I define “nuking ourselves into oblivion” as “waging a sufficiently large-scale nuclear war that currently functional political institutions and physical infrastructure cease to exist in most of the world.” In other words, the collapse of civilization in most of the places that currently enjoy it. (I include the caveat “in places that currently enjoy it” because much of the Congo doesn’t really have functioning institutions or infrastructure now).
I don’t think we’ll ever do it - that historical moment has passed. There are precisely two powers with the capacity to wreak the kind of civilization-ending havoc described above: The United States and the Russian Federation. And both powers are very, very serious about making sure the balloon never goes up. Even at the height of the Cold War, the US and then-USSR put a lot of very serious effort into making sure they avoided an accidental war - they set up hotlines, signed arms control treaties, and so on. And even when they had every ideological reasont to want the other wiped from the face of the Earth, they refrained for fear of mutual annihilation.
The Russian Federation today has no ideological reason to wish the United States any particular harm. Oh, they’d probably like us to be a bit less of a world power - but that’s about the extent of it. And likewise with us. The NEW START treaty is going to further reduce nuclear stockpiles, resume inspections on both sides, and so on. The upshot of all this is: There’s no reason to think the Russians would ever launch a full-scale nuclear strike, and nor would we.
That leaves the second-tier nuclear powers - and frankly, none of them have enough nukes to end civilization. Not even the PRC. Nor do they have any real reason to build up a stockpile on that scale - a few dozen warheads are quite a sufficient deterrent for any real-world use, and are easier to control and maintain than a massive stockpile. Besides, China isn’t the USSR - it doesn’t have any sort of aspiration to export The Revolution on a global scale.
My view is that there may well be a nuclear exchange someday, and it would truly suck for the people involved. Maybe Pakistan and India will go at it, or North Korea will decide to go out with a bang. One could even imagine more fantastical scenarios - Iran hitting Jerusalem, China hitting a US carrier group defending Taiwan, and so on. But none of these are civilization-killing events.
Does anyone think otherwise? Has the “nuclear apocalypse” moment passed, or is this still something in the realm of possibility?
We’re closer today than we’ve ever been to a nuclear exchange. The government of Pakistan could topple at any moment. History tells us it will topple at any moment, in fact.
That doesn’t mean they’ll go balls-to-the-wall-launch-all-the-bombs, but it’s not a very comforting thought, either.
Now, the countries with big enough stockpiles to nuke significant portions of the world are much farther from doing so, and so in that sense we’re further from oblivion.
I don’t think that the ball going up in Pakistan (or even on the Korean peninsula, which seems more likely to me atm) would destroy all civilization, as I don’t see it being more than a really nasty local disaster. The US, Russia, China and the EU (all are major nuclear powers btw, at least in so far as they can project their nuclear arsenal around the world instead of just locally or regionally, not just the US and Russia) are unlikely in the extreme to jump in to either conflict with nuclear weapons blazing. Even if Korea goes completely pair shaped I don’t see China willing to go to the mattresses for lil’ Kimmy and his merry men. Any exchange of nuclear weapons would probably be something like North Korea lashing out at South Korea and possibly Japan, and then being completely wiped out by conventional or nuclear weapons from everyone else. It would be ugly (VERY ugly) in terms of human suffering and destruction (plus the huge disruptions in trade), but it wouldn’t end civilization the was the OP is asking…IMHO anyway.
No…I think we are probably past the point where it’s likely to happen, at least in the short or medium term. In the long term it’s hard to say. As the US declines as a major power that’s going to shift things from the current US-Centric world to a multi-polar one. I know that folks like Der Trihs think this will be a marvelous thing, but I’m less sanguine about it. Plus there is the potential that as we advance technologically, nuclear weapons might become more powerful or more usable…and that might mean we have future shots at wiping each other out using the damned things (think of what an anti-matter bomb could do if they ever worked out how to manufacture the stuff in any sort of usable quantity).
