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.
Oct 30, 2022·edited Oct 30, 2022Liked by Michael Huemer
Something else has been bothering me. Do we have good reason to think Putin’s successor will be less prone to starting a nuclear war? Shouldn’t the fact that he’s shown restraint so far (and for some many years) count favorably in the risk assessment? What reasons do we have for concluding that the next person with their finger on the button will be as restrained as Putin has been so far? Will there even be an accepted single person with that authority, or will be there be an even more terrifying decentralization of launch authority? (This would be more terrifying because it would increase the number of nuclear attack authorizers, which increases the odds of a lunatic and/or idiot launching an attack.) If we survive this, massive arms reduction should be a top priority, as should working to assure reasonable, intelligent, and well-intentioned leaders are in charge of the nukes that remain in the meantime.
I don’t think that is how decentralisation of nuclear launch control works. It’s not ‘multiple people can launch nukes’, but rather ‘a consensus of multiple people’ is required to launch the nukes
That’s a helpful correction. Thank you. I should have used a different term to refer to what I have in mind. I had more in mind a lack of consensus about the procedure, resulting in multiple actors down the chain claiming authority. That doesn’t mean there will be compliance with orders, but it does create dangerous uncertainty.
This view of Putin seems pretty divorced from the empirics.
A review of Putin’s history shows he doesn’t kill people for fun — that his actions are very much consistent with maximizing some combination of self-interest and Russian territorial expansion.
I think some of the misunderstanding comes from the fact that, yes, a Russian nationalist “morality” has almost nothing to do with a utilitarian one.
Even in his utterly-botched Ukraine invasion, Putin has constantly made decisions to withhold firepower when it comes to certain targets and infrastructure. Also look at his deals like allowing grain to flow (just reversed, after Crimea attacks.) These suggest calculated decisions are being made about damage and bargaining chips. It’s evidence against the “madman” narrative. There are also many ways he can escalate before launching nukes against the west.
These things should be considered when estimating probabilities. I’d say 1% of a tactical nuke, and say .1% of striking the west directly. Happy to bet on it, though maybe we’d need to move to New Zealand to avoid survival distortions of the odds.
And I didn't say he killed people purely for fun! But as to nationalism, this whole thing is so severely and obviously against Russia's interests that it's hard to call him a Russian nationalist.
I don’t spend much time trying to figure out what foreign policy would be reasonable for the US to adopt in Ukraine, because there has been nothing reasonable about the policy so far. Why should I expect them to change?
Just an alternative scenario: assuming that the dictator in RF does not personally launch a nuke as this task would be carried out by nuklear weapons' technicians. Ordering such a strike would indeed be against the interests of Russian population (as is much of what putins been doing lately) and would therefore hardly be popular. Besides, ordering a launch of a strategic ICBM would indeed signal desperation and loss of control to the circling vulchers. Loyalty is bought and coerced at the Kremlin. And those who for whatever reasons support putins reign now are quite ready to turn on him at the first possible sign of weakness. But not to be the ones to start nuking the world themselves but to restore and secure their own wealth, prestige, power. The persons actually operating the launch would likely also not be excited to sacrifice themselves to carry out the final horrific crime of a desperate dictator. They'd probably be weighing possible outcomes of their choice A) becoming a known war criminal, imprisoned or killed, forever losing their family and any hope to live a normal life or B) avoiding such devastation, wiggling out without being held responsible, going unnoticed or maybe even being recognized as a hero who prevented a disaster and receiving praise and other awards for their courageous act. Not a very difficult choice. The Russian elites may say they hate the West but they still own their vacation homes there, send their kids to school there, jeep their money in western banks. So if Putin ever reached this level of desperation to seek blowing up the world as his last act, ignoring the danger to his own children, he'd probably end up alone, stamping his feet and getting ignored and then assassinated shortly after.
Besides- judging by countless recent- and earlier- revelations regarding the state of russian military and weapons, I would be surprised if Russian nukes actually worked. They're probably rusty, missing many parts that were stolen and sold, their warheads filled with ants.
