The prophecy is more than seeing into the future. For the prophecy sees without the element of time. For the prophecy sees things as they were, as they are, and as they always shall be.
Alexander Gates, a geology professor at Rutgers-Newark, is co-author of ”The Encyclopedia of Earthquakes and Volcanoes,” which will be published by Facts on File in July. He has been leading a four-year effort to remap an area known as the Sloatsburg Quadrangle, a 5-by-7-mile tract near Mahwah that crosses into New York State. The Ramapo Fault, which runs through it, was responsible for a big earthquake in 1884, and Dr. Gates warns that a recurrence is overdue. He recently talked about his findings.
Q. What have you found?
A. We’re basically looking at a lot more rock, and we’re looking at the fracturing and jointing in the bedrock and putting it on the maps. Any break in the rock is a fracture. If it has movement, then it’s a fault. There are a lot of faults that are offshoots of the Ramapo. Basically when there are faults, it means you had an earthquake that made it. So there was a lot of earthquake activity to produce these features. We are basically not in a period of earthquake activity along the Ramapo Fault now, but we can see that about six or seven times in history, about 250 million years ago, it had major earthquake activity. And because it’s such a fundamental zone of weakness, anytime anything happens, the Ramapo Fault goes.
A. I found a lot of faults, splays that offshoot from the Ramapo that go 5 to 10 miles away from the fault. I have looked at the Ramapo Fault in other places too. I have seen splays 5 to 10 miles up into the Hudson Highlands. And you can see them right along the roadsides on 287. There’s been a lot of damage to those rocks, and obviously it was produced by fault activities. All of these faults have earthquake potential.
Q. Describe the 1884 earthquake.
A. It was in the northern part of the state near the Sloatsburg area. They didn’t have precise ways of describing the location then. There was lots of damage. Chimneys toppled over. But in 1884, it was a farming community, and there were not many people to be injured. Nobody appears to have written an account of the numbers who were injured.
Q. What lessons we can learn from previous earthquakes?
A. In 1960, the city of Agadir in Morocco had a 6.2 earthquake that killed 12,000 people, a third of the population, and injured a third more. I think it was because the city was unprepared.There had been an earthquake in the area 200 years before. But people discounted the possibility of a recurrence. Here in New Jersey, we should not make the same mistake. We should not forget that we had a 5.4 earthquake 117 years ago. The recurrence interval for an earthquake of that magnitude is every 50 years, and we are overdue. The Agadir was a 6.2, and a 5.4 to a 6.2 isn’t that big a jump.
Q. What are the dangers of a quake that size?
A. When you’re in a flat area in a wooden house it’s obviously not as dangerous, although it could cut off a gas line that could explode. There’s a real problem with infrastructure that is crumbling, like the bridges with crumbling cement.There’s a real danger we could wind up with our water supplies and electricity cut off if a sizable earthquake goes off. The best thing is to have regular upkeep and keep up new building codes. The new buildings will be O.K. But there is a sense of complacency.
OPINION — Last week, aircraft and personnel from 14 NATO countries carried out the annual exercise, code-named Steadfast Noon, which involved practicing nuclear strike missions with dual-capable aircraft and unarmed, American-made B61 tactical nuclear bombs, similar to the roughly 150 B61s the U.S. currently has on bases in five European countries.
According to a NATO statement on the exercise, “No live weapons are used. This exercise helps to ensure that NATO’s nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective.”
No scenario was given for what led to a U.S. President authorizing the apparent use of such devastating weapons in last week’s exercise, and that fact alone encouraged me to go back into records to try to show again how doubtful it would be for any such Presidential order to occur.
In this case, I went to the amazing set of Presidential Oral Histories compiled by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia that contain revealing interviews with personnel from the past administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton and George W. Bush.
I focused on the President George H. W. Bush administration with Dick Cheney, when he was Secretary of Defense, and the late Colin Powell, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Here is what they said when the issue of possibly using U.S. tactical nuclear weapons came up in late 1990 as the U.S. was preparing Operation Desert Storm to push Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
As Cheney put it when questioned at the Miller Center in March 2000, “If he [Saddam] uses biological or chemical agents against our troops, all bets are off and we reserve the right to use any means at our disposal to respond…The threat clearly was that we’d use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons.”
Cheney went on, “I asked for—and had to ask a number of times—for there to be some planning done in the Joint Staff about how we would react if in fact, that happened. I said, I want to know how many tactical nuclear weapons will it take to destroy a division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. Here’s your divisions laid out there. You come back and tell me how many nukes.”
As for President Bush, who would have had to order their use, Cheney said, “He [Bush] would have been aware that this was a problem, as I say, without question, but I don’t recall a conversation with him. The nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons option was something I wanted. I wanted to know myself, if something happened, is this an option? What do you do to them? So as I say, I found out it takes 17 weapons to destroy an Iraqi Republican Guard division. Or at least that is what I was told.”
Cheney said he had “read the history of the Eisenhower years and we’re trying to build nuclear weapons, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren’t that far in the past. We’d used them. By the time you get to the 1990s it is not a very realistic option from the standpoint of the U.S. military.”
The Cold War scenario had been “we might have to resort to nuclear weapons to stop—and reserved the right to do so—to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe,” Cheney said, but then he added, “We had problems with some of those weapons; we had to redeploy them. I think there was always doubt, at least in some of our minds, about an 8-inch nuclear round that you are going to launch out of some artillery piece over here and hit a target 10 or 12 miles away, if that was what you were doing. Didn’t seem to be necessarily the right thing to do if you didn’t have to.”