I’d put my money on something else finishing us off though, at least right now. A really big rock, some sort of nasty astronomical event, a high mortality plague, 2012…
I didn’t bother mentioning North Korea because I honest doubt they have the capability to deliver a warhead any farther than Seoul. Granted, that would be rather unpleasant for the people of the Koreas but not a disaster on the scale of an Indo-Pakistani exchange (and certainly not on the scale of a US-Soviet one).
Honestly, I doubt it. Nuclear weapons are not tools of war so much as bargaining chips. They are a way of bullying one’s way into positions of power. I doubt Iran or North Korea or anyone else short of psychotic terrorists want nuclear weapons to actually use them, So much as have them as a deterrent to invasion and a way of using the threat of nuclear war as a way of bartering better deals for themselves.
Thankfully, it seems to me that in spite of their collective ignorance and selfishness, Most of the leaders of the world know you cant conquer the wold by destroying it. Even demented fanatics like Ahmadinejad must see that.
Of course it is possible. I’m not savvy enough to argue the probability. It could happen. It might happen. If it does, suffice to say that none of us will be online to discuss it further.
Another way of saying this is that nuclear weapons are not strategic or tactical weapons in the conventional sense, but tools of political policy
The problem comes in when you have a leader that doesn’t want to conquer but wishes instead to destroy. I don’t think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad falls into this category despite his fanaticism, but it wasn’t at all clear that Yuri Andropov wasn’t willing to push the button in his brief term as the terminally ill General Secretary if he felt that the integrity of the Warsaw Pact was threatened, a few that we later to be discovered was shared by several in high levels of the Soviet military.
There have been several previous threads on this topic:
[THREAD=585739]How will human society end?[/THREAD]
[THREAD=13139387]Nuclear Non-Proliferation Facts [/THREAD]
[THREAD=584512] Was the U.S. ever in danger of losing the “Cold War”? [/THREAD]
[THREAD=558825]Is there any point to the U.S. having nuclear weapons? [/THREAD]
[THREAD=546038]best place to avoid getting killed in a nuclear war [/THREAD]
[THREAD=545661]Nuclear weapons in non-MAD scenarios[/THREAD]
I’m expecting a nuclear strike within the next decade. Possibly America taking out North Korea, or an exchange between Israel and Iran, or just possibly Britain on Argentina.
We did use them, albeit not so much to defeat the Japanese (who by that time were so hobbled as to hardly pose a threat) but to demonstrate to the Soviets the power of our new weapons. Unbeknownst to the United States, the Soviets had already obtained the basic information to build fission devices and were already on their way to independently designing and building thermonuclear weapons (H-Bomb or just “The Bomb”).
In general, nuclear weapons, especially when employed against a power with anything like parity, are not effective on the battlefield without serious and spiraling repercussions. The notion of tactical nukes, to be used in limited fashion against conventional forces, is severally flawed when one considers that an opposing power would then feel required to respond in kind. In short, nuclear weapons are, regardless of yield or classification, highly destabilizing, with implications for use that extend far beyond the focus of battlefield or theater commanders.
If history has taught us anything it is that things have a way of spiraling out of control in, with hindsight, stupid fashion. Look how WWI started.
For all the bitching about the US being the bully on the block the US has had a (largely) stabilizing effect on the world. Actually the US + the USSR did. Sure they would set off brush wars and act like jerks but neither side would let things get truly out of hand towards a global style conflict. With the USSR folding the world, perversely, became a more dangerous place. There was no balance on the “other side” to pull countries short. The Soviets would not have abided North Korean nukes unless those nukes were under Soviet control.
Perversely because nukes are destabilizing they are stabilizing. That whole MAD thing…it works. There are many countries that are willing to go to war but none I can remember who went to war with a nuclear armed opponent (at least nothing more serious than a minor border dispute and I am not even sure about that).
Nukes destabilize things if used. They do that so well they tend to restrict their own use because it is borderline crazy to employ them except as a last ditch measure.
Even at the height of the Cold War a nuclear exchange would’ve been limited mostly to the northern hemisphere. To wipe out civilization worldwide would require every country to have a large nuclear arsenal. This probably won’t happen for awhile.