Hey there, great article! Thanks so much for shining a light on nuclear weapons. (see my substack for 100 pages on the subject).
I don't know what will happen in Ukraine regarding nukes. I'd guess not for now, but who knows. I've made the very same speculation about Putin getting cancer, was fun to see it here as well. You're right, there are conditions under which the MAD doctrine can fall completely apart. The MAD doctrine assumes we are rational, but if that were true, we would have never mass produced these weapons in the first place. Also, on multiple occasions we've come within minutes of launching nuclear war BY MISTAKE.
The one thing I'm clear on is that it's not possible that we're going to keep nuclear weapons around forever and never use them. It's not a question of if, but when. It's literally insane that this is not a major topic of ongoing conversation.
I will have to disagree that we should respond to a nuke used by Putin with a nuke attack of our own. It would be wiser to simply wait, and let Putin's crime really sink in with the global community. Let the media feast on it for months. And then respond with a conventional attack. If we go nuke against nuke, we would be lowering ourselves to Putin's level, and a great many people will conclude we're equally guilty.
Thanks again for this article, you've made my morning. Subscribed.
Hi Mike. The nuclear winter modeling was based on Cold War nuclear warhead inventories, missile inventories, and destructive power per warhead. All have dropped dramatically since the end of the Cold War. In terms of warhead count, the US has about one-sixth its peak (about 5,000 vs 31,000). It's similar for Russia. This is mostly due to successive arms reduction treaties from the 1980s through the 2000s. The biggest drop was during President George W. Bush's administration, and it's flattened since.
The models Carl Sagan and others worked with assumed much larger numbers of ICBMs for both sides than now exist, far more warheads per ICBM, and much bigger warheads. All we have now are 450 creaky ICBMs from the 1970s with one warhead each. We have more firepower on ballistic missile submarines, but much less than before, and the warheads are significantly less powerful than during the Cold War.
Some warheads are *variable yield* – they can set the yield from say five kilotons to 150 or 300 kilotons. (Five kt is much less than Hiroshima/Nagasaki.)
Many or most bombs both sides had during the Cold War were 1+ megatons. Tsar Bomba was 50+ megatons, and the Soviets tested it *outside*, and we tested a 15 megaton bomb *outside* ... We had 500 25 megaton bombs (never tested – the B-41 gravity bomb; it doesn't use gravitons, just falls from a bomber). Just seven of those exceeds the power of our entire existing ICBM fleet.
The reason the warheads are less powerful is that they're far more accurate than in 1960s-70s. Knowing you'll be within 200 meters of a target vs. a mile or two makes a big difference. Nuclear bombs are less destructive than I think most people assume. Even a one megaton bomb won't vaporize everything for miles around. But it the aggregate boom of our inventories is maybe 1% what it used to be (very likely much less than 1%), then we'd have to model it from scratch. I assume we've learned a lot about the relevant atmospheric and other sciences since then, as well as modeling.
If your argument stops at "is intrinsically moral/immoral", then I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with it. A basic *reality standard*, where we situate ourselves in reality, appraise a context, etc. would sweep that away when it became obvious that we would do extremely bad things, like get millions of people killed, if we went around doing stuff because of academic-style assertions that someone was "unusually evil" and appeasing them was "intrinsically immoral". That's not a serious philosophy for humans or other sentients.
Getting to "unusually evil" would be challenging, and take a lot of work. You'd probably need to know a lot about Putin and Russia. That will be challenging if you didn't already know a lot, since the Russian side is heavily censored, and US media are extremely biased such that they're effectively extensions of the Biden administration. (As Chomsky noted, the RT app is gone, lots of pressure to pull Sputnik. Even worse censorship in the EU.)
