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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