A sufficiently large exchange of nukes in the Northern Hemisphere would put enough radioactive mess in the atmosphere as well as enough dust in the atmosphere to destroy human life on the planet…or at the very least reduce it to such an extent that anything that was left would not be called a “civilization” by our standards (think back to living in caves and such).
It is a remote possibility, but remote at best. The best scenerio is the subcontinent of India.
North Korean nukes are farther along than we previously thought, and while they can do a lot of damage it isn’t a fatal attack for humanity.
I can see Pakistan and India escalating to something more of a disasterous loss of life.
The problem with an all out nuclear attack would be the aftermath. It would take a long time to recover, for various reasons from destruction of educated areas of the world, to the fact a lot of the minerals mined easily are gone and what we’re mining now takes a bit of doing to extract. In other words it’s not like people find gold just sitting around anymore like they did in the gold rush days. That kind of mineral mining is gone.
If you want to do a “what if” on nuclear destruction, you’re best bet is to start with an exchange of India vs Pakistan and work from there, on ways to destory humanity to there
That the “whole MAD thing…it works,” is highly debatable even as a theoretical discussion, and in practice we can point to several instances where the doctrine of assured destruction (the “mutual” part was added by critics of the policy) utterly failed to prevent a chain of events that potentially could have led to an exchange, and it was only the actions of a few individuals, and occasionally just one, who acted as peripeteia to reverse a doctrinal course of destruction. To understand this better, the reader needs to know the history of assured destruction as a doctrine, the theory and assumptions behind it, and how it has worked (and exceptions to working) in the past.
Assured destruction as a doctrine emerged out of systems analysis, which was an attempt to take the theory of operations research (mathematical modeling of complex interrelated activities) and apply it to large multidisciplinary systems in the real world. Operations research had proven to be extremely valuable during WWII in a number of contexts, including production of aircraft and weapon systems, troop deployments, bombing campaigns, et cetera. Instead of relying on a blind comparison of overall numbers, it looked at the influences behind those numbers, e.g. X planes attacking Target A are more effective than 3X planes attacking Target B. It served to identified strategies that worked from those that didn’t in a fairly rigorous and highly quantitative manner, and was extremely valuable in determining what factors or activities were “long poles” in an overall plan, which has become what we now know as critical path method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) used to develop the US Navy’s Polaris/Poseidon/Trident Fleet Ballistic Missile system.
System analysis was intended to take this to a new level, applying it to systems that had qualitative goals and metrics rather than rigorously defined schedules and production quotas. Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. “Mac” McNamara was often viewed by the general public as being the father of applied systems analysis, and although he was hardly the first person to develop or apply the use of statistical game theory he was probably the first to implement it on an industrial scale, first as a predictive statistician for the XXI Army Air Force firebombing campaign in the Pacific, culminating in the effective destruction of Japanese industry, then as a rising star and ultimately first non-family president of the Ford Motor Company (he famously “designed” the Ford Falcon using systems analysis principles which became Ford’s highest profit vehicle for several years running), and then by invitation of John F. Kennedy (and later Lyndon Johnson) as the US Secretary of Defense, where Mac applied systems analysis to the Cold War conflict with the Warsaw Pact, modernization and efficiency in weapons procurement, and the Viet Nam war.
Even by Mac’s later reflections (as can be found in In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam the method was often suspect in achieving or even understanding the ultimate result. Systems analysis is predicated upon the assumption that you know enough about all of the influences of a system to categorize and quantify all of the significant drivers (both independent and interrelated) of the system. This often turned out to not be the case. For instance, the bombing campaigns in Viet Nam were enormously successful in destroying great swaths of land, disrupting conventional logistical channels, and otherwise killing the hell out of a lot of people. They did nothing, however, to improve the US position in Viet Nam, and in fact further cemented to the population that the US was just another in a long line of conquerors to be repelled by any possible means.