I didn't realize this until I saw the most chilling article I've ever seen at the NYT, or any American media. They reported the murder of 30-year-old female Platonist philosopher Darya Dugina in Moscow like they'd report gas prices (she was murdered by the Ukrainian government). They quoted US government sources saying that while her murder was "strategically useful" or something, it was annoying to the US government. (It was clear they were writing the story because the US government told them to.) The only other thing the Times said about her was that she "shared her father's worldview". My God. The Ukrainian government official they quoted actually used the word "murder" to describe their act – another first that I wouldn't write off as an English fluency quirk. I've never seen anything like this. The leftist commenters were fully behind it. That's all it took – a year or less of programming by the US government and its media organs, and poof, they lose their basic human outrage and opposition to murder. (Her father, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, is supposed to be bad, maybe "unusually evil". Biden admin got Amazon to *ban his books*, though they eventually brought back his book on Heidegger.)
Before we'd get to "unusually evil" for a distant world leader, we'd probably decide it wasn't a useful label or appraisal anyway, since we can't do anything with it. It's also acontextual, like academic philosophy is generally – it strips all knowledge and information about things like geopolitics, the histories of countries, the actual goals humans have, particularly the humans here (Putin, other Russians, Ukrainian leaders, Biden, EU, etc.), America's goals, short-term and long, infinite strategy questions, other forces and trends worldwide that might bear on all of this, the capabilities of the Russian military, the capabilities of the US military, NATO, and how much Americans and other humans should care about or invest time in forming strong opinions on arbitrary wars (all wars are arbitrary by default until we have reason to elevate them to non-arbitrary status, and then their importance is finite, and our appraisals will ideally be shaped by the facts, context, all of the above).
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will directly affect the lives of everyone around the world. Russian regime and army are committing atrocities and genocide daily. Stopping them now is crucial to maintaining a measure of peace and prosperity in the US (along with many other places).
Comments like this have convinced me that liberals pose an existential risk to the continued survival of humanity and must be systematically exterminated in order for concepts like "good" and "evil" to continue to have meaning.
Slavery doesn't need me to shill for it; slavery is and has been the natural condition of most men in most times and places. Freedom is a precious gem - one that you and yours would extinguish in a fit of petulant, narcissistic rage. You are a child, fit only to make the decisions of a child. Try to grow up.
Something else has been bothering me. Do we have good reason to think Putin’s successor will be less prone to starting a nuclear war? Shouldn’t the fact that he’s shown restraint so far (and for some many years) count favorably in the risk assessment? What reasons do we have for concluding that the next person with their finger on the button will be as restrained as Putin has been so far? Will there even be an accepted single person with that authority, or will be there be an even more terrifying decentralization of launch authority? (This would be more terrifying because it would increase the number of nuclear attack authorizers, which increases the odds of a lunatic and/or idiot launching an attack.) If we survive this, massive arms reduction should be a top priority, as should working to assure reasonable, intelligent, and well-intentioned leaders are in charge of the nukes that remain in the meantime.
I don’t think that is how decentralisation of nuclear launch control works. It’s not ‘multiple people can launch nukes’, but rather ‘a consensus of multiple people’ is required to launch the nukes
That’s a helpful correction. Thank you. I should have used a different term to refer to what I have in mind. I had more in mind a lack of consensus about the procedure, resulting in multiple actors down the chain claiming authority. That doesn’t mean there will be compliance with orders, but it does create dangerous uncertainty.
This view of Putin seems pretty divorced from the empirics.
A review of Putin’s history shows he doesn’t kill people for fun — that his actions are very much consistent with maximizing some combination of self-interest and Russian territorial expansion.
I think some of the misunderstanding comes from the fact that, yes, a Russian nationalist “morality” has almost nothing to do with a utilitarian one.
Even in his utterly-botched Ukraine invasion, Putin has constantly made decisions to withhold firepower when it comes to certain targets and infrastructure. Also look at his deals like allowing grain to flow (just reversed, after Crimea attacks.) These suggest calculated decisions are being made about damage and bargaining chips. It’s evidence against the “madman” narrative. There are also many ways he can escalate before launching nukes against the west.
These things should be considered when estimating probabilities. I’d say 1% of a tactical nuke, and say .1% of striking the west directly. Happy to bet on it, though maybe we’d need to move to New Zealand to avoid survival distortions of the odds.
1% and 0.1% sound reasonable.