As for Joint Chiefs Chairman Powell, Cheney said, “Colin had strong feelings, Powell did, about tactical nuclear weapons. He didn’t like them. Maybe it was his European experience…He was not a big fan of tactical nukes. I think part of that was based on his earlier experiences in the service. But that was, I would say, the dominant thinking in the U.S. Army especially, and the military.”
I, myself, know that to have been true, having written about the neutron warhead in 1977. I studied nuclear weapons thereafter and can say the Army disliked the thought of using tactical nuclear weapons because no one knew what would happen after the first one was used.
When Powell, himself, was interviewed in 2011 for the Miller Center collection, he looked back to the 1990s and said, “The Army did not need to have nuclear weapons. We could make the rubble bounce everywhere now. I was pushing Secretary Cheney to eliminate nuclear weapons in the Army. The Marine Corps was already getting rid of them and some of the Air Force weapons and all of the tactical nuclear weapons aboard the ships.”
In fact, in advance of President George H. W. Bush’s doing away with most deployed U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in September 1991, Powell recalled, “We sat at the President’s desk one afternoon and I said, Mr. President, I’ve talked to the Chiefs, and they all agree with this…even the Chief of Staff of the Army agrees—surprise, surprise. In ten minutes, he approved the elimination of all of our tactical nuclear weapons, except for the number we kept in the Air Force for fighter-bomber delivery.”
In a broader sense, Powell said, “Nukes are of course a weapon of mass destruction, but I can list as many countries that have given them up as those who have tried to pursue them…South Africa gave it up. Even Libya gave it up, and Chile. They all abandoned it. And Iran and North Korea. They can’t be used. It would be suicidal.”
In his Miller Center 2000 interview — and remember this was before the 2003 Iraq invasion when Cheney was Vice President – Cheney recalled during 1990 he had ordered a review of the SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan that provides target options for a U.S. President in the event strategic nuclear weapons are to be used.
Cheney found, as he said back in March 2000, “The number of weapons [in the SIOP plan back then] that were actually going down in a particular geographic area, it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, frankly. It was clear that there were places where there were one hell of a lot of weapons going down because we just added stuff over the years and had never really gone back and looked at it in those terms.”
As a result, he said, “We concluded…we had a lot more nuclear warheads than we needed. That we could cover the target base and do what needed to be done with fewer weapons…We wanted to preserve the Triad [nuclear delivery by submarines, bombers and land-based ICBMs]…But it also offered up the opportunity to put stuff on the table in the course of strategic arms control talks, because now we had something to trade away.”
In fact, Cheney’s 1991 SIOP study became the basis for Bush’s radical arms control reduction proposals to Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev in September 1991.
Other parts of Cheney’s 2000 interview are even pertinent today as the Biden administration is preparing its own Nuclear Posture Review, due in the next few months.
For example, Cheney said, “I’m just trying to recreate in my own mind some of my thinking. In a whole other part of the DoD arena, cruise missile technology, we had developed the capability—with standoff conventional weapons, which we demonstrated conclusively in Iraq [meaning Operation Desert Storm]—that we can go in and hit key nodes and shut down a country, take down the power grid, shut down their transportation system, their telecommunication system, whatever it meant. It meant pinpoint strikes with accurate weapons, but a conventional warhead [emphasis added]. You give me a few cruise missiles, I can shut down any country in the world for a period of time.”
In short, Cheney in 2000 recognized that some, if not many, targets programmed for nuclear weapons could be hit by precision conventional weapons.
I would say almost all could be hit with precision conventional weapons or even taken down with cyber weapons. It’s time to see nuclear weapons for what they are – and were back in 1945 – terror weapons to end a war, not to fight one.
Another issue being considered for the Biden Nuclear Posture review is a proposal for the U.S. to adopt a “no first use” policy for its nuclear weapons. The Trump Administration, in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, rejected that idea and stated that “the United States would only consider the employment of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies, and partners.”
Again, I turn to the Miller Center oral histories, this time to James Baker’s interview in March 2011 when he talked about his time as Secretary of State in the days before Operation Desert Storm. Baker recalled that before he met with Saddam Hussein’s closest advisor, Tariq Aziz in January 1991, the Defense Department, meaning Cheney, told him, Baker, “that if they use weapons of mass destruction on our troops, we would respond,” meaning use nuclear weapons.
Baker continued, “And so what I said to the Minister [Aziz] was, Minister, if you use weapons of mass destruction on our forces, the American people will demand revenge, and we have the means to exact it. Then I said, ‘That is not a threat, it is a promise.’ So, after they captured Saddam and debriefed him, they said, ‘Why didn’t you use your chemical weapons when the Americans were coming?’ And he implied—maybe he didn’t say this in so many words, but implied—it was because of what Baker told Aziz at Geneva. So, it [the nuclear threat] was effective.”
Baker said, “Based on this real-time example of how such a threat really worked to protect our troops,” the Obama 2010 Nuclear Posture Review made a mistake when it said it would only use conventional weapons against a non-nuclear state that employed chemical or biological weapons.
Thus, although the NATO exercise last week tested whether the U.S. and its allies were prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons, it’s doubtful any real order to do so will ever occur.
