What I Think About the Risk of Massive Scale Nuclear War Now

Last week, I published a review of The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg I wrote for a book review contest. I wrote that last year. Though it came very close to becoming a finalist in the contest, it didn’t, and thus wasn’t published last year. (If it had been published as part of the contest, even as a mere finalist, far more people would’ve read it, and it would’ve raised more awareness). I’d considered other ways to publish it. Once Daniel Ellsberg died, I decided to just publish it here rather than get it somewhere with more readers.

Since writing that review, I’ve learned the consequences of mass scale nuclear war (the kind which would happen if the United States and the Russian Federation had a nuclear war with each other) may be less than Ellsberg presented them. However, they’d still be extremely terrible, and it’s possible Ellsberg was right about the severity of the consequences.

This is the top threat to humanity. More than pandemics. More than climate change. We’ve gotten through many pandemics, often with great losses, but societies pull through. Environmental changes have caused many historical societies to cease to exist, but I believe it is likely some human communities will survive climate change too (though perhaps not mine).

I’m not sure humanity can continue to exist after a mass scale nuclear war.

Nuclear FOMO Might Kill Us All (in Memory of Daniel Ellsberg), Part 5 (Conclusion)

(Continued from Part 4)

VIII.

To those who are interested in prediction markets, I must throw out this quote as a teaser:

Most accounts of the Trinity tes on the early morning of July 17, 1945, recount that Fermi offered to accept bets the night before as to whether atmospheric ignition would occur. He said, “I feel I am now in a position to make book [that is, to accept bets at fixed odds] on two contingencies: 1) that the explosion will burn New Mexico; 2) that it will ignite the whole world.” Too bad that the actual odds Fermi offered that night on these events are lost to history. Whether anyone placed money with Fermi and what odds he did offer seem never to have been reported. There are strong hints that his odds for total atmospheric ignition were much higher than three in a million. He would hardly have offered to “make book” on the basis of odds like that… … As Peter Goodchild recounts, Fermi’s expression of uncertainty about the occurrence of atmospheric ignition had been neither a joke nor a last minute tremor.

If you want to know more about what this quote refers to, read the book. It dedicates an entire chapter to this topic.

IX.

Ellsberg claims that the United States has used nuclear weapons many times since the end of World War II—and he doesn’t just mean the tests. He says that the U.S. government’s primary use for nuclear weapons is not deterrence—that’s a lie for the public—but threatening first-use strikes to bully other governments into caving to U.S. government demands. He even says, “All American presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have acted on that motive, at times, for owning nuclear weapons.”

Nuclear FOMO Might Kill Us All (in Memory of Daniel Ellsberg), Part 4

(continued from Part 3)

VII.

The United States, in war, never targets civilians, especially not high concentrations of civilians, such as cities.

Do you believe that?

If yes, explain why the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities instead of uninhabited Japanese islands, or an unpopulated part of Hokkaido.

Because no Japanese would be around to observe it? Then why not tell the Japanese where and when the bomb would be dropped so they could send observers? If the United States had dropped an atom bomb on one of the uninhabited islands between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, they could’ve invited Soviets too. So why drop atom bombs on cities?

Ellsberg says:

When Truman later mentioned that neither the prospect nor the actual use of the atom bomb ever gave him a moment’s hesitation or a night’s troubled sleep, that seemed odd to many Americans, including myself when I first read it. After all, he might have said that it was a difficult, in fact anguishing, moral problem, a grave decision, but that there was just no way around it. How could it not be a moral challenge? But Truman sometimes went on to mention something that was scarcely clear to many Americans then, and still is not: that we had long been killing more people than that in the course of our non-nuclear fire-bombing attacks.

On the next page, Ellsberg says, “there was no no moral agonizing at all among Truman’s civilian or military advisors about the prospect of using the atom bomb on a city. That moral threshold had been crossed long before.”

When had the moral threshold been crossed?

Nuclear FOMO Might Kill Us All (in Memory of Daniel Ellsberg), Part 3

(continued from Part 2)

V.

