The Nuclear Risks of Prigozhin's Coup
We dodged a nuclear bullet. Our luck won't last.
My phone started buzzing as soon as news broke of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny. The confusion, instability and uncertainty gave many of us nuclear chills. Many claim these weapons are the foundation of our defense, our ultimate security. But at moments like this we understand that they are our ultimate threat.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Most of the reporting on the crisis understandably focuses on what it means for Putin, Russia and Putin’s war on Ukraine. But Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with some 5,900 weapons. One or two explosions would be a catastrophe. Ten would be a level of destruction never before seen in human history. A hundred or more would bring the end of civilization.
The Daily Beast Editor Anthony Fisher asked me for my analysis. I wrote it early this morning and it is now live on that publication. Here are some excerpts. To read it in full, please go to the news site
There were four major nuclear risks during this 24-hour coup. Two unlikely; two very real.
The first was that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin would seize some of Russia’s nuclear weapons. This was highly unlikely…All Russian nuclear weapons are equipped with use controls, requiring codes to unlock. Even if he gained access to them, how would he use them? Whomever used Russian weapons on Russian people would immediately become a national pariah.
The second was that Vladimir Putin would use them against the rebels. He has command of the codes and weapons (though some believe he may need the concurrence of the defense minister or military chief to launch them). But he, too, would face the same problem as Prigozhin. Despite his repeated nuclear threats, even Putin understands that the weapons don’t have much military purpose and their use would discredit the user.
More serious was the risk of the collapse of the state, and with it, the system of nuclear command and control. Only once before in history has the world faced the prospect of a nuclear-armed nation descending into chaos. That was in the August 1991 attempted coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. It, too, failed.
But when the Soviet Union collapsed a few months later, there was immediate concern: Who gets the weapons? Who gets the material used to build the weapons? What happens to the scientists who know how to build the weapons?
At that time, the U.S. and Russia were on good terms. A concerted, well-funded U.S. effort led to the greatest cooperative nuclear reductions in history, including the removal and destruction of thousands of weapons from Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
With Putin now gravely weakened, the Russian state again appears unstable. But there is no guarantee that such an effort could be repeated. A nuclear black market could spread weapons, material and scientists to the far corners of the globe….
…….Although there have been dozens of computer and machine failures that brought us perilously close to mistaken nuclear launches over the decades, the weakest link in the nuclear command and control chain remains the humans who manage them. Many of these leaders have been considered mentally unbalanced, including in our country. It takes a committed optimist to believe that we can leave thousands of nuclear weapons in fallible human hands indefinitely and something terrible won’t happen.
Something terrible will happen. It just didn’t happen this time.
…To continue reading, please go here.
The problem with the entire Nuclear War Industrial Complex is that its foundational cornerstone is a lie.
That lie is that use of the A-bomb was what ended World War II.
The second bomb was dropped at Nagasaki, the most anti-imperial city in Japan over the previous 300 years, and mistakenly on the Urakami Catholic Church, the largest Christian church in Asia, built by the contributions of the members, descendants of the Christians suppressed in the 17th Century by the Shogunate who remained secretly Christian all through the Shogunate, which the bombardier mistook for the Mitsubishi factory that was the "target" (they had to bomb on radar or drop it in the ocean, if they were going to get back, and they ran out of gas on the runway at Kadena as it was, the entire mission was FUBAR from takeoff to landing).
That day, the Imperial War Council met all day. The Nagasaki bombing was never mentioned. That's because they were completely absorbed by the USSR's attack that morning, which was completely unexpected. The vaunted Kwantung Army no longer really existed, since the best units had been withdrawn to Kyushu for he final confrontation with the Americans. That day the Red Army moved 110 miles into Manchuria, like a knife through hot butter. The Japanese knew the Soviets would have it all by the end of the month. The Russians expected to invade Hokkaido in late September. There was no defense in the north; they would have been in Tokyo by mid-October and by the time the US landed on Kyushu on beaches no one would have gotten off of (I have spoken to Marines who visited the invasion beaches in September 1945, when all the defenses were there to see; it was their considered opinion they couldn't have broken them).
The Japanese knew what the Soviets had done in Germany after the surrender, and they knew the Soviets would be equally hard on them. That's why they surrendered to us. And of course they told us the bomb was the reason why (Japanese history of the Pacific War is "We went to war to liberate Asia from the White Man and we won every battle but had to make strategic retreats and then - Atom Bombs!"), which allowed them to play Nuclear Victim for the past 80 years, which got them let off the Japanese version of "de-Nazification" that was forced on Germany; the (un)Liberal(not)Democratic Party was founded by the former leaders in the war - which never happened in Germany.
We founded our post war military and diplomatic strategy on a lie, since no sane person will ever use these weapons. Which is why we have lost every war we've fought since 1945.
Nuclear weapons are, and always have been, bullshit. But they're nice and pretty and so several generations of over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable trust fund babies have made nice careers (Ladies and gentlemen, Henry the K) as nuclear bullshit artists.
When I set out to write "Tidal Wave", I was still a believer in the nuclear bullshit, but the facts are now available to anyone who knows how to ask Google the right questions to get PDFs of the de-classified reports and such that open the door to Reality.
Sadly, after 75 years there is little evidence that focusing on the weapons will ever deliver us from the nuclear threat. Indeed, there is little evidence that ANY of the things we've been doing for 75 years will ever work. Wasn't it Einstein that claimed that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of stupidity?
Even if we somehow got rid of all nuclear weapons, that wouldn't really solve the problem for very long. Psychopathic power trippers like Putin would then simply turn their attention to other means of threatening their victims with mass chaos, and an accelerating knowledge explosion will provide them with ever more such options.
If "realistic" and "reasonable" ideas that experts would certify as credible could end the nuclear weapons era, after 75 years wouldn't that era already be over? If that's true, then the most promising area for investigation would seem to be in that collection of ideas which reside outside the status quo group consensus. Let's call them "crackpot ideas".
A key problem I see is that experts, those with credibility and cultural authority, can not afford to publicly explore beyond the failed status quo because doing so would threaten their professional reputations and income. Experts can't afford to be seen as crackpots. They can't afford to do the job which needs doing.
So what then? One paradigm shift that might be explored would be to shift our focus from weapons to those who would use them. The reasoning here is that so long as violent men are running rampant all over the planet, a focus on weapons is a loser's game. It seems more accurate to state that we have a violent men problem than that we have a nuclear weapons problem.
So here's another proposal from outside the box. Anything is worth a try.
Let's give every national security expert in America 100 million dollars from the national treasury so that they can stop worrying about their reputations and incomes, and focus their intelligence and experience instead on the real problem that we face, which is...
Violent men.
We need people with cultural authority who are liberated to think outside the box. Without that, the most likely outcome is that we will keep doing the same failed things over and over again until the day that we run out of luck.