It does amaze me that people in general seem to think nuclear weapons are no longer a major concern, yet they remain the biggest concern period! How could they not, when they have the destructive power to largely wipe out the majority of human civilisation as we know it? I guess everyone just forgot that little factoid, you know, the one that would completely change human history forever, by perhaps ending human history…It’s good to know the general public has their priorities straight.
One thing to bear in mind is that the West openly spends large amounts of money on “building democracy” in Russia and its neighbours. The US National Endowment for Democracy has on its website examples of grants to Russian projects totalling over $ 7 million in 2019.
Organisations in the Ukraine that took US and EU money prior to 2014 are known to have spent it on “sports equipment” like ice hockey body armour, baseball bats and camping gear, which was then used to block the centre of Kiev and fight the police in order to overthrow a democratically elected president less than a year before the next elections.
Paying to overthrow an elected president because he didn’t sign a trade deal with you: “building democracy”.
Shitposting on social media to throw some sand in the gears of the biggest military alliance on earth: “Russian aggression”.
The “democratically elected” leader of Ukraine was about to change the constitution with his justice secretary … Maybe you read up on why there were huge demonstrations at that time.
Tim Bartlett
3 years ago
It’s good to hear that the military and intelligence services still have some objective grip on reality in this country. Nuclear weapons were more important than the development of bronze or gunpowder, and having them in a nuclear world vital until we all somehow learn to stop coveting what our neighbours have.
But weapons of mass destruction are utterly wrong to use or even to intend conditionally to use (no-one should intend, however conditionally, to kill civilians or the population at large – ie to commit a war crime). So let’s take them immediately off the table as well as stopping coveting as you say.
That’s the conundrum. There’s absolutely no point in having them if you’re not prepared to use them. A moral person such as yourself wouldn’t, however you and your dependents then potentially become prey to someone who would. Are you prepared to lose everything and still love your enemy?
Mark Corby
3 years ago
As US Airforce General, Buck Turdgidson said in Dr Stangelove ” the Ruskie talks big, but frankly we think he is short of know-how, I mean you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys”.
Has anything changed?
G Harris
3 years ago
An extremely serious point well made and understood, but Russian cyber-meddling extends far beyond getting a cabal of well-educated state sponsored anonymous trolls posting loads of provocative dis/misinformation on Facebook from a room somewhere in St Petersburg.
A third of ALL computer malware and trojan horses are estimated to come from Russia, plus there’s the huge accompanying rise in online fraud associated with the country including the illegal trafficking of drugs, weapons, humans and personal information, much of it facilitated by the simultaneous rise of ‘anonymous’ crypto-currencies, most famously Bitcoin.
Further to this, in the internet age, you also have the increasing potential for and indeed incidences of hugely disruptive Denial of Service ‘DDos’ cyber-attacks on government and banking websites plus, with Internet of Things, greater opportunities to attack and undermine consumables and even major infrastructure thus creating chaos.
Never to dismiss the constant threat presented by nuclear weapons, not least ‘isolated’ detonation by accident or by rogue, non-state terrorist actors, but as more and more states acquire them, the principle of MAD still holds as strong as it always did on that state based basis.
Their catastrophic global damage would be nigh on impossible to contain in the event of their significant deployment in any major conflagration, so their eradication or even limitation, whilst an entirely laudable aspiration, is akin to getting the toothpaste back in the tube ie a largely token, idealistic and unrealistic aim.
Controversial I know, but better to focus our efforts and resources on the ‘smaller’ things we can genuinely do something about rather than the elephant forever brooding ominously in the corner of the room that we can’t and which, in the highly unlikely event of peace, harmony and goodwill descending on all humanity any time soon, in reality shows no signs of ever leaving.
Mutual Assured Destruction works only when all participants in the game are relatively sane (in the sense that they agree that survival is better than death however glorious. So it does not apply to the numerous religious fanatics that infest the world. I think the main limit on nuclear weapons currently is that they are very expensive to make, store, hide, maintain, and deliver. Reducing the numbers of those already built would make them even more expensive and less likely to accidentally fall into the hands of the aforesaid religious fanatics.