On the other hand, as long as the threat to use nuclear weapons exists, such exercises could, as they have done in the past, help avoid lesser military conflicts between countries that possess them or other weapons of mass destruction.
“I made this decision as a goodwill gesture, to give a lesson in politics and state administration, and to prove that I don’t rule the country with militias.”
He announced the move by posting online a letter in his own hand, dated the previous day and addressed directly to the group, Saraya al-Salam. In it, Sadr orders the group’s offices closed across most provinces, with the exception of Najaf, Karbala, Salahuddin, and the capital of Baghdad.
A handwritten letter by Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that orders closed most offices of his milita, Saraya al-Salam. Oct. 28, 2021. (Photo: Social media)
“I made this decision as a goodwill gesture, to give a lesson in politics and state administration, and to prove that I don’t rule the country with militias,” the letter read.
“Opening headquarters or carrying weapons are not allowed, outside these four provinces,” he added. “However, carrying weapons and opening headquarters in the holy provinces [Najaf and Karbala] should be in coordination with state security forces.”
“This decision must be applied in 15 days, starting the issuance date of this letter,” he concluded.
Saraya al-Salam, previously known as the Mahdi Army, is a Shia armed militia founded by Sadr, who comes from an important religious family in Iraq.
Some political observers read al-Sadr’s letter as just one among many post-election steps he is taking to pave the way for his winning political coalition to form a new Iraqi government.
His political alliance won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the national election, held earlier this month on Oct. 10, 2021.
WASHINGTON ― A former Australian prime minister said Friday he thinks China could “soon” invade Taiwan or otherwise escalate the situation and that the West should now be planning its military and economic response.
“I think we need to be prepared to think the unthinkable,” former Prime Minister Tony Abbott said at a Wilson Center event here.
“I think it’s highly possible that at some point in time, perhaps quite soon, China might up the ante, either with a blockade of the so-called rebel province ― to teach the Taiwanese that they … need to make some kind of an accommodation with Beijing ― or perhaps even a full-scale invasion,” he added.
Abbott earlier this month made geopolitical waves when he accused China of being a bully and expressed enthusiastic support for Taiwan while visiting the democratically ruled island.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, has stepped up military harassment of the island by flying fighter jets toward Taiwan ― a trend Abbott said he expects to “get more intense.”
Abbott sees Chinese leader Xi Jinping as emboldened by the West’s mild reaction to China’s takeover of Hong Kong. Unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan would offer military resistance, but it would still need outside backing, he said.
“In the absence of support from others, the Taiwanese might regard it as an unequal and ultimately hopeless struggle. And that’s why I think it’s important for Taiwan’s fellow democracies to provide all the solidarity that we can,” Abbott said.
U.S. President Joe Biden set off alarm bells in Beijing early this month by saying the U.S. has a firm commitment to help Taiwan defend itself in the event of a Chinese attack. Though the White House later played down the remarks, Abbott said he was “encouraged” by Biden’s comments and that there’s more broadly been a “rhetorical escalation” from the West.
Abbott’s appearance came weeks after the unveiling of a U.S.-British deal to supply nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, which supplanted a prior French deal to supply Australia with its own submarines.
On Friday, Abbott reiterated his calls for Australia to take over one or more retiring U.S. Los Angeles-class or U.K. Trafalgar-class submarines soon because the new nuclear-powered subs won’t arrive for years. The nuclear-powered submarines he’s proposing for the interim would augment the Collins-class submarines in Australia’s inventory, he said.
“We need better, bigger, faster more wide-ranging submarines not in two decades time but now,” he said, adding that “the challenges are pressing, the peril is not far off.”
Both the U.K. and France have dispatched carrier groups to the region, and the Royal Navy’s Astute submarine was on a port call to Perth on Friday. Abbott said he hopes the U.K. will send more naval assets and use Singapore’s facilities, as the U.S. Navy does.
“I think it’s very important for Britain and France, which have long had a Pacific presence, to increase that Pacific presence, given that east Asia is probably now the most strategically important part of the world,” he said.
Abbott also called for enhanced intelligence sharing with Japan, saying it could be a “powerful addition” to the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement.
U.S. military officials have called China the “pacing challenge.” On Thursday, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Hyten said the rate at which China’s military is developing capabilities is “stunning,” while U.S. development suffers from “brutal” bureaucracy.
In spite of a Biden administration defense budget that prioritizes technology development, Abbott said “the gap is likely to get wider, not smaller in the years to come.
“Is the U.S. increasing its capabilities at the same rate as China is? I think the short answer is no,” he said.
Joe Gould is the Congress and industry reporter at Defense News, covering defense budget and policy matters on Capitol Hill as well as industry news.
In this June 11, file photo, US President Joe Biden and France’s President Emmanuel Macron walk along the boardwalk during the G7 summit in Carbis Bay, England.
By Maegan Vazquez, CNN
(CNN) — President Joe Biden on Friday admitted that his administration was “clumsy” in its handling of the deal that deprived France of billions in defense contracts.
“I was under the impression that France had been informed long before that the deal was not going through, honest to God,” Biden said on Friday, sitting alongside Macron in the French Embassy to the Holy See.
Last month, the US, the United Kingdom and Australia announced a new partnership that includes providing assistance to help Australia develop nuclear-powered submarines — a deal France says was made without its knowledge, jeopardizing an existing contract worth billions to provide Australia with diesel-powered submarines.
