When I was a very little boy, one dinner time my father started talking about nuclear war, nuclear weapons, and the radiation that would come right through the walls and kill you. I remember how terrified I was, and I remember looking out the window and saying, Right through the glass? Yes, right through the glass.
I was too young to know about the Cuban missile crisis, but years later my father told me how frightened he had been. The Korean War had ended only a few years before, and my father's six years in the artillery in WWII was not a distant memory.
Funny how a scare turns to fascination. I read everything with the word nuclear in it, and 60 years later I build equipment for the nuclear industry. I am sure it started with that conversation.
I have been trained in something called Root Cause Analysis, common in the nuclear industry. When there is a catastrophe or a near miss (funny term that!) you analyse the snot out of it until you know what has to be done to prevent recurrence.
Complex systems like nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons systems, economies and countries have many checks, approvals, barriers to failure, redundancies and automated detection systems, so a catastrophe almost always has multiple causes.
Complex systems are never static. They either adapt and renew, or they stagnate and deteriorate. People leave, experience is lost, procedures are revised, equipment is replaced, minor problems have temporary fixes that become permanent, all with unforeseen consequences. Niall Ferguson in one of his books said that complex system can go on for years, seemingly healthy, with the residents blissfully unaware of the rot within. Then one day, a small operator error, a minor equipment failure, a valve that doesnt close at TMI, a foreclosure in 2008, or a gun shot from an obscure Serbian nationalist triggers a cascade of events that crashes through all the inadequate measures and best intentions in place. Black Swan! Unforeseen but predictable.
It is interesting that when you stand amidst the wreckage and the bodies, looking back in time, with a little investigation the path to failure is relatively easy to see, right back to the initiating event. But, when you go back in time and look forward, all you see is a mass of potential problems and which one is key? Resources are finite and you can rarely deal with them all. I like Kissinger's observation that choices are never between a good option and a bad option. They are about finding the least worst option.
One cause that comes up frequently is over confidence, ie hubris. With respect, I hear that in some of the comments.
I think America and its allies are going to be tested soon.
I like WigWag's comment about the disconnect between the college educated elite and the working class joes. No wonder Labour is switching to the Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK. Charles Murray observed that today there is a cohort of wealthy young Americans that are going from high school to college to business, academia or politics, who have never worked with their hands, never mowed lawns, never waited on tables or cleaned toilets or worked in a factory.
It also lead me to a disturbing insight about stubbornness in refusing to abandon long-held views in the face of evidence. You mention KAL007. I am objectively certain later revelations support the “tragic accident” view you cite.
However, I was the leader and minder of 30 British university students studying Russian in Soviet Ukraine that fatal night, and not only recall every tense hour, and the fear we shared with our hosts, but came to support the cogent arguments of R.W. Johnson that it was not an accident. Many did: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n13/paul-foot/the-scandal-that-never-was
Here I am, in 2021, knowing the later revelations and stil unwilling truly to accept them,Still thinking more about hysterical Americans pouring Stolichnays in the gutters, while our Soviet hosts hugged us. About the air boycott, so we barely got to make it home vis Air India
So I tell the story your way, but a part of me is waiting for new evidence....
I relate this to shed light on the stubborn cognitive dissonance of others... and my own.
The key points that we should all be able to agree on is this:
(1) No one knows the future.
(2) There is a risk -- not calculatable -- of nuclear war -- among little powers, big powers or both. Because something hasn't happened, doesn't mean it can't happen. Because there is a risk of it happening, doesn't mean it will happen even given enough time.
So ... surely a rational, prudent person would ask: is there anything I can do NOW, at very little cost, that might make a significant difference to my own well-being, should the worst happen? (And note that the 'worst' is really not a point, but a spectrum -- ranging from an H-bomb bursting with you in the kill zone, all the way over to a nuclear power plant going up, with you in the fallout zone or a nuclear war among other countries that seriously disrupts our own supply chain.)