And I didn't say he killed people purely for fun! But as to nationalism, this whole thing is so severely and obviously against Russia's interests that it's hard to call him a Russian nationalist.
I don’t spend much time trying to figure out what foreign policy would be reasonable for the US to adopt in Ukraine, because there has been nothing reasonable about the policy so far. Why should I expect them to change?
Just an alternative scenario: assuming that the dictator in RF does not personally launch a nuke as this task would be carried out by nuklear weapons' technicians. Ordering such a strike would indeed be against the interests of Russian population (as is much of what putins been doing lately) and would therefore hardly be popular. Besides, ordering a launch of a strategic ICBM would indeed signal desperation and loss of control to the circling vulchers. Loyalty is bought and coerced at the Kremlin. And those who for whatever reasons support putins reign now are quite ready to turn on him at the first possible sign of weakness. But not to be the ones to start nuking the world themselves but to restore and secure their own wealth, prestige, power. The persons actually operating the launch would likely also not be excited to sacrifice themselves to carry out the final horrific crime of a desperate dictator. They'd probably be weighing possible outcomes of their choice A) becoming a known war criminal, imprisoned or killed, forever losing their family and any hope to live a normal life or B) avoiding such devastation, wiggling out without being held responsible, going unnoticed or maybe even being recognized as a hero who prevented a disaster and receiving praise and other awards for their courageous act. Not a very difficult choice. The Russian elites may say they hate the West but they still own their vacation homes there, send their kids to school there, jeep their money in western banks. So if Putin ever reached this level of desperation to seek blowing up the world as his last act, ignoring the danger to his own children, he'd probably end up alone, stamping his feet and getting ignored and then assassinated shortly after.
Besides- judging by countless recent- and earlier- revelations regarding the state of russian military and weapons, I would be surprised if Russian nukes actually worked. They're probably rusty, missing many parts that were stolen and sold, their warheads filled with ants.
Hey there, great article! Thanks so much for shining a light on nuclear weapons. (see my substack for 100 pages on the subject).
I don't know what will happen in Ukraine regarding nukes. I'd guess not for now, but who knows. I've made the very same speculation about Putin getting cancer, was fun to see it here as well. You're right, there are conditions under which the MAD doctrine can fall completely apart. The MAD doctrine assumes we are rational, but if that were true, we would have never mass produced these weapons in the first place. Also, on multiple occasions we've come within minutes of launching nuclear war BY MISTAKE.
The one thing I'm clear on is that it's not possible that we're going to keep nuclear weapons around forever and never use them. It's not a question of if, but when. It's literally insane that this is not a major topic of ongoing conversation.
I will have to disagree that we should respond to a nuke used by Putin with a nuke attack of our own. It would be wiser to simply wait, and let Putin's crime really sink in with the global community. Let the media feast on it for months. And then respond with a conventional attack. If we go nuke against nuke, we would be lowering ourselves to Putin's level, and a great many people will conclude we're equally guilty.
Thanks again for this article, you've made my morning. Subscribed.
Hi Mike. The nuclear winter modeling was based on Cold War nuclear warhead inventories, missile inventories, and destructive power per warhead. All have dropped dramatically since the end of the Cold War. In terms of warhead count, the US has about one-sixth its peak (about 5,000 vs 31,000). It's similar for Russia. This is mostly due to successive arms reduction treaties from the 1980s through the 2000s. The biggest drop was during President George W. Bush's administration, and it's flattened since.
The models Carl Sagan and others worked with assumed much larger numbers of ICBMs for both sides than now exist, far more warheads per ICBM, and much bigger warheads. All we have now are 450 creaky ICBMs from the 1970s with one warhead each. We have more firepower on ballistic missile submarines, but much less than before, and the warheads are significantly less powerful than during the Cold War.
Some warheads are *variable yield* – they can set the yield from say five kilotons to 150 or 300 kilotons. (Five kt is much less than Hiroshima/Nagasaki.)