In weapons procurement, Mac’s attempts at cross service harmonization to reduce development cost and simplify logistics produced a few notable successes and a number of very visible failures. In retrospect, systems analysis was great at figuring out what strategies didn’t work, but not so good at sifting through workable strategies. We’ll go into more detail about systems analysis with regard to the nuclear triad and assured destruction below, but suffice it to say for the moment that the same criticisms apply.
In terms of the theory of assured destruction, it appears quite reasonable on the surface; a bargain between parties not to send each others’ souls to hell. However, there are a number of assumptions that underlie assured destruction that are anything but rigorous. Specifically, the following list of assumptions must be satisfied for the doctrine of assured destruction to be successfully applied:
[ol][li]All parties must have an infallible way to detect an attack, and an ability to discriminate between a legitimate attack and a simulated or erroneous attack (false positive)[/li][li]All parties must be perfectly rational; they must have all information available necessary to make a credible evaluation of the threat, and must be unaffected by personal bias or ideology; all must believe that the other parties will behave in a similarly rational fashion[/li][li]All parties must be in complete command and control of their weapons; no weapon can be used outside the scope of doctrinal authority and direct command of rational actors[/li][li]All parties must have complete counterstrike or retaliatory capability; no party can believe that they can successfully launch a disarming first strike on another, or contrarily, believe that they can be disabled by such a strike[/li][li]No party can have the ability to successfully defend against an attack such that they will result in significantly superior military or industrial capability following an attack[/ol][/li]
This is certainly a stringent and unlikely list of assumptions. It assumes a high degree of perfection in both knowledge and actors to behave according to a rational script when the consequences of error are complete destruction of one’s life, nation, and ideology. Such assumptions are dangerous even when you completely understand the psychology of “the other side” and can make reasonable predictions about their responses. In the situation that you have less than perfect knowledge–true of any real-world scenario–these assumptions are a house of cards that can collapse with the slightest perturbation.
Actually games, based upon Nash equilibrium theory, demonstrate that this strategy is only marginally stable for two players, and unstable for three or more, especially when there is any real or perceived different in parity (in terms of the effectiveness of an attack). Any party that develops a new and unmatched capability in either attack or defense–which occurred with regularity during the Cold War–instantly disrupts the equilibrium; hence, why we were so afraid of the Soviet Union developing the (thermonuclear) Bomb, the Soviets putting missiles in Cuba, and deployment of the SS-18 ‘Satan’ heavy throw ICBM, even though this only served to match, not exceed US and NATO capabilities. With three or more players, you end up in a Mexican standoff; the smart thing for one player to do is form an alliance or non-aggression pact with another, but in doing so they dilute the effectiveness of the third player, making him prone to preemptive attack.
Mutual Assured Destruction: Doctrine, Strategy, Nuclear Weapon, Deterrence Theory, Nash Equilibrium, Absolute War, Balance of Terror, Counterforce, Doomsday, a critical look at game theory approaches to assured destruction doctrine of Herman Kahn, delves into this in more detail. Kahn himself was a great critic of the supposed unwinnable, much less unthinkable nuclear war. His writings and lectures on the topic formed the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which is not only a hilarious movie but actually good insight into the psychology behind nuclear deterrence and ideologically-driven conflict. Gen. Turgidson, played by George C. Scott in arguably the best performance of his career (and one that he duplicated with a straight face in the later Patton) demonstrates both the insecurity and paranoia of applied assured destruction; that in not knowing the true outcome we tend to interject our desired solution, (“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”), and in not understanding our opponents we tend to assume the worst of their intentions, (“Sir, you can’t let him in here. He’ll see everything. He’ll see the big board!”)
As for application, while it is true that the United States and the Soviet Union (and their attendant partners/puppets) didn’t engage in a nuclear exchange, there are a number of instances in which doctrine and policy pointed strongly toward this as the optimum or required solution. In addition to the Cuban Missile Crisis (averted, if McNamara’s recollections can be trusted, by the influence of a minor Cabinet official who happened to have insight into the psychology of Nikita Khrushchev through a personal relationship), the Able Archer 83 exercise, and the Petrov Incident. There were a number of other situations in which the President seriously discussed with his cabinet the possibility of a nuclear exchange, including one initiated by the United States, and no doubt several undocumented discussions among Soviet leadership in addition to the half a dozen known incidents.
