Dancing With Chaos
Will a
Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?
By MANUEL
GARCIA, Jr.
01/09/08 "Counterpunch"
-- - The first, and also previous, nuclear war consisted of
two atomic bomb attacks that destroyed the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, on August 6 and August 9
of 1945. These attacks by the United States of America against
an utterly defeated and prostrate Japan occurred in the last
month of the Pacific War (which occurred between December 7,
1941 to August 15, 1945 for the USA) and were demonstrations of
remorseless American power intended to deflate the triumphant
spirit of a Soviet Union victorious against Nazi Germany (May 8,
1945), and to check the Soviet leadership from advancing its
forces into Japan (despite being implored to do so by the Allies
at the Yalta Conference six months earlier).
Tsarist Russia had lost its
1904-1905 war with Imperial Japan for control of Manchuria
(northern China) and Korea, both of which Japan occupied until
1945. During World War 1 (1914-1918) and the Russian Civil War
(1917-1923), a dozen nations invaded Russia, occupying many
regions and fielding troops that supported the pro-tsarist,
anti-Bolshevik White forces between 1918 and 1920. Japan
supplied 37 percent of the troops in this Allied Intervention,
70,000 of the 188,000 total and by far the single largest
contingent; they were all deployed in the Vladivostok
(northwestern Pacific) region and were the last to leave, in
1922. A series of Soviet-Japanese border wars occurred between
1938-1945, primarily a 1938 war along the Siberian-Manchurian
border (western-eastern) just northeast of Korea, a 1939 war
along the Mongolian-Manchurian border (eastern-western),
northwest of Korea, and the Russian invasion of Manchuria on
August 8, 1945.
With the demise of the Japanese
Empire, the Russians and Chinese consolidated their adjoining
domains of control spanning the Eurasian landmass east of the
Baltic and north of the Black Sea, Caucasus and Himalayas, for
over four decades until the breakup of the Soviet Union. Over
the last twenty years, the United States has actively sought to
encircle Russia with military forces implanted in client states
that are former Soviet Republics or Eastern European Socialist
Republics, now independent, whose compliance has been bought. A
similar policy applies to China and its surrounding south and
central Asian states. This US policy is often personified by
Zbigniew Brzezinski (the Carter Administration National Security
Advisor credited with funding the advanced militarization of the
Afghani mujahideen that included Osama Bin Laden), who
characterizes it as geostrategic dominance radiating from the
control of Caucasus and Central Asian republics, several rich in
oil.
In recent weeks, US commentators
(e.g., P.
C. Roberts and
W. S. Lind)
on Russia’s intervention into the Republic of Georgia (a US
client state in the South Caucasus Mountains) to reverse the
Georgian invasion of breakaway region South Ossetia, believe the
blundering belligerence of US policy toward Russia could
escalate to the point of armed confrontation, and this would
erupt into a nuclear war.
The logic assumed is that the US
would have to rely on missile-borne tactical nuclear warheads
launched by air and naval forces to counter Russian troops and
armor in the Caucasus, since the US is too distant to transport
its troops quickly, and many of them are bogged down in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and who knows, maybe also Iran by that time. The
Russians could be assumed to use their tactical nuclear weapons
to compensate for their possible disadvantage of having less
technically sophisticated weapons systems relative to the ”smart
bomb” precision-guided munitions and “stealth” delivery vehicles
of the US military. Once a shooting war starts, the natural
tendency is to reach for your biggest guns and fire away before
the other guy can clear his holster.
So, is a new nuclear war
possible? Let’s muse on this. After all, the time necessary for
rationality to work its good is only available before the
shoot-out, or after the killing is done and the survivors are
ready to move on to the burials.
The purpose of war is to
increase your degree of control OVER OTHERS. This is usually
equated to having acquired greater political and military power.
This is true even if the the war is conducted as nothing beyond
brigandage and piracy: plunder, profit and wealth are seen as
increasing your power to control events. Using this metric, it
is easy to judge if you have won or lost a war.