The rift escalated to the rare point that France temporarily recalled its US ambassador, and even Biden was caught off-guard by how furious French officials became over the matter.
“I think what happened — to use an English phrase — what we did was clumsy,” Biden continued. “It was not done with a lot of grace. I was under the impression that certain things had happened that had not happened.”
It was a striking admission of a foreign policy misstep for a President with decades of experience in that arena.
Biden called France “an extremely valued partner and a power in and of itself.”
“There’s too much we have done together, suffered together, celebrated together and value together for anything to be able to break this up. We’re at one of those inflection points in world history. Things are changing. Pieces of the board are moving,” he added.
When Macron was asked if he was satisfied that the relations with the United States had been repaired, he told reporters, “We clarified together what we had to clarify.”
“Now what’s important is to be sure that such a situation will not be possible for our future,” he added.
Macron emphasized that “what really matters now is what we will do together in the coming weeks, the coming months, the coming years.”
The two leaders appeared in good spirits ahead of the meeting, waving to the press and smiling before clapping each other on the shoulder as they walked inside the embassy.
The highly anticipated bilateral meeting between the long-standing allies is taking place ahead of the Group of 20 meeting in Rome and the United Nations’ subsequent climate summit in Glasgow. The bilateral follows Biden’s earlier meetings on Friday with the Pope at the Vatican and with the Italian president and prime minister.
The location for the meeting — on French territory in Rome — is intentional, a diplomatic source told CNN.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Rome that he expected the meeting to be “constructive and deeply substantive,” and that Biden and Macron will cover a gamut of issues facing their alliance, from “counterterrorism in the Middle East to great power competition to economic, trade and technology issues.”
Sullivan said a “forward-looking” statement is expected to be released following the meeting, which will touch on areas of cooperation, counterterrorism, the Indo-Pacific, energy and technology.
The two leaders are also expected to be in the same room for other meetings throughout the summits.
In mid-September, the two leaders spoke over the phone, appearing to ease some of tensions over the submarine deal.
During the 30-minute call, Biden appeared to acknowledge missteps in how his administration had approached the talks. And, importantly, a joint statement about the call noted that “the two leaders have decided to open a process of in-depth consultations, aimed at creating the conditions for ensuring confidence and proposing concrete measures toward common objectives.”
“The meeting between the two leaders will be the occasion to make some announcements and to see whether or not … this crisis was the occasion to define … a new common agenda, or if there are sort of long, lingering issues that cannot be addressed,” Belin told CNN.
Sullivan told reporters on Thursday that the Biden administration feels “very good about the intensive engagement that we’ve had with France over the course of the past few weeks,” noting his own recent visit to Paris, the President’s two calls with Macron since the submarines spat and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Paris trip.
“We’re eager to have the conversation tomorrow because the agenda really is overflowing,” Sullivan said. “There are so many issues in which we and France come from common values, common perspectives, common interests, and need to be aligned in terms of our policy approaches.”
The outrage in Paris over the subs agreement was dismissed by some in Washington,and Belin wasn’t convinced that the US and France see the stakes of Friday’s meeting the same way.
“I can tell you it’s highly anticipated on the French side. I wonder if it’s highly anticipated on the other side,” Belin said, calling the dynamic “a reflection of the imbalance in a relationship.”
“One is the superpower. The other one is this strong middle power. But you have an imbalance. And for France, having a good relationship, or having a clear relationship, with the US — it’s also a condition, for instance, for influence in Europe,” she added.
There have been other rifts, too, such as the surprise over the deadly and chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which involved NATO allies, such as France.
Macron used the withdrawal to make the case for his larger vision for European global leadership — particularly its independence from US national security policy.
During a speech from Baghdad this summer, Macron remarked: “Whatever the American choice, we will maintain our presence to fight terrorism in Iraq as long as the terrorist groups continue to operate and as long as the Iraqi government asks us for this support.”
The meeting between the two leaders, which is clearly seeking to repair relations, comes just four months after their last summit with other world leaders in Europe, where Macron heaped praise on Biden and called him “part of the club.”
“I think that what you demonstrate is that leadership is partnership, and we do appreciate,” Macron said.
And asked at the time if allies think America is back, Biden looked at Macron and said, “Ask him,” to which Macron replied: “Definitely.”
The Macron meeting is a smaller part of a larger theme playing out as Biden returns to Europe for the summits.
Biden, who stepped into his presidency declaring that American diplomacy had returned following a period of Trump-led nationalism, has returned to Europe for the second time since coming into office among a more skeptical group of world leaders.
Leaders attending the global summits in Europe in the coming days, such as Macron, have their own stakes.
France’s presidential election is in April. Macron, who is seeking reelection, is on a charm offensive with voters. In June, his party performed poorly in regional elections, which were being closely watched ahead of the presidential vote next spring. However, given the low voter turnout, political experts said it was hard to draw conclusions.
France is also assuming its six-month presidency of the European Union in January — marking a test for Macron’s larger vision. And with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s imminent departure from office, Macron, if reelected, could stand to become the de facto dean of Europe.
