Thoughts on nuculer politics.
Note that I actually pronounce it correctly.
Thoughts on Nuclear Weapons
In 1942, when President Roosevelt asked Oppenheimer to head up the Manhattan Project, even Einstein, Teller, and Oppenheimer himself weren't really sure it would be possible to push a chain reaction (Fermi had received his Nobel prize for chain-reaction studies back in '38) into uncontrolled detonation. They knew it was possible to let one run free, and let it get so hot as to burn its way through almost anything (known to the moviegoing world as the China Syndrome) until it reached either the water table or the Earth's mantle. They didn't know it was possible to design, build, and set off an atomic bomb.
But in August of '45, not only did we have one, we had three, and we knew they worked, because we set one of the things off.
It was a big deal then, and it's a big deal now, but why? What makes an atomic (fission) device, or a thermonuclear (fusion) device such a special thing in the history of weaponmaking?
It helps to lay a little background. In the mid-1830s a fellow name of Richard Gatling tried (unsuccessfully, for various reasons) to patent a weapon he believed so horrific it would end war forever. The patent took, later, but more importantly to us, it didn't end war. Didn't even change war, really, until 1917. Even in 1914 and 1915, the planners and commanders of the grand European family quarrel were fighting the exact same war they'd fought in 1869, which was roughly the same war as in the Crimea 50 years before, which hadn't changed even incrementally since the war before that, in 1806.
Thirty years later, however, management science, military science, and natural science had all advanced quite a bit, to the point where new technologies were not merely being engineered on every side, but quickly analyzed and assimilated into the tactics of warfare by everyone else. Air/land and air/sea warfare had begun to be integrated very rapidly. Bombing from the air, as opposed to launching explosives from one point on the ground to another, went quickly from a new idea to something anyone could do. So it would be with the next new thing: the atomic bomb, which made its debut exactly 30 years after August 1915.
Let's depart for a moment, from the history of the thing, to perhaps the most important question about it: what makes an atomic (or nuclear) bomb a big deal? The flash, the heat pulse, the overpressure wave, the implosion wave, are all really quite similar effects to chemical (meaning explosive) bombs, aside from the flash itself, which is the smallest deal of the big deal. Bombs filled with high explosives cause a wave of heat, crushing pressure, and immediately subsequent vacuum as the oxygen inside the radius of the overpressure wave depletes. What makes an atomic bomb different is the flash, which is a wave of radiation from heat and visible light up through x- and gamma rays (which again, is the least destructive effect) and the fact that the heat pulse and overpressure wave are much, much more powerful than comparably-sized explosive bombs. An explosive bomb weighing a ton has an explosive force right around one ton of TNT, because generally speaking, TNT is what explosive bombs are full of. A nuclear bomb weighing around a ton could deliver an explosion up to a couple of million times as big. It's also what leaves people grasping, intellectually, to apprehend what it means to set off a “megaton device.”
Simply put, as Paul Nitze and Edward Teller before him realized, it really is just a bomb. When it goes off, there is a flash, a loud bang, and a spherical wave of force departs the point of origin at supersonic speed, just like any other bomb. It leaves a crater, and often starts fires because it is very hot when it goes off, just like every other bomb. Unlike every other bomb, an atomic or nuclear bomb leaves a very big crater, as much as miles wide, and the spherical wave of pressure continues its supersonic progress for hundreds and hundreds of meters, as opposed to a few dozen. The heat bakes earth under it into ceramic or glass, and the fires may rage across miles in every direction except down. But again, this is mainly to do with the proportional increase in the amount of energy released by detonation, not the nature of the detonation itself; an explosion is still an explosion. A nuclear explosion is a very big explosion, not some entirely different kind of event.
So what makes the Bomb a big deal? I've just got done saying it's a bomb like any other, which it is. But we've all seen the news, whereon single 2,000-pound (one-ton) explosive bombs are used to crush houses, office buildings, even thick-roofed bunkers specifically designed to resist explosions. A megaton bomb is a million of those, going off all at once and in the same place. The destructive radius of a 2,000-pound explosive bomb is something around forty or fifty meters; in an open field, closer to a hundred. If you put it down a chimney, quite a bit less. But when that one-ton device goes off with its one ton of explosives, it makes a big (about a hundred yards across) crater and a lot of stuff gets flung away from the point of origin at very high speed, and generally speaking, whatever used to be there isn't anymore. When a million of them squeeze all together, into the same point of origin, and push outward all at once, that radius gets widened. The crater left by a one-megaton device, with its roughly one ton of uranium and hydrogen, is not quite a half mile wide. That's a radius of roughly 400 or 500 meters. A two-megaton device leaves a crater nearly a whole mile wide, a radius half-again as big as one megaton. And so on: the point being, The Bomb is a shitload more dangerous than any other bomb. Roughly speaking, a million times more dangerous. Dangerous enough, even, that it inspires men like Robert Oppenheimer to consider whether they should ever design one in the first place (in his case, after the atomic bomb was already a fact.)