As for cyber warfare, for several years I had a job involving Internet security at a major brokerage. Any connection we had with the outer world was constantly probed for vulnerabilities. To the extent that it was possible to determine where a probe or attack was coming from, it was obvious that the answer was ‘everywhere’ and from all kinds of actors, from governments and major corporations to script kiddies fooling around in their parents’ basement. The Russiagate fables were concocted to give the Democratic Party establishment an excuse to help them keep their jobs in spite of their increasingly disastrous leadership and have little bearing on reality.
Social media have changed and are continuing to change things — see Martin Gurri, interviewed at https://pullrequest.substac…, but their effects are too unpredictable to please authoritarians like Tsar Vladimir P. or the Emperor Xi. The dissidence and conflict in the US has been here for a long, long time and is deeply ingrained.
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
I grew up in the 80’s acutely aware, and terrified, of nuclear war. I’ve not felt that fear for thirty years and don’t now. Cyber warfare is there – both commercial or national. It’s tremendously sad that so much inventiveness and energy is going into developing weapons. The US version of capitalism won the Cold War – nuclear weapons won’t win any war. But, there are a lot of interests making a lot of money out of nuclear weapons in Russia,the US and beyond. Yes to treaties, then start looking at who benefits from the ultimately horrendous waste of money and energy that is the arms industry.
Andrei Timoshenko
3 years ago
I would argue that rather than trying to determine the geostrategic interests of Russia as a nation, it is more useful to look at the philosophical worldviews of its nationalist leaders, which have predominated throughout Russian history, and of which Putin is certainly one. The goal of the Russian government is to preserve and promote the “Russian idea” and this depends much more on Internet “psyops” (for lack of a better term) and targeted military and economic intervention than it does on nuclear sabre-rattling.
The “Russian idea” was probably best distilled as the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” ideological doctrine under Nicholas I, further developed by the likes of Leontiev KN and Tikhomirov LA, to a large extent reflected in the works of, say, Dostoevsky (The Bothers Karamazov, chief among them) and currently represented in Putin’s ideas of “sovereign democracy”. The foundation of the “Russian idea” is the belief in a natural hierarchy and the expectation of subordination both between people and between nations (or, better, “tribes”), and this makes the pursuit of either equality or liberty antithetical to it.
In order to preserve this idea within Russia, and to facilitate its spread beyond its borders, those who abandon it must be punished, those who support or reflect it – rewarded, and those who follow antithetical ideas – undermined. Thus, we see:
1. Interventions and Georgia and Crimea upon the emergence of strong liberal movements (rather than simply pro-Western ones, with e.g. Shevarnadze in Georgia or Lukashenko in Belarus long playing both sides, but remaining unpunished while they remain autocratic). This is punishment of those who abandon autocracy.
2. Military support in Syria and Central Africa (very far from Russia’s “near abroad”) and economic and political support of Venezuela, North Korea or Serbia to the extent they remain autocratic and pledge subordinate fealty to the Russian “big brother” (contrast the Russian attitudes towards a more “grateful” Serbia and a more independent and liberal Macedonia, for example). These are examples of rewarding support.
3. Finally, the Internet trolling operations to enflame and exacerbate divisions in the West work to undermine the attractiveness and effectiveness of pluralist, liberal systems for both the home audience and international ones. They do not need to influence outcomes to be successful, they just need to reduce pluralist nations to angry tribalism, and this they have done well. The message is “sure you must accept some restrictions on your freedom (discipline), but in return you avoid violent riots, “swarms” of immigrants and the corruption and seduction of your children”. In other words, liberal societies may have had a decent run by living off the moral, hierarchical core of their Christian pasts, but now that they have consumed the last of it, they will collapse, as they were always destined to do.
In this light, advanced technology (both nuclear and not, both military and not) is not developed and paraded chiefly to say “we deserve a seat at the adult table”, but to say “our “Russian idea” delivers impressive results”. Thus, not only a (unverified and possibly non-scaleable) Mach 27 delivery system, but space! AI! (see Cognitive Technologies), COVID vaccine! jet fighter prototypes!
Kiran Grimm
3 years ago
The post-Soviet spread of nuclear weapons technology is discussed in a 2009 book on the political and technical history of the bomb: “The Nuclear Express” by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman.
At the time of publication this book was criticised for demonising China and exaggerating the potential nuclear threat from small “rogue states” such Iran and North Korea. While we still don’t know what the Iranians have achieved or may achieve with nuclear technology the North Koreans detonated their first thermonuclear device in 2017 ““ a big weapon for such a small nation.