We proceed by inquiring about
the psychological and technical enabling factors, and the
political and diplomatic restraining factors for the outbreak of
a nuclear war:
1, psychology: are the
prospective belligerents easily inclined to war?
2, technology: are their
military establishments ready for nuclear combat?
3, politics: can the ruling
class be assured of maintaining control of its own
population?, could there be a revolution if the war fares
badly?
4, diplomacy: is the
potential estrangement of and isolation from European
states, and other allies, a significant restraint?; is it
possible that in a mid-war or post-war weakened condition
your state becomes unable to control new rebellions by
imperial subject states, or to stop encroachments into your
domain of influence by imperial rivals?
We can contract the previous
four major questions in these two: have we identified all
possible contingencies and devised alternative plans for each?,
does the cost-benefit ratio for the war outweigh that of
diplomatic alternatives, and after what period of time? We
consider the four factors in turn.
Psychology: Remembering
World War Two
It is important to know that the
overwhelming fraction of the Allied war effort against Nazi
Germany was provided by the Soviet Union (Russia and its union
of socialist republics), and they suffered the greatest losses
as a result. Consider the following numbers. The combined 1939
population of the fifty-five countries involved in World War Two
(WW2) was 1.962 billion; the total number of war dead was 72.8
million, which was 3.7 percent of the 1939 population of
participants. Of course, many of these countries bore only a
slight to moderate burden in carrying on the war, while a small
number provided the greatest efforts and made the greatest
sacrifices (see “World War II casualties”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties).
The combined human losses of the
Soviet Union, China, Germany and Japan were just under 73
percent of the total deaths for WW2. The Asian theater of WW2
was essentially the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, while the
European theater of WW2 was essentially the Russo-German War of
1941-1945.
Let us look at the impact of WW2
on five selected countries, by using three ratios for each
country, where these ratios are defined as follows.
Country:
the percentage of its 1939
population killed in WW2;
the ratio of its 1939 population to the 1.962 billion WW2
participants;
the ratio of its WW2 dead to the total WW2 dead;
(all ratios below are expressed as percents).
Soviet Union: 13.7; 8.6;
31.7.
China: 3.9; 26.4; 27.5.
Germany: 10.5; 3.6; 10.
Japan: 3.8; 3.6; 3.7.
USA: 0.3; 6.7; 0.6.
The Soviet Union lost nearly 14
percent of its population (every 7th person) in the war, and
this mortality amounted to almost one third of the entire WW2
dead. China was three times as populous as the Soviet Union, so
its loss of nearly 4 percent of its people (every 26th person)
amounted to over one quarter of the entire WW2 dead. Germany
lost over a tenth of its population (every 10th person), which
amounted to 10 percent of the WW2 dead; and Japan’s loss of just
under 4 percent of its people (every 26th person) amounted to
nearly 4 percent of the WW2 dead.
Notice that the United States’
WW2 dead amounts to a fifty-fifth (1/55) of the Soviet total,
and the 1939 national populations were comparable, the Soviet
population being 29 percent higher. It would be very beneficial
to the world if Americans, commemorating their Memorial and
Veterans’ Days, would try imagining their feelings if they had
suffered war as deeply as the Soviet people (every 7th person
instead of every 172nd person lost). Now, we never trivialize
the real pain of war veterans, their relatives and and friends,
however small a portion of a nation’s population they may happen
to be. But, clearly, the impact of a WW2 experience like that of
the Soviets will imprint a dread of war far more deeply into the
national consciousness than a WW2 experience like that of the
United States.
Another interesting numerical
result is that the combined losses of Germany and Japan amount
to only 13.7 percent of the WW2 dead, and the combined
population of these two Axis powers amounted to only 7.2 percent
of the WW2 participating population. Advanced industrialized
nations hell-bent on war can drag in a multitude of victims
vastly more numerous than themselves. A reasonable assumption
for today is that the state planners and popular historical
memories in both Russia and China viscerally appreciate the
importance of this point, but that it may be dimly perceived in
US popular imagination, and even dismissed by US policy-makers.
This is probably the type of caution introduced by European
allies when the US engages them in multilateral diplomacy and
planning, and which is so annoying to US unilateralists.