We haven't mentioned the lingering radiation effects associated with stuffing a bunch of uranium into an explosion, and I'm not going to. It's germane to a discussion of weapons, or the environment, but not to the politics of nuclear weapons.
The politics of nukes arose sometime in '44 or '45, maybe even as late as '46 when the Soviets realized they would have to make one, too, and re-commenced a genuinely concerted effort to build and set off a Bomb, now focused on proving to the United States that they could do it, too, rather than on proving to the Germans that they could do it first. The psychology there is a little involved, but ultimately it boils down to this: if a nation wishes to be known as a Great Power, that nation must have the Bomb. If a nation's neighbors have the Bomb, and that nation wishes to be considered on an equal basis with those neighbors, that nation must also have the Bomb. And if a nation does not have the Bomb, it will not make any great decisions about how the world works, because the Bomb is the key to the executive lounge, and in politics as in business, the executive lounge is where the big deals get made.
These rules apply to current great powers, former great powers, former minor powers, and current minor powers and oh-yes-theres alike. What anyone may understand, but few spend time considering, is that all are alike constrained by those rules: the United States, China, and Russia can no more get rid of their nukes, than they can afford to have every Malawi, Ecuador, and New Zealand building their own. The doors of power, so to speak, are closed both ways: the great powers of today, must spend inordinate amounts of effort (and money) maintaining power, if they wish to have an equal say in their futures with the other great powers, just as minor regional powers like Iran, Israel, and Pakistan must at least consider very carefully developing the Bomb themselves, even make preparations that could produce a Bomb in short order, if they wish to remain regional powers, or move upstairs to the executive suites with the great powers. The minor powers, in this case, are constrained not merely by the fact of being minor powers, but moreso by the fact that nuclear weaponry comes at a premium price, ruinously so for even robust economies like the US' in the 1950s, let alone the sickly, wheezing anemic pygmy economy of North Korea, which recently tested the Bomb. The Onion published a joke headline, “North Korea Blows Up 40 Years' Worth of GNP,” that wasn't far off the mark, nor would it be terribly far from true for most Third World economies, whose defense budgets compare to the US' much as you'd expect: they are lesser powers for more reasons than money, but that's the big one. It costs four hundred billion dollars a year, every year, to develop a military as big and as capable as the United States', and should a war break out, it runs a cool couple hundred more to maintain troops in the field year-round. Every year. Those are in billions: that's six hundred with more zeroes than anybody besides Bill Gates and Warren Buffett ever need to be able to count, to make war as a great power, and that's on a budget.
It's also led us back to the point, which is: since 1945, and especially since 1949, there have been no serious attempts by the great powers to make war on one another. We have finally, and I would suggest irrevocably, found a weapon which by its very effectiveness, prevents those possessing it going to war. I point back to the constraints suffered by the members of the executive lounge: this is the big one. No more wars, period. We can jaw, jaw, jaw all we like; we can give one another the silent treatment for decades, even. But spats between the US, China, Russia, Britain, and France (and South Africa, and Israel, and India and Pakistan) may not erupt into war. Ever. And everyone in the club recognizes, acknowledges, and agrees to abide by that constraint, no matter how much we may want to slip our self-buckled leashes, as for example in 1962, when the US and the Soviets each very seriously considered an all-out first strike against the other.
When I say all-out, I mean that: there is no escalation of nuclear war. There is pregnant, or not pregnant. There is nuclear war, or not nuclear war. Other wars can escalate all they like; the politics of nukes are different than the politics of warfare over the previous 10,000 years. There is the go-order and the stand-down, and those are the only two states: one or zero. Nuke or not-nuke.
And that is the peculiar politics of nuclear war: so-called “conventional” wars are bound by convention, by agreements and traditions that make some behavior expected and some prohibited. The principle of “just” war; the principle of proportionality; the principle of forbearing, as often as possible, from destruction of non-combatant people and civilian buildings and property. It is the principle of proportionality that most especially must be done away with in nuclear conflict, since a “proportional” response to an attack using nuclear weapons is essentially impossible. A one-megaton device must be balanced with a million tons of chemical explosives? Nonsense; nuclear weapons may only be answered with other nukes. Proportional response is simply no longer possible for great powers, as are most of the other conventions binding nations into “civilized” means of war.