The truth is that even educated and well-informed leaders of major nations that have much to lose in even a limited nuclear exchange are often not rational actors, either through emotion, obfuscatory ideology, or lack of specific knowledge and bad analysis (which is what led to the entirely avoidable and unnecessary Cuban Missile Crisis). As McNamara repeatedly pointed out in his post-Cold War assessment of the effectiveness of his own methods, “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.” Nobody may want that, but such things have happened before and will happen again; nuclear weapons make them happen with a speed and lack of reflection that dwarfs conventional warfare. Policies like “Launch On Warning”–the official US policy of initiating a retaliatory attack if a launch is detected–which are intended to enhance the assumptions of assured destruction also remove the opportunity for rationality or assessment of false positive detection failure, and thus are further destabilizing.
Nuclear weapons are inherently destabilizing as actual weapons. The more nations that have nuclear arsenals make it more likely that someone will eventually exercise that capability despite (or in ignorance of) the consequences. As bargaining chips they are moderately useful, although they’re also prone to misuse and proliferation, require onerous security measures, and are generally something we could use less of, though it is doubtful we’ll ever be free of them completely.
I am not dismissing your well written post but at the end of it all it remains that in 60+ years nukes have never been used in war (testing sure).
Yes, there have been occasions where we have come perilously close either by mistake or intent. In the end though the people responsible for pushing the button backed off because the consequences are so extreme they brook no mistakes. As such countries have stepped back from the brink rather than plunge headlong into war. As mentioned WWI is a prime example of a seemingly trivial catalyst propelling much of the world into war (and WWI is a fundamental cause of WWII). Today, those countries would back off even if some dude was assassinated.
More countries with nukes certainly makes things less safe (more opportunity for something to go wrong). The collapse of the USSR did not help in this regard as there is no one on the “other side” keeping their side in line.
Once someone lets a nuke fly then yes, destabilization will be hot on its heels. Nevertheless the huge reluctance of someone to press the button (even nutso regimes like North Korea) does provide a stabilizing influence.
If India and Pakistan did not have nukes I would be willing to wager that they’d have come to blows more often. If Israel was not perceived as having nukes I wonder how much more aggressive their neighbors might have been.
Yes, I see your point, which serves to reinforce the the basic premise that as a policy or strategic doctrine assured destruction is unreliable. The premise of assured destruction is that deterrence is a built-in feature of the system; that all parties will act and react in an informed, rational, long-range self-interested manner such that the system tends to stabilize away from a nuclear exchange. The reality is that we have been at the brink of nuclear war on several known occasions and it has often been a single individual who is not in the direct line of executive command who has averted a response.
Let’s look at a couple of examples. In 1958 the United States deployed PGM-17 Thor IRBMs in the UK and PGM-19 Jupiter IRBMs in Italy and Turkey. This was not only a direct threat to the Russian motherland–something that Russians are historically fearful of–but the inability of the Soviet forces to pose a counterthreat to the United States make the reformist Nikita Khrushchev look politically weak. In response, the Soviets began to build missile silos for SS-3 and SS-4 IRMBs ninety miles off of the coast of Florida in Cuba, which had been recently overthrown by Castro’s Marxist revolutionaries and repelled a CIA backed counterrevolutionary action (the “Bay of Pigs” invasion). The United States photographed and recognized the silos while simultaneously receiving information about purported Soviet missile capabilities from Oleg Penkovsky, the British SIS agent. That information indicated that the missiles were not yet ready to be fielded and that warheads were not on the ground in Cuba; both assertions later proved to be partially or completely incorrect (albeit by no fault of Penkovsky, who relayed information that was either outdated or altered by parties already suspicious of Penkovsky’s activities).