It does amaze me that people in general seem to think nuclear weapons are no longer a major concern, yet they remain the biggest concern period! How could they not, when they have the destructive power to largely wipe out the majority of human civilisation as we know it? I guess everyone just forgot that little factoid, you know, the one that would completely change human history forever, by perhaps ending human history…It’s good to know the general public has their priorities straight.
People haven’t forgotten it; they likely count on it as the reason to not use nukes. Mutually assured destruction is as viable today as ever.
Allow me to introduce you to AI…
One thing to bear in mind is that the West openly spends large amounts of money on “building democracy” in Russia and its neighbours. The US National Endowment for Democracy has on its website examples of grants to Russian projects totalling over $ 7 million in 2019.
Organisations in the Ukraine that took US and EU money prior to 2014 are known to have spent it on “sports equipment” like ice hockey body armour, baseball bats and camping gear, which was then used to block the centre of Kiev and fight the police in order to overthrow a democratically elected president less than a year before the next elections.
Paying to overthrow an elected president because he didn’t sign a trade deal with you: “building democracy”.
Shitposting on social media to throw some sand in the gears of the biggest military alliance on earth: “Russian aggression”.
The “democratically elected” leader of Ukraine was about to change the constitution with his justice secretary … Maybe you read up on why there were huge demonstrations at that time.
It’s good to hear that the military and intelligence services still have some objective grip on reality in this country. Nuclear weapons were more important than the development of bronze or gunpowder, and having them in a nuclear world vital until we all somehow learn to stop coveting what our neighbours have.
But weapons of mass destruction are utterly wrong to use or even to intend conditionally to use (no-one should intend, however conditionally, to kill civilians or the population at large – ie to commit a war crime). So let’s take them immediately off the table as well as stopping coveting as you say.
That’s the conundrum. There’s absolutely no point in having them if you’re not prepared to use them. A moral person such as yourself wouldn’t, however you and your dependents then potentially become prey to someone who would. Are you prepared to lose everything and still love your enemy?
As US Airforce General, Buck Turdgidson said in Dr Stangelove ” the Ruskie talks big, but frankly we think he is short of know-how, I mean you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys”.
Has anything changed?
An extremely serious point well made and understood, but Russian cyber-meddling extends far beyond getting a cabal of well-educated state sponsored anonymous trolls posting loads of provocative dis/misinformation on Facebook from a room somewhere in St Petersburg.
A third of ALL computer malware and trojan horses are estimated to come from Russia, plus there’s the huge accompanying rise in online fraud associated with the country including the illegal trafficking of drugs, weapons, humans and personal information, much of it facilitated by the simultaneous rise of ‘anonymous’ crypto-currencies, most famously Bitcoin.
Further to this, in the internet age, you also have the increasing potential for and indeed incidences of hugely disruptive Denial of Service ‘DDos’ cyber-attacks on government and banking websites plus, with Internet of Things, greater opportunities to attack and undermine consumables and even major infrastructure thus creating chaos.
Never to dismiss the constant threat presented by nuclear weapons, not least ‘isolated’ detonation by accident or by rogue, non-state terrorist actors, but as more and more states acquire them, the principle of MAD still holds as strong as it always did on that state based basis.
Their catastrophic global damage would be nigh on impossible to contain in the event of their significant deployment in any major conflagration, so their eradication or even limitation, whilst an entirely laudable aspiration, is akin to getting the toothpaste back in the tube ie a largely token, idealistic and unrealistic aim.
Controversial I know, but better to focus our efforts and resources on the ‘smaller’ things we can genuinely do something about rather than the elephant forever brooding ominously in the corner of the room that we can’t and which, in the highly unlikely event of peace, harmony and goodwill descending on all humanity any time soon, in reality shows no signs of ever leaving.
Mutual Assured Destruction works only when all participants in the game are relatively sane (in the sense that they agree that survival is better than death however glorious. So it does not apply to the numerous religious fanatics that infest the world. I think the main limit on nuclear weapons currently is that they are very expensive to make, store, hide, maintain, and deliver. Reducing the numbers of those already built would make them even more expensive and less likely to accidentally fall into the hands of the aforesaid religious fanatics.