I used to think that American "preppers" were people leading boring personal lives who wanted to play-act in their own Mad Max fantasy. But whether or not that's true, the fact is that having a few weeks' food and other necessities in the basement, some potassium iodide tablets handy, and knowing that if you see a bright flash in the distance you should drop to the ground -- costs almost nothing. (Many, if not most, casualities from a nuclear weapon will be people outside the immediate death zone who are shredded by flying glass and other debris. So "duck and cover" isn't so crazy after all.)
How horrible to have to be talking about this, when we should be discussing how close we're getting to nearly-free energy via controlled fusion, defect-free genomes in our descendants via genetic engineering, the elimination of dangerous boring jobs via AI, and all the wonderful promises for the future that human rationality has come up with.
But we are where we are. And being rational includes understanding 'normalcy bias', and learning from the past.
"X will make war too terrible to wage/too expensive to wage." "We're at the End of History. Liberal democracy is inevitable."
Right. Go on, all you smart intellectuals. Take a few hours to prepare for the worst, just in case. No one else needs to know. [All you need to know can be found in the Civil Defense Manual, Volumes I and II, available here: CivilDefenseManual.com]
We should not leave out the incident involving a Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- every major Russian and American city should have a statue dedicated to one Vasily Arkhipov. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59]
And this is a good opportunity to urge everyone here to spend a few dollars and buy a bottle of potassium iodide tablets: in the event of a nuclear war, or disaster, it will allow your thyroid gland to satiate itself on harmless Iodine-127 instead of the radioative Iodine-131 which will be produced by nuclear wars or accidents. Not so important for old people, but definitely indicated for children.
As for rational self-interest protecting us from nuclear war --- it didn't protect us from World Wars One or Two. And we should also consider the effects of the decline of America and the rise of China. The decaying soon-to-be-former world super-power is going to be subject to increasingly irrational impulses. Get that potassium iodide!
Just finished reading the inventory of close-calls due to error. It takes me back to my 1980’s decade of nuclear war fear. I recall contemplating every foreign-policy action in terms of “closer to or farther from nuclear war. Of course- my analysis was naive and misinformed. One would assume or rather fantasize that there is a greater degree of mishap-safety, than actually is the case.
People have exaggerated ideas regarding the risk of nuclear war. As a matter of fact nuclear weapons greatly mitigate the risk of a major war. As Machiavelli put it, fear is more reliable than love, since it involves self-interest, which love does not. The fabled balance of terror is no more than mutual self-interest, and it’s more to be relied upon than idealism and wishful thinking.
Humans learn to ignore risks out of their control. It can be a good survival and mental health strategy.
I was born in the 50's. At some point I decided, probably subconsciously, that I had no control over nukes and would not waste time and energy worrying about it. Early on I concluded that ducking and covering under my desk was a joke.
It will either happen or not.
People who could not manage the nuclear risks this way found other ways. Some built bomb shelters to give themselves the illusion that they did have some control of the situation.
That their action (we have to do something) was based on an illusion, but for many it was a good thing as it reduced their anxiety and gave them as sense of greater control over their lives.
We each find our own way to manage the many risks we face as living beings.
I do expect the people in government and the military who do have some abilities to reduce the risks to worry about these issues and take what actions they can to minimize them.
I am at risk when I drive my car, but I have some control in that situation. I drive defensively to reduce the risk. I know I cannot reduce the risk to zero. I manage the risk so that I don't obsess over the risks and become to afraid to drive. Poor risk management can emotionally paralyze a person.
Never be shocked that others evaluate and manage risks in ways different from your own.
"It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.
The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges* left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?"
*Note: these were small depth charges, meant to annoy not destroy.
What your list of "close calls" actually demonstrates is that the checks and backups actually work.
I was on the front line in Germany during that 1977 incident My unit and the others like it were on the Soviets' battlefield prep list. Read about it in Stars and Stripes. None of that warning made it to us, either, except in S&S.
What a long list of "near misses" that is, and with nary a hit. Of course, no system built by man is perfect; however, I decline to cower under my bed--or in a bunker--in terror that sometime something might go wrong.
And a couple of examples that illustrate the hysteria of this sort of thing.