So, the US may have a more
casual attitude about bellicose posturing and nuclear war
threatening bravado, while the Russians and Chinese are likely
to be very circumspect and deliberate about threatening nuclear
war; if they do, pay attention!
Technology: The Military
Is A Hungry Robot
The US military is a brainless
stomach that always wishes to be fed, it is the very definition
of fiscal cancer. It has no other goal beyond immediate
ingestion of capital drained from the US treasury, so all its
pronouncements, papers, studies, proposals and testimony are
devoid of meaning beyond their role as advertisements aimed at
the audience of policy-makers heading the capitalist, government
and propaganda ministries of the
military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC). The purpose of
these advertisements is to induce as many of these
directorate-class individuals as possible to put their influence
behind the many schemes for larding the military. So, we can
expect any part of the military that sees initiating a nuclear
war as an instant benefit to itself by calling its services into
action, to lobby for it. A brainless stomach has no concept of
consequences, or of others. “More” fills the conceptual space,
and all the frenzied, convoluted babble is a drone of
incantations intended to materialize that “more.”
While the hardware for nuclear
war is complex, both the US and Russian military establishments
have decades of experience with it, and they have maintained
their training. These military forces could use their nuclear
weapons as ordered without a significant number of technical or
personnel failures. Some of the warheads launched might be duds,
in that their detonation would be flawed and their full
explosive yield would be unrealized; and some of the personnel
might crack under the pressure of actual combat -- either as a
blind panic or an intentional rebellion -- and fail at their
posts. However, we can expect a low incidence of such failure in
either the US or Russian forces.
This is unfortunate from the
point of view of preventing nuclear war. We now know that "a
guy named Arkhipov saved the world" during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. “During a naval skirmish between an American destroyer
and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on Oct 27, 1962,” where
“the destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try
to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped
torpedo...that the submarine was authorised to fire it if three
officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate
over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the
other said no.”
This was no failure of Russian
military training (which like that in the arts and sciences is
of unparalleled rigor), but instead the operation of vivid
historical consciousness. I fear that the culture of the United
States is so shallow and immature that thorough military
training can transform any callow youth into a robot soldier
attuned to his or her assigned functions, and unlikely to have
the psychological depth and historical consciousness to question
orders and training under conditions of extreme danger, urgency
and confusion, or to recognize moments of pivotal importance.
Military establishments are
intended to be robotic performers, reliable agents implementing
commands abstracted and codified from the political directives
of the national leadership. So, we should assume that by far the
best way to prevent the military from proceeding with a nuclear
war is by influencing the policy that it operates under, so that
it is one of restraint.
Still, let me make a direct plea
to any US soldier or sailor who finds themselves charged with
launching a nuclear weapon: don’t do it, mutiny, revolt. Think,
the more and sooner the better. Be Arkhipov. I think the
Russians will be more restrained than the Americans about first
use, but will have zero hesitation about second use.
Politics: Popular
Loyalty Or Popular Revolt?
Because Russia is a lesser power
than the United States, and because of the many and obvious
provocations made by the US against Russia as part of its
encirclement strategy, as well as the shameless advantage US
capitalism took of Russia during the immediate post-soviet
period of political fragmentation and economic reorganization,
the Russian people will have no trouble supporting their
government regardless of how any potential war with the US
transpires; they will always see themselves as the defenders,
not the aggressors. This will be especially true if the US fires
first, which it delights in boasting it feels free to do; and we
can be sure that if Russia does fire the first nuclear shot, it
will be an evidently defensive preemptive strike. The
expectation of popular loyalty, won by the robust revival of the
Russian economy under Vladimir Putin’s administration, as well
as a reaction to US belligerence, frees the Russian leadership
of any fear about revolution erupting in reaction to possible
reverses in a potential Russo-US war, even a nuclear one. Russia
is united.