Many or most bombs both sides had during the Cold War were 1+ megatons. Tsar Bomba was 50+ megatons, and the Soviets tested it *outside*, and we tested a 15 megaton bomb *outside* ... We had 500 25 megaton bombs (never tested – the B-41 gravity bomb; it doesn't use gravitons, just falls from a bomber). Just seven of those exceeds the power of our entire existing ICBM fleet.
The reason the warheads are less powerful is that they're far more accurate than in 1960s-70s. Knowing you'll be within 200 meters of a target vs. a mile or two makes a big difference. Nuclear bombs are less destructive than I think most people assume. Even a one megaton bomb won't vaporize everything for miles around. But it the aggregate boom of our inventories is maybe 1% what it used to be (very likely much less than 1%), then we'd have to model it from scratch. I assume we've learned a lot about the relevant atmospheric and other sciences since then, as well as modeling.
I mean, if almost all people are evil (which is plausible), then maybe a nuclear war would be good!
Question: Does being amoral make a person evil or does a person only become evil when doing wrong?
If a psychopath never did anything wrong out of self interest, do we consider him evil?
If your argument stops at "is intrinsically moral/immoral", then I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with it. A basic *reality standard*, where we situate ourselves in reality, appraise a context, etc. would sweep that away when it became obvious that we would do extremely bad things, like get millions of people killed, if we went around doing stuff because of academic-style assertions that someone was "unusually evil" and appeasing them was "intrinsically immoral". That's not a serious philosophy for humans or other sentients.
Getting to "unusually evil" would be challenging, and take a lot of work. You'd probably need to know a lot about Putin and Russia. That will be challenging if you didn't already know a lot, since the Russian side is heavily censored, and US media are extremely biased such that they're effectively extensions of the Biden administration. (As Chomsky noted, the RT app is gone, lots of pressure to pull Sputnik. Even worse censorship in the EU.)
I didn't realize this until I saw the most chilling article I've ever seen at the NYT, or any American media. They reported the murder of 30-year-old female Platonist philosopher Darya Dugina in Moscow like they'd report gas prices (she was murdered by the Ukrainian government). They quoted US government sources saying that while her murder was "strategically useful" or something, it was annoying to the US government. (It was clear they were writing the story because the US government told them to.) The only other thing the Times said about her was that she "shared her father's worldview". My God. The Ukrainian government official they quoted actually used the word "murder" to describe their act – another first that I wouldn't write off as an English fluency quirk. I've never seen anything like this. The leftist commenters were fully behind it. That's all it took – a year or less of programming by the US government and its media organs, and poof, they lose their basic human outrage and opposition to murder. (Her father, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, is supposed to be bad, maybe "unusually evil". Biden admin got Amazon to *ban his books*, though they eventually brought back his book on Heidegger.)
Before we'd get to "unusually evil" for a distant world leader, we'd probably decide it wasn't a useful label or appraisal anyway, since we can't do anything with it. It's also acontextual, like academic philosophy is generally – it strips all knowledge and information about things like geopolitics, the histories of countries, the actual goals humans have, particularly the humans here (Putin, other Russians, Ukrainian leaders, Biden, EU, etc.), America's goals, short-term and long, infinite strategy questions, other forces and trends worldwide that might bear on all of this, the capabilities of the Russian military, the capabilities of the US military, NATO, and how much Americans and other humans should care about or invest time in forming strong opinions on arbitrary wars (all wars are arbitrary by default until we have reason to elevate them to non-arbitrary status, and then their importance is finite, and our appraisals will ideally be shaped by the facts, context, all of the above).
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will directly affect the lives of everyone around the world. Russian regime and army are committing atrocities and genocide daily. Stopping them now is crucial to maintaining a measure of peace and prosperity in the US (along with many other places).
Comments like this have convinced me that liberals pose an existential risk to the continued survival of humanity and must be systematically exterminated in order for concepts like "good" and "evil" to continue to have meaning.
Slavery doesn't need me to shill for it; slavery is and has been the natural condition of most men in most times and places. Freedom is a precious gem - one that you and yours would extinguish in a fit of petulant, narcissistic rage. You are a child, fit only to make the decisions of a child. Try to grow up.