"Soviet bombers laden with nuclear weapons sat on their runways with their engines roaring, on red alert."
No, they weren't. When aircraft sit on their runways, their engines are in idle--not roaring--until they're actually taking off. For one thing, the brakes won't hold if the engines are that powered up, whether the jets of a badger or all those props of a bear.
"Everyone in the bunker began screaming. Sweat poured off Petrov’s face."
Widely claimed in hysterical reports--what eye witness, what person present in the bunker, says so? I've seen none.
"The United States still has an official policy of launch on warning...."
I certainly hope so. The policy was instituted when the Soviets developed a policy, and the tactic to execute it, to detonate warheads over our missile bases in sequenced arrivals to prevent us from being able to launch--the air bursts would rapidly dissassemble our missiles during launch phase. The now-Russian tactic would be easily adaptable to sequenced EMP, which would disrupt our missiles' electronics.
That pin-down tactic is also why we wound up eschewing a dense-pack plan of silo installation.
And yet, with that so-called hair trigger in place, nary a missile has been launched. Because checks and backups work.
"Once, an unstable pilot deliberately turned on the two arming switches on his plane’s nuclear bombs.
"Lost nuclear-armed bombers have flown into the Russian warning net. [And they weren't shot down? By the same government that shoots down lost civilian airliners?]
"Air Force officers have tampered with missiles so better to launch them without orders."
Things right out of a John Travolta sort of movie. You have sources for these incidents? Actual sources, quoting actual people, not newspaper claims quoting their childhood invisible friends.
Just when I was despairing about Tiger Mom-gate and the spreading insanity among our intellectual elites, you've given me something else to worry about!
Wow, this essay is a real tour de force; it’s both chilling and brilliantly written. Given the mistakes that almost led to nuclear disaster during the Cold War, is there any reason to believe that mistakes could not have led to the accidental release of SARS-CoV-2 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
Great essay and comments. Here are my two cents.
When I was a very little boy, one dinner time my father started talking about nuclear war, nuclear weapons, and the radiation that would come right through the walls and kill you. I remember how terrified I was, and I remember looking out the window and saying, Right through the glass? Yes, right through the glass.
I was too young to know about the Cuban missile crisis, but years later my father told me how frightened he had been. The Korean War had ended only a few years before, and my father's six years in the artillery in WWII was not a distant memory.
Funny how a scare turns to fascination. I read everything with the word nuclear in it, and 60 years later I build equipment for the nuclear industry. I am sure it started with that conversation.
I have been trained in something called Root Cause Analysis, common in the nuclear industry. When there is a catastrophe or a near miss (funny term that!) you analyse the snot out of it until you know what has to be done to prevent recurrence.
Complex systems like nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons systems, economies and countries have many checks, approvals, barriers to failure, redundancies and automated detection systems, so a catastrophe almost always has multiple causes.
Complex systems are never static. They either adapt and renew, or they stagnate and deteriorate. People leave, experience is lost, procedures are revised, equipment is replaced, minor problems have temporary fixes that become permanent, all with unforeseen consequences. Niall Ferguson in one of his books said that complex system can go on for years, seemingly healthy, with the residents blissfully unaware of the rot within. Then one day, a small operator error, a minor equipment failure, a valve that doesnt close at TMI, a foreclosure in 2008, or a gun shot from an obscure Serbian nationalist triggers a cascade of events that crashes through all the inadequate measures and best intentions in place. Black Swan! Unforeseen but predictable.
It is interesting that when you stand amidst the wreckage and the bodies, looking back in time, with a little investigation the path to failure is relatively easy to see, right back to the initiating event. But, when you go back in time and look forward, all you see is a mass of potential problems and which one is key? Resources are finite and you can rarely deal with them all. I like Kissinger's observation that choices are never between a good option and a bad option. They are about finding the least worst option.
One cause that comes up frequently is over confidence, ie hubris. With respect, I hear that in some of the comments.
I think America and its allies are going to be tested soon.
