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 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?

I Don’t Know What to Make of R.F. Kuang’s Babel (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1.

The Magic System

The quick explanation of the magic system in R.F. Kuang’s Babel is: people engrave two or more words onto silver bars from different languages and the gap in meaning between the words create the magic. If the words are too close in meaning, nothing happens, and if they are too far apart in meaning, nothing happens, so there’s an art to choose words which are close in meaning yet have a difference in nuance. They must be words which are in current common usage, which excludes entirely extinct languages, but Latin and Ancient Greek words are still useful because Oxford compels enough people to stay fluent in those languages. An attempt was made to revive Old English so it’d be useful for magic, but that failed, thus Old English words are (mostly) useless for silver magic. The people who recite the words on the silver bars must be so fluent in all languages used they can dream in those languages, otherwise the magic won’t work. This limits the number of people who control this magic. In the case of spells which rely on English-Mandarin translation pairs, less than five people in the entire world can use those spells. Finally, as English, German, and the Romance languages are converging in usage, the spells based only on those languages are losing their efficacy, so the translators need to branch into more languages, such as Mandarin and Sanskrit, to make new, more powerful spells.

There’s more to the magic system than that, but that’s the overview.

As soon as one particular detail of the magic system was introduced (which I have NOT described), I rolled my eyes and thought, ‘of course the protagonist is going to exploit this in the climax, otherwise there’d be no point in explaining this.’ I was right, that was the exact feature of the magic system Robin exploits in the climax. Maybe I’m too genre savvy.

I Don’t Know What to Make of R.F. Kuang’s Babel (Part 1)

I binged all the Amazon reviews of Babel by R.F. Kuang some months ago. Finally, this month, I cracked it open myself. Based on the reviews, I expected it would be a long essay on intersectional social justice politics and colonialism lightly dressed as fiction with shallow characters. I doubted I’d want to read it word-for-word, but I was curious enough to skim it. But first, I wanted to get as far as I could reading-word-for word and only skim when I lost patience.

I read the novel cover-to-cover.

For that alone, I must respect this novel, and give it 4 stars out of 5.

One section of the novel got me close to skimming, but I read one more scene, and the next scene convinced me to read in full, not to skim.

What made me turn the pages?

Review of Outlaw Mage by K.S. Villoso

I backed the Kickstarter for Outlaw Mage: A Magical School Dropout’s Adventure, and recently read the eBook. So, here’s my review.

My history with Villoso’s books

I read about half of The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. I DNF’d because I lost track of the plot and it didn’t seem worth it to figure out what was going on. However, something about the way Villoso writes her characters impressed me, and I remained interested in her future work.

I’m happy to say that I never got as lost in Outlaw Mage as I did in The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. Once I passed a certain tipping point, the story hooked me and I was flipping (eBook) pages to find out what happens next. So, even if you didn’t enjoy The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, you might enjoy this novel.

Link

The Book Cafe published my review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books by Leah Price. Here’s the link to get you past the paywall.

This Expert Agrees with Me: Smartphones Aren’t Ruining Social Lives. We Are. (Be Nice to Yourself Anyway.)

Reading Indistractable by Nir Eyal gave me a whole slew of reactions.

I never owned a smartphone. Therefore, I know firsthand that I can get distracted all over the place without a mobile device. Even in the most boring place in the universe, I’ll distract myself with daydreams. I only feel bored when I’m compelled to do something tedious which doesn’t allow me to daydream.

“Smartphones are a BANE PLAGUING SOCIETY, oh no the kids” articles leave me nonplussed because, from the outside, smartphones don’t seem that powerful. When these articles are written by tech insiders, I assume they want to exaggerate their own influence. They’d rather believe they are ruining the world than believe that they don’t matter. Seeing someone as well-informed as Nir Eyal confirm with research that “OH NO SMARTPHONES RUIN HUMANITY” articles are overblown or even outright wrong is refreshing.

Book Review: “The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water” by Zen Cho

After watching this review, I was just curious enough about “The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water” by Zen Cho that I decided to read it myself. So what did *I* think?

What Is This Novella About?

In Malaysia, there is a group of Tang (i.e. Chinese-Malaysian) ‘bandits’ running around, trying to survive as the authoritarian government oppresses Tang people. After they rescue a nun at a coffeeshop from sexual harassment, the nun insists on joining them as they travel to deliver their, um, “black market rice”.

Can you be more helpful in telling me what the Novella is about?

Okay. When I wrote this book review, I used Libbie Hawker’s formula for writing book blurbs (which I think is helpful for writing spoiler-free summaries in book reviews, not just selling books).

That formula (with answers for “The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water” is) :

Who is the main character? Tet Sang

What do they want? To stay alive and to stay with the group of bandits. Except, near the end (as in, within the last 10% of the novella) it turns out that Tet Sang wants something different that came out of the blue for me.

What or who stands in their way? The bandits are wanted men and the Protectorate’s people are hunting them.

What will they do, or what must they do, in order to get what they want? Safely deliver the goods and get paid.

What is at stake if they fail? They get captured or not paid enough money to survive as a group.

That does not sound like such a bad story.

It doesn’t, but I think Libbie Hawker’s formula tends to flatter stories (probably because it’s supposed to sell books). One of the problems is that it’s not actually that hard for the bandits to evade the Protectorate’s people. Even when their plan falls apart, somebody gives them good advice, and all they have to do to get the money they need and avoid capture is to follow the advice.

Is following the advice hard?

No, following the advice is totally doable.

Review: Royal Rescue by A. Alex Logan

What is this novel about?

Prince Gerald wants to live without marriage and sex. Yet he was born as one of the princes of the Thousand Kingdoms, where all princes, princesses, and princexes must begin participating in a royal rescue at the age of eighteen and be married by their early twenties. Gerald’s mother will only let him choose whether he wants to be a rescuer or a rescuee. After he refuses both roles, he wakes up to find that he has been magically transported to a tower guarded by a fire-breathing dragon in the middle of an inhospitable desert so that he can be ‘rescued’ by his future spouse.

He needs to rescue himself to avoid being ‘rescued’. But that might not be enough. In order to secure his freedom, Gerald might have to dismantle the entire system of young royals rescuing other young royals. If the royal rescues keep on happening, not only will Gerald be trapped, but many others will continue to be trapped in a much crueller manner.

What sexual and/or violent content does this novel contain?

There is discussion of sex, including references to characters having sex off-page, but there is no on-page sex (not even fade to black). There is violence, including putting collars on the necks of children, which cause wounds, infections, and pain as they grow older yet the collar doesn’t grow bigger with them. And a character badly burns another character, causing severe injuries (and detailed descriptions of the burn injuries). Weapons with blades also are used to injure others.