian casualties and with minimal damage to useful infrastructure. If conditions warrant, you can even stop the war by killing the military or civilian leaders who are leading and/or causing it. (Civilian leaders are protected by diplomatic immunity, but that’s another story.)

Accurate weapons are not just theory. They are real. They include shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons, which drove the Soviets from Afghanistan as early as 1989. That was 33 years ago. Today, they also include shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons and drones. But drones can be inaccurate if badly guided, as the US sometimes did in Afghanistan.

The Molotov cocktails that Ukrainians fighters are even now preparing are also mostly “accurate” in this sense. But Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons, like Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons, can be much more effective against a modern mechanized army like the Russian one now invading Ukraine.

So where are the Javelins and the Stingers in Ukraine? Before the invasion began, Javelins appeared in a US “beat your chest” promotional video published to counter the Russian’s “beat your chest” videos of its massive mobilization just outside Ukraine’s borders. But, since the invasion began, there’s not been a word or image of them. If every able-bodied Ukrainian defender had a Javelin or a Stinger, or both, this would be a very short war. So where are these critical weapons?

I can think of three reasons why we don’t know. In order of declining encouragement for Ukraine and the West, they are:

First, news reporters, having earned their spurs reporting wars against terrorists, haven’t yet learned to focus on what matters in a war like this one. Second, Ukraine and the West may be keeping these weapons highly secret for tactical and strategic reasons. Third, NATO may have kept these weapons out of Ukraine for too long, in the vain hope of reducing tensions and resolving the conflict by diplomacy. Now NATO may have to get them inside Ukraine and in the right hands while Russian forces control the skies and the highways.

The War in Ukraine is, in part, a war of threats and shadows. So perhaps it’s best that we in the public don’t know. But these accurate weapons might be the unspoken reason why the Russian “blitzkrieg” has slowed down. We can only hope so.

3. Nuclear weapons. One good reason not to advertise the use of accurate weapons is to lower the risk of Russia escalating the conflict. Vladimir Grozny—Vlad the Threatener—has referred obliquely to nukes at least twice. So it behooves us to analyze cold-bloodedly what, if any, role nuclear weapons might play in this conflict.

If goes without saying that no one—not even Vladimir Grozny—wants to start a general nuclear war. No one wants to extinguish our species, including himself. And that, scientists tell us, is precisely what a nuclear war involving the exchange of just fifty or more big nukes would do. Besides ubiquitous fallout and radiation, the most likely means of extinction would be causing a general failure of agriculture in a “nuclear winter.”

According to arms-control treaties, each of the US and Russia has about fifteen hundred strategic nuclear weapons. So an unrestrained nuclear brawl could extinguish our entire species—and probably all life on Earth—about sixty times over. That would make “overkill” an understatement.

Putin’s recent rants about Russian victimhood and Ukrainian “nazification” can make him seem unhinged. It’s possible the impression is deliberate, designed to give weight to his many threats. But if you look at his two high generals, glaring at him across a long table with anything but admiration, you get another impression entirely. Very likely, they would refuse to execute any order to start a general nuclear war, just as our own Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Mark Milley, apparently was preparing to do when it looked as if our Demagogue was about to go rogue and risk war with China.

Political leaders today have little military experience, let alone with nukes. Putin never served. Nor did four of our last five presidents, including Joe Biden. George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard but never got close to combat.

Ronald Reagan served, but due to poor eyesight only domestically. He never saw combat. As president, he was so incurious as to wait for his second term before asking his generals how many people would die in a general nuclear exchange. When they told him 600 million, he contacted Mikhail Gorbachev and got serious about disarmament.

So our species’ first line of defense against a sui-genocidal nuclear exchange is the top officers who would be asked to start it. Regardless of nation or tribe, they are practical men who know what the outcome would be. I think, in a clinch, we can count on them to stop species self-extinction, the formal chain of command be damned. It was, after all, a senior Soviet naval officer—the commander of his flotilla—who vetoed the use of Russian nuclear torpedoes in 1962 and probably saved our species from nuclear Armageddon.