Washington, Oct 30 (UNI/Sputnik) Allies of the United States in Europe and in the Pacific region are trying to prevent US President Joe Biden from adopting the principle of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, which can allegedly add more courage to Russia, the Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing sources. Currently, Biden analyses the American nuclear policy and is expected to be through by the end of the year, according to the media. The US nuclear policy remains vague since the Cold War, the newspaper reports. Washington hypothetically can proactively use nuclear weapons, which makes the allies feel protected. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia are among those allies who are trying to influence Washington on the issue. Many are concerned that Biden considers the possibility to switch to the “sole purpose” policy, which enables the US to resort to nuclear arms only under specific conditions. This principle will not enhance stability, but will add more courage to Russia and China, according to sources. UNI/SPUTNIK VP RNJ
Abstract: Though current US defense policy centers on matters of conventional war and terrorism, other problems remain more existentially worrisome. Most conspicuous in this regard are variously intersecting issues of nuclear war avoidance. The following article examines these always-complex issues with systematic references to pertinent risks and to the core global obligation to confront them as intellectual challenge.
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“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”-Archilochus, Fragments[1]
In the Beginning
First things first. On existential national security matters, candor is indispensable. In essence, we inhabit a world that generally prefers the study of “many things” to “one big thing.”
This usual preference is easy to understand. After all, thinking about things organically or holistically is more complex and potentially bewildering. Still, in the inherently vital matters of military strategic assessment, a theoretical perspectiveis indispensable.
Always.
There is more. In the final analysis, learning about “one big thing” is a demanding matter of theory-building. Without a comprehensive theory of nuclear war avoidance, the “worst” will happen.[2]
By definition, there can be no proper theory without a prior and underlying focus on discernible commonalities. Indeed, the systematic discovery of commonalities or regularities constitutes the beginnings of any science, and science represents the only reasonable way to approach the many-sided issues of nuclear war avoidance. There are, to be sure, alternative patterns of inquiry, but these distracting patterns must be based on faith, “common sense” or overt anti-reason.[3]
They ought never be relied upon.
Correspondingly core questions should now arise. Where, exactly, does the United States stand with regard to existential nuclear threats? Once upon a time, beginning in the 1950s, nuclear war avoidance became humankind’s main survival imperative. This entirely sensible rank-ordering was plain, visible in the newspapers, on evening news programs and in the movies.[4] It was a conspicuous, urgent and infinitely perplexing focus. Among other things, this focus reflected the more characteristic preference orderings of rich nations than poor ones, but one central fact remained clear:
There is more. In the “old days,” scholars could speak more-or-less reasonably about “nuclear disarmament” or “denuclearization.”[7] But we still don’t live in a reasonable or reasoning world, and purposeful peace strategies will need to include various compromises or “tradeoffs.”
On specific matters of nuclear war avoidance, this means, inter alia, continuously refining the threat-based strategies of“escalation dominance”[8] and nuclear deterrence. At an even more rudimentary or “molecular” level, citizens of nuclear and near-nuclear states, long accustomed to coarsely competitive postures of belligerent nationalism, will finally need to change. More precisely, they will need to achieve certain basic transformations of consciousness.
Though rarely understood, this means that they will need to detach their diverse and accumulated hopes for immortality from the nation’s presumed geopolitical success.[9]
What can this possibly mean? This is hardly a statement for mass-based understanding. It is also very unlikely to make sense to political leaderships nurtured by epiphenomena, or what Plato would have called “mere shadows of images.”
Ultimately, the answer depends on science. Are we humans fully prepared to abandon the incomparable promises of Faith in the abstract interests of Reason? One needn’t be a disciplined analytic thinker to answer this query honestly. Faith, we learned earlier from Sigmund Freud, is largely a matter of “wish fulfillment.” And there can never be any more compelling human wish than the express “will” not to die.[10]
Students of world politics have always been instructed that their subject centers on some vague quality typically called “power?” These instructions have not been wrong ex hypothesi, but they have until now failed to identify the greatest conceivable form of power. This is power over death or the apparent promise of immortality.
Nowadays we see the attraction of this particular kind of power most plainly in matters of Jihadist terrorism, but it can also animate the all-too-many perpetrators of both war and genocide.
These allegations are “only” intellectual arguments. What then could they signify to citizens of any nation that has traditionally prided itself on being “practical?” The most plausible short answer here is endless belligerent nationalism and in more selective situations, nuclear deterrence.
There is more. Inevitably, nuclear deterrence is a “game” that certain world leaders may have toplay. Accordingly, these leaders can choose to learn the game purposefully and skillfully or simply deal with it inattentively or inexpertly. In any such game, calculably gainful plays would still be theoretically possible, but these would necessarily be based upon variously enhanced capacities for threat assessment and strategic decision-making.
In the final analysis, as all ought to have learned from history – including the still-ongoing unraveling history of American power in Afghanistan – “winning” will not mean what it meant originally. Victory will not be about acquiring geopolitical supremacy and hegemony, but enabling broadly systemic cooperation and a more reassuringly continuous dynamic of serious crisis de-escalation.
Incontestably, a viable global civilization represents a sine qua non for absolutely every nation’s physical survival. Ultimately, however, any such civilization[11] will have to be constructed upon more than some presumptively favorable “balance” of military power. Inter alia, it will have to be founded upon suitably fashioned visions of “cosmopolitanism”[12] or human “oneness.”[13]
On its face, any such endorsement must represent the reductio ad absurdum of all possible intellectual misjudgments. Among relevant hazards of strategic judgment, it would be problematic to assume that nuclear deterrence credibility needs to be positively correlated with threat destructiveness. Indeed, from the standpoint of creating stable nuclear deterrence, the likelihood of any actual nuclear conflict between states could sometime be inversely related to the plausibly expected magnitude of catastrophic harms.[16]
This is only an “informal” presumption, however, because we are presently considering a unique or unprecedented event, one of inherently limited predictive capacity. Because any true mathematical probabilities must always be based upon the discernible frequency of relevant past events, events that are sui generis (such as a nuclear war) can be “predicted” only with less than scientific methods. Any such “prediction,” therefore, could have no proper policy-making value.
