Are We All About to Die?

I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen more discussion and concern about the possibility that we’re all shortly going to die fiery deaths. I refer, of course, to the Ukraine-Russia war. The odds of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia must be at about the highest they’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, though very few seem to be concerned about it.

I guess everyone is so used to nuclear weapons, and they’ve been unused for so long, that we don’t worry about it anymore.

What’s So Bad About Nuclear War?

A few comments about the threat. It is widely supposed that nuclear war would extinguish humanity and possibly life on Earth. I don’t think this would happen. Maybe if the two nuclear superpowers decided to distribute their nuclear attacks across the world in the way calculated to kill the most people, they might be able to kill everyone. But they would not do that. For instance, there’s no reason why either side would bomb Africa, South America, Australia, various island nations, or most of Asia.

The most dire predictions for consequences of nuclear war are based on the idea of “nuclear winter”, wherein so much soot is thrown into the upper atmosphere that it blocks out a significant portion of the sun’s light for an extended period of time, causing large drops in global temperatures. On the plus side, this could counteract global warming! On the downside, crop failures would lead to mass starvation.

Nuclear winter is controversial, but even under pessimistic accounts of the cooling effects, I think some people would still survive. People are clever, they would adjust the crops that they tried to grow and where, and they would in general do what they had to do. So it’s highly probable that at least some people would survive.

Still, a nuclear war could easily be the worst disaster in history, killing hundreds of millions of people and pretty much destroying Russia, Europe, and the U.S. So let’s just say that it’s well worth avoiding.

How Big Is the Risk?

Of course I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s not a negligible risk. I said that it’s the highest that it’s been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in one way, things are worse now: During the Cuban Missile Crisis, both Kennedy and Khrushchev definitely wanted to avoid war. (Even so, Kennedy thought there was about a 1/3 probability that they would fall into it anyway.) Today, we don’t really know what’s going on in Putin’s mind. I think he is less predictable and less sane than Khrushchev.

You might say: “Why would Putin start a nuclear war? It would obviously be against his and Russia’s interests. He must be bluffing.” But before he invaded Ukraine, you could have used the same sort of argument that he wouldn’t invade Ukraine.

It’s not even clear that it will be against his interests. Obviously it would be against the interests of Russia and the rest of the world. But assume that he’s a complete monster and doesn’t give a crap about that, because that’s probably the case.

Here’s a scenario. Putin has cancer (actually true— https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/vladimir-putin-losing-sight-given-27090195). Say he’s deteriorating rapidly and knows that he’s doing to die soon, no matter what he does. As he nears the end of his life, he decides that he doesn’t want to go out losing to America. He decides that if he has to go, he’s going to take millions of his enemies with him; if he can’t win the war, he’ll make sure everyone loses it. So he orders a massive nuclear strike on Ukraine, maybe Western Europe too, maybe the U.S. too.

No normal, sane person would do such a thing. But Vladimir Putin is literally a serial killer who got control of a country. And I don’t mean that figuratively; I mean “literally” literally (https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-people-putin-is-suspected-of-assassinating-2016-3, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/18382598/chilling-clues-seven-russian-oligarchs-murdered-putin/). So it’s sort of like predicting what Jeffrey Dahmer would do if he had 6,000 nuclear missiles and nothing to lose.

So it’s really not particularly farfetched that this could be the end of Western civilization. And of course, it’s absolutely insane that we have a social system in which one serial killer has the power to murder hundreds of millions of people. But that is in fact the system we have. After we get through the current crisis, assuming we get through it, all countries involved should make it their top priority to end that system, i.e., to ensure that no one person has the power to order the launch of nuclear missiles.

What to Do?

I don’t know what the solution is, exactly. But I think that a long time ago — like maybe when U.S. intelligence first learned that Russia was planning an invasion, before the invasion actually happened — the Biden administration should have tried to arrange a series of talks involving Russia and Ukraine to see if some kind of settlement that didn’t involve a war could be reached. I don’t know if that would have worked. Some people think Putin just wanted to ensure that Ukraine would not join NATO, in which case that seems like a worthwhile deal. Others think he really wanted to take over Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet empire, and so it wouldn’t have worked. But you’d think we could at least have given it a try for the sake of maybe avoiding a nuclear war. You know, given the hundreds of millions of lives at stake and all.

Of course, you might worry (and if not, you should worry) about the incentive effects. If we gave Putin what he wanted to avoid war, that could have set a precedent under which other evil dictators (or even this same one) make further demands with further threats of war. So obviously we want to think hard about what we’re willing to give in on.

However, bear in mind that a nuclear war is enough to ruin your whole week. If we accidentally stumble into even one nuclear war, that’s the end of our society. We won’t have the chance to subsequently reap the benefits of deterring future aggression. Maybe the Australian historians in centuries to come will look back at what happened and reflect that it was unwise to push the Americans. But that won’t help us because there won’t be any Americans anymore.

Normally, in repeated interactions (like a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma), it pays to demonstrate your seriousness by sometimes retaliating for bad behavior even when doing so produces no short-term benefit for you. It pays to prove that you can react out of anger. But the rules are just different with nuclear superpowers, because one interaction gone wrong has the potential to end the whole game.

What we should probably do is try to appease Putin for the time being, while we wait for him to die of cancer. Of course, having him assassinated would be ideal; the problem is the serious risk that the plan would fail and then actually provoke a war.

If, however, Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, the U.S. should retaliate in kind — not an all-out attack, but a nuclear attack of comparable magnitude on some Russian military assets. The reason is that otherwise, Russia would learn that they can use nuclear weapons without fear of reprisal, which increases the chances that they would launch further nuclear attacks.