Ellsberg describes many layers of codified secrecy he encountered when he was a RAND consultant. There were classification levels above ‘Top Secret’ you only knew about if you had the right classification to know it existed.

Having so many layers of secrecy makes error checking difficult—or impossible.

Even when, as a RAND consultant, Ellsberg discovered mistakes, he had difficulty correcting them. Sometimes the people who could correct the mistake didn’t have the proper classification to learn relevant information, so when Ellsberg said, ‘you should do this,’ it made no sense to them, and they didn’t do it.

Per treaty with Japan, the United States wasn’t allowed to put nuclear weapons anywhere in Japanese territory (Okinawa was under U.S. rule in the 1960s and thus didn’t count). The Japanese really, really cared about this. They cared so much that, if the United States put nuclear weapons in Japanese territory, Japan might cut off diplomatic relations with the United States and pivot to China.

Nuclear FOMO Might Kill Us All (in Memory of Daniel Ellsberg), Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

III.

Americans believe that only the POTUS can authorize the use of the United States’ nuclear weapons. Before I read this book, I never questioned this belief. Heck, I never thought about it.

Just a few minutes of thought reveals a problem: if an enemy wants to prevent the United States from launching nuclear weapons, all they have to do is assassinate the POTUS. Okay, it’s more complicated than that. They also have to assassinate the VPOTUS and anyone else to whom the military could deliver ‘nuclear codes’ in the short term.

Thus, if someone like the Soviet Union wanted to prevent the United States from using nuclear weapons, all they had to do was bomb Washington D.C. when the POTUS, VPOTUS, Speaker of the House, etc. were all in town.

The solution is obvious: pre-delegate the authority to use nuclear weapons to people in multiple locations, either locations the enemy can’t predict, or so many locations the enemy can’t attack them all.

Ellsberg says this is exactly what the U.S. military has done, and he believes this is still true today. That only the POTUS has the authority to trigger the launching of the United States’ nuclear weapons is a lie. Ellsberg dedicates many pages to his evidence; I won’t repeat it.

Any of those people who are authorized to initiate the use of nuclear weapons can trigger a war—not just the POTUS.

Then Ellsberg asks: why keep this secret? If the enemy believes that they can prevent a nuclear attack by bombing Washington D.C., especially if they believe it’s their only hope of survival, doesn’t that give them an incentive to try that? An enemy might even believe they could initiate a nuclear war and survive. Wouldn’t announcing pre-delegation of nuclear weapons authority discourage them from pulling that stunt?

It gets worse.

Nuclear FOMO Might Kill Us All (in Memory of Daniel Ellsberg), Part 1

A few days ago, Daniel Ellsberg died.

Last year, I’d read his book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner and written a review for a contest. I didn’t even make it as a finalist, and had been sitting on this review ever since.

I’m publishing it now in five parts (Monday – Friday) to honor his life.

***

I.

This is the most important part of the introduction to The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower. Even if you ignore the rest of this review, read this passage:

In 1961 I had learned as an insider that our secret nuclear decision-making, policy, plans, and practices for general nuclear war endangered, by the JCS estimate, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a third of the earth’s population. What none of us knew at the time—not the Joint Chiefs, not the president or his science advisors, not anyone else for the next two decades, until 1983—were the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then or later would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most large species). (See chapter 18.) It is the smoke, after all (not the fallout, which would remain mostly limited to the northern hemisphere), that would do it worldwide: smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight, lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age, and killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two. U.S. plans for thermonuclear war in the early sixties, if carried out in the Berlin or Cuban missile crises, would have killed many times more than the six hundred million people predicted by the JCS. They would have caused nuclear winter that would have starved to death nearly everyone then living: at that time three billion. The numbers of warheads on both sides have since declined greatly—by over 80 percent!—from their highest levels in the sixties. Yet by the most recent scientific calculations—confirming and even strengthening the initial warnings of more than thirty years ago—even a fraction of the existing smaller arsenals would be more than enough to cause nuclear winter today, on the basis of existing plans that target command and control centers and other objectives in or near cities. In other words, first-strike nuclear attacks by either side very much smaller than were planned in the sixties and seventies—and which are still prepared for instant execution in both Russia and American—would still kill by loss of sunlight and resulting starvation nearly all the humans on earth, now over seven billion.