Concerning the ascertainable probability of a nuclear war, one derivative understanding is primary and axiomatic. This understanding stipulates that differences in probability must depend on whether the particular conflict in question would be intentional or inadvertent. A further division must then be made between an inadvertent nuclear war caused by errors in calculation (nuclear war by miscalculation) and one occasioned by accident, computer hacking or computer malfunction.
Absolutely no meaningful scientific estimations of nuclear war likelihood could ever be made apart from such antecedent conceptual divisions.
Relevant Military Exercises
During August 2021, four expansive military exercises were undertaken across the world. These US operations included an exercise staged by the US Navy 5th and 2nd fleets (close to Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea respectively) and Large Scale Global Exercise 21, led by the US and allied forces with a focus on the Indo-Pacific Ocean area. All exercises were conducted with China and Russia openly identified as “hypothetical” adversaries.
In response, China conducted a large-scale military exercise in the South China Sea during the same period, and another joint exercise with Russia in China’s Northwest Region. The American exercises were conducted far from the US homeland, but the China/Russia exercises were launched close to home. Cumulatively, such exercised maritime and troop movements expressed various determinable elements of “Cold War II.”[17]
Looking ahead in Washington, air space and outer space are both apt to become further militarized, thereby rendered subject to steadily expanding nuclear war preparations. Most expectedly worrisome, in this regard, would be correspondingly greater risks of nuclear crisis and actual nuclear war, especially a nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.
To date, this has been an unassailable presumption. Foreseeably, it will not change. the “Westphalian”[20] system of international relations and international law first bequeathed by treaty law in 1648. This system of belligerent nationalism remains rooted in persistent anarchy and is already being steadily worsened by chaos.[21]
The Changing Balance of World Power
Historically, the idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is a variant[22] – has never been more than facile metaphor. In fact, it has never had anything to do with ascertaining any true equilibrium. And as any such “balance” is always a matter of individual and subjective perceptions, adversary states can never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances are tangibly oriented in their favor. In consequence, each side in a still-Westphalian world order must perpetually fear that it will come out “second best” or even be left behind. Among nation-states, the continual search for balance, though traditionally reassuring, can only produce ever-widening patterns of insecurity, inequality and disequilibrium.
At the start of the Cold War (what the present author now calls (Cold War I), the United States first began to codify rudimentary orientations to nuclear deterrence and nuclear war. At that simpler time, the world was tightly bipolar and the overwhelmingly clear enemy was the Soviet Union. Tempered by a shared knowledge of the horror that had ceased (temporarily) in 1945, each superpower understood a conspicuously core need to expand global cooperation (especially the United Nations) as a necessary adjunct to national conflict preparedness.
With the start of the nuclear age, American national security was premised on grimly primal threats of “massive retaliation.” Over time, especially during the Kennedy years, this bitterly corrosive policy was softened by subtler and more nuanced threats of “flexible response.” Along the way, a coherent and generalized American strategic doctrine was crafted, in increments, to more systematically accommodate almost every conceivable kind of adversarial military encounter.
Scientific and historically grounded, this doctrine was developed self-consciously and with deliberate prudence. In its actual execution, however, much was left to visceral or “seat-of-the-pants” calculations. In this particular regard, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis speaks for itself.
Strategic doctrine, as earlier generation “defense intellectuals” had already understood,[23] is a “net.” Reasonably, only those who “cast” can expect to “catch.” Nonetheless, even the benefits of “casting” must ultimately remain subject to specific considerations of individual human personality. In the terms of professional strategic thinkers, there must always remain an “idiosyncratic factor.”
Individuum est ineffable. At some point, an individual decision-maker could lie beyond predictive and understanding. Then, looking ahead to potential nuclear war threats and crises, the ungraspable individual could interact in unforeseen ways with other complex factors, possibly creating variously unseen synergies. What then?
In strategic planning and thinking, there will always be certain irremediable uncertainties. In the face of such uncertainties, the point will be not to prevent them altogether (that would be impossible), but to prepare for all known and foreseeable contingencies intellectually and analytically.
Cold War II
For a time, following collapse of the Soviet Union, the world became increasingly multipolar. But now we seem to be witnessing the evolution of a second cold war. This time around, there will likely be more conspicuous points of convergent interest and cooperation between Washington and Moscow. In principle at least (e.g. current mutual concerns about controlling Jihadist terrorism) “Cold War II” could offer an improved context for identifying overlapping strategic interests. But now there are also apt to be other primary “players,” most plausibly China.
Details matter. Even after the extension in force of New START agreement between the U.S. and Russia, Moscow continues to reinvigorate its production of intercontinental ballistic missiles and ICBM supporting infrastructures. In part, this represents a predictable Russian response to ongoing fears that America may be expanding its plans for expanded ballistic missile defense in Europe[24] and (as corollary) for enlarging NATO blueprints to advance aggressive strategies of “encirclement.”