And so, we find ourselves about a dozen years into the Nuclear Age, at the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when great powers ceased to make war on one another forever. Both sides of the table, for nearly a week, discussed very seriously an all-out first strike against the other. What it would cost; what would be lost; what would be gained; how long it would need to be prepared before it could be accomplished. Ultimately, Premier Khrushchev decided based on his understanding of the US position (which was substantially clear, as both sides had very high-level spies. We can discuss later, how much more tenuous those negotiations might have been, had the two heads of state understood one another's thoughts and intentions less well) that maintaining offensive nuclear forces in Cuba was an unnecessary provocation, and that he would remove them. Castro, whose interests were dramatically advanced by having even Russian nuclear weapons on his soil (thus rendering it essentially sacrosanct from US invasion) was predictably furious, and predictably impotent to affect Khrushchev's decision.
Why do I say, that that was the moment great powers swore off making war on one another forever?
Because, and this is the cusp: Khrushchev and Kennedy both decided that they would not make a first strike. The other side knew. They made their positions public, so they knew that the other side would know. And then...nobody fired. Knowing that the other guy wouldn't shoot first, neither side, Russian or American, delivered a devastating nuclear attack on the other great nuclear power, even in the face of certain knowledge that a first-strike was not coming from the other guy, and therefore a surprise attack with overwhelming force might very well succeed.
That was the end of great power war, in October of 1962.
I would argue, that really President Truman brought it about in 1949, when he decided to go ahead with developing thermonuclear weapons, but no one was sure that there would be no more great power wars until 1962, and even then only in hindsight, can we say for sure, that that was the last time great powers had to decide not to make war on one another. It was also, arguably, the very first time that the UN was useful to the great powers (as opposed to the lesser powers and the also-rans, who have one and only one forum where they may speak with equal weight, to the great powers) though not the last. But that is a digression for another time: the fact remains, as long as great powers remain nuclear powers, great powers will remain (albeit uneasily) at peace with one another. End of line.
So thanks, Oppie. It seems, simultaneous with becoming the "destroyer of worlds," you were the creator of a new one.
Thoughts on Nuclear Weapons
In 1942, when President Roosevelt asked Oppenheimer to head up the Manhattan Project, even Einstein, Teller, and Oppenheimer himself weren't really sure it would be possible to push a chain reaction (Fermi had received his Nobel prize for chain-reaction studies back in '38) into uncontrolled detonation. They knew it was possible to let one run free, and let it get so hot as to burn its way through almost anything (known to the moviegoing world as the China Syndrome) until it reached either the water table or the Earth's mantle. They didn't know it was possible to design, build, and set off an atomic bomb.
But in August of '45, not only did we have one, we had three, and we knew they worked, because we set one of the things off.
It was a big deal then, and it's a big deal now, but why? What makes an atomic (fission) device, or a thermonuclear (fusion) device such a special thing in the history of weaponmaking?
It helps to lay a little background. In the mid-1830s a fellow name of Richard Gatling tried (unsuccessfully, for various reasons) to patent a weapon he believed so horrific it would end war forever. The patent took, later, but more importantly to us, it didn't end war. Didn't even change war, really, until 1917. Even in 1914 and 1915, the planners and commanders of the grand European family quarrel were fighting the exact same war they'd fought in 1869, which was roughly the same war as in the Crimea 50 years before, which hadn't changed even incrementally since the war before that, in 1806.
Thirty years later, however, management science, military science, and natural science had all advanced quite a bit, to the point where new technologies were not merely being engineered on every side, but quickly analyzed and assimilated into the tactics of warfare by everyone else. Air/land and air/sea warfare had begun to be integrated very rapidly. Bombing from the air, as opposed to launching explosives from one point on the ground to another, went quickly from a new idea to something anyone could do. So it would be with the next new thing: the atomic bomb, which made its debut exactly 30 years after August 1915.