As a result, Kennedy forced the issue to a head with the blockade. Khrushchev, caught between his own hardliners and the threat of nuclear exchange with the United States (which clearly would have come out ahead despite the threat of Soviet missiles), sent two telegrams to the White House; one offered a capitulatory deal, the other threatened dire response. Kennedy and his advisors took the second to be a threat either by Khrushchev or military leaders who had taken over, and his cabinet turned to discussing the parameters of an inevitable war. It was (according to Robert McNamara, and confirmed by others) Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, a senior State Department official who had been ambassador to the Soviet Union and who had spent considerable time with Nikita Khrushchev, who single-handedly persuaded Kennedy to respond to the first message and ignore the second.
While the rest of Kennedy’s closest advisers were talking about inevitable war, a minor functionary with no executive authority essentially prevented the United States from initiating a destructive and pointless war over a weapons deployment that was simple parity for US IRBMs in Europe which themselves were planned to be withdrawn within two years as ICBM forces became available for deployment. Assured destruction didn’t unambiguously succeed here; it failed on a large scope and the crisis was averted by the luck of having a trusted adviser who has special and unique insight into the psychology of the other player.
An even more striking example is the Petrov Incident, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, then a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces, was on duty when the Soviet early warning detection system indicated that a threatening missile was heading toward the Soviet Union. Petrov’s job was to convey this information, and per then Soviet doctrine could have potentially resulted in a “launch on warning” counterstrike. Petrov, however, was aware of bugs with the system and judged the threat to be an error. Had he not done so, the threat would have been elevated. Given the tension of the recent Soviet shootdown of KAL 007 as it ventured over Soviet airspace and the fear of retaliation, it isn’t much of a leap that an assessment of attack could have resulted in a preemptive response to a presumed (but false) attack.
Try another one out for size: from the deployment of the LGM-30F Minuteman II missile with its new Permissible Action Links (PALs) which were intended to limit launch access to only people in authority who had access to the codes, which would be relayed to silo command centers in the case of a launch order. Fearing that communications may be limited, the commander of SAC had the PALs all set to a default number that all “hole rats” knew by heart. As a result, any missile officer could have launched a missile at any time on his own authority. While missile officers were thoroughly vetted to ensure their emotional stability, it was still entirely possible for a single person (or rather, two people as the Minuteman had a “dual key” failsafe) to launch a weapon capable of killing millions of people and destroying a large city.
Pointing to the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union didn’t have a nuclear exchange doesn’t prove anything. A thorough examination of the policy, doctrine, and history of strategic weapons during the Cold War, however, indicates that we were plausibly close to nuclear war on multiple occasions, and it was only dumb luck and single individuals–not the system of (mutual) assured destruction–that prevented escalation. And again, this is with two “rational” players who each recognized the significant losses they would be subject to in war. With three or more players, and particularly minor party players who do not have parity or may be prone to acting in ways that are contrary to their best interests, the strategy of assured destruction is demonstrably unstable.
Yes, we have tip-toed to the brink on a few occasions.
Yet every time that line was not crossed.
If nukes did not exist (at all) what do you think might have happened in the cases you posed?
WWII killed near 50 million people. It was a result of WWI which was started over something very minor and WWI saw another 15 million or so die.
How many people have nukes killed? A couple hundred thousand? Not nice but not close to conventional war so far.
It remains that getting close and not crossing the line shows that nukes have had a stabilizing effect.
Would it be better if they never existed? I dunno…knee jerk reaction would say of course. But sans nukes would the US and the Soviets have come to blows in another World War that killed tens of millions? We can’t answer that but history suggests it probably would have happened.
I have no love of nukes but as a weapon of war they do, perversely, keep the peace.
Well the only reason why we have not done it already it sheer luck. There have been a handful of people who either ignored orders or refused to push the button to launch a nuke. Able Archer, A US destroyer taunting a soviet sub with depth charges during the Cuban Crisis. That Northern Lights test rocket. Now even if one did go off who would do a first attack with 1 missile? No one but still they might attack you out of spite then you HAVE to attack back right?