At this fragile moment. foci are easy to identify. Strategic planners are now thinking especially about already-nuclear North Korea and Pakistan and a prospectively nuclear Iran. Among other key issues,Tehran’s repeated calls for “removing” Israel as a state have been exterminatory;[25] in law, they therefore represent a documented “incitement to genocide.” Furthermore, military nuclear developments in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran could quickly prove synergistic, circumstances that are largely unpredictable and potentially even overwhelming.[26]
There must also be apt legal considerations of justice.Nullum crimen sine poena; “No crime without a punishment,” was a key principle of justice reaffirmed at Nuremberg, in 1946. This peremptory principle originated in the Hebrew Bible and its Lex Talionis, or law of exact retaliation.
Popular viewpoints notwithstanding, the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords will have no discernible effects on preventing nuclear war in the Middle East.[27] If anything, Iran was made more belligerent by the Accords’ explicit intent to diminish Iranian power. Soon, certain major Sunni Arab states (plausibly Egypt and/or Saudi Araba) may feel compelling new incentives to nuclearize themselves. And with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, an already-nuclear Pakistan will likely become more tangibly influential in the region.
How will this expanded influence affect China, India, Russia and Israel?
In all these ambiguous cases, there could emerge more-or-less credible issues of enemy irrationality.[28] Regarding such “special” situations, ones where leadership elites in Beijing, Islamabad, Delhi, Tehran or elsewhere might sometime value presumed national or religious obligations more highly even than national survival itself, the precarious logic of deterrence could fail. Such failure need not be incremental and manageable. Instead, it could be sudden and catastrophic.
Any such fearful scenario is “probably improbable,” but it is by no means inconceivable. This hesitancy-conditioned probability calculation is effectively mandated by variously fixed limitations of science. As indicated earlier, one can never speak reliably about the probability of unique events (all probability judgments must be based upon the determinable frequency of past events). Fortunately, of course, there has never been a nuclear war, but this absence also means a scientific incapacity for certain meaningful predictions.
Further Importance of Synergies[29] and Nuclear Doctrine
Always important for leaders to understand will be possible interactions or synergies between changing adversaries and their particular ties to China, Syria and Russia. In managing such strategic threats, a new question should arise: Will “Cold War II” help our steeply imperiled planet, or hurt it even more?
Such queries should always represent intellectual questions, not narrowly political ones. Above all, they will need to be addressed at suitably analytic levels.
There is more. Strategic policies will have to deal with a variegated assortment of sub-national threats of WMD terrorism. Until now, insurgent enemies were sometimes able to confront states with serious perils and in widely assorted theatres of conflict, but they were never capable of posing any catastrophic hazards to a nation’s homeland. Now, however, with the steadily expanding prospect of WMD-equipped terrorist enemies – possibly, in the future, even well-armed nuclear terrorists[30] – humankind could have to face strategic situations that are prospectively more dire.
For the United States in particular, the unraveled situation in Afghanistan portends heightened chances of WMD terrorism, against the homeland and certain allies, especially Israel. The adversarial particulars remain unclear, but ISIS-K resurgence/reconstitution and the strengthening of other Islamist groups may also bode ill for rational enemy decision-making. What then?
To face any such unprecedented security situation, national leaders will need to “arm” themselves with previously-fashioned nuclear doctrines and policies. By definition, any such doctrines and policies ought never represent “seat of the pants” reactions to ad hoc threats. Rather, because generality expresses a trait of all serious meaning in science – “one big thing” – such doctrines and policies will have to be shaped according to variously broad categories of strategic threat. In the absence of such previously worked-out conceptual categories, human leadership responses are almost certain to be inadequate, or worse.
A concluding thought about synergies: Such portentous intersections could occur between military and non-military threats. For example, and prospectively most ominous, would be synergies that arise between nuclear proliferation and disease pandemic. In the conceivably worst case, a man-made “plague” of nuclear war would coincide with a natural plague of pathogens.[31]Prima facie, any such “force multiplication” should be avoided at all costs.
The Question of Rationality
From the start, all strategic policies have been founded upon some underlying assumption of rationality.[32] Americans have always presumed that their enemies, both states and terrorists, will inevitably value their own continued survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences. But this core assumption ought no longer be taken for granted.
Expressions of decisional irrationality could take various different and overlapping forms. These forms include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary national decision maker).
Confronted with Jihadist enemies,[33] states and terrorists, world leaders must quickly understand that our primary threats to retaliate for first-strike aggressions[34] could sometime fall on deaf ears. This holds true whether America would threaten massive retaliation (MAD), or the more graduated and measured forms of reprisal termed nuclear utilization theory (NUT).[35] In the months and years ahead, threateni8ng anti-American terror groups (e.g., Taliban, ISIS-K, etc.) that “we will hunt down and destroy you” is apt to fall upon deaf ears.
There is more.Ultimately, any sensible. nuclear doctrine should recognize critical connections between law and strategy. From the formal standpoint of international law,[36] certain expressions of preemption or defensive first strikes are known as anticipatory self-defense. Expecting possible enemy irrationality, when would such protective military actions be required to safeguard the human homeland from diverse forms of WMD attack?
This now becomes an all-important question.
The Legal Standpoint and Nuclear Targeting
Though often subordinated to strategy, there are also pertinent jurisprudential issues for decision-makers and commanders. Recalling that international law is part of the law of the United States,[37] most notably at Article 6 of the US Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”) and at a 1900 Supreme Court case (the Pacquete Habana), how could anticipatory military defense actions be rendered compatible with conventional and customary obligations? This critical question must be raised and plausibly answered.