I like WigWag's comment about the disconnect between the college educated elite and the working class joes. No wonder Labour is switching to the Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK. Charles Murray observed that today there is a cohort of wealthy young Americans that are going from high school to college to business, academia or politics, who have never worked with their hands, never mowed lawns, never waited on tables or cleaned toilets or worked in a factory.
Chilling and important, Claire.
It also lead me to a disturbing insight about stubbornness in refusing to abandon long-held views in the face of evidence. You mention KAL007. I am objectively certain later revelations support the “tragic accident” view you cite.
However, I was the leader and minder of 30 British university students studying Russian in Soviet Ukraine that fatal night, and not only recall every tense hour, and the fear we shared with our hosts, but came to support the cogent arguments of R.W. Johnson that it was not an accident. Many did: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n13/paul-foot/the-scandal-that-never-was
Here I am, in 2021, knowing the later revelations and stil unwilling truly to accept them,Still thinking more about hysterical Americans pouring Stolichnays in the gutters, while our Soviet hosts hugged us. About the air boycott, so we barely got to make it home vis Air India
So I tell the story your way, but a part of me is waiting for new evidence....
I relate this to shed light on the stubborn cognitive dissonance of others... and my own.
Expertise on how to break through this?
The key points that we should all be able to agree on is this:
(1) No one knows the future.
(2) There is a risk -- not calculatable -- of nuclear war -- among little powers, big powers or both. Because something hasn't happened, doesn't mean it can't happen. Because there is a risk of it happening, doesn't mean it will happen even given enough time.
So ... surely a rational, prudent person would ask: is there anything I can do NOW, at very little cost, that might make a significant difference to my own well-being, should the worst happen? (And note that the 'worst' is really not a point, but a spectrum -- ranging from an H-bomb bursting with you in the kill zone, all the way over to a nuclear power plant going up, with you in the fallout zone or a nuclear war among other countries that seriously disrupts our own supply chain.)
I used to think that American "preppers" were people leading boring personal lives who wanted to play-act in their own Mad Max fantasy. But whether or not that's true, the fact is that having a few weeks' food and other necessities in the basement, some potassium iodide tablets handy, and knowing that if you see a bright flash in the distance you should drop to the ground -- costs almost nothing. (Many, if not most, casualities from a nuclear weapon will be people outside the immediate death zone who are shredded by flying glass and other debris. So "duck and cover" isn't so crazy after all.)
How horrible to have to be talking about this, when we should be discussing how close we're getting to nearly-free energy via controlled fusion, defect-free genomes in our descendants via genetic engineering, the elimination of dangerous boring jobs via AI, and all the wonderful promises for the future that human rationality has come up with.
But we are where we are. And being rational includes understanding 'normalcy bias', and learning from the past.
"X will make war too terrible to wage/too expensive to wage." "We're at the End of History. Liberal democracy is inevitable."
Right. Go on, all you smart intellectuals. Take a few hours to prepare for the worst, just in case. No one else needs to know. [All you need to know can be found in the Civil Defense Manual, Volumes I and II, available here: CivilDefenseManual.com]
We should not leave out the incident involving a Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- every major Russian and American city should have a statue dedicated to one Vasily Arkhipov. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59]
And this is a good opportunity to urge everyone here to spend a few dollars and buy a bottle of potassium iodide tablets: in the event of a nuclear war, or disaster, it will allow your thyroid gland to satiate itself on harmless Iodine-127 instead of the radioative Iodine-131 which will be produced by nuclear wars or accidents. Not so important for old people, but definitely indicated for children.
As for rational self-interest protecting us from nuclear war --- it didn't protect us from World Wars One or Two. And we should also consider the effects of the decline of America and the rise of China. The decaying soon-to-be-former world super-power is going to be subject to increasingly irrational impulses. Get that potassium iodide!
Just finished reading the inventory of close-calls due to error. It takes me back to my 1980’s decade of nuclear war fear. I recall contemplating every foreign-policy action in terms of “closer to or farther from nuclear war. Of course- my analysis was naive and misinformed. One would assume or rather fantasize that there is a greater degree of mishap-safety, than actually is the case.