If the above claims are correct, people who build private nuclear bunkers to wait out fallout are wasting their resources. Even if they store enough supplies to wait out a decade or two of nuclear winter, it’s not clear how they could survive once their supplies run out. Even if they’re experienced farmers and have seeds and tools, they might not figure out how to grow food in a post-nuclear-winter ecosystem soon enough to avoid starvation.

This tells me the best place to be during a nuclear strike is in a city which is guaranteed to be targeted in a United States-Russian Federation nuclear war. That way I’ll die quickly.

But why the heck should I make choices about this at all? Why should you? Why put energy into figuring out how to react to a nuclear winter instead of preventing it?

What the Heck Will Happen to Downtown San Francisco?

Westfield, the top shopping center in San Francisco, will leave downtown. After I learned Nordstrom’s, the flagship tenant, was closing a couple months ago, I knew this was coming. Other major downtown retailers are closing. The Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels are going into foreclosure.

Oh, and vacancy rates in office buildings are super-high, and I expect will go higher.

The city-county government gets much of its funding from property taxes on downtown office buildings (and the hotel tax). Much of that money is going away.

Many people blame ‘crime’ and ‘safety’ concerns. I call bullshit. Crime is a problem, but not a new problem. Even if downtown San Francisco were crime-free, not enough people would want to shop at those stores, lease those offices, and stay at the hotels to keep them viable—and that’s the real reason for the closures.

What changed? Fewer travelers, especially fewer convention travelers. More work-from-home, less in-office work. People are more accustomed to online shopping than ever before.

Want to Keep Good Relationships in the Age of Covid? Then Trust No One.

On the Masks4All subreddit, someone shared their story of catching covid despite wearing a fit-tested P100 everywhere indoors out of home and their mother (with whom they lives) doing the same. They asked how that could’ve happened. Many people speculated about fomites and long-distance air patterns. Others wondered whether their mother really wore a P100 everywhere indoors out of home.

Then, an update: their mother had lied, and spent three hours indoors unmasked with relatives who don’t take covid seriously.Do some of OP’s comments seem extreme to me? Yes. But their first covid infection in March 2020 turned into long covid, and reinfections often make long covid worse. (Source: this survey says 80% of long covid patients who experienced reinfection said the reinfection made at least some of their symptoms worse). And the person they trusted most in the world lied to them and caused them bodily harm. In their shoes, I might say some extreme things myself.

I don’t know what OP’s mother was thinking except, well, maybe I do.

What a Short History of Pandemics Taught Me About Covid-19 (Part 3)

The Rise of Strong States

The previous post discussed how New Deal Democrats / Soviet Communists / Italian Fascists eradicated malaria from the regions under their control by coercing people to change farming practices and alter the landscape. This is one example of a common pandemic phenomenon: increases in state control. This began with the Black Death, when some governments in Europe started sanitary control boards and imposed quarantines—an unprecedented government intrusion on commerce. Meanwhile, Muslim countries, India, and China refused to quarantine or impede commerce during plague outbreaks.

During all major pandemics, some governments try strong measures which interfere with everyday life in order to stop the disease, and it often makes the governments more powerful in the long run. When I lived in Taiwan, I was legally required to take two HIV tests, and if I’d tested positive I would’ve been required to leave Taiwan (that law is no longer in effect).

In early 2020, the speed with which the government banned gatherings above a certain size took me aback. Was it justified for containing a relatively unknown new virus? Maybe. In retrospect, it was a mistake for covid-19 specifically. Ramping up production of N95s (through wartime manufacturing measures if necessary to make them faster) then mandating the use of N95s would’ve been far more effective, and not curtailed the freedom of assembly.

Then, in 2021, came the vaccine mandates, which forced many people to either take the vaccine or lose their jobs.