From the standpoint of international law, inter alia, it is always necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from “preventive ones.” Preemption is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation that the only foreseeable alternative would be to be struck first oneself. A preemptive attack is launched by a state that believes enemy forces are about to attack. A preventive attack, on the other hand, is not launched out of any genuine concern about “imminent” hostilities, but rather for fear of some longer-term deterioration in a prevailing military “balance.”
In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive strike, however, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here is not only the practical difficulty of accurately determining “imminence,” but also the implicit problems of postponement. Delaying a defensive strike until an imminent threat would be more tangibly ascertainable could invite existential harms. In any event, any state’s resort to “anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or non-nuclear, and be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear adversary.
Ipso facto, any such resort involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides could prove catastrophic.
My late friend and frequent co-author, General John T. Chain, a former USAF SAC Commander-in-Chief (CINCSAC) and Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff director (JSTPS) understood that pertinent world leaders would need to consider and reconsider key issues of nuclear targeting.[38] Relevant operational concerns here concern vital differences between the targeting of enemy civilians and cities (so-called “counter value” targeting) and targeting of enemy military assets/infrastructures (so-called “counterforce” targeting). Oddly enough, most national leaders likely still don’t realize that the essence of 1950s/1960s “massive retaliation” and “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) was always an unhidden plan for counter-value targeting.
Any such partially-resurrected military doctrine could sound barbarous or inhumane, but if the alternative was to settle for less credible systems of nuclear deterrence, explicit codifications of counter value targeting posture could still represent the best way to prevent millions of civilian deaths (i.e., deaths from nuclear war and/or nuclear terrorism). Neither preemption nor counter-value targeting could ever guarantee absolute security for Planet Earth. Nonetheless, it remains imperative that the United States and other nuclear weapons states put capable strategic thinkers[39] to work on these and all other nuclear warfare issues.[40]
In The End
The first time[41] that a world leader has to face an authentic nuclear crisis, his/her response should not be ad hoc. Rather, this response should flow seamlessly from broad and previously calibrated strategic doctrine. It follows that national leaders should already be thinking carefully about how this complex doctrine ought best to be shaped and codified. Whatever the particulars, these leaders must acknowledge at the outset the systemic[42] nature of our “world order problem.”[43]
Any planetary system of law and power management that seeks to avoid a nuclear war must first recognize a significant underlying axiom:As egregious crimes under international law, war and genocide[44] need not be mutually exclusive.On the contrary, as one may learn from history, war could sometimes be undertaken as an “efficient” manner of national, ethnical, racial or religious annihilation.[45]
When the war in question is a nuclear one, the argument becomes unassailable.
Global rescue must always go beyond narrowly physical forms of survival. At stake is not “just” the palpable survival of Homo sapiens as a distinct animal life form, but also the species’ essential humanitas, that is, its sum total of individual souls[46] seeking “redemption.”[47] For now, however, too-few species members have displayed any meaningful understanding of this less tangible but still vital variant of human survival.[48]
It’s time to start worrying again about nuclear war avoidance, but this time worrying won’t be enough. The only reasonable use for nuclear weapons on this imperiled planet will still be as controlled elements of dissuasion, and not as actual weapons of war. The underlying principles of such a rational diplomatic posture go back long before the advent of nuclear weapons. In his oft-studied classic On War (see especially Chapter 3, “Planning Offensives”), ancient Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu reminds succinctly: “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.”
There can be no more compelling strategic dictum. Indeed, this distilled wisdom represents the “one big thing” for US strategists, commanders and policy-makers “to know.” It would be best not to have any enemies in the first place, of course, but such residually high hopes would be without any intellectual foundation. Hence, they would always remain unsupportable.
For the United States, unwelcome outcomes in Afghanistan do not portend actual nuclear warfare prospects per se, but they do suggest a general widening diminution of American power. Among other things, this diminution could spawn various regional or global crises that bring the United States into a much larger ambit of WMD scenarios, ones involving both war and terror. Even if the US were not itself involved in any such crises directly, other states or the world as a whole could quickly become entangled in extremis atomicum.
What then?
Immediately, to the extent possible, national leaders should make all appropriate intellectual and analytic preparations. In carrying out this responsibility, careful attention should be given to scenarios of inadvertent nuclear war, narratives pertaining both to accidental nuclear conflict and to nuclear war as the result of a miscalculation. Though prospects for a deliberate nuclear war ought never to be downplayed, preparations for credible nuclear deterrence must be continuously maintained at the highest possible levels.
Now, it is nuclear war by inadvertence that warrants exceptional intellectual attention.
To meet these interrelated security requirement, leaders of both nuclear and near-nuclear states must first acknowledge the overriding seriousness of our global atomic threat. Instead of ad hoc or seat-of-the-pants strategizing – a characteristic policy failing of America’s “Trump Era” geopolitical calculations – these leaders should be reminded that there can be nothing more plausibly practical than good theory. Specifically, they can learn from philosopher of science Karl Popper’s classic The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959): “Theory is a net. Only those who cast, can catch.”[49]
To prevent a nuclear war, humankind will need the best possible “nets.”
Published by andrewtheprophet
This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be. 11:11 View all posts by andrewtheprophet
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