As for cyber warfare, for several years I had a job involving Internet security at a major brokerage. Any connection we had with the outer world was constantly probed for vulnerabilities. To the extent that it was possible to determine where a probe or attack was coming from, it was obvious that the answer was ‘everywhere’ and from all kinds of actors, from governments and major corporations to script kiddies fooling around in their parents’ basement. The Russiagate fables were concocted to give the Democratic Party establishment an excuse to help them keep their jobs in spite of their increasingly disastrous leadership and have little bearing on reality.
Social media have changed and are continuing to change things — see
Martin Gurri, interviewed at https://pullrequest.substac…, but their effects are too unpredictable to please authoritarians like Tsar Vladimir P. or the Emperor Xi. The dissidence and conflict in the US has been here for a long, long time and is deeply ingrained.
I grew up in the 80’s acutely aware, and terrified, of nuclear war. I’ve not felt that fear for thirty years and don’t now. Cyber warfare is there – both commercial or national. It’s tremendously sad that so much inventiveness and energy is going into developing weapons. The US version of capitalism won the Cold War – nuclear weapons won’t win any war. But, there are a lot of interests making a lot of money out of nuclear weapons in Russia,the US and beyond. Yes to treaties, then start looking at who benefits from the ultimately horrendous waste of money and energy that is the arms industry.
I would argue that rather than trying to determine the geostrategic interests of Russia as a nation, it is more useful to look at the philosophical worldviews of its nationalist leaders, which have predominated throughout Russian history, and of which Putin is certainly one. The goal of the Russian government is to preserve and promote the “Russian idea” and this depends much more on Internet “psyops” (for lack of a better term) and targeted military and economic intervention than it does on nuclear sabre-rattling.
The “Russian idea” was probably best distilled as the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” ideological doctrine under Nicholas I, further developed by the likes of Leontiev KN and Tikhomirov LA, to a large extent reflected in the works of, say, Dostoevsky (The Bothers Karamazov, chief among them) and currently represented in Putin’s ideas of “sovereign democracy”. The foundation of the “Russian idea” is the belief in a natural hierarchy and the expectation of subordination both between people and between nations (or, better, “tribes”), and this makes the pursuit of either equality or liberty antithetical to it.
In order to preserve this idea within Russia, and to facilitate its spread beyond its borders, those who abandon it must be punished, those who support or reflect it – rewarded, and those who follow antithetical ideas – undermined. Thus, we see:
1. Interventions and Georgia and Crimea upon the emergence of strong liberal movements (rather than simply pro-Western ones, with e.g. Shevarnadze in Georgia or Lukashenko in Belarus long playing both sides, but remaining unpunished while they remain autocratic). This is punishment of those who abandon autocracy.
2. Military support in Syria and Central Africa (very far from Russia’s “near abroad”) and economic and political support of Venezuela, North Korea or Serbia to the extent they remain autocratic and pledge subordinate fealty to the Russian “big brother” (contrast the Russian attitudes towards a more “grateful” Serbia and a more independent and liberal Macedonia, for example). These are examples of rewarding support.
3. Finally, the Internet trolling operations to enflame and exacerbate divisions in the West work to undermine the attractiveness and effectiveness of pluralist, liberal systems for both the home audience and international ones. They do not need to influence outcomes to be successful, they just need to reduce pluralist nations to angry tribalism, and this they have done well. The message is “sure you must accept some restrictions on your freedom (discipline), but in return you avoid violent riots, “swarms” of immigrants and the corruption and seduction of your children”. In other words, liberal societies may have had a decent run by living off the moral, hierarchical core of their Christian pasts, but now that they have consumed the last of it, they will collapse, as they were always destined to do.
In this light, advanced technology (both nuclear and not, both military and not) is not developed and paraded chiefly to say “we deserve a seat at the adult table”, but to say “our “Russian idea” delivers impressive results”. Thus, not only a (unverified and possibly non-scaleable) Mach 27 delivery system, but space! AI! (see Cognitive Technologies), COVID vaccine! jet fighter prototypes!
The post-Soviet spread of nuclear weapons technology is discussed in a 2009 book on the political and technical history of the bomb: “The Nuclear Express” by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman.
At the time of publication this book was criticised for demonising China and exaggerating the potential nuclear threat from small “rogue states” such Iran and North Korea. While we still don’t know what the Iranians have achieved or may achieve with nuclear technology the North Koreans detonated their first thermonuclear device in 2017 ““ a big weapon for such a small nation.