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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