Let's depart for a moment, from the history of the thing, to perhaps the most important question about it: what makes an atomic (or nuclear) bomb a big deal? The flash, the heat pulse, the overpressure wave, the implosion wave, are all really quite similar effects to chemical (meaning explosive) bombs, aside from the flash itself, which is the smallest deal of the big deal. Bombs filled with high explosives cause a wave of heat, crushing pressure, and immediately subsequent vacuum as the oxygen inside the radius of the overpressure wave depletes. What makes an atomic bomb different is the flash, which is a wave of radiation from heat and visible light up through x- and gamma rays (which again, is the least destructive effect) and the fact that the heat pulse and overpressure wave are much, much more powerful than comparably-sized explosive bombs. An explosive bomb weighing a ton has an explosive force right around one ton of TNT, because generally speaking, TNT is what explosive bombs are full of. A nuclear bomb weighing around a ton could deliver an explosion up to a couple of million times as big. It's also what leaves people grasping, intellectually, to apprehend what it means to set off a “megaton device.”
Simply put, as Paul Nitze and Edward Teller before him realized, it really is just a bomb. When it goes off, there is a flash, a loud bang, and a spherical wave of force departs the point of origin at supersonic speed, just like any other bomb. It leaves a crater, and often starts fires because it is very hot when it goes off, just like every other bomb. Unlike every other bomb, an atomic or nuclear bomb leaves a very big crater, as much as miles wide, and the spherical wave of pressure continues its supersonic progress for hundreds and hundreds of meters, as opposed to a few dozen. The heat bakes earth under it into ceramic or glass, and the fires may rage across miles in every direction except down. But again, this is mainly to do with the proportional increase in the amount of energy released by detonation, not the nature of the detonation itself; an explosion is still an explosion. A nuclear explosion is a very big explosion, not some entirely different kind of event.
So what makes the Bomb a big deal? I've just got done saying it's a bomb like any other, which it is. But we've all seen the news, whereon single 2,000-pound (one-ton) explosive bombs are used to crush houses, office buildings, even thick-roofed bunkers specifically designed to resist explosions. A megaton bomb is a million of those, going off all at once and in the same place. The destructive radius of a 2,000-pound explosive bomb is something around forty or fifty meters; in an open field, closer to a hundred. If you put it down a chimney, quite a bit less. But when that one-ton device goes off with its one ton of explosives, it makes a big (about a hundred yards across) crater and a lot of stuff gets flung away from the point of origin at very high speed, and generally speaking, whatever used to be there isn't anymore. When a million of them squeeze all together, into the same point of origin, and push outward all at once, that radius gets widened. The crater left by a one-megaton device, with its roughly one ton of uranium and hydrogen, is not quite a half mile wide. That's a radius of roughly 400 or 500 meters. A two-megaton device leaves a crater nearly a whole mile wide, a radius half-again as big as one megaton. And so on: the point being, The Bomb is a shitload more dangerous than any other bomb. Roughly speaking, a million times more dangerous. Dangerous enough, even, that it inspires men like Robert Oppenheimer to consider whether they should ever design one in the first place (in his case, after the atomic bomb was already a fact.)
We haven't mentioned the lingering radiation effects associated with stuffing a bunch of uranium into an explosion, and I'm not going to. It's germane to a discussion of weapons, or the environment, but not to the politics of nuclear weapons.
The politics of nukes arose sometime in '44 or '45, maybe even as late as '46 when the Soviets realized they would have to make one, too, and re-commenced a genuinely concerted effort to build and set off a Bomb, now focused on proving to the United States that they could do it, too, rather than on proving to the Germans that they could do it first. The psychology there is a little involved, but ultimately it boils down to this: if a nation wishes to be known as a Great Power, that nation must have the Bomb. If a nation's neighbors have the Bomb, and that nation wishes to be considered on an equal basis with those neighbors, that nation must also have the Bomb. And if a nation does not have the Bomb, it will not make any great decisions about how the world works, because the Bomb is the key to the executive lounge, and in politics as in business, the executive lounge is where the big deals get made.
These rules apply to current great powers, former great powers, former minor powers, and current minor powers and oh-yes-theres alike. What anyone may understand, but few spend time considering, is that all are alike constrained by those rules: the United States, China, and Russia can no more get rid of their nukes, than they can afford to have every Malawi, Ecuador, and New Zealand building their own. The doors of power, so to speak, are closed both ways: the great powers of today, must spend inordinate amounts of effort (and money) maintaining power, if they wish to have an equal say in their futures with the other great powers, just as minor regional powers like Iran, Israel, and Pakistan must at least consider very carefully developing the Bomb themselves, even make preparations that could produce a Bomb in short order, if they wish to remain regional powers, or move upstairs to the executive suites with the great powers. The minor powers, in this case, are constrained not merely by the fact of being minor powers, but moreso by the fact that nuclear weaponry comes at a premium price, ruinously so for even robust economies like the US' in the 1950s, let alone the sickly, wheezing anemic pygmy economy of North Korea, which recently tested the Bomb. The Onion published a joke headline, “North Korea Blows Up 40 Years' Worth of GNP,” that wasn't far off the mark, nor would it be terribly far from true for most Third World economies, whose defense budgets compare to the US' much as you'd expect: they are lesser powers for more reasons than money, but that's the big one. It costs four hundred billion dollars a year, every year, to develop a military as big and as capable as the United States', and should a war break out, it runs a cool couple hundred more to maintain troops in the field year-round. Every year. Those are in billions: that's six hundred with more zeroes than anybody besides Bill Gates and Warren Buffett ever need to be able to count, to make war as a great power, and that's on a budget.