The US public is unprepared for
the sacrifices attendant to a nuclear war, no matter how
“tactical” and “limited.” Every nuclear munition carries the
destructive power of many conventional bombs or cannons, and
shot for shot every fall of a nuclear munition will produce
proportionately many more casualties. US soldiers and sailors
will fill coffins or dematerialize at rates not experienced
since the Civil War. The American public has been protected,
shielded and distracted from the impact of war, especially since
the Vietnam War, but the number of casualties to be expected
from even a limited tactical nuclear war would be impossible to
hide (as the casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan are hidden
today), and the mollycoddled American viewing public would be
traumatized on apprehending the magnitude and pace of the
carnage.
The reactions to this fright
would be varied, but in all cases they would contribute to the
agitation of the public, a loss of placidity and thus an
increased difficulty of social control. This triggers the
primary anxiety of the ruling class. It is nearly inconceivable
that US public agitation over the number of military casualties
from a foreign nuclear war would rise to the same intensity as
the Parisian public’s agitation about starvation in 1789, but
the great fear of the US ruling class would be that it had
become of the same type. Today’s paycheck-dependent US Americans
are disunited by their fearful prejudices and diminishing
expectations in an eroding economy, while the Russian people are
experiencing historically significant economic growth and
political stability. At what point of disaffection would the US
public unite into storming its own Bastilles, at what level of
unsatisfied wants -- in a population indoctrinated to be
self-governed by wants -- would the US public acquire the
motivational rage of a Cindy Sheehan and become the 21st century
san-culotte whose pikes were now the subject of the 2nd
amendment?
We should not let such florid
rhetoric carry us on flights of fancy of Phil Gramm (‘let them
whine for cake’) types arriving at their Sidney Carton moment,
but neither should we underestimate the potential for outbreaks
of real social unrest in the US as a consequence of losing
people to a nuclear war of imperialistic hubris.
Diplomacy: Consolidating
Conquest, Or Chaotic Collapse?
The imperialist imagination sees
conquest as the method of consolidating power. The emperor
projects a conception of order onto the world, and then seeks to
subject each actual state and population into fulfilling an
assigned role. Every country is a tile that fits into the grand
mosaic of the imagined empire, adding its unique hue to the
overall image and easing the interconnectedness of all others
into a consolidated structure. Conquest is accomplished by
force, bribery or inequitable alliance.
However, every tile of the world
mosaic has its own conception of itself and its role in the
world, so there is always opposition to empire. Most people call
this freedom.
Imperialistic thinking assumes
that power, the ability of superior force to hold sway, is the
only dimension along which international relations operate. It
ignores chaos, the ability of nature and reality to erupt with
surprises, and entropy, the tendency of all structure to
dissipate, as other dimensions of international relations. It is
impossible to predict all possible outcomes of present
situations, so it is impossible to devise perfect systems of
control. While we are always free to take action, we can never
be certain of all its possible consequences. Aside from our
common-sense plans for managing the practicalities of our lives,
the overall contingency plan that comes closest to perfection is
to “go with the flow.” This is zen. The only thing we can ever
really control is our own behavior. Because all known previous
empires have collapsed, chaos and entropy being prominent in
their demise, we can anticipate a similar fate for the American
empire.
The Russian economy is booming
in part because Russia is a major supplier of oil and gas to
Europe. Russia is also a leading supplier of military and
nuclear power technology. Many people easily ascribe the various
conflicts occurring in Eurasia to rivalries over the control of
oil and gas fields and the routing of pipelines. China’s
exploding economy would love to plunge its straw -- direct
trans-border pipelines -- into Iran’s oil pools and drain them
without interference; Iran would love China to monetize its oil
bonanza, so it wants to power itself with nuclear energy to
maximize its oil profits. Russia is eager to supply Iran the
nuclear power technology it wants, because it is a profitable
business venture, and because they want the security of
controlling the fuel cycle of a close neighbor, for the purpose
of nonproliferation (of nuclear weapons).
However, these logical
commercial synergies fail the most important acceptance
criterion of US capitalism, “what’s in it for me?” The US would
prefer a compliant Iran drained to its benefit, such as in the
days of the Shah, it would prefer Central Asian oil to flow
south through Afghanistan and east through the Caucasus, Black
Sea and Turkey, and it would prefer Europe to limit its energy
dependency on Russia. It is not just a matter of increasing the
oil supplied to the US, it is about throttling the sources of
Russia’s and China’s growing economic power; it is about
control.
