Tag: Terminator II

How About A Winnable Nuclear Exchange, America?

W.J. Astore

Sure, we might get our hair mussed …

Like too many people, I sometimes make the mistake of talking about nuclear war, when it’s really annihilation and genocide we’re talking about.

Wars have winners and losers. In nuclear “war,” everyone loses. The planet loses. Life loses and death triumphs on a scale we simply can’t imagine.

Language is so important here. I grew up learning about nuclear exchanges. EXCHANGES! The U.S. military talks of nuclear modernization and “investing” in nukes when the only dividend of this “investment” is mass death.

One of the few honest acronyms is MAD, or mutually assured destruction. Lately, it’s an acronym that’s largely disappeared from American discourse.

More than anything, though, realistic images of a nuclear attack are perhaps the most compelling evidence against building more nukes, as in this powerful and unforgettable scene from Terminator 2:

To me, nothing beats that scene.  That is nuclear “war.”

The U.S. has over 5000 nuclear weapons; the Russians close to 6000. That’s more than enough to destroy the earth and a few other earth-sized planets. Imagine the scene above repeated eleven thousand times on our planet.

The insanity, the immorality of spending another $2 trillion on new nukes … well, it boggles my mind. We’ve become like the mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, worshipping the bomb, acolytes of death and destruction.

If we all don’t end up killing ourselves and the planet in “an exchange,” we’ll likely degenerate into utter barbarism, as depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And even that grim novel has a life-affirming ending that is most unlikely.

Amazingly, after I wrote the above passages about nuclear “war” and “exchanges,” I came across Admiral TR Buchanan’s recent keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he uses the word “exchange” in a remarkably banal (and frightening!) way.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript (available at https://www.stratcom.mil/Media/Speeches/Article/3976019/project-atom-2024-csis-poni-keynote/) with emphasis added.

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so it’s certainly complex because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that’s a place we’d like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don’t want to have an exchange, right?

I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it’s terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we’re largely viewed as the world leader.

And do we lead the world in an area where we’ve considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we’d have to have sufficient capability.

We’d have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn’t expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.

So very complex problem, of course. And as I think many people understand, nuclear weapons are political weapons. I think Susan Rice said that at one point.

The motto of Admiral Buchanan might be: We had to destroy the world in order to lead it. Buchanan here is less sane than General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove.

This admiral thinks we might have to have “an exchange” with Russia, and that, if we do, we could do so “in terms that are most acceptable to the United States,” and that even after “an exchange,” the U.S. can still “continue to lead the world.”

Truly this is the banality of evil. I like how even after “the exchange,” we need to have a “reserve capacity” so that we can nuke the world again.

This is madness–sheer madness–but it’s received as probity and sane “strategic” thinking by the national security blob.

This guy was promoted to admiral precisely because he thinks this way. He thinks without thinking. With no humanity.

Well, as General Turgidson says in Dr. Strangelove, we might just get our hair mussed during a nuclear “exchange,” but does it really matter as long as we can kill more of them than us?

Earth Day and Nukes

W.J. Astore

Stop the Madness and Save the Planet

Today is Earth Day: a good day to commit ourselves to saving the earth from the ravages of nuclear war. Global warming may get us in the long term, but nothing will kill the planet quicker than a nuclear war.

I’ve written a lot about the folly, the greed, the absurdity, of yet another round of “investment” in nuclear weapons.  There’s no need for an updated nuclear triad when the present triad is more than enough to destroy the earth and probably several other planets as well.

America’s nuclear triad currently consists of land-based ICBMs (Minuteman III), bombers like the B-1 and B-2, and submarines that carry nuclear-tipped missiles.  The Pentagon plans to “modernize” all these “legs” of the triad at a possible total cost of $2 trillion over the next 30 years.

First off, land-based ICBMs and nuclear bombers are no longer needed. The ICBMs are especially vulnerable to attack, putting pressure on DC decisionmakers to launch them quickly in case of a warning (perhaps false) of a nuclear attack against their silos.

All the U.S. truly needs for deterrence is the current Ohio-class sub force with its Trident II missiles. That force can be modernized without an entirely new class of sub being built, which is perhaps why we’re seeing ads about building new submarines as “job-creators.”

In the USA, more nukes are “justified” most often by threat inflation (or even threat creation) and military Keynesianism—morally dubious claims that jobs are created by building genocidal weapons and doomsday machines.

Speaking of America’s submarines and their missiles: Each Trident II D5 missile has up to 8 warheads, with up to 20 missiles per submarine.  One submarine could conceivably destroy 160 targets, with each of those warheads having a “yield” of somewhere between 5 and 25 Hiroshima bombs.  That arsenal, if launched, could very well tip the world into nuclear winter while killing tens of millions of people outright. A nuclear winter would kill billions. From one sub! And the Navy has 14 of them!

Senator George McGovern in 1963 complained about the absurd nuclear “overkill” the U.S. possesses.  Just over 60 years ago, some members of Congress vowed to do something to stop the madness.  And then came Vietnam … and so many other wars and rumors of war.

We Americans are so easily distracted by war and propagandized into believing that safety comes from swinging the biggest nuclear club.

Anyone who thinks about nuclear weapons and war games in the abstract should watch this scene from “Terminator II.”  It’s perhaps the best, most visceral, image of what one nuclear bomb would produce.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SuTmLvPzkmQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”  The more nuclear weapons we build, the darker our fate becomes, and the closer we come to terminating ourselves and our planet.

On this Earth Day, the U.S. should commit itself to a “no first use” policy with respect to using nuclear weapons and to total nuclear disarmament, to be achieved over the next 20-30 years.

Something like a JFK-like vow is needed here: Before the decade is out, America should commit itself to halving its nuclear forces, working with other countries on the goal of nuclear disarmament.

Only the future of humanity, as well as that of the earth and all living things, is at stake here.