It's also led us back to the point, which is: since 1945, and especially since 1949, there have been no serious attempts by the great powers to make war on one another. We have finally, and I would suggest irrevocably, found a weapon which by its very effectiveness, prevents those possessing it going to war. I point back to the constraints suffered by the members of the executive lounge: this is the big one. No more wars, period. We can jaw, jaw, jaw all we like; we can give one another the silent treatment for decades, even. But spats between the US, China, Russia, Britain, and France (and South Africa, and Israel, and India and Pakistan) may not erupt into war. Ever. And everyone in the club recognizes, acknowledges, and agrees to abide by that constraint, no matter how much we may want to slip our self-buckled leashes, as for example in 1962, when the US and the Soviets each very seriously considered an all-out first strike against the other.
When I say all-out, I mean that: there is no escalation of nuclear war. There is pregnant, or not pregnant. There is nuclear war, or not nuclear war. Other wars can escalate all they like; the politics of nukes are different than the politics of warfare over the previous 10,000 years. There is the go-order and the stand-down, and those are the only two states: one or zero. Nuke or not-nuke.
And that is the peculiar politics of nuclear war: so-called “conventional” wars are bound by convention, by agreements and traditions that make some behavior expected and some prohibited. The principle of “just” war; the principle of proportionality; the principle of forbearing, as often as possible, from destruction of non-combatant people and civilian buildings and property. It is the principle of proportionality that most especially must be done away with in nuclear conflict, since a “proportional” response to an attack using nuclear weapons is essentially impossible. A one-megaton device must be balanced with a million tons of chemical explosives? Nonsense; nuclear weapons may only be answered with other nukes. Proportional response is simply no longer possible for great powers, as are most of the other conventions binding nations into “civilized” means of war.
And so, we find ourselves about a dozen years into the Nuclear Age, at the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when great powers ceased to make war on one another forever. Both sides of the table, for nearly a week, discussed very seriously an all-out first strike against the other. What it would cost; what would be lost; what would be gained; how long it would need to be prepared before it could be accomplished. Ultimately, Premier Khrushchev decided based on his understanding of the US position (which was substantially clear, as both sides had very high-level spies. We can discuss later, how much more tenuous those negotiations might have been, had the two heads of state understood one another's thoughts and intentions less well) that maintaining offensive nuclear forces in Cuba was an unnecessary provocation, and that he would remove them. Castro, whose interests were dramatically advanced by having even Russian nuclear weapons on his soil (thus rendering it essentially sacrosanct from US invasion) was predictably furious, and predictably impotent to affect Khrushchev's decision.
Why do I say, that that was the moment great powers swore off making war on one another forever?
Because, and this is the cusp: Khrushchev and Kennedy both decided that they would not make a first strike. The other side knew. They made their positions public, so they knew that the other side would know. And then...nobody fired. Knowing that the other guy wouldn't shoot first, neither side, Russian or American, delivered a devastating nuclear attack on the other great nuclear power, even in the face of certain knowledge that a first-strike was not coming from the other guy, and therefore a surprise attack with overwhelming force might very well succeed.
That was the end of great power war, in October of 1962.
I would argue, that really President Truman brought it about in 1949, when he decided to go ahead with developing thermonuclear weapons, but no one was sure that there would be no more great power wars until 1962, and even then only in hindsight, can we say for sure, that that was the last time great powers had to decide not to make war on one another. It was also, arguably, the very first time that the UN was useful to the great powers (as opposed to the lesser powers and the also-rans, who have one and only one forum where they may speak with equal weight, to the great powers) though not the last. But that is a digression for another time: the fact remains, as long as great powers remain nuclear powers, great powers will remain (albeit uneasily) at peace with one another. End of line.
So thanks, Oppie. It seems, simultaneous with becoming the "destroyer of worlds," you were the creator of a new one.