World Targets in Megadeaths
How do we prevent World War Three?
When I recently wrote about ten years of war in Ukraine, I expressed the opinion that the war could easily go on for another ten years. And I am still of the opinion that this is what the people in control in Washington — and maybe to some respect in Berlin and London — see as the most desired outcome. But the frenetic increase of World War Three rhetoric in the news media here in Europe and over the pond has given me pause. It seems to me, that we’ve never been this close to a global thermonuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in 1962. At least that is the picture I get when reading the headlines. Never before in my lifetime have I read so many stories about the real possibility of a new world war breaking out. One that will, most likely, end in nuclear devastation of large parts of the planet.
A random selection of headlines from my notebook:
Bloomberg: If You Think World War III Is Unimaginable, Read This
Newsweek: Putin Warns of Full-Scale World War III in Victory Speech
The Telegraph: Macron must be bluffing — or trying to start a new world war
World Socialist Web Site: Biden’s State of the Union message — Get ready for World War III!
Modern Diplomacy: Why is NATO preparing for World War III?
Politico: The World War III election
The Independent: Zelensky warns Ukraine conflict will turn into World War 3 if Russia not contained
Berliner Zeitung: Schachmatt der Diplomatie - Warum wir auf der Schwelle zum Dritten Weltkrieg stehen
Der Spiegel: Putin prahlt mit russischen Atomwaffen
Even if you discount all of the stories written about this possibility as the usual media hyperbole, designed to attract eyeballs by hooking readers with emotional reactions, it is nonetheless very worrying that the possibility of the end of all human civilisation is again and again held up as something that might very well happen. In repeating this messaging over and over, the press is getting people used to the idea. A global conflict that is likely going to escalate into nuclear war thereby becomes something people start to accept, may even see as inevitable1, instead of an unthinkable horror that needs to be stopped at all costs.
The obvious route to walking back this existential threat to mankind is to end, or at the very least, massively de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine. I have therefore changed my, so far thoroughly pacifist, opinion on how I think the West needs to deal with the war in Ukraine. We need to end it as soon as possible. We need to stop Putin, but at the same time we need to give him some of what he wants — as unjust and unjustified as that might be — to also make him back down.
The Nuclear Threat
It is obvious to me that Ukraine has no hope of winning the war in the way it has been fighting since 2022. This has been clear from pretty early on to anyone who looked at the situation from both sides of the conflict. Despite all of the Ukrainian and NATO propaganda, the US knows this too.
It is understood throughout the American intelligence community that Ukraine has little chance of winning the war. Its major counteroffensive of last year has failed, the army is depleted and short of ammunition, and military experts here have predicted that Putin will move to tighten his control over eastern Ukraine and the four border oblasts he has seized by moving to take Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, about twenty miles from the Russian border.
— Seymour Hersh, The Iron-Clad Piñata
The thing is, the US kind of likes its foreign wars. As long as no US soldiers die on the ground, these keep the military-industrial complex churning and prop up the economy. Countries like Germany seem to have learned to emulate this.
There’s one huge problem with this approach, though. Well, aside from people dying by the tens of thousands, that is. The problem being that the longer this war goes on, the bigger the possibility will be that something goes wrong and the nukes start flying. It has almost happened in the past2. Actually, nuclear warheads are not as secured as most people think3. And thanks to technology like Perimetr, all it takes is one inadvertent launch. Maybe everyone should watch Dr. Strangelove again; that movie is much less ridiculous as you might have originally thought.
So even if you’re totally indifferent to any Ukrainians and/or Russians dying by the tens of thousands, this war might very well kill all of us. That’s the problem with hot proxy wars that involve nuclear superpowers. Even the legacy press, while vehemently denying the manifest realities of the battlefield, seems to have cottoned on to this fact. They’ve started to scare us with it, because this makes them money, but what my colleagues have failed to grasp is the conclusion every serious humanitarian must draw from this realisation: If nuclear war will most likely end our civilisation, we must make sure it doesn’t happen — by all means necessary. Which in turn means we must end this war as soon as possible.
Ending the War in Ukraine
But the question is how can we end this war? Ukraine seems to be unable to beat back the Russians on their own. To involve NATO forces would mean to directly risk an all-out confrontation, which then would greatly increase the risk of a nuclear strike by both sides. This means we need to find a way to enable Ukraine to end the war on its own. In my opinion, a strategy would have two aspects:
Militarily, we need to step up our support of the Ukrainian armed forces. But more crucially, we need to make it clear that our support comes with strings attached. We can’t keep wasting money that gets soaked up by the latent corruption over there and we can’t keep sending arms and military assets that get wasted on unrealistic offensives. NATO needs to figure out a realistic strategy to end this war, force the Ukrainians to accept it and then implement it without delay. In short: Shift the war goals from unrealistic expectations and an attempt to prolong the war in the interest of Western defence manufacturers to an approach that will end it as fast as possible in the safest way possible.