The limited use of small nukes for “tactical” purposes is another matter. Small nukes have been around a long time, since early in the Cold War. Scant reporting in recent years have suggested that both the US and Russia have tried to “perfect” them, for possible use in limited applications, without triggering Armageddon.

Apparently small nukes can be made in many sizes, with yields ranging from those of conventional weapons up to two or three kilotons (equivalent of TNT), or about a fifth the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. There have also been hints that their radioactivity can be limited, so that they operate much like conventional explosives, but smaller, lighter and more fearsome. We can assume that Russia has such weapons, including those that can be fired from artillery, as it spends most of its government research money on weapons.

Would Russia use such weapons to grab or keep ahold of Ukraine? That is the real substance of Vladimir Grozny’s threats. Even he is not crazy enough to start a general nuclear war, though he may want his adversaries’ people to think he is.

Several considerations make even limited us of small nukes unlikely. First, once a nation uses nuclear weapons, it’s hard to know when to stop. There is no policeman in the field to say, “You can fling a nuke up to 200 tons of TNT equivalent, but not 201 or more.” Even if there were, whether an adversary would obey the “law,” and, if so, how carefully he would follow it, are open questions. Before using any nuke in war, any leader must cross a real red line, beyond which military and political risks and uncertainties rise exponentially.

Second, no nuke is an accurate weapon if actually used, unless perhaps used to target a crazed leader in his bunker. The whole reason for having nukes is that they make a big bang. Given the state of Ukraine’s military, whose concentrated facilities can, in theory, be taken out with conventional explosives, a leader who used nukes would be incurring all the risks and uncertainties discussed above for little additional advantage.

Third is the risk of radioactivity. While clever design can reduce the residual radioactivity of a nuclear blast, it can’t eliminate it entirely. Radiation and radioactive byproducts are intrinsic to the nuclear fission process that nuclear weapons use. Why take the risk of radiation with half-lives of tens of thousands of years (or more), especially when you intend to occupy and control the place you bomb?

An otherwise puzzling event suggests as much. Early in the invasion, a large and powerful contingent of Russian troops went straight for the quarantined radioactive zone around the notorious, melted-down nuclear power plant at Chernobyl. Its apparent intent, shortly realized, was to control the area and exclude Ukrainians.

Why did the Russians do that? What they announced just after the operation’s success provided a hint. They said the area was under control and the highly radioactive material, buried under tons of sand and concrete after the meltdown, was contained. Apparently they had been worried that the Ukrainians, in a last-ditch attempt to deny the Russians access to Kyiv, would use the buried radioactive poison in some sort of dirty bomb.

It says a lot about the Russians that they would even think of that. Wouldn’t it be far less likely that people who live in the area and call it their home would think of such a thing?

But that worry also suggests something else sinister: the Russians apparently want to use the Ukrainian capital, not destroy it. As I suggested in a recent essay, they would like to swallow Ukraine whole.

For all these reasons, Russia’s resort in this conflict to small nukes, like big ones, is unlikely. Putin’s threat is simply another manifestation of his new public personality as Vladimir Grozny. While his general staff would probably not countermand his orders—as they would if he wanted to start a general nuclear war—they would probably put up strong resistance to any such scheme.

* * *

One can never be entirely sure of anything involving Russia, let alone Vladimir Grozny, Vlad the Threatener. From Chechnya, through Georgia, to the streets of Moscow where Boris Nemtsov and a number of journalists were murdered, his career has consistently profited from unpredictable violence. But the logic of the situation suggests that Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine will be decided by conventional means.

In any conventional war, accurate weapons can be decisive. As I’ve argued before, they often favor the defender, in this case Ukraine. So the best thing that the West can do to preserve Ukraine and its people as a separate nation is to make sure the every freedom fighter has a Javelin, a Stinger, or both, ASAP. If the people win this one, as they should, the risk of unprovoked military aggression as a tool of “statecraft” will fade a little further into history.


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