People have exaggerated ideas regarding the risk of nuclear war. As a matter of fact nuclear weapons greatly mitigate the risk of a major war. As Machiavelli put it, fear is more reliable than love, since it involves self-interest, which love does not. The fabled balance of terror is no more than mutual self-interest, and it’s more to be relied upon than idealism and wishful thinking.
Humans learn to ignore risks out of their control. It can be a good survival and mental health strategy.
I was born in the 50's. At some point I decided, probably subconsciously, that I had no control over nukes and would not waste time and energy worrying about it. Early on I concluded that ducking and covering under my desk was a joke.
It will either happen or not.
People who could not manage the nuclear risks this way found other ways. Some built bomb shelters to give themselves the illusion that they did have some control of the situation.
That their action (we have to do something) was based on an illusion, but for many it was a good thing as it reduced their anxiety and gave them as sense of greater control over their lives.
We each find our own way to manage the many risks we face as living beings.
I do expect the people in government and the military who do have some abilities to reduce the risks to worry about these issues and take what actions they can to minimize them.
I am at risk when I drive my car, but I have some control in that situation. I drive defensively to reduce the risk. I know I cannot reduce the risk to zero. I manage the risk so that I don't obsess over the risks and become to afraid to drive. Poor risk management can emotionally paralyze a person.
Never be shocked that others evaluate and manage risks in ways different from your own.
It is part of the diversity of our species.
I agree with WigWag: a tour de force. Here's yet another close call, which played out in the Atlantic during the Cuban Missile Crisis:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man
"It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.
The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges* left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?"
*Note: these were small depth charges, meant to annoy not destroy.
Wow.
What your list of "close calls" actually demonstrates is that the checks and backups actually work.
I was on the front line in Germany during that 1977 incident My unit and the others like it were on the Soviets' battlefield prep list. Read about it in Stars and Stripes. None of that warning made it to us, either, except in S&S.
What a long list of "near misses" that is, and with nary a hit. Of course, no system built by man is perfect; however, I decline to cower under my bed--or in a bunker--in terror that sometime something might go wrong.
And a couple of examples that illustrate the hysteria of this sort of thing.
"Soviet bombers laden with nuclear weapons sat on their runways with their engines roaring, on red alert."
No, they weren't. When aircraft sit on their runways, their engines are in idle--not roaring--until they're actually taking off. For one thing, the brakes won't hold if the engines are that powered up, whether the jets of a badger or all those props of a bear.
"Everyone in the bunker began screaming. Sweat poured off Petrov’s face."
Widely claimed in hysterical reports--what eye witness, what person present in the bunker, says so? I've seen none.
"The United States still has an official policy of launch on warning...."
I certainly hope so. The policy was instituted when the Soviets developed a policy, and the tactic to execute it, to detonate warheads over our missile bases in sequenced arrivals to prevent us from being able to launch--the air bursts would rapidly dissassemble our missiles during launch phase. The now-Russian tactic would be easily adaptable to sequenced EMP, which would disrupt our missiles' electronics.
That pin-down tactic is also why we wound up eschewing a dense-pack plan of silo installation.
And yet, with that so-called hair trigger in place, nary a missile has been launched. Because checks and backups work.
"Once, an unstable pilot deliberately turned on the two arming switches on his plane’s nuclear bombs.
"Lost nuclear-armed bombers have flown into the Russian warning net. [And they weren't shot down? By the same government that shoots down lost civilian airliners?]
"Air Force officers have tampered with missiles so better to launch them without orders."
Things right out of a John Travolta sort of movie. You have sources for these incidents? Actual sources, quoting actual people, not newspaper claims quoting their childhood invisible friends.
Eric Hines
I hope the Russians love their children, too...
Just when I was despairing about Tiger Mom-gate and the spreading insanity among our intellectual elites, you've given me something else to worry about!
Wow, this essay is a real tour de force; it’s both chilling and brilliantly written. Given the mistakes that almost led to nuclear disaster during the Cold War, is there any reason to believe that mistakes could not have led to the accidental release of SARS-CoV-2 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?