The second aspect is diplomacy. We need to start negotiating with the Russians to figure out what it takes, for them, to end this war. It’s probably realistic to cede to them the territories they’ve taken so far. And we might have to guarantee that Ukraine will never be included in NATO. Maybe in exchange, we can guarantee to the Ukrainians that they will be economically integrated into the EU common market. This compromise would probably be acceptable to the Russians. It would have been an amazing opportunity to have started this process before the recent election in Russia — as a way for the West to weaken Putin’s position within his own country by showing that we are more reasonable than his government — but sadly, this chance was missed.
To get this done, NATO (or leading NATO countries) will have to make it clear to the Ukrainian government that our substantial support of their war effort comes at the cost of them ending the war quickly and without provoking the Russians into any button pushes that can’t be taken back. It would be an offer even the most stalwart patriots à la Zelensky can’t refuse. The Ukrainian government has admitted often that the country’s survival depends on the monetary contributions and arms shipments from NATO countries.
If necessary, the diplomatic olive branch will have to be backed up by doubling down on providing money, weapons and training to the Ukrainian armed forces and by making sure none of this support is squandered. A few hard-fought Ukrainian advances could be strategically used to pressure the Russians into accepting these terms. It would probably drastically increase the Ukrainian casualties, but in the end, a lot less people would die than if they continued the war as is for five to ten years.
After an agreement is hammered out, there would be a phase of a few weeks for people in the east of Ukraine to move west and people in the west, who want to become Russians, to move east across the frontlines. Then, a Korean-style DMZ could be created and the hot war would cool down again, significantly decreasing the chance of the thousands of hours of Fallout I’ve played to actually have been a good educational investment into my future.
All of this might sound cold, but that’s the only way to approach politics at this scale. The stakes are just too high to think about it any other way. Emotions get in the way of Realpolitik, of reaching the best realistically possible outcome. It’s horrible for the people displaced from their homes. But on the other hand, they will still be alive. And so will be tens of thousands of young boys who would otherwise have died. People’s homes and patriotic feelings should never take precedent over people’s lives. And as someone who comes from a country that actually was similarly divided to stop World War Three the last time, I can offer the perspective that borders like these are transient. It might take fifty years, but with any luck, a future Russian government will be less barbaric and Ukraine will be reunited with its lost territory.
The one thing I am almost sure of is this: If we continue on this course, future Russian governments are more likely to become less reasonable, more people will die and we might solve global warming very quickly by cooling down the planet drastically with nuclear fallout. This should be clear to anybody who has studied European history since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is willing to use their brain instead of having propagandists telling them what to think.
Don’t laugh. This is exactly how World War One started.
If it weren’t for Stanislav Petrov, the world would have ended just about a month after I was born.
The US military, for many years, preferred the ability to launch a quick retaliatory nuclear strike to making sure nukes couldn’t be launched in error. Setting the launch code to eight zeroes is only one example of this.
Less than three hours until doomsday, by SAC’s own admission. Then what? SAC had nothing else up its sleeve other than rushing a security team to the silo, parking its truck on top of the silo lid with the gearbox in neutral, and praying it would fall into the silo and crush the missile when the lid blew sideways prior to lift-off. (This truck trick was performed a number of panicky moments during the Cold War for a variety of reasons including spurious indications at the underground launch centers indicating an inadvertent launch in progress.) The Air Force will dismiss this as ancient history, but consider a list of so-called “Dull Sword” incidents involving Air Force nuclear weapons for 2009-2013 pried loose through a Freedom of Information Act request. This bill of goods lists nearly 1,500 reportable incidents. They involved everything from mechanical failures of weapons or the equipment used in handling them, to lapses of security, to violations of nuclear weapon safety rules – intentional violations in some instances.
Further reading:
The Oops List, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 56, No. 6. pp. 64-67
Broken Arrows: Nuclear Weapons Accidents, Atomic Archive
Hmm, interesting!
I share the feeling as the topic of Nuclear War is coming up more often.
For me there was the Lex Fridman recent interview with the author of "Nuclear War: A Scenario", and then today the announcement of the "Fallout" series based on the Fallout games.
Putting on the No-Agenda hat: could it all be just advertisement for the series?!!
The world is getting crazier by the day