We can expect the Europeans to
try soothing the neo-con fevered Bush Administration, quietly
behind closed embassy doors, from working itself into a rabid
lather for nuclear war with Russia, initially in the Caucasus.
This will have some influence, because the failure of Europe to
join in a diplomatic demonization campaign against Russia, like
the earlier campaigns against Iraq, would make it more difficult
for the US to proceed to war. Also, the US is mindful that were
it to be seriously weakened by a unilateral nuclear war with
Russia, an unscathed Europe would easily step into control of
its empire. After all, this is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Harry Truman did to Winston Churchill’s British empire.
Also, Europe would worry that a
nuclear war in the Caucasus might spread, war usually does when
one side becomes desperate. If Russia were being “bombed back to
the stone age” it would most certainly bomb the US bases in the
Central Asian republics along its southern border. These would
be legitimate military targets, and would no doubt be actively
involved in the US war against Russia (why else are they
there?). This would draw the Central Asian republics into the
war and probably topple their ruling classes, which Russia would
see as their just deserts. A similar catastrophe might happen to
Poland and other Eastern European states hosting US missile
systems. For Europe, the thought of the disruption of their oil
supplies from Russia and Central Asia, along with the
possibility of sustaining casualties from nuclear bombardment,
should be enough to propel them into vigorous and sustained
diplomatic action to restrain US belligerency. They will
probably say all manner of nasty things about Russia, to mollify
their infantile US emperor, and do as little as possible to
disrupt their existing commercial arrangements with Russia.
Analogous to the situation of
the US public, if Europe and American “allies” were to suffer
directly and severely from the war, they might unite in revolt
and then use their military forces against the US, or Russia, or
both as they guessed would offer the best relief. What is that
level of “direct and severe suffering” that would trigger a
European military response? Good question.
There are many other
possibilities for mischief once the US is embroiled in a nuclear
war and inattentive to its empire. Other nations could decide it
was an opportune time to settle their own scores with each
other, independent of the US-Russia war. China and India fought
a border war in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is
believed to have erupted because the US was completely
preoccupied elsewhere. One can imagine Israel finding it
opportune to accelerate its liquidation of the Palestinians,
expand into Lebanon, attack Iran or a variety of its neighbors,
or all of these, while the US was absorbed in a nuclear war
radiating from the Caucasus.
Of course, a restraining
consideration here is that the US might not be capable or
willing to assist and even fund Israel during the course of its
own major war with Russia, unless Israel were a full-fledged
partner in that war. If Israel were so blinded by its own
ambition that it did join the war against Russia, then Russian
arms would quickly and forcefully be turned against it, and this
would almost certainly be joined by military actions from many
states in the Middle East. The intelligent course for Israel
would be to stay out of a US war against Russia (which will
really look dirty to the US public as they see their own forces
being nuked), but even then it might have to accept a diminished
level of support from its great protector, and consequently a
more successful opposition from its many subjects and neighbors.
Conclusion
Once the chaotic dimension of
reality is realized, it becomes easy to envision any number of
disastrous developments for each of the initial combatants, and
even the initial bystanders. From any perspective, it is easier
to imagine a negative cost-benefit ratio to this war than a
positive outcome. For this reason, I think it less likely to
occur. However, one must not underestimate the stupidity of
imperialists, if war does break out then I think the Russians
will have a clearer view of how to proceed, and this will mean
painful losses for the US, its allies and enablers.
The great fallacy of the
imperialistic mind is that the threat of destruction is equated
with the power to control. Control is an illusion, chaos is the
reality. A successful warrior dances with chaos, and success
means simply that one is still alive.
Manuel Garcia, Jr. is
a retired physicist who spent 15 years working on US underground
nuclear tests. Time and effort have gone into understanding why
nuclear weapons still exist. E-mail =